The Sheik

I’m gonna go ahead and say it–rape fantasies aren’t my thing. (I know it’s a shocker.) So I was prepared to hate The Sheik and hate it plenty. And I kind of did hate it but not quite in the way I expected to.

The novel by E. M. Hull (Edith Maude Hull) was first published in 1919. It was made into the famous Rudolph Valentino movie two years later. Several decades later, it seems to have been part of the inspiration for one of my all time favorite books, The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (also probably a contender for “classic trash” status). Here’s what McKinley had to say about The Sheik:

Speaking of embarrassing and detestable stories. I read E M Hull’s The Sheik because I thought it was going to be . . . a wonderful old-fashioned British Empire novel where an English woman rides off into the desert to have adventures. It isn’t. It’s about the punishment a woman who tries to do a man’s job . . . necessarily calls down upon herself and how if she’s punished long and hard enough she’ll learn to like it and embrace it as her fate as a woman. Oh yes, and the sheik himself turns out to be English — not a, you know, unsavoury non-anglo foreigner — so it’s okay that she falls in love with him after he’s been raping her into submission for a while.

Can you see where the hate might come in here? “Raping her into submission” and all.

And, just to top off the offense, the first third of the book is just boring. At least once she’s kidnapped something interesting is going on. The beginning is just “look at this haughty caricature of a woman, doesn’t she deserve something bad that I’ll now foreshadow vaguely?” So, how could it have been such a huge bestseller? What’s the appeal?

I read McKinley’s comments before I read the book, so I was ready for really gross stuff about how much fun rape can be if the woman just gives in. But that doesn’t happen. The author never pretends that the rape scenes are anything other than horrible for Diana, the story’s leading lady. (By the way–it is pretty clear in the book that Diana has been raped repeatedly, but there are no graphic descriptions of any of the action.) Diana doesn’t like getting beaten up or raped or controlled and she never does, even when she decides she loves her abuser. And the way she feels about him does seem pretty realistic when you think about abuse victims and Stockholm syndrome and battered women.

It reminded me of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, actually. The idea that alcoholism is a disease and not a moral failing wasn’t a widely accepted idea in 1885, when the book was first published. (Alcoholics Anonymous wasn’t founded until 1934, and the American Medical Association didn’t recognize alcoholism as a disease until the 1950s). And yet, Twain’s depiction Huck’s father, Pap, sure sounds like the story of an alcoholic today. Twain was able to observe some truth about why a drunk was a drunk and look at him with sympathy, even though his culture didn’t have the same vocabulary of psychology for discussing the subject of alcohol abuse that we have today.

So, perhaps we can say the same for Hull. She has accurately observed something about the way an abused woman can feel toward her abuser. I can imagine a woman in 1919, who loves a husband who sometimes hits her, reading this and feeling like she’d finally found a story about a woman who she in some way recognized and with whom she could identify.

Hull also has sympathy for the abuser, something that today’s language of abuse rarely does. His convincing back story involves being abandoned by his alcoholic, violent father, after the father rapes and abuses his mother. The Sheik eventually falls in love with Diana and he regrets that he sometimes can’t help abusing her, as his father abused his mother. They both recognize the abuse as terrible, not a sexy good time as in some creepy rape fantasy literature today, but the abuse is a price they’re willing to pay for their love. Creepy, sure, but there is something recognizable and believable inside it, even if it doesn’t wrap up with a message that a modern audience can be comfortable with.

Interesting to think that everything Twain wrote, and everything the Brontes and Jane Austen wrote, came many years before this book, when this book seems so primitive in its attitudes about love and violence and relationships between men and women. Then again, violence against women is still a part of our culture and cultures around the world. Maybe we haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think.

This book could also be considered once of the earliest examples of a modern romance novel and some pieces of the formula are there–the haughty woman who is above love, the initial fights and romance/seduction, misunderstandings between the lovers, a separation, then all becomes clear when the lovers reunite, happily ever after.