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COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
In Women in the Popular Imagination in the Twenties, Billie Melman explores the appeal of the "desert romance," the stereotypically described erotic encounter between a European woman and an Arab or supposedly Arab lover--a formula that produced a string of highly popular English novels in the early years of the twentieth century. Denounced in the popular press as immoral or absurd, parodied and scorned, the desert romance was nevertheless voraciously read and viewed--largely by women--in its various incarnations in both novels and films. Melman suggests that desert romances evoked such negative reactions not simply because of their "obscenity" but also because they were "obscene novels for women": "Countless articles, burlesques and cartoons implied, or stated outright, that the desert romance was pornographic literature, manufactured by female writers for the consumption of a sex-starved mass female audience" (92).
The desert romance's sadomasochistic plot elements--its ritualistic abductions, seductions, and rapes inflicted on European women by ruthless "desert chieftains"--may have freed women readers from guilt by projecting sexual impulses onto a stereotypically sinister and "savage" male. Readers could vicariously enjoy the moment while pitying the abused female character. In these novels, according to Melman, "the modern, sexually emancipated woman can pursue pleasure without being punished for her presumption. For, unlike Clarissa, the English-woman who is ravished in the Sahara does not virtuously die but lives to enjoy a blissful state of concubinage in the imaginary desert" (93).
In recent years, feminist critics have shed new light on the mixed messages of the desert romance. Much of the attention has focused on E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1919), an early and influential example of the genre, and one which exemplifies its paradoxical and double-edged appeal, its unsettling brew of feminine victimization and female sexual empowerment. While admittedly perceptive feminist analyses have recast the novel as a signpost pointing the way to sexual liberation, however, no work has thoroughly interrogated the cultural stereotypes that facilitate the supposed sexual freedom of the novel's adventurous female protagonist. Published in 1919, The Sheik narrates the story of the independent Lady Diana Mayo, abducted and raped in the Sahara by Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, a "savage" protagonist who is later revealed to be an Englishman. The wife of an English farmer, Hull--a pen name for Edith Maude Winstanley--visited the Sahara only after the publication of her novel. The popularity of her first orientalist fantasy inspired Hull's sequel, The Sons of the Sheik, as well as her many other best-selling "novels of the East," such as The Desert Healer and The Captive of the Sahara. The popular hysteria inspired by Hull's sadistic "sheiks" reached its peak with the hugely profitable film versions of The Sheik and its sequel, which helped to elevate their star, Rudolph Valentino, into an icon of exotic masculinity.
While Melman is correct in viewing desert romances as erotic escapist fantasy, she fails to explore the stereotypes and assumptions by means of which a guilt-free erotic fantasy is achieved. The exotic settings that enable the English heroines to escape "civilization," along with the restraints of sexual inhibition, make the desert romance qualitatively different from a Clarissa with a happy ending. Despite their provocative insights into the genre's appeal to women, most critics, like Melman, downplay the novel's construction of sex and gender relations within the context of race and class. While Sarah Wintle notes that The Sheik's "(apparent) transgression of racial boundaries gives an added charge" (291), for instance, she is far more concerned with the work's function as an elaborate erotic daydream, one that bears comparison with the fiction of D. H. Lawrence. Those critics who focus directly on the novel's interracial romance are more likely to ignore Hull's use of egregious racial stereotyping. Examining Diana Mayo as an adventurous woman traveler in "Lust and Dust: Desert Fabula in Romances and Media," Julia Bettinotti and Marie Francoise Truel suggest that women's travel stories employ "the fabula of interracial marriage" to reject "the racism dominant in male travel literature" (191). In fact, Hull's numerous novels of the desert are haunted by the fear of "miscegenation," and she subjects her plots to considerable strain in order to "guard" her heroines from interracial marriage.
Far from being apolitical escapist fantasies, Hull's novels exemplify an uneasy attempt to weave together stereotypical assumptions concerning gender, class, and race, in patterns that would be tantalizingly shocking, but also acceptable, to their English and American readership. The "sexual freedom" that Hull's novels offered women readers was dearly bought, since it entailed accepting disabling definitions of femininity and masculinity, subject and ruler, and East and West. Thus, Hull's novels remain significant today not primarily as early examples of women's "sexual liberation," but because they reveal the power that conventional stereotypes of gender and race could exert on the popular imagination during the early twentieth century and afterwards. That Hull's racial stereotypes have so often been dismissed as peripheral by late-twentieth-century critics is also a matter of reflection for all of us.
In keeping with her analysis of the desert romance as escapist fantasy, Melman suggests that, in The Sheik, "both the marriage [of Diana and Ahmed] and the discovery of Ahmed's 'real' [English] identity are gratuitous" (102). Viewed from another perspective, however, these two events are central to the novel's project. For in a very real sense the novel is about "disguise" and "masquerade": a woman who disguises her gender in the "trousers" of a man--Ahmed describes Diana as a "garcon manque"--and an Englishman who disguises his race in the robes of an Arab chieftain. The final union of Diana and Ahmed is made possible both by the seductions of these dual disguises and the reassurance of their removal.
As Hull composed her first novel, the figure of the "English sheik," the Englishman who masqueraded in the "flowing robes" of an Arab "chieftan," had already captured the English imagination. The same year that The Sheik was published, Londoners were being entertained by Lowell Thomas's documentary film about the Great War, which focused in part on "Lawrence of Arabia's" military activities in the Middle-Eastern campaign. A
review of the film in the 1919 Sphere showed T. E. Lawrence in Arab dress, and described him misleadingly as "the leader of the Arab Army."1 In the words of Lawrence's biographer Michael Yardley:
Lowell Thomas's pseudo-documentary extravaganza ... opened at the Covent Garden Theatre on 14 August 1919. The exotic film, music and lecture presentation ... was an instant success. Part of...
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