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"And He Was an Arab!": Imperial Femininity and Pleasure in E.M. Hull's 1919 Desert Romance, The Sheik
Glennemeier, Jaelyn
Glennemeier, Jaelyn
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Abstract
E.M. Hull’s sensational novel The Sheik thrilled and shocked early twentieth century readers with its tale of a woman’s journey into the Sahara desert and her interracial sexual desire for the brooding Arab sheik who captures her. The groundbreaking book made the mysterious and thrilling Arabian desert accessible to working class readership and broke the rules on what was acceptable on the written page. This paper contextualizes The Sheik within the “golden age” of women’s travel writing by comparing the journey of its heroine, Diana Mayo, to the non-fiction travel accounts of other pioneers of Middle Eastern travel. The memoirs of Gertrude Bell, Lady Mary Montagu, and E.M. Hull reveal an shared imperial identity unique to white women of the British Empire. It is an identity founded in the newly acquired autonomy granted to women through their physical mobility in the desert and their negotiations of gender in the early twentieth century. In exploring this identity, this paper demonstrates Hull’s use of fiction to test the bounds of white women’s engagement with the Middle East and their participation in the Orientalist fantasies based in sex, desire, and liberation from which they had been historically excluded.
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Date
2018
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Department of History, University of Kansas