#great ladies in fiction
Evelyn Carnahan’s greatest hits, The Mummy (1999) Dir. Stephen Sommers
Evelyn is such a great and complex character! She’s proud of what she does and works hard at her passions, even though she’s barely recognised for it:
“You put up with me because I can read and write ancient Egyptian, and I can decipher hieroglyphics and hieratic, and I am the only person in a 1,000 miles who knows how to properly code and categorise this library, that’s why!”
“I put up with you because your father and mother were our finest patrons, that’s why!”
She loves animals and because she formed a Bond with her camel, her camel got her to Hamanuptra first, thereby winning the 500-dollar-wager.
When she realises she’s done goofed and brought an evil mummy back from the dead, she’s all like “I never believed in that fairy tale, curses, hokum stuff, but I am now converted because I had an encounter with a “3000-year-old, walking, talking corpse”, so now Iwe have to stop him.”
(She literally has an entire argument with O’Connell about it, which just so happens to be one of my favourite scenes EVER because it literally goes from a blame-game to “this is everybody’s problem” to “I’m staying” to the classic “Fine. Fine!” parting line. Like, c’mon, this entire movie was a romantic comedy and nobody can tell me otherwise.)
She’s intelligent, passionate, charming, funny, somewhat athletic (she can swim in a nightdress and run like stink, but she can’t throw a punch and resorts to poking people in the eye), owns up to her mistakes, has stellar leadership and negotiation skills (“Let’s be nice children. If we’re going to play together, we must learn to share.” Also literally negotiating shares in treasure while O’Connell strangles), loves her brother despite not approving of his schemes, and does super well under pressure (translates hieroglyphs her brother is describing to her while being attacked by a mummy, comes up with the idea to kiss Imhotep to save O’Connell, her brother, et al., and so forth).
Tl;dr: Evelyn Carnahan is a great character. Don’t bother trying to change my mind.
Edit: While O’Connell and Evelyn were drinking, he told her to call him ‘Rick’, but she was so drunk that she didn’t remember that. How do we know? She never calls him Rick for the duration of the rest of the film. It’s never brought to the foreground, but it’s another (hilarious!) detail about Evelyn in that she cannot hold her liquor!
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