Court of the Veils: Men are like hawks

First of all, thank you to Laura Vivanco at Teach Me Tonight for linking to me and welcome anyone who followed that link. I really enjoy that blog and the community of scholars associated with it! 

There is a big gap in my sheik romance collection, so the next romance I’ll be writing about is Violet Winspear’s Court of the Veils, a Harlequin Romance first published in 1968. Here is the Romance Wiki page for Court of the Veils.

Court of the Veils, US edition 1969

This gap is partly because of the ephemerality of popular fiction like romance and the fact that my methods of collection were more haphazard than systematic. As I mentioned earlier, I found most of my books at second hand stores.  I suspect, though, that there may also be other more social and political reasons for the disappearance and reappearance of sheik romances. I suppose I would need to do a full-on survey and math-y analysis to see what the actual trends are. Another project for the future!

In the meantime, I’ve taken the lazy way out and done a google ngram of both sheik and sheikh in English fiction:

I have no idea what that very large peak around 1900 is about – it’s also one of the few places where 'sheik' is very out of sync with 'sheikh'. But, the ngram does match up with my impressions: which is that in the 20th century there was a peak of sheik lit in the 1920s, then another in the mid-1960s and then another rise in the mid-1980s and 1990s. Speculation is always welcome! Prominence of oil in the news? Political turbulence? Colonial and post-colonial involvement? Or simply the vagaries of trends?

Anyway, as it so happens, my next romance is less of a sheik romance than a desert romance.  It takes place in North Africa and the desert plays a prominent role in it, but the hero is not a sheik in any way. This is the case for the next few books. I’m guessing this is probably a race thing; while E. M. Hull solved this by having her hero not really be Arab, the next few books opt instead to avoid the issue entirely.

Violet Winspear is a name which is going to occur often in the forthcoming posts. A British novelist, she wrote 70 romances for Mills & Boon/Harlequin and was unfortunately also known for her off-hand comment that her heroes are “the sort of men who are capable of rape.” She was one of the launch authors for Harlequin Presents, a line well-known for its ‘alpha’ heroes.

But back to the book!

Court of the Veils begins in a slightly odd style, almost that of a newspaper report. There’s been a plane crash in the desert near El Kadia “in the Sahara”. (Winspear never mentions the country the novel is set in, but I looked up El Kadia and it’s in the north-east of Morocco and not exactly in the Sahara .)

Among the passengers were Armand Gerard, his English fiancée Roslyn Brant and her close friend Juliet Grey, an air hostess. Armand and Roslyn were on their way to meet his family at their date plantation Dar al Amra. Armand dies in the crash and a young woman clutching an engagement ring from Armand survives. She has forgotten everything, but it appears that she must be Roslyn Brant and thus Armand’s grandmother welcomes her to the plantation to recover.

Except it’s super obvious from the very beginning that this woman (the heroine) is not Roslyn Brant, but is Juliet Grey! So obvious! Otherwise, why frame and phrase everything in such an awkward way?!  It’s not clear whether we’re supposed to draw this conclusion early on and be waiting for her to recover her memory and realize it, or whether we’re supposed to slowly come to that conclusion, as she does. But if the heroine’s identity was supposed to be a mystery, it is most definitely not.

Anyway, the heroine is referred to as Roslyn for almost the whole book, so I’m going to refer to her that way, for convenience sake. Even though it’s totally a lie! Well, less a lie than a mistake.

Madame Gerard (also known as Nina Nanette from her days as a famous Parisian stage actress - so French!) has two other grandsons, who are both at the plantation when Roslyn arrives.  Tristan is Armand’s brother and writes operas. Duane Hunter had a British father and was raised on a plantation in British Guiana.  His mother died when he was ten, continuing the trend of ‘mothers are always dead’. Duane has moved to Dar al Amra to run the plantation for his grandmother. 

Court of the Veils is full of many, many little details about the country and the culture. In Reading the Romance, Janice Radway argued that one thing romance readers felt they got out of romances was knowledge about faraway places and times.  Well, Violet Winspear gives that to you in spades and it’s mostly quite enjoyable to read. I can’t speak to its accuracy, though… I've been to Morocco, but not in the 1960s.

The first bit of local detail is the name of the plantation, Dar al Amra, which Madame Gerard translates as ‘House of the Master’: “The plantation house was long ago the residence of a wealthy Aga who had a large harem, and our main patio is called the Court of the Veils” (8).

Empty harems are a recurring feature of sheik romances, so we’ll be seeing them again.  I may have to do a Bingo card.

Another trope you may recognize from The Sheik is Madame Gerard’s description of men of the desert as never being “completely tamed, and that is one of its primitive pleasures, that the desert harbours wolves, leopards and hawks that are not always four-footed and winged” (11). Men are dangerous animals! And just wait, you may be able to guess which animals women are…

When Roslyn and Madame Gerard arrive at the plantation, she meets Tristan, a slender young man “with black hair threaded with grey, Latin eyes and the features of his dead brother” (14). I found it interesting that he is often described as Latin as well as Gallic. Is this a common British use of the term or is it simply one that’s fallen out of fashion? I wouldn’t usually describe a French person as having 'Latin eyes', even though French is as Latin as Spanish, I suppose…

And finally we meet the man who is obviously the hero. We can tell because he and the heroine instantly do not get along. Duane Hunter has tawny-green eyes and is “brown as rawhide from the desert sun, lean and hard and uncompromising as a lash that always found its mark” (17).  He is our sheik stand-in; his Grandmother describes him as a “desert barbarian” (17). And he is skeptical that Roslyn is who she says she is. And very rude about it. Even though we all know he’s right. Sparks ahead!

And with that set-up, I must go… Next week, the conclusion of Court of the Veils. And the middle part too!