Evil Empire 117that resonated with the Gothic mood of the times, it was a reminder that
empires fall as well as rise. Egypt—hovering on the edge of integration
into the circuits of European power and capital—existed in a kind of
doubled time: a closing precapitalist past and an imminent capitalist
future. Soon wealthy Britons were collecting artifacts and renovating
rooms in Egyptian style, and, in 1812, the London Museum and Pan-
therion, popularly known as the Egyptian Hall, opened to the public.
In this context, it would have been odd for Shelley’s descriptions of
her dead-but-alive creature not to evoke mummies—those uncannily
preserved corpses plucked from the peripheral battlegrounds of inter-
imperial rivalry and circulating in the intertwined economies of war,
archaeology, popular culture, and looting.
On the other hand, Shelley’s monstrous progeny anticipates Superman
(though his creators never cited Shelley as an influence). The creature is “more
powerful,” of “superior” height, with “ joints more supple”; he is “more agile,”
of greater “stature,” better able to withstand “the extremes of heat and cold.”
He never leaps a tall building, but he does bound “over the crevices in the ice.”
And he is faster than the speeding bullet Victor fires at him, dodging it and
racing away “with the swiftness of lightning.” He also has a predilection for
secret citadels and fortresses of solitude in alpine “ice caves” and arctic “dens.”
Superman, a refugee from the technologically advanced world of
Krypton, represents a form of hypermodernity. Shelley’s creature, for all
its necrotic pastness, likewise foreshadows futurity. When he prevails upon
his maker to fashion him a female companion, he swears they will depart
Europe for “the vast wilds of South America,” a commons beyond empire, far
“from the habitations of man.” In these distant, unenclosed, and supposedly
empty lands, they will live free and contented, sleeping on “a bed of leaves”
and subsisting on “acorns and berries.” They will tread lightly and trouble
humankind no more. But Victor is unconvinced. He worries the female
creature might be “ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and