Reality Uncovered through the Mummy Legend: Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars and Anne Rice's The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned

A pioneer of the mummy legend, Bram Stoker's novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) conjures the horror of the mummy through Tera, whose body is brought from Egypt to London as part of archaeological excavation. Picturing the strict struggle between the evil and the good as well as the constant imperial and racial conflict between the west and the east, Stoker's story sets an example to Anne Rice's The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989), which revivifies the mummy of Ramses II. Despite drawing certain similarities with Stoker's horror work, Rice's romance novel focuses mainly on Ramses' humane adventures in the-twentieth-century London and Egypt. More significantly, the mummy legend is utilised in these narratives to reflect the fin de siecle pursuits of the British Empire and the androcentric and racist mind-set prevailing throughout the twentieth century through the objectification and stigmatisation of the mummies as part of the east. Keywords: Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, mummy, gothic, imperialism, racism.