What your great-gran was reading

E.M. Hull, The Sheik (1919: London; Virago, 1996).

I'd been meaning to read this for a while. I first heard of it in Ross McKibbin's Classes and Cultures, an historical survey of interwar Britain. The plot: a haughty English heroine is kidnapped in the Algerian desert by a lusty sheik who rapes her repeatedly. She eventually falls for him, but, as McKibbin notes, "Her choice is not quite so shocking as it appears, since the sheik (typically) turns out to be half-English and of noble birth." It was a runaway best-seller, going through several editions in its first year and selling over 1.2 million copies. The thought of 1.2 million English ladies panting over this kind of softcore rape fantasy reduced my friend Bethany and I to tears of laughter. Needless to say, it was only a matter of time before I tracked it down for myself.

The Sheik did not disappoint, either as straight-up romance or historical artifact. The reclusive Edith Maude Hull, who wrote it as a hobby, was marvelously artless. She transmitted her sexual fancy, and her preconceptions about race and gender, with equal candour. The result is more innocent than repellent. In fact, the rich, beautiful, pampered, racist Diana Mayo is so smug in her (false) sense of superiority and self-sufficiency, you really start wanting her to be conquered by someone. Eventually, she is. And how! By the end of the book just a glance from the Sheik elicits quivers and shakes. The story's climax offers ludicrous proof of Lady Diana's utter submission. Not a feminist read, although perhaps a post-feminist one, given the unquestionable popularity of Hull's vision with interwar female readers. (And yes, I am again reminded of the Twilight saga, another piece of unliterary, unfiltered fantasy storytelling. Apparently Stephenie Meyer has responded to criticisms of her books with, "I never said that I was a writer.")

The Sheik is not a fount of political correctness. It is astonishingly racist in its depiction of Arabs, constituting a complete catalogue of stereotypical slurs; the men are dirty and violent, but easily cowed, while the women are slavish and sniveling. Diana is at one point captured by a rival sheik, described as "the Arab of my imaginings":

[...] this gross, unwieldy figure lying among the tawdry cushions, his swollen, ferocious face seamed and lined with every mark of vice, his full, sensual lips parted and showing broken, blackened teeth, his deep-set, bloodshot eyes with a look in them that it took all her resolution to sustain, a look of such bestial evilness that the horror of it bathed her in perspiration.

Ahmed Ben Hassan, the Sheik, of course, does not fit this description. "Only" his sexual cruelty towards Diana fits the racial stereotype, while the heroine is bewildered by the Sheik's meticulous grooming and cleanliness - hygiene being apparently the preserve of Europeans.

The same passion with which Hull rails against the natives, however, she injects into the romantic bits as well, and the results are perfect: "The touch of his scorching lips, the clasp of his arms, the close union with his warm, strong body robbed her of all strength, of all power of resistance." Rrrow!