Palace of the Pomegranate: The noble yet savage palm tree

And now the thrilling finale! Sadly, this is (I feel) not one of Winspear’s best romances and it actually ends quite abruptly.  But let’s go back to where we left off…

Grace is pointing a gun at Kharim, threatening to shoot him unless he gives her an escort out of the desert and back to Reza Shahr. “She would be unafraid to use it, for she was Grace Tillerton Wilde, and the derring-do and ruthless will of Jonas were in the marrow of her shapely bones” (112).  The derring-do of a toffee baron, that is.

Kharim tries to talk her out of it, but ultimately he takes her by surprise and disarms her. Grace tries to run away, but he catches her. He puts her to bed and then she reveals that she was never 'intimate', shall we say, with her husband. Once Kharim hears this, he refers to her as “now mon enfant rather than ma belle” (120). As I suggested previously, Grace’s virginity marks her as not a ‘woman’, despite her age. Now she’s even been downgraded from attractive male youth to ‘my child’. 

After this, nothing much seems to change. Grace and Kharim argue. Kharim gives her a beautiful brooch. Kharim compares Grace to a thoroughbred. Grace thinks about the cruel, cruel desert. And she learns that they’re on their way to Kharim’s palace: the titular Palace of the Pomegranate. She’s also taken to calling Kharim ‘seigneur’ (which harkens back to The Sheik’s monseigneur). So now she calls him seigneur and he calls her mon enfant. 

One day, when they are almost at the palace, Grace and Kharim are riding and arguing and she has finally had enough. She whips her horse into running into the desert. But her escape attempt is not successful. Very strikingly, Winspear writes:

“Her confidence billowed like her windswept cloak…and then came sudden and shocking deflation as Beauty [her horse], in his wild free motion, stumbled upon one of the sandstone rocks half buried in the sand” (143). 

Beauty breaks his leg and Grace has to simply wait there until Kharim finds her. As in The Sheik, it is the horse that suffers, as Kharim has to shoot it. I wonder if there’s something to the fact that in both novels horses are compared to women and then bear the brunt of women’s efforts to escape patriarchal power. Psychoanalytic speculation welcome!

And then this incident is capped with Grace riding back to camp in Kharim’s arms “like a child” (150).

At last the tribe has reached their encampment outside of Kharim’s palace.  This is the occasion of Shalena’s wedding to Achmed. Grace dresses up and thinks that she looks “almost as if she had stepped out of the canvas of an Ingres painting” (155) – another reference to past representations of the Orient. Kharim, she thinks, is “as noble and savagely graceful as the tall palm trees” (159). I’m not sure I think of palm trees as ‘savage’, but that could just be me.

Anyway, the wedding goes well, Shalena is very excited and Achmed is happy. When Achmed carries her out of the tent, “Grace saw Shalena suddenly tighten her arms about Achmed’s neck. Love for him had overcome her moment of terror, as love was meant to do” (167). Grace begins to wonder what her own feelings about Kharim are, exactly. And just as Grace is wondering, she feels like Kharim is planning to get rid of her. He has said that he will take her back to Reza Shahr after all. Good old push and pull! 

The palace is beautiful, as we might have expected.  Sheik’s palaces in sheik romances are never ill-kept, moldering heaps.  Grace thinks that “she had surely found Sheba’s garden at last, only to know that one day soon she would be turned out of it” (174). She believes that Kharim could never love a woman “not of his own heritage” (174), although he’s never said anything of the kind. 

But then she has a conversation with a second Eastern woman with a speaking part! This is an older woman, Hathaya, who is Kharim’s housekeeper. She reveals that Kharim’s mother was one lady Rachel. 

Vindicated! My ability to predict plots is pretty good, if I do say so myself. Kharim’s mother is indeed Rachel Leah Bourne, the well-known travel writer, whose books inspired Grace to travel into the desert . 

Rachel and Kharim’s father had met and married, but he died in a military skirmish while she was pregnant. She returned to the Palace and raised Kharim under the guardianship of his grandfather, the old khan. Hathaya speculates that because of his mother’s Englishness, “it is inevitable that [Kharim] will have eyes for an English woman” (183).

This gives Grace hope. She dresses for dinner in a Persian-style outfit: trousers and shift and veil. And Kharim comes to dinner dressed in a European dress-suit. It’s like Grease, when Sandy and Danny try to fit in with what they think the other wants by dressing in tight tight pants and a cardigan, respectively! Sadly, no singing follows.

Instead, they go to the roof. They stand there and stare into each other’s eyes and without anyone saying anything, everything is apparently resolved: “like a star bursting into stunning silver pieces the truth struck at them” (190). They kiss and Grace thinks that “he had been born of an English mother, but in his heart and his bones he was a Persian, of a different creed and culture…yet Grace knew as he held her that they were one heart, one soul, mingling forever in their two bodies” (190). The End.

This was an interesting book, if emotion-wise a bit all over the place. It didn’t feel like a book set in the 1970s (despite the cover’s '70s aesthetic) – it really felt like it could have been set at the same time as Hull’s The Sheik. The hero does turn out to be ‘actually’ Persian, while still having the ‘not really’ of an English mother. I’m looking forward to seeing how the next book deals with this...

Next up: a 1920s magazine post! I feel like I haven’t done one in forever!

Palace of the Pomegranate: A woman is like a candy

There’s an Eastern woman with a speaking part in this (actually two, we’ll meet the other one later): Shalena, who is “darkly pretty” and helps Grace in the camp with her toilette.  Grace assumes that she is Karim’s “desert kadin” but in fact Shalena is engaged to one of the other men – Achmed, who is a wonderful cook. She doesn’t really get a story arc, but she seems very nice.

Grace is thinking about how to avoid having sex with Karim, something which she assumes will be an imminent issue. Her plan involves using the gun which she earlier threatened her husband with. 

This book is a bit oddly structured because while she’s worrying about this she also stares at herself in the mirror and muses about her past. But we’re about halfway through the book, which is a bit late for mirror-staring.  It does provide the opportunity for one of the more absurd lines in the book, when Grace is thinking about how her grandfather (the candy baron) never really cared about her: “Always for him Grace had been an object to improve upon…as if like a candy she could be made sweeter, choicer, more decorative and lucrative” (92).

Ladies are like toffees!

Grace, like Diana when in the Sheik’s tent, takes the opportunity to peruse Karim's shelves. She can’t help but admire his taste in décor; his taste in novels also surprises her, as “the fact that he was educated was more of an affront to Grace than if he had been a truly wild son of the desert” (94).

When Karim returns, he’s shaved off his beard: “he was clean-shaven, and the hard, sculptured look of his features was both fascinating and terrifying.  His eyes were a deep, brilliant green, lambent as a leopard’s in the blue light of the hanging lamps” (95). Grace argues with him incessantly, justifiably given that he’s basically kidnapped her, but narratively it just makes her seem like an argumentative person. She snipes at him, calling him a villain and then he calmly mocks her by saying “so that is what we are, eh? The sinner and the saint” (95) and then tells her that he hopes she’ll enjoy the dinner

Grace and Karim do a lot of talking at each other in this book. At one point he even quotes Oscar Wilde at her: “Here you are ‘whitely wanton with a velvet brow. A mouth like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory.’ The man who wrote those lines – perhaps to a woman, perhaps to a boy – had your surname, Lady Wilde.  He might well have had your image in his brilliant, strangely romantic mind.  In breeches and shirt, with your hair partly concealed, you look a boy who might tempt a satyr. In your silk, mon puritain, you look a woman to tempt a saint” (102).

This is very interesting. Grace is boyish here both as a reference to Diana’s boyishness in The Sheik and for the same reasons as Diana was boyish. She’s independent, virginal and uninterested in love; she is not womanly, then, but also beyond being a girl (and no, not like Britney Spears). 

I haven’t been able to figure out what Oscar Wilde work this is a quote from. Wilde does have a collection of fairy tales called House of Pomegranate, but this is not from that. In fact, the first part of the line, “whitely wanton with a velvet brow” appears to be from Love’s Labour’s Lost (by another man rumored to have written some poetry to perhaps a woman, perhaps a young man). 

In any case, this passage is interesting because it brings in the suggestion of homosexuality, something which has been associated with ‘the Orient’ in a number of Western works. This doesn’t go anywhere in this particular novel, but it’s still interesting…

Anyway, after more sniping at each other, Karim tells Grace that he’s not intending to “use brute force” on her (that is, rape her), just to wait around until she wants to have sex with him. While keeping her effectively a captive. This differentiates him from The Sheik, but still keeps him pretty sketchy. 

But he believes in destiny, apparently. And at this point he thinks she’s had sex with Tony, her husband, so he wonders why she objects to getting involved with him, when she didn’t object to her arranged loveless marriage. Karim speculates that “the marriage to Lord Wilde was more suitable for you than a marriage founded on emotion.  It provided you with the freedom to keep your heart to yourself, and your body, not to mention your soul. Love unlocks the heart, does it not? Love uncovers the body. Love enslaves the soul” (110).

It’s not clear here whether Karim is implying that he’s in love with Grace. He never really says so, but maybe we’re supposed to infer that? But Grace doesn’t think so, she thinks he’s talking about lust.

And then she tries to shoot him.

Does she succeed? Find out in the final installment on Thursday!

Palace of the Pomegranate: the romantic vet!

Late post! Well, this is not an auspicious beginning to my new posting schedule. I’ll have to step it up.

Back to Palace of the Pomegranate…Tony, Grace, Kharim and the whole expedition start to head back to Reza Shahr, despite Kharim’s warnings that they may be headed into a dangerous sand storm.    

Everyone is an idiot.

During the ride, Grace makes some pretty big assumptions about Kharim.  For instance, while she’s embarrassed that Kharim must be able to tell that Tony hit her the night before, she thinks that “Kharim was a Persian, and for him a woman was an obedient slave or she was nothing.  He was too primitive at heart to know or care that women needed to be loved for more than their bodies” (52).  She has not exchanged more than ten words with this guy! Why does she assume this?

The sand storm begins to arrive, “like a savage tiger with a lashing tail and teeth bared to bite them” (53) – again with the big cats. This sparks another argument between Grace and Tony. He makes to strike her with his whip (!), but instead startles his horse, which runs off into the storm. I think we can all predict how the problem of a married heroine is going to be solved here.

Grace wants to ride off after Tony (why?!), but Kharim stops her. They wait out the storm together and then Kharim sends some of his men out to find Tony. While the men are searching, Grace becomes suspicious about Kharim’s identity (it’s obvious now that he’s not just a guide) and he reveals that is indeed a leader, not a guide. He had seen Grace before her marriage, when she visited a Persian wedding with her grandfather, and was taken with her. 

Kharim has a…poetic…way about him. Grace describes him as “saying the sort of things no man had ever said to her” (64). When Grace says that he must have been born in the desert, he replies:

“True, I was born in the very heart of it, and the first thing I saw when my eyes were fully open was a desert star.  I would say that it has led me ever since on a quest for – heaven” (64). 

Which I guess no one has ever said to me either? 

As predicted, the men return with Tony’s body strapped to their horse.  He’s suffocated in the sandstorm and they bury him there in the desert. Grace is, understandably, feeling pretty conflicted about this and also pretty guilty. She feels like it was her fault, that she brought Tony to the desert, although I have to say that I’m not sure how guilty she should feel since he was (only allegedly I suppose) trying to kill her.

Anyway, in her distraction Grace almost sprains her ankle, leading Kharim to chide her about taking care of injuries in the harsh desert. And to reveal that he is…a qualified vet! Just like The Sheik! It’s an odd continuity for Winspear to insert into the book, since that qualified vet bit never did make that much sense to me. It didn't seem particularly romantic or revealing of East/West or man/woman relations. But obviously it means something to her. Speculations anyone? 

Anyway, the fact that he’s a qualified vet does give Kharim the opportunity to mention the ever popular comparison between women and horses:

“I am a qualified vet, milady, and you would be surprised how much a highly strung filly and a woman have in common.  They both have emotional natures and fine-boned ankles” (68). Well, he does have a sense of humor!

Anyway, Kharim has been leading the party not back to Reza Shahr but instead further into the desert – he says towards to the garden of Sheba. Kharim tells Grace that now that her husband is dead, he is in charge of her; apparently, it is the custom that “when a woman loses her husband in the desert, the head of a caravan then becomes responsible for her” (70). Grace is dubious about this and threatens him with jail. 

It seems that Kharim has planned to take Grace away with him all along. She’s just that beautiful. That’s how she’s attracted the notice of the man who turns out to be “Kharim Khan, and the paramount chief of my tribe, the Haklyt Rohim.  In this the Land of the Peacock Throne and the King of Kings, I am more powerful than even you may imagine. For me the abduction of a mere girl is a bagatelle.  I could be assassinated at any time, having enemies who hate me as you could never dream of hating anyone, even such as me, a man of a desert nation who saw you – and wanted you!” (73). It’s like this dialogue was written in the 1920s! It’s very striking.  I don’t remember Violet Winspear’s other romances being like this.

Kharim “the paramount chief” then takes Grace back to his tribe’s camp, where he installs her in the ‘harem section’ of his tent. What awaits her? Will she ever escape? We'll have to wait until Monday to find out...

Palace of the Pomegranate: A homage to The Sheik?

Hello readers! Sadly the new school term is almost upon us. I’m teaching an introductory course on Sociocultural Anthropology this term (yay!), so I won’t have as much free time for the blog as I did in the summer. I’ll be too busy writing lectures and applying for jobs. But don’t worry, I’m not giving up – I still have literally millions of books to read! I’m just going to switch to posting twice a week (Mondays and Thursdays) instead of three times a week. I'll post 1920s stuff every time I finish a sheik romance. Hopefully that schedule is not too optimistic of me…

And now on to a new book! Next up is another romance by Violet Winspear: The Palace of the Pomegranate, a Harlequin Presents novel from 1974. I think this time we’re going to get a romance with a ‘real’ sheikh – except he’s not actually Arab but Persian and not a ‘sheikh’, per se. But close enough.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Palace of the Pomegranates has a lot of references to E. M. Hull’s The Sheik.  It begins with the heroine being described by an elderly woman at a party of ex-pats, just like in The Sheik. In this case, the party is in Reza Shahr. Perhaps my googling skills are slowly going downhill, but I can’t find a city called Reza Shahr. Only a neighbourhood in Mashhad, Iran? In any case, the book never mention the name Iran; everyone always refers to Persia. It’s interesting how blurry the geography and political context get. This is something that also happens in romances set in the US (so many made-up American small towns), but it does have a different effect.

 

Anyway, the rumour is that Grace Tillerton, “heiress to the fortune earned by the Tillerton toffee factories,” is still a virgin, despite her recent marriage to impoverished aristocratic playboy Tony Wilde (Wilde by name, Wilde by nature, I presume). Grace married Tony purely to please the stern grandfather who raised her (just like The Sheik’s heroine Diana was raised by a stern older brother). And Tony married her for the money.

Having a heroine married to someone who it’s fairly clear will not end up the hero is unusual for a romance. Usually if the heroine’s been married (which was not out of the question in 1970s romances), she’s already divorced or widowed by the time the romance starts. But Grace’s husband is still alive and kicking. 

1970s independent woman!

The cover of the Harlequin Presents edition evades the hero question entirely, by just having this striking drawing of the heroine.  It’s very 70s! I actually love it! 

This guy?

I can’t tell in the Mills and Boon edition who the man in the drawing is intended to be. Is it Tony Wilde or is it Kharim Khan (you’ll find out who he is soon)?

Grace, like Diana, is not a fan of love or marriage. She asks a young Officer who’s a little in love with her “Has there ever been a man who loved with a single hunger, wanting no one else but his wife? I doubt it” (8). She muses that “men liked to please themselves, but they didn’t really consider that women had the right to indulge their longing and desires.  They were chattels, whichever way the situation was looked at” (12). 

Grace and Tony are planning a trip into the desert to find the legendary lost Garden of Sheba, where “Sheba was said to have made love with Solomon” (9). This confuses our location even further, since the Queen of Sheba was maybe from around Yemen?  Or eastern North Africa? And King Solomon lived in Jerusalem?

Anyway, Grace is warned against going into the desert by a number of the expats. They say she’s too frail for the desert, that there might be dangerous men in the desert (the threat of rape by terrible foreigners, as in The Sheik) and, more unusually, that her husband might be planning to kill her for her money and the desert would be a great place to do it!

In this novel, Winspear has brought the conflicts in British gender relations which in The Sheik are in the recent past (the abusive husband who is Ahmed’s biological father) into the present and thus more direct comparison with ‘Oriental’ gender relations. We might think that Eastern men and women have arranged marriages and unequal relations (and Grace does, to a certain extent), but look – this British couple has an arranged marriage and there’s nothing more unequal than (perhaps) plotting to kill your wife. And both of these cases are removed (to different extents) from the most readers’ day-to-day lives, given their location in the worlds of the rich and aristocratic.

But Grace refuses to be warned. She is infatuated with the idea of the desert: “it may be a savage place, but at least it isn’t as uncivilized as our so-called modern society. […] out there in the desert everything is so open – so free and gold and blue” (13). And she scoffs at the notion that someone would try to kidnap her (“that old chestnut about hot-natured nomads,” as she describes it). 

And so Tony and Grace set off into the desert, led by their Persian guide Kharim. We meet him at last! At first he’s innocuously passing himself off as a guide, if one with "the look of a leader" and eyebrows with "an almost Mephistophelean slant to them" (34). As they finally set off into the desert, Grace is very very excited: “As Grace thought of being in the real desert, with nothing but sand all around them like the rough pelt of a tiger, she felt quivers of excitement coursing through her body” (26). Very excited.

Grace thinks about how she first found out about the lost garden of Sheba – in the autobiography of a British woman Rachel Leah Bourne who had spent most of her life in the East and then disappeared, presumed dead.  I’m thinking this Rachel Leah Bourne was not dead, but is in fact: Kharim’s mother! That’s my bet. Any takers?

Grace has enjoyed her first day in the desert and they set up camp at an oasis. She and Tony spar.  Grace is rude to their guide for no particular reason and thinks that “the eyes of a Persian leopard would flash like that only seconds before it leapt upon its prey and tore it to pieces” (35). Winspear really loves her big cats. 

Kharim recommends that they not break camp the next day, because one of the porters believes there’s a storm on the way, but the couple do nothing but argue with him that it looks fine!  It’s not really clear to me why Tony and Grace have hired a local guide if they planned to disregard all of his advice about super dangerous sandstorms. Why bother?

Later on in the evening Tony comes to Grace’s tent drunk and tells her he wants to have sex. She tries to kick him out and he hits her across the face. Just as he is about to cap it off with a kick in the ribs, she points her gun at him and threatens to shoot. This indignity is last straw for Grace and she offers Tony even more money to leave her alone and get a divorce. 

But first they have to get out of the desert. Against their guide’s warnings, the next morning they set out back towards the city. But a storm is on its way… 

Will they survive the swirling sands? And what is Kharim’s interest in all this mess anyway? Next installment – Thursday!

Immortal Flower: Surprise fake engagement!

When we last saw our heroes, Steven and Renata had just inserted themselves awkwardly into Ramon and Mandy’s surprise proposal dinner. So no proposal for Ramon…

I’m beginning to think that Renata in fact doesn’t fit the typical profile of the ‘Other Woman’ that we saw in Winspear’s novel. She does serve as a foil for the heroine in terms of Mandy’s own insecurities about herself – Renata is glamorous whereas Mandy isn’t, intellectual whereas Mandy gave up on university. And Mandy does think that Steven is in love with Renata pretty much throughout the entire novel. But…she’s actually kind of nice? She’s just a fabulous woman who is always well-dressed, likes to throw fancy parties, hobnobs with directors and sheiks, and is just good friends with Steven. Just an all-round nice woman. Props to Elizabeth Hoy for this characterization and not making the only women in the book enemies!

After the aborted proposal, Mandy learns from Steven and Renata that Ramon is actually already in the process of becoming betrothed to the beautiful daughter of a neighbouring oil sheikh. So it seems like his interest in Mandy could cause a lot of trouble, especially with his father. Mandy begins to wonder how she got into this and why Ramon is taking it all so seriously! “Hadn’t he ever before had a seaside holiday friendship?” (112).

She breathes a sigh of relief, however, when she doesn’t hear from Ramon for a while. She returns to correcting the Professor’s page proofs for his manuscript. The Professor goes off on another expedition to some ruins, but Steven stays behind because he’s worried about Mandy being alone in the villa with all the potential drama with Ramon and his father swirling about. Mandy is angry because she feels like Steven has been spying on her and also desolate because she’s beginning to realize that she cares for Steven and she thinks he’s uninterested in her romantically.

And frankly, I’m not surprised. Why doesn’t he just say, ‘I’m interested’ instead of doing things like sighing loudly at her behaviour and saying that sometimes “I’m tempted to wish you were young enough to be taken across my knee and spanked” (117)? And not in a sexy way?

But their time together alone at the villa is actually quite pleasant. They swim together, recite Yeats at each other and visit some beautiful mosaics. This peacefulness is interrupted by the arrival of two rather intimidating men come to take Mandy to see the sheikh. Luckily Steven arrives just as they are about to bundle her into the car and insists on going along with her. 

The men take them to Sheikh Hassan’s apartment in Tunis, which is furnished ‘in ultra-modern style’, including “strangely twisted steel wire ‘mobiles’ holding light bulbs shaded with large tropical sea shells, [and] a huge incomprehensible piece of scultputre in honey-coloured wood” (138). It’s an interesting choice, given that most houses or apartments in sheik romances are usually described in the same ‘Oriental’ fashion. Although I’m not completely convinced by the romance (more on that later), I think Elizabeth Hoy is actually pretty interesting writer.

Well, as everyone expected, the Sheikh plays the heavy and warns Mandy off of his son. In fact, even though she declares herself uninterested in Ramon romantically, the Sheik tries to buy her off, offering to give her money if she flies back to England immediately and signs a paper ‘relinquishing all claim’ to Ramon. Wow.

Mandy is offended. And then Steven announces to Sheikh Hassan that he has just dealt both of them a ‘mortal insult’ because… they are actually engaged!

Surprise! 

Well, it’s a surprise to Mandy too, but she plays along. And Steven somehow convinces her that this fake engagement makes total sense and that it’s something that he’s really only doing to help her out. If they’re not engaged, apparently Ramon will never believe she doesn’t want to marry him. Apparently he is simply a love-sick mad young man who will never listen to reason. Really. They even put an announcement in the paper and lie to the Professor. 

Renata, ever reasonable, frames Ramon’s infatuation in terms of his own struggle to gain independence from his father and the conflict between Ramon’s new ideas and his father’s old-fashioned ideas. And then she throws Steven and Mandy an engagement party, just to really make their story seem real!

Two unexpected guests appear at this party and I bet you can all guess who they are:

The marabout! He tells Mandy that “the snares still lie about your feet, but if you keep close to Steven all will be well. Great joy awaits you” and then disappears (178). Presumably to go find the canapés. 

Ramon! He’s haggard and upset. Stereotypically, Steven suggests that “passions can be fierce in these latitudes” (180). Ramon tries to whisk Mandy away to Paris, refusing to believe that she’s become engaged to Steven of her own free will, until she blurts out her actual feelings for Steven: “It’s Steven I love […] it will always be Steven” (184). Chagrined, Ramon leaves immediately to go make peace with his father. And that’s that.

Mandy feels sorry for Ramon and awkward about her pretend engagement with Steven, especially now that she’s blurted out her love for him. Steven asks her if those things she said were really only ‘amateur dramatics’ and she reveals that she does indeed love him. Only then does he say that he loves her too. In fact, he never actually says it outright, only referring to “the way I feel about you” and “you got me right from the day you went for me saying you have red hair”. And then that’s it. They’re engaged for real. The End. 

Well, what do you think? I'm not sure about the pacing of this book and the romance is resolved much too quickly for my liking, but it was an enjoyable read. We should be reaching the era of books with actual Arab heroes soon, though... Maybe the next one?

Male (Vamp) and Female (Director)

The divisions between MALE and FEMALE were a big topic of discussion in the 1920s movie magazines of the time. (Is there a time when they haven’t been? Examples welcome!) What should women be doing? What should men be doing? How should they relate? And what should they look like on film? Long story short, as I’ve mentioned before, these discussions were related to other changes in gender relations (such as women’s suffrage, more women in universities, changes in fashion).

In the pop fiction world, Elinor Glyn was the queen of sensational novels of man/woman relations. She coined the term “it” as a term for personal magnetism. Her book Three Weeks (1907) about an affair between an English nobleman and a married queen was made into a popular film in 1924. There are many articles about or by her in the film magazines. Maybe I'll cover one in a future post.

Coverage of E. M. Hull’s The Sheik and the film also focused on man/woman relationships. Sexy women actresses (in particular seductive and exotic female actresses) were vamps and sexy men actors were sheiks. Articles asked ‘do ladies want a dominant man?’ Stories of sheiks and Western women in love drew out the contradictions and tensions of these discourses.  In the romances and films of the 1920s, sheiks are dominant male figures and the heroines submit to them. But at the same time, as Westerners and flappers the heroines represent the rise of modernity.  And in the films the actors were the focus of female spectators’ gaze (see Laura Mulvey’s theories about 'the male gaze'  in classic cinema and later theorists such as Mary Ann Doane's arguments that female spectatorship was very also important). 

And here is a Dinosaur Comic about 'the male gaze' as linked to in the previous blog: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=859.

 

Which leads us to today’s article, from Photoplay Volume 17-18, Jan –June 1920 (on the Internet Archive, as usual). While not strictly about sheik romances, it’s about the film-making at the time and I love it.

Teach me to make Love!

And you can see that the typical fan is a woman

The first wonderfulness of this article is the caption to the picture on the top left: “Miss Parks telling Mr. Cody how to make love.” Miss Parks is the Female (director) and Mr. Cody is the Male (vamp).  And it is either very cold in that studio or Miss Parks is wearing an artistic scarf. Or both!

The article starts out with a reference to “the law of opposites” and Emerson. If anyone knows what Emerson has to say about “opposites attract” I would love to be filled in! It’s a bit beyond my area of expertise, I’m afraid.

Anyway, the article posits that there’s a natural balance to things: for a long time there were female ‘vamp’ actresses who were directed by men. But now: 

“there comes into our midst a bizarre creature with the appellation of ‘male vampire’ and he startles us by stating that he believes women are the ‘coming’ directors because they have more imagination than the average man and then proceeds to act upon this uncanonical opinion by adding to his exotic fold of studio assistants a woman director, the wife of a Frenchman.”

And, of course, of the two female directors (the other one being Lois Weber), being a brunette, Lew Cody picked the blonde director! So says the article. 

Then the article suggests Miss Parks might “be a descendant of the Amazon Queen, Califria, who, according to De Montalvo’s rosily romantic tale of 1510, with her warlike companions carrying golden spears, were the sole inhabitants (guarded by the griffins) on the then-an-island California”. 

Googling ‘Califria’ lands you with a page of misspelled Californias, so don’t even try it.  I think it should be Calafia . Suggestively for our purposes, the Wikipedia summary of de Montalvo’s novel says that Califia, the Amazon Queen, is “a pagan who is convinced to raise an army of women warriors and sail away from California with a large flock of trained griffins so that she can join a Muslim battle against Christians who are defending Constantinople”. But I’m pretty sure Photoplay is not suggesting that Ida Parks is a secret Muslim.

Read the Wikipedia article, though! It reveals that there used to be a Califia ‘multimedia experience’ at Disneyland where the part of Califia was played by Whoopi Goldberg.

This article also makes me confused about what directors did at the time, because it includes a quote from Ida Parks saying that she had never directed a man before, but enjoyed it so much that she now prefers to direct men. If you’ve got a movie with both men and women in it (and most movies of the time did) don’t you have to direct them both?

Anyway, Ida Parks apparently at the time wrote her own continuity (silent films didn’t have scripts in the same way films do now) and cut (aka edited) the film as well. She got into directing because her husband was a director (she was initially a stage actress).

Did I mention that the movie is called “The Butterfly Man”? Photoplay also reveals that the star, Lew Cody, had recently signed a three-year contract to make more ‘male vampire’ movies, a contract which “stipulates also that Mr. Cody cannot during that period commit the faux pas of marrying.” So that tells you something about female spectatorship at the time and what studios thought female fans expected from their male stars…

Next up… the actual conclusion of Immortal Flower.