The Uncanny Beauty in the French Gothic: Gautier’s “The Mummy’s Foot” and Mérimée’s “The Venus of Ille”

To continue, what is so uncanny or strange about the female figure in Gautier’s “The Mummy’s Foot”? Where can one trace or suggest the antithetical vision in this tale? It is important to commence the analysis by an interpretation of the form of the female figure. Beauty is not architectural or archeological in this tale, it is rather scattered, dismembered and partial. Footless. And just like the Venus, she is preserved and un-dead, however she is a mummified human figure, not a statuesque superhuman. The Princess, although a revived mummy, possesses still some supernatural qualities, for her awakening from the dead and her traveling throughout time and places can’t be rationally explained. At the beginning, the reader doesn’t seem to find any elements of the gothic beauty, for she is described as “a young girl possessing the purest Egyptian type of perfect beauty”[1]. The only ‘odd’ thing that the protagonist remarks about her is her costume signifying that she is a mummy and which he mentions at the end of his description:

As for her costume, it was very?odd?indeed.

Fancy a?pagne, or skirt, all formed of little strips of material bedizened with red and black hieroglyphics, stiffened with bitumen, and apparently belonging to?a freshly unbandaged mummy.??

“The Mummy’s Foot” depicts?exotic?and?foreign?beauty. I think these are the two key epithets when it comes to the composition of Beauty in the Gautier. The Parisian protagonist is enthralled by the Egyptian princess (in the socio-historic context, France was fascinated by the Orient; in the colonial context, famous are Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt). There’s nothing wicked or mad about the Princess, but the uncanniness is probably perceived more in the fact that she is lacking a foot. Or, better put, it is the foot that is uncanny since it becomes alive.?

Additionally, let’s not forget that the foot of the Princess is?priced?and?sold?in an antique shop as a paperweight object. It is then?objectified; it is, once again, a commodity. Apart from its product quality, it is also presented as mysterious and alarming by the old merchant:

'Old Pharaoh will not be well pleased. He loved his daughter, the dear man!

Before it was turned into a commodity, the foot was flesh and bone and it belonged to a human being. It was a living whole, not an isolated object (this is not completely true, and I will go back to this later). After having refused to marry the old merchant, the Princess’ coffin was desecrated: her body was violated and her foot was removed. Then the price tag was put on the latter for sale. This process is called no more that?human trafficking. To revenge himself for the refusal done, the merchant eroticizes and fetishizes the removed part by turning it into a commodity that exists inside of a constant collective exposure and ab(use). From the capitalist point of view, everything has a price and anything can be sold. Anything can be?acquired?and?appropriated:?

[…], the part becomes literally fixed – a thing to be viewed and loved […], to be?possessed?(the mesh of hair, the foot of La Princesse Hermonthis in Gautier’s “Le Pied de momie”) […].[2]

Does one really possess something? The dismembered body of the Princess becomes, after being mutilated?–?valued, but as mentioned before, the uncanniness or the strangeness of the story lies in the?revived?foot. The protagonist is terrified more by the dancing and talking foot then by the arrival of the footless mummy:

Instead of remaining quiet, as behaved a foot which had been embalmed for four thousand years, it commenced to act in a nervous manner, contracted itself, and leaped over the papers like a startled frog. One would have imagined that it had suddenly been brought into contact with a galvanic battery. I could distinctly hear the dry sound made by its little heel, hard as the hoof of a gazelle.

I became rather discontented with my acquisition, inasmuch as I wished my paper-weights to be of a sedentary disposition, and thought it very?unnatural?that feet should walk about without legs, and I commenced to experience a feeling closely akin to?fear.?

From a sedentary, unmovable, fixed object to an automaton. Here we have again the resemblance between objects and human beings, although the foot was?a priori?amorphous. The protagonist feels at malaise and very uncomfortable because the foot functions by itself – it resembles, by its purpose, to his own foot (“The Uncanny Valley”). The foot is now?unnatural, says the protagonist, and it provokes?fear. We have once again the transition from the sublime/the sublimation to terror. The foot is visualized, similar to Venus, as antithetic: it simultaneously represents admiration and horror. It transits from an adorned object to abject. Needless to say, this is where Todorov’s definition of the Fantastic could perfectly fit in: the protagonist is uncertain and hesitative of that which is not natural.?

?????????What is even stranger is that the foot itself understands how the business works, for it doesn’t give itself to the Princess until she pays for it. The idea of the real owner or the real proprietor is quasi non-existent or unrewarding in this case, but at the end even the very fleeing object turns money-oriented: “Have you five pieces of gold for my ransom?” Does it turn money-oriented or is it conscious of the fact that it has been objectified? I think: both. This objectification is haunting it in the same manner in which a commodity is haunting a consumer. Similar to the Venus who, once manufactured, turns into a living monster, so does the haunted foot become a hunter. A debt collector, so to speak. The foot exists solely through the exchange of money. It?gives itself away?only through the act of purchase, appropriation and consumption. Finally, it subsides but with a constant thought of having to be bought. Interesting enough, the foot doesn’t seem to be happy or excited when the Princess finally finds it. On the contrary, it becomes a revived monstrous object that asks for money. As much as the foot represents a magic medium, a magic vector between the Princess and the protagonist (the foot conjures the Princess), so does the pathogenic Capital-vampire entail the never-ending consumptive abusiveness. The symbolic of the revived foot lies in its antithesis: it is never purchased for good – no, and it is uncanny in as far as it is visibly aware of this antithesis – it is prostituted and it prostitutes itself. It doesn’t need a proprietor to exist, but it does need money to?belong, even if that belonging were momentary.

?????????As might be expected, there are two different perspectives from which the foot is perceived in the tale: first is that of the old merchant and the second is the protagonist’s perspective. The protagonist is using the foot as an object, as a paperweight thing, as a?decorum?qualified with, first, use, and then with exchange value: it will at the beginning be perceived esthetically and in a utilitarian manner (use value) by the protagonist. Nonetheless, the foot will, once the protagonist reaches the fantastic kingdom of the Princess, become a metonymy for her hand and therefor an object of exchange value (my italics):

Filled with that daring inspired by dreams in which nothing seems impossible, I asked him for the hand of the Princess Hermonthis. The hand seemed to me a very proper?antithetic recompense for the foot.?

The protagonist’s reaction vis-à-vis the foot will have different phases: in the curiosity shop he will be amazed by it, in his room he will be terrified by it once it turns into an automaton, finally it will lead him to the Princess’ hand in effort to make her his bride.?1) The utilitarian object – 2) the abject – 3) the recompensing object, are the three phases that the foot undergoes in its relation with the protagonist.?

On the contrary, the old merchant fetichizes and eroticizes the foot, after vandalizing the Princess’ body and her coffin. The foot represents his point of obsession. He is the one who then cruelly abuses and prostitutes the Princess while dismembering her and selling her foot off. I don’t think there’s been much attention payed to this scene which has all the elements of not only the gothic tradition, but of the horror literature as well. The reason for this could be because the narrator subtly and only in one passage explains how the old merchant actually acquires the foot. To resume these two perspectives, I will cite Jutta Fortin (my italics):

What is new and significant is the fact that the portrayal of this?commercialization?of love, in the fantastic, is closely connected with the simultaneous?fetishization of objects, on the one hand, and the?objectification of humans?- notably of women - on the other.?Indeed, while objects are fetishized in this genre, conversely, humans become like things or machines: they are depicted as insensitive, inflexible, and unspontaneous.[3]

The final question I would like to briefly address is the following: can we perceive the foot as a whole or as a part, after all??

I mentioned before that the foot was a living whole, not an isolated object. Nevertheless, Deborah A. Harter suggests that these objects are ones which Lacan names ‘objects petit autre’: “they are constituted precisely as objects that are neither felt to be fully a part of the self nor sensed entirely as other” (p.77). The walking foot evokes undeniably the hand - Thing, in the?Addams Family. But unlike Thing, the foot revives only at the moment of the Princess’ arrival. When the Princess is asleep, it exists only as a static, rigid piece. It is neither the self nor the other, but it is uniquely (at least in Gautier’s narrative) through the resuscitation of the dead that it?itself?resuscitates. Thus, because a piece of body symbolizes the embodiment of death, vicissitude and dying, so does its reactivation – that of an object seemingly cut out of the other – turns out to be abjection because it exists in nowhere else than that liminal space between the self and the other.?

The representation and the symbolic of the image of the foot is, as shown, so rich in Gautier’s poetics that the Princess’ role remains overshadowed by it.?

Conclusion

The representation of antithetic beauty in the “Venus of Ille” and the “Mummy’s Foot” exists on many levels: Beauty is simultaneously anthropoid and non-anthropoid (while being qualified as superhuman as well); it is dead and un-dead; it is exotic/foreign/unfamiliar and familiar; it is sublime and terrifying/wicked; it is commercialized/objectified/assessed and fetichized. It is, finally, partial and unabridged.?

However, no matter how much we try to explain it vis-à-vis the introduction of antithesis, its strangeness or its uncanniness is nothing else than the reaction it provokes on the reader:?intellectual uncertainty or hesitation to explain it (Todorov).?This is where Mérimée’s and Gautier’s romanticist sensibility proves successful and undoubtedly plays a big role in the Gothic tradition of 19th-century France.?

[1]?Gautier, Théophile. “The Mummy’s Foot “.?https://archive.org/stream/themummysfoot22662gut/pg22662.txt, accessed April 27, 2021

[2]?A. Harter, Deborah.?Bodies in Pieces. Fantastic Narrative and the Poetics of the Fragment. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California 1996, p. 73

[3]?Fortin, Jutta.?“Brides of the Fantastic: Gautier's "Le Pied De Momie" and Hoffmann's "Der Sandmann". Comparative Literature Studies, 2004, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2004), Penn State University Press, pp. 257-275

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