| | The Curse of the Mummy's Text |
 | | Instead, he insists, the creature "is hopelessly bogged down in a complicated story that involves capturing his reincarnated girl-princess and returning with her to the world of the dead"; he has "never developed a coherent text, let alone a family" whereby the incest formula might be operative (260). |
 | | Mummies may tap into some effective taboos and may indirectly represent psychologically disturbing notions: the persistence of their lumbering is bothersome; they are "undead" -- but many monsters are more effective on these scores. |
 | | Ambrose Pratt's The Living Mummy (1910), although including an ambulatory mummy obedient to an evil mastermind and demonstrating a predilection for strangling his victims, is too rife with embarrassing melodramatic sappiness, along with racism and sexism, to be an effective text. |
| www.wsu.edu /~delahoyd/mummy.article.html (1734 words) |