The Sheik

The Sheik is a 1919 novel by Edith Maude Hull, an English novelist of the early twentieth century. It was the first of a series of novels she wrote with desert settings that set off a major revival of the “desert romance” genre of romantic fiction. It was a huge best-seller and the most popular of her books, and it served as the basis for the film of the same name starring Rudolph Valentino in the title role.

Throughout its history, The Sheik has attracted controversy, though this has shifted in form over the years. When it was published, it was considered an erotic novel and variously described in the press as “shocking” and “poisonously salacious.”

In more recent decades, the novel has been strongly criticized for its central plot element: the idea that rape leads to love i.e. forced seduction. Other criticisms have been directed at ideas closely related to the central rape plot: that for women, sexual submission is a necessary and natural condition; and that rape is excused by marriage. There has been much criticism of various Orientalist and colonialist elements, such as the fact that interracial love between an Englishwoman and a “native” is avoided and the rape ultimately justified by having the rapist turn out to be European rather than Arab. With its plot centered on the subjugation of a willful woman, The Sheik has been compared to The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare.

Criticism of the novel has been tempered, however, by other writers observing that women writers of Hull’s period used the already well-established genre of the Orientalist fantasy to begin putting feminist ideas before their primarily female readership. Women appear as protagonists in desert romances, for example, and in The Sheik specifically, the reader is engaged with Diana as an independent-minded and defiant woman for most of the novel’s length, before Hull concludes her story in a conventional way. Moreover, it appears the couple means to live in the desert – a break on Hull’s part with the typical romance novel ending that sees the heroine safely ensconced in the townhouses and country estates of the British aristocracy.

Strong contrasts are also painted between the relative liberty of European women and the servitude of their counterparts from the Middle East:

That women could submit to the degrading intimacy and fettered existence of married life filled [Diana] with scornful wonder. To be bound irrevocably to the will and pleasure of a man who would have the right to demand obedience in all that constituted marriage and the strength to enforce those claims revolted her. For a Western woman it was bad enough, but for the women of the East, mere slaves of the passions of the men who owned them, unconsidered, disregarded, reduced to the level of animals, the bare idea made her quiver.

Although this passage appears early in the novel and is to a great extent negated by Diana’s later submission to Ahmed, the questions it raises about women’s rights echo some of the main themes of contemporary suffragists. (wikipedia.org)