ABSTRACT
Marie Corelli’s Ziska: Or the Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897) revises tropes of fin-de-siècle mummy fiction, particularly H. Rider Haggard’s She, to critique both the objectification of women and the colonization of Egypt by linking the violence of patriarchy to that of empire-building. The latter is particularly topical, as 1897 marks the apex of The Egyptian Question. 1 Ziska emerges one year after the serialization of Haggard’s wildly-popular She (from October 1886–January 1887), and participates in the same literary mania for mummy fiction. Nicholas Daly observes that “[b]etween 1880 and 1914, however, more than a dozen mummy narratives appear” including popular works by Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker (25). 2 These works feature men who conquer and domesticate formidable women, possess land and ancient artifacts, and break curses that threaten British masculinity and national interests. While popular tropes of the mummy tale and imperial romance often feature vengeful, supernatural figures who wreak havoc on the English metropolis and its subjects, Corelli’s novel reimagines the female mummy as refusing all objectification, consumption, or domestication. 3 Rather than ease British fears about the consequences of colonization through the recuperation of a mighty female figure in marriage or destruction, Ziska plays upon those fears in the form of a revivified harem girl who is never contained, diffused, or incorporated into a tidy Victorian marriage (or cemetery) plot. Corelli imbues her fearsome heroine with ancient Egyptian goddess imagery, such as Wadjet, Isis, and Hathor, in order to imagine both Ziska’s and Corelli’s own emancipation from the confines of Victorian gender conventions.
