Spoiler: Spanish ladies

Week three of the blog! Already this is longer than any other blog I’ve written! Do I get a medal? A cookie?

For real now: the conclusion of The Sheik…

Sheik Ahmed had just rescued Diana Mayo from the Robber Sheik Ibraheim Omair, but in the process been badly wounded. As they all ride back to the camp, Diana is worried about Ahmed, who is still unconscious. Once back, Raoul Saint Hubert (who is also a doctor?) overhears Ahmed’s semi-conscious feverish mutterings recapping his relationship with Diana, which end with “Diane, Diane, how could I know how much you meant to me? How could I now that I should love you? […] Diane, Diane, it is all black. I cannot see you, Diane, Diane…” (240).

The next day, Diana and Raoul are sitting by the unconscious Ahmed’s bedside and she distractedly comments on Ahmed’s hands: “His hand is so big for an Arab’s” (243). Ah yes, that well-known racial stereotype of Arab men having small hands. Is this a thing? Or is E. M. Hull just obsessed with hands?

Anyway, this off-hand comment leads Raoul to finally reveal the mystery of Sheik Ahmed. He answers: “He is not an Arab […] He is English” (243). So that explains the hands, then!

Then begins the fascinating story of Ahmed’s parentage:

His father was an English peer, the Earl of Glencaryll. His mother was a Spanish woman. As Raoul explains it, “many of the old noble Spanish families have Moorish blood in their veins, the characteristics crop up even after centuries. It is so with Ahmed, and his life in the desert has accentuated it” (244).  I’m not sure what characteristics this long-lost “Moorish blood” is supposed to explain.  It can’t be Ahmed’s stubbornness, his temper or his tendency to mistreat women, since we soon learn that his father had all of those. Is it his skill with horses? Looking good in a djellaba?

Long ago, Raoul’s father was great friends with the old sheik, Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, “a wonderful man, very enlightened, with strong European tendencies. As a matter of pure fact he was not too much in sympathy with the French form of administration as carried on in Algeria, but he was not affected sufficiently by it to make any real difference” (245).

Raoul’s mother had recently died (everyone’s mother is always dead in this book), and Raoul’s father had gone to stay with the old Sheik to take his mind off his grief. One evening some of the Sheik’s men found a woman wandering in the desert. She was young (around 19), pregnant and unwell and wouldn’t answer any questions about herself. She basically spent all her time crying.

She and her son, once he was born, stayed in the camp and the whole tribe adored the baby (Ahmed, of course). The old Sheik, in fact, fell in love with the woman, but she would not agree to marry him. Sadly she never fully recovered her health and when she was near death she finally told them her story (just like Raoul is finally telling Diana Ahmed’s story):

It turns out that Ahmed’s mother was the only daughter of a noble Spanish family. At seventeen, she was married to Lord Glencaryll, without “any regard to her own wishes” (247). But, like Diana, she grew to love him. However, he had a terrible temper and when he was drunk (which was often) it was even worse. It’s pretty clear that he beat her, as well as emotionally abusing her. Lord Glencaryll took her on a trip to Algiers and wanted to travel into the desert with her:

“He had been drinking heavily, and she did not dare to upset his plans by refusing to go with him or even by telling him how soon her child was going to be born.  So she went with him, and one night something happened – what she would not say […] whatever it was she waited until the camp was asleep and then slipped out into the desert” (248).

I can’t remember who (and thus apologize for the lack of citation), but at least one of the academics writing on The Sheik has pointed to the way this narrative complicates the gender/race politics of the present-day narrative.

The way I see it, while the two stories locate gendered violence as something that men do to women, E. M. Hull by telling them both does not allow us (the reader) to think that this happens only in the ‘uncivilized’ areas of the world.  Ahmed’s mother (who is never given a name in the book) flees from the violence of a British man into the desert, where she is treated well by an Arab man. Diana is abducted from the desert and treated badly by a man who she believes is Arab, but who (heritage-wise) is British/Spanish. But…in both of these stories, the badly treated women love the men who treat them badly. The men who might treat them well (the old Sheik, Raoul Saint Hubert) met them too late.

Well, once Ahmed’s mother died, she left him with the old Sheik who adopted Ahmed, giving him his name and raising him in the desert. When Ahmed was fifteen, he was sent to Paris for an education and met Raoul. He was a “handsome, high-spirited lad” (250) with a quick temper, who didn’t like to obey anyone except the old Sheik. He spent two years in England as well, but Ahmed always wanted to return to the desert and the father he loved.

The old Sheik had never told Ahmed of his parentage or told Lord Glencaryll about his son (according to his mother’s wishes) and once he did, managed to do so in perhaps the worst way possible. Raoul’s father had the task of telling Lord Glencaryll about his son and learned that apparently the tragedy of his wife’s disappearance had cured him of his alcoholism (and his temper). This seems unlikely, but I guess we’ll go with it.

Then, Raoul’s father sent for Ahmed and told him the whole story.  This did not go well: Ahmed lost his temper and cursed out basically everyone possible, up to and including all of England. He refused to see his biological father and returned immediately to the desert, sending all letters his father sent addressed to Viscount Caryll (his courtesy title) back unopened, with ‘Inconnu, Ahmed Ben Hassan’ written on them.

So, that went well. After that, Ahmed was a changed man: “all the loveable qualities that had made him so popular in Paris were gone, and he had become the cruel, merciless man he has been ever since.  The only love left in him was given to his adopted father, whom he worshipped” (256).

And that is the story of Ahmed. Full of questions about the nature of inheritance, the role of nature and culture in forming a person...

Back in the present, Diana’s opinions of Ahmed aren’t really changed by this story. She still loves him and thinks of him as an “Arab of the wilderness”; “the mere accident of his parentage was a factor that weighed nothing” (259).

As you may have already guessed, Ahmed does not die. Slowly he regains consciousness and his strength. When he is getting better, though, he begins to avoid Diana and she is afraid that he is no longer interested in her. One night, Ahmed reveals that he is planning to send Diana away. He thinks she can go back to her old life. She gets angry, thinking he is simply tired of her, but Ahmed reveals that he loves her and it is because of that that he is letting her go. Distraught, Diana tries to kill herself (this book doesn’t go by half measures) and Ahmed stops her and gives in. He will not send her away and they will live together in the desert. The last words of the novel are Diana’s:

“I am not afraid of anything with your arms round me, my desert lover. Ahmed! Monseigneur!” (296).

And that was E. M. Hull’s The Sheik. As a novel, I’m not sure most people today would be 100% enthusiastic about it. But it is very interesting, especially in the context of race and gender in pop culture history. It is also pretty epic. If anyone else has read it, I’d love to hear your opinions! If not, have I inspired you to read it or is my epic summary good enough?

There is also a sequel -- Sons of the Sheik -- about Ahmed and Diana’s two twin sons, one raised in the desert and one raised in England. I don’t own a copy, but if I can find one I might review it too, if requested. It has a dancing girl in it! And whipping!

Next up… another article from 1920s movie magazine and then the first of many sheik romances inspired by The Sheik. Most of them are much much shorter, so I promise the posts won’t be quite so epic… Maybe I’ll start with Desert Barbarian…

French, the language of love

It’s Friday the 13^th! But that means nothing in the world of romance…

Well, back to The Sheik. I’m sure everyone has been waiting with bated breath for the conclusion! Actually, despite some of my complaints in the last post about too much interior monologue-ing, it is quite an exciting book, especially the second half.

When we last left Diana and Ahmed, he had just re-captured her and she had just realized that she was in love with him. Of course, she doesn’t tell him, as Ahmed has made it quite clear that he’s uninterested in love. Instead she worries about his possible retaliation for her escape. And looks at him with “misty yearning in her eyes” (139). Diana has very mixed feelings.

Two months pass and Diana and Ahmed are actually getting along pretty well: 

A still from the film The Sheik with Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres. Actually, probably a publicity shot.

“Weeks of vivid happiness that had been mixed with poignant suffering, for the perfect joy of being with him was marred by the passionate longing for his love.” 

Just like Movie Weekly, E. M. Hull was very fond of adjectives.

Diana has from the start had a bit of a thing for the desert (an essential element of the mystique of the sheikh – sand is a necessity) and now’s she’s really taken to it, in an only slightly racist way: 

“The beauties and attractions of the desert had multiplied a hundred times.  The wild tribesmen, with their primitive ways and savagery, had ceased to disgust her, and the free life with its constant exercise and simple routine was becoming indefinitely dear to her” (144).

Ahmed has been nice to her recently, relatively speaking. Yet Diana is now filled with jealousy about the Sheik’s past ‘affairs’: as she refers to them, “les autres.” French is the language of passion in this book – as well as a marker of the colonial government in the area and Ahmed’s hatred of the English, which we’ll find out about soon.  And now the Sheik’s French friend the author Raoul Saint Hubert (not to be confused with the wonderful restaurant chain… mmm… St-Hubert…) is coming to visit. Diana is upset that an aristocratic white guy will be coming to the camp and seeing her shame, and also jealous of the deep friendship between Ahmed and Raoul. Is there any Ahmed/Raoul fan fiction? I wonder…

And since I’m talking about slash… Obedience is a recurring theme in The Sheik – Diana moves from obeying no one but herself, to obeying and submitting to the Sheik, who (in Emily Dickinson fashion) she eventually refers to as Monseigneur, “mon maître et seigneur” (292). Does considering The Sheik as a fantasy of domination reframe its narrative? It makes for some interesting interpretations of passages like the following:

“He demanded immediate obedience, and only a few hours before she had made up her mind to unreserved submission, and she had broken down at the first test. The proof of her obedience was a hard one, from which she shrank, but it was harder far to see the look of anger she had provoked on the face of the man she loved” (164).

Of course there is an essential element missing here, and that is consent, the watchword of current bdsm communities. Diana has not consented to be in this relationship. Can she later then consent retroactively? It’s not an advisable prescription for real life behavior, but can it work in fiction?

For me, it’s not working. Of course, I’m not the intended audience, not being a reader in the 1920s. Would that make a difference? There are some discussions in romance land about the role of  ‘reader consent’ in rape/forced seduction narratives in romances. How did readers in the 1920s interpret this story?

This will come up again shortly, but for now Raoul Saint Hubert’s visit continues. He and Ahmed argue about Ahmed’s behavior towards Diana. Her Englishness is a bone of contention – for Raoul it means that Ahmed should never have abducted her, for Ahmed…well, he hates the English so for him it’s a sticking point.

Did I mention that Raoul, of course, falls in love with Diana, but out of respect for Ahmed represses his love?

Anyway, now comes the thrilling drama. In a twin scene to Diana’s first abduction, Diana and Gaston (the Sheik’s valet) and some of the Sheik’s men are riding in the desert when they surrounded by a large group of Arab men on horseback. Diana and Gaston try to escape, but Gaston is shot and Diana captured by the men, who are with Ahmed’s hereditary enemy: the robber Sheik Ibraheim Omair. It has happened again, and the book makes the parallels clear, as Diana thinks of how “the same feeling of unreality that she had experienced once before the first day in the Sheik’s camp came over her” (197).

When Ahmed realizes that Diana has been taken by Ibraheim Omair, he is distraught: “she had become necessary to him as he had never believed it possible that a woman could be” (200).  He assembles a group of fighting men and they go after her.

Diana wakes up in the camp of Sheik Ibraheim Omair. An Arab woman (one of the few in this novel) tries to make her drink drugged coffee. Diana resists and holds onto the hope that Sheik Ahmed will come for her. But first Ibraheim Omair arrives.  Unlike Ahmed, he is “the Arab of her imaginings”: slovenly, fat, his face marked with vice (219). For every noble Arab on a horse, there must be a fat evil Arab with giant Nubian slaves. It’s an obligation…

Horrifyingly, the Arab woman jealously flings herself at Ibraheim Omair’s feet, arguing with him in Arabic. He flings her off, and then, as she returns, kills her with a knife. It’s pretty unexpected and very gruesome. This ‘robber’ Sheik’s behavior begins to make Sheik Ahmed’s behavior seem quite reasonable and gentle in comparison.

Ibraheim Omair then turns to efforts to rape Diana. She fights him wildly, and just as she is about to lose, Ahmed arrives! So Ibraheim Omair tries to strangle her, but is instead himself strangled by Ahmed. This is described quite vividly and bloodily, but I’m not going to quote it here. This violence revives in Diana her old fear of Ahmed, but she has no sympathy for the dead man. At that moment, some of Ibraheim Omair’s men enter the tent and attack Ahmed and Diana. They are eventually fought off, with the aid of Raoul Saint Hubert, but in the process Sheik Ahmed has been stabbed in the back and ends the battle prostrate on the ground.

Is he dead?

I know I promised the conclusion today, but discussing the final revelations about Ahmed is going to take more time and space than I have in this post. It’s already too long! So – Monday, I promise!

So…women are like horses?

Back to The Sheik:

When we last saw Diana, she had just been abducted and raped by Sheik Ahmed ben Hassan, and brought to live in his camp. His tents are beautiful, by the way, in the fashion that ‘Oriental’ living spaces are in Western representations: full of hangings and a hint of sex, “a curious mixture of Oriental luxury and European comfort. The lavish sumptuousness of the furnishings suggested subtly an unrestrained indulgence, the whole atmosphere was voluptuous” (61).

In fact, Diana initially ascribes the splendor of the tents to what she thinks of as the “strain of vanity in all natives” (67). Yet the Sheik’s bookshelves are full of books on sport and travel. And, a bit inexplicably, on veterinary surgery.

Maybe these books on veterinary surgery are related to the Sheik’s passion for horses. The novel really hits us over the head with the ‘taming women is like taming horses’ metaphor.  There are numerous scenes of the Sheik taming various horses; these horses are vicious and dangerous, but beautiful. A horse named Shaitan, for example, has killed three men, but Ahmed, of course, can ride him. And, just like he breaks horses, Ahmed tells Diana that he will break her. As he says “I do not kill a horse until I have proved beyond all possible doubt that I cannot tame it. With you I have no such proof. I can tame you and I will” (113).

In addition to being a brutal, if effective, horseman (no horse whispering for the Sheik), Ahmed is also a fierce and independent leader, inspiring both fear and loyalty in his men. This is pretty typical of the heroes in sheikh romances. In a way, it’s a counterpart to historical romance’s fascination with British aristocracy (all those Dukes who loved me). Men with power, status and inherited wealth are desirable heroes.

However, while British men get to be ‘everyday’ guys in contemporary romances (well, as everyday as doctors and business tycoons can get), Arab men pretty much only show up as sheikhs. Without the title, they become invisible as romantic interests. And, in the 1920s, as we’ll see in the next post, sometimes they were never really there in the first place (oooo…mysteries!).

Anyway, the next few chapters dwell on descriptions of Diana’s emotional turmoil: fear, anger and, most of all, humiliation. “A numb feeling of despair came over her and with it a sense of unreality, as if it were a hideous nightmare from which she would wake, for the truth seemed too impossible, the setting too theatrical” (78). It’s compelling, but can get to be a bit much. At a certain point you start to think – yes, we already know she is feeling these emotions! They are not a surprise to us! These chapters are all told from Diana’s point of view – at this point we get very little insight into the Sheik’s motivations or feelings. All we know is that he wanted her, so he took her.

Yet, while the horse metaphor suggests that Ahmed will break Diana, Diana also recalls an incident in her past that suggests that Ahmed too might be ‘tamed’, if not broken. Once she went to the circus in Vienna and saw a young female lion tamer. The highlight of this woman’s show was when she ate dinner in the lions’ cage “surrounded by savage snarling brutes” (84). Diana is reminded of this incident by her own fear when dining with the Sheik.

Here the Sheik is like the lions: dangerous and hungry. Diana doesn’t even think of trying to tame him at this point in the novel, but as readers we might consider that a possibility. Especially since this reminiscence is immediately followed by Ahmed’s dog, who doesn’t like most people, making friends with Diana.

Of course, the next time Diana compares the Sheik to an animal, she compares him to a tiger she shot in India! She felt a strange admiration for his power and beauty, but he had just eaten a woman the week before. So she had to shoot him. How unreliable are metaphors and foreshadowing…

After many weeks with the Sheik, Diana finally gets an opportunity to try to escape. Riding out alone with Ahmed’s French valet, Gaston, Diana distracts him and takes her chance. She gallops away into the desert and for a short while feels like she has regained her self. Unfortunately for her, but fortunately for the plot, the Sheik finds her.  He will keep her at all costs and even shoots her horse to stop her! And he loved that horse.

Now the next twist occurs. Riding with the Sheik, held by his strong arms, Diana realizes that she loves him, “that she had loved him for a long time, even when she thought she hated him and when she had fled from him” (133). Frankly, I didn’t see it. I mean, I saw it coming, but it’s hard to see her love developing. Admiration for Ahmed’s vitality and strength, yes. But love? I'd love to hear opinions!

Apparently, it is Ahmed’s difference (especially his difference from the men she’s known and been indifferent to) which has made Diana love him: “her heart was given for all time to the fierce desert man who was so different from all other men whom she had met, a lawless savage who had taken her to satisfy a passing fancy and who had treated her with merciless cruelty. He was a brute, but she loved him, loved him for his very brutality and superb animal strength” (133). Well.

This love has even overcome any scruples Diana might have about being involved with someone “of a different race and colour” (134). Did I mention that the race politics in the book are pretty complicated (aka mostly racist in a 1920s way, but also super interesting)? On the one hand, Diana describes Ahmed as ‘a savage’ and there are so many offhand comments about the ways of ‘Arab men’ and the ‘Oriental temperament’. On the other hand, love appears and erases categorical boundaries. Yet…on the third hand, it is these very differences (described as racial differences – although ultimately revealed not to be) which create love in the first place!

Tune in next week to find out how E. M. Hull manages to tie these difficulties up in a neat bow at the end of the book. Biological essentialism solves everything?

I can’t lie – I’m still not done The Sheik.  I’m going to split it up into two or three posts, since I suspect I’m going to be pretty long-winded on the subject anyway. There’s just so much to talk about in this book!

The Sheik, published in 1919, was British novelist Edith Maude Hull’s first book and was fantastically popular. In 1921, Paramount made a film of the novel starring Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres. Both the book and the movie generated a lot of press, a lot of copycats and a lot of parodies. I’m pretty sure I have at least one sheikh romance on my bookshelf that is basically just The Sheik with the names changed. We’ll see when I get to it…

The Sheik is out of copyright now, so if you want to read along you can get an electronic copy at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7031). It’s a fascinating book, both in terms of the story and what it reveals about changing social attitudes in the early twentieth century. That said, it’s pretty iffy in terms of its race and gender politics. It would (hopefully) never get published as a romance nowadays, given that (spoiler alert) the heroine ends up falling in love with the hero who abducted and raped her. So there’s that…

From the Library of Congress, via flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/trialsanderrors/3810353131/).

Is she writing Help Me? Upside-down both ways?

Our heroine is a British aristocrat named Diana Mayo. Her brother is a Sir and her father was very, very rich. Interestingly, for the first ten or fifteen pages we only see Diana from the perspective of the ex-pats in the North African town she’s staying in with her brother. The requisite offended older lady is very offended by Diana’s plan to take a trip into the desert with only servants for company and suggests that these actions “cast a slur not only on her own reputation, but also on the prestige of her country” (1). The men, meanwhile, are mostly all in love with her.

Diana has been raised by her selfish and generally unemotional brother, since her mother died in childbirth and her father killed himself immediately thereafter. She is, according to one of the men, “the coldest little fish in the world, without an idea in her head beyond sport and travel” (3). She’s been basically raised as a boy, expects the independence of a boy and has an absolute horror of love and even physical affection. Her brother, too, seems entirely uninterested in women. E. M. Hull doesn’t do the psychologizing that current romance novels tend to do but I think we can all agree that a mother dead in childbirth and a father who was so in love that he then killed himself, leaving his children behind, makes a good fictional ‘route’ for ‘no interest in romance’.

But Diana also stands in for the ‘flapper’, an icon of changing norms of womanhood. She’s boyish, wears her hair short, enjoys dancing…and believes marriage is the enslavement of a woman to a man. The first time we see her she is described as “vividly alive”, “of medium height and very slender, standing erect with the easy, vigorous carriage of an athletic boy, her small head poised proudly” (4).

Did I mention that her red-gold hair is being lit beautifully by the light from the electrolier? Now why did that word never catch on?!

In the first chapter, Diana says so many times that she will never be willing to obey anyone but herself, that she has no interest in love and that the trip she’s about to undertake is perfectly safe (despite everyone’s warnings that a pretty woman like her shouldn’t go out into the desert without a white man and some white women along – well, they don’t put it like that, but that’s the gist of things) that it’s pretty much a guarantee that this trip is indeed dangerous, that Diana will fall in love and that she will be forced to obey someone else (perhaps the titular Sheik?).

Diana is used to travelling with her brother, Sir Aubrey. They’ve been to India and to America, and mostly anywhere that good hunting is to be found. However, he’s taking off to America to find himself a wife so that the family name can be carried on (how romantic!) and Diana is going into the desert without him, as she refuses to put off her trip (and he in turn refuses to delay his).

Diana rides off into the desert with her guide Mustafa Ali, servants and a pack of camels for her baggage. She is deliriously happy to be in the desert: “the burning sun overhead in the cloudless sky, the shimmering haze rising from the hot, dry ground, the feathery outline of some clustering palm trees in a tiny distant oasis were like remembrances that she watched again with a feeling of gladness that was fuller and deeper than anything that she had been conscious of before” (34).

Unfortunately, as we learn later, her guide has been paid off by the Sheik and Diana’s party is surrounded by a group of men carrying rifles on horseback. Diana, stubborn and brave, takes off on her horse, but is chased down by a man with “dark piercing eyes, and white gleaming teeth” (the Sheik) who plucks her up off of her horse and rides away with her. For the first time in her life, she feels fear and is pretty much overwhelmed by it, both physically and mentally.

The Sheik takes her to his tent, and, addressing her in French, informs her that he is “the Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan” (57). Without explicitly saying it, he basically says that he’s brought her there to rape her: “Why have I brought you here? Bon Dieu! Are you not woman enough to know?” (57).

Then follows a pretty-explicit-for-the-1910s, if-not-actually-that-explicit, rape scene. It’s a conflicted scene, once you know the book’s ending. A lot of the language is similar to that which might be used in a consensual (if forceful) love scene: “the hot mouth pressed on hers was like a narcotic, drugging her almost into insensibility” (58). (“Your love is my drug”?) But E. M. Hull also makes it clear (without using the word) that this is a rape. Diana feels trapped and powerless. She is filled with horror and revulsion. The danger that everyone said was lurking in the desert (an Arab guy who will rape her) came true. Yet, the rest of the book then undoes these fulfilled expectations – Ahmed ben Hassan is not what he seems…and danger can be made less dangerous…

Next Monday – the rest of the book.  Who is this Sheik? What about all the horse metaphors? You say this is a romance?