Coping Through Curse: Confronting British Metropolitan Identity Through the "Curse of Tutankhamen" (1923-1933)

Abstract

This thesis seeks to understand the origins of the curse of Tutankhamen within interwar British society and to explain why the British were willing to believe in the “curse of Tutankhamen” between 1923 and 1933. It argues that the curse served as a method of coping as the British reforged their rational, Enlightened ways with irrational imaginings to deflect feelings of trauma after the First World War and of vulnerability with the loss of Egypt as a protectorate in 1922. Just as the British newspapers evaded discussing the true story of the archaeological dig of the tomb of Tutankhamen, so too did the British use their own imperial ideas of Egyptian Romantic allure to circumvent the reality of Egyptians through the curse of Tutankhamen.

I argue that the curse of Tutankhamen was a British-created myth with necessary Egyptian influences that served to preserve British imperial views of the “other” in the wake of World War One (1914-1918) and the British Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence on February 28, 1922. Importantly, this thesis maintains that the veracity of the curse itself is secondary to the cultural effects of the purported curse in the British metropole. The curse of Tutankhamen was a myth born out of the British metropole-favored imagination and threating comparison with the Empire inherent in Orientalism. By analyzing coverage in British newspapers such as The Times and The Daily Mail and the accounts of later historians such as Allegra Fryxell and Roger Luckhurst, this thesis argues that the British authored and perpetuated the “curse of Tutankhamen,” by basing the curse within British perceptions of modern and ancient Egypt. The curse symbolized the mythological arrival of the periphery of the British Empire within British metropolitan identity.