Egyptomania Goes to the Movies by Matthew Coniam

Author:Matthew Coniam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

Charles Trowbridge (left) and Dick Foran wonder if it’s too early to wake Tom Tyler in The Mummy’s Hand (1940).

Seemingly endowed with talismanic and psychometric properties, they were often kept as curiosities, and the phrase “mummy’s hand” would have been as familiar to the film’s original viewers as, say, “rabbit’s foot” or, indeed, “monkey’s paw.” (Scanning the archives, one occasionally encounters the simile “stiff as a mummy’s hand” through the thirties, too.) “The hands of colonized subjects—South Asian craftsmen, Egyptian mummies, harem women, and Congolese children—were at the crux of Victorian discussions of the body that tried to come to terms with the limits of racial identification,” notes Aviva Briefel in the book The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination:

The hands of mummies in particular came to be identified with a resilience that married artistic integrity with gothic horror. Witnesses of mummy unwrappings singled out the hands for their resistance to the ravages of time, a fact that attested to the embalmer’s formidable skill…. Theophile Gautier describes the “gilded nails” of a mummy at the 1957 Paris exhibition as imitating “with sepulchral modesty the gesture of the Venus of Medici.” Beauty and permanence were also conveyed through descriptions of mummies’ hands grasping still-living plant bulbs or flowers, as in George Wilson’s poem The Sleep of the Hyacinth (1860). Wilson composed the poem following the exhumation of the mummy of an Egyptian princess clutching a hyacinth bulb, which flowered when it was planted.

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