D
Genre: Historical: Other, Romance
Many of us have heard tell of the The Sheik, the 1919 “romantic” adventure novel written by E.M. Hull. It s one of the early depictions of a rapist alpha-hole hero, a strong woman tamed by the dick of her man, and a super racist, colonialist plot.
Okay, it’s not an early depiction of that last part, you can find super racist colonialist plots throughout much of the Western Literature Canon, but three things make a good list. Anyway, I was introduced to the story by the silent film from 1921 staring Rudolph Valentino, and was young enough that I really did not get the rapey implications that were not shown on screen. As I got older, I started putting the pieces together, but didn’t quite “Get” it until I actually read the book when I first started hanging around these parts.
It’s SUPER rapey. The prose is good, and the descriptions are gorgeous, but it’s really hard to get around the fact that the plot is built around a “want, take, have” rapist who sees this woman and decides that he will have her, and then she falls in love with him for it.
Victoria Vane is a romance author who also was dismayed at the rapeyness, but loved the way the chracters were drawn and the prose. So she decided to try to rework it to make it less rapey, and also to add actual sex scenes and not fade to black:
Nevertheless, this story captured my imagination and even though I had a number of other writing projects in progress, The Sheik held me hostage and absolutely refused to let me go. Once I began fantasizing about alternate scenarios, dialogue, and plot twists, I knew it was calling to me. I had no choice but to re-tell this story the way I envisioned it.
While I have taken a number of liberties in my re-telling, the main plot, characters, and descriptive passages are largely unchanged. I kept everything I loved and changed what I loathed. Although my version is not completely devoid of violence (to omit all of it would only have watered down Ahmed’s powerful alpha character), I have taken out the rape and animal abuse which I abhorred in the original. I have also thrown the bedroom door wide open
It…I’m not convinced it works.
The basic plot in The Sheik Retold is that Diana Mayo is a woman who grew up in the care of her older brother with no parents, and her brother didn’t know how to raise a girl so Diana is unwomanly and independent and gives no fucks. She plans a month long trip through the deserts of North Africa with only native guides and no other Europeans, and everyone is like “that’s fucking crazy!” and she turns down a marriagae proposal because that would be the end of her independence and she has no feelings of love or desire for sex, so screw it, I’mma do what I want.
Once out in the desert, her guide leads her into an ambush, where she is taken captive by Sheik Ahmed ben Hassan. He brings her back to his camp, and tells her that she will submit to him, but he wants her to do it willingly and won’t force himself on her. Kind of, because he does cut off her clothes and touch her until she’s on the brink of orgasm and loving it, and then he’s like, “but I’m not going to actually fuck you until you beg for it, so goodnight!”
The next morning, she watches him break a horse by letting it fight itself out while he essentially sat on it’s head, until it accepted him as master, and Diana relaizes that is how it will go for her- he can keep her there and she may as well acquiese to his masterful dick. So she does and the sex is good, but she’s still trapped there, so how much consent is actually involved is pretty dubious.
Ahmed’s BFF, a French viscount, writer, and doctor (he’s very accomplished) comes to visit, and Diana is really uncomfortable with someone from her world knowing who she is and where she is and what’s been happening to her. Ahmed is not that sympathetic to her concerns, because he’s an asshole.
There’s an escape attempt that turns into a kidnapping that nearly gets Ahmed killed and starts an all-out tribal war. While Ahmed is recovering, Diana remarks that his hands are “large for an Arab” and she’s told that well, no, he’s actually English, and the son and heir of an Earl, but he hates the English and everything about them. He was adopted by the previous Sheik of his tribe and now he’s the bestest Sheik that ever Sheiked because white dudes do everything best.
Diana has naturally fallen in love with him, enough to let him perform anal sex on her (look, I don’t know) and he’s in love with her but won’t admit it to anyone because weakness and also how could he love an Englishwoman so he lets her go, but she comes back to warn him that the colonial occupying army is trying to hunt him down, and he says, yeah I knew that, but you came back so I guess we should get married.
The end.
There’s a lot here, and a lot of it is at the hands of E.M. Hull, who was a product of her time, but it’s there’s a lot of straight up rape in her book. And the fact that Ahmed only becomes a legit romatic prospect in the eyes of Diana when she finds out that he’s not Arabic, he’s actually a white dude, and nobility at that.
I understand that Vane was trying to make this less objectionable, and wanted to balance keeping the characters true to how they were originally written. I get that. I don’t think she went as far as she could have, to be honest. Deciding to acquiesce to sex when you really don’t feel like you have a choice, because “submit or be killed when my patience runs out” are the options he gives her, isn’t consent. She may chose to say, “Yeah, I chose this” if that’s what she needs to do to keep herself sane, but objectively….no.
And for what, really? To keep Ahmed as a total alphole who still can’t figure out what consent is? There are parts of this character that don’t need to be kept true, to be honest. “Want, take, have” with no regard to anyone else’s feelings or needs isn’t a heroic trait. The only difference here is that the rape isn’t violent, but it’s still hate-fucking with shadey and dodgy consent.
(Look, I’m all for a good hate-fucking, as long as everyone involved is consenting to the fucking part.)
I could buy the argument of, “I wanted to keep the story as Hull intended it intact, but make it less brutal and more explicit” — which isn’t the argument she made. I can’t pretend that “I’ll keep you here forever and I just might kill you if I don’t get my way” isn’t rapey. It’s still pretty rapey.
I remember watching the silent movie with my mom (Who certainly hadn’t read the book, and I don’t think she’d seen the movie before), and when they got to the “His hands are large for an Arab” “Well about that…” part, she went, “Oh, I see how it is- he’s okay for her to fall in love with him now that he’s a white guy. Interesting.”
(My mom, being Midwestern, and this being a long time ago, would not actually say “that’s fucked up” but it was alllllllll there in her “interesting.”) It’s super colonialist racist. The whole set up of Ahmed is actually the heir to some Earl or whatever, so it’s not like she’s actually been banging a not-white man is just yucky.
Basically, I kind of applaud the idea of trying to take some of these super messy bits of our history (and this book is part of our history) and making them less messy. I wanted this book to be better than the original. Alas, I don’t think Vane went far enough, so it’s still really messy.
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I don’t get a hero who hates a certain race/nationality, but then has unprotected sex with a woman of that race/nationality. What does he imagine will happen if (no, when, given how virile these heroes are) she gets pregnant? Will he take the baby away from her so he can raise it as part of the right race with the correct culture?
I’ve noticed in some early twentieth century fiction–particularly British–there’s a tendency to lump together Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people in a generic not-quite-white category and treat them with scorn. Classic mystery writers such as Christie and Marsh come forcibly to mind. And, yeah, it’s racist as hell even though such characters are often portrayed as exotic and attractive. What I can’t understand is why some of our best romance writers continue to perpetuate this myth with their Greek, Italian and still sheiky alpha heroes. Does being washed in the blood of the $buck$ transcend those race issues? Racism is defined by an attitude not the actual bloodline of its object.
Also, for the record, I’m a little tired of cute Irishmen in cute Irish families. My mom used to refer bitterly to “no Irish need apply” signs and I feel that glamorizing an ethnic group is kind of the backside of racism.
Sadly, I have not just heard tell of this movie. A (female) professor showed it during one of my classes at university because, in her words, the writer/director deeply understood women.
The entire class was deeply disturbed. And what that movie had to do with Greek and Roman studies I’ll never know.
@PamG I’ve been wondering if Harlequin is still doing the Greek tycoon books given the economic troubles in Greece. I’m just glad those horrid Native American romances are gone. Talk about WTF racism.
I was quite young when I read the original of The Sheik (in translation, and Icelandic translators back then were in the habit of changing, omitting and even adding things, so I don’t know how accurate it was compared with the original) and the rapey thing went completely over my head. I did find it implausible that she would have fallen in love with him when he was holding her prisoner, and boy, did I ever notice that having him be English suddenly made it acceptable for them to be together. I was outraged, and this was before I even learned that the phenomenon had a name.
This new version does not sound like it did anything to make the start of the “relationship” less rapey, only differently rapey and more explicit. Making sex her choice when she really has none is just rape by another name.
What this sounds to me is that Victoria Vane took one of the forerunners of the classic old skool romances and made it explicitly old skool.
I wish more people (and authors in general) understood that not having the power to say no, whether because someone is simply giving in to someone else because it’s easier or they’re genuinely threatened or have no other option, isn’t real consent. (And part of the reason why the romanticizing of the Daenerys/Drogo relationship scares me a little, regardless of how it ultimately played out.) It definitely sounds like this book needed waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more of an overhaul to address all its problems than the author was able to give it.
Didn’t Johanna Lindsey do this with “Captive Bride” waaaayyy back in 1977 – albeit without actually using Hull’s writing? It was the first last and only one of her books I ever read.
We all know back door action with your faux Arab captor= love. I mean, clearly. It’s like a Hallmark card but with less glitter and more lube.
Can’t say that I care to read this, but I appreciate such a thoughtful review. The movie is indeed WTF-rific.
I’ve read many, many romances over the years, including some winners from the bodice ripper era. But the original “Sheik” is by far the rapey-est book I’ve ever read. I didn’t expect a 1919 book to be as explicit as it was. (Not descriptive, but totally clear that it was rape. And also totally clear that “she brought it on herself by her foolish independent behavior”.)I have absolutely no desire to read an attempt at making it more palatable. Better to read it in it’s original form if you must, so you really understand attitudes of the period.
If you have an urge for something really old, but not rapey, I’ve just noticed that there’s a free version of “The Scarlet Pimpernel” on Kindle, as well as a free version of one of the Pimpernel sequel books, “I Will Repay”. I snapped ’em up.
@Leah I know ther has been some discussion (at least in academic circles in Canada) in reframing the definition of rape. So instead of being defined by consent it would be defined, at least in part, by coercion to take into account situations where the rapist is in a position of power over their victim that makes it impossible for there to be true consent to a sexual relationship (ex boss, teacher, commanding officer, captor).
@Karin, there’s a sequel to Pimpernel?!?!!?! Squeeeeeee!!!!!
Catherine Asaro did a retelling of the Sheik (Nightbird) that made the hero more palatable — he was still a jerk a lot of the time, but he got that it made the heroine unhappy, so he tried to change a bit.
I am not sure I’m ok with the concept of this book.
Apropos consent, isn’t it weird to take someone else’s writing and hijack it like that? It’s credited as being written by both of them, so it’s not plagiarism, but it’s not like they’re a writing team, either. Hull wasn’t looking to collaborate.
It’s not a complete rewrite, like a retelling, an homage, a response or fanfic. This sounds to me almost like censoring it, or whitewashing it, or bowdlerization or something.
I don’t know how to articulate it exactly, but it gives me bad feelings.
It’s been years since I read it, but I thought “The Blue Sword” by Robin McKinley used some of the plot of “The Sheik.” However, the hero of that book kidnaps the heroine because he recognizes she’s destined to save his people and is, in fact, descended from their greatest hero, also a woman. There is eventually a romance, of course.
I remember thinking at the time that using a fantasy setting and changing the hero’s motivation removed the rapey aspects of the story. I should probably reread it to see if that judgment holds up. It came out in the 80s, and it didn’t take much then to be an improvement on a lot of other books available.
Well it’s not like I was surprised by this being about rape, but the behaviour listed in this ‘hero’ are distressingly close to my own past. PSA to authors: this is not good behaviour.
Mary, there are SCORES of sequels to the Scarlet Pimpernel, it’s how the Baroness made her fortune. Go forth and read! All the minor characters get their own books (this proving there’s nothing new under the sun).
I agree with KKW. I own a falling-apart copy of The Sheik, as well as The Sons of the Sheik. Both are leather-bound, with pages that are brittle and brown with age. Both belonged to one of my mom’s sisters, and since the only sister left alive is now blind, I’m keeping them. The first “romance” books I ever read. Even to my young (about 12) eyes, I disliked that the “hero” forced himself on the heroine. But I also loved to imagine the part of the sex scenes that were implied.
The idea that someone else is imposing their opinions is anathema to me. Leave an original story alone! If you want to “improve” on it, do as other authors have and recast the story with other characters. It’s like when a movie is made of a book: the book is the author’s vision, the movie is the director’s vision. I prefer the originals…always.
Ah yes, The Sheik. I was both horrified and pissed off. Horrified by rape-and-attempted-suicide-means-love theme, and pissed off because on her own I rather liked the character of Diana. She was like two different people, though. On her own or with other characters in the book she was interesting, strong, defiant, adventurous and on her toes. Then that damn sheik would show up and she would transform into a quivering mass of jelly.
In my mind the only way to rewrite Hull’s story to make it more palatable is if the sheik ends up being attacked by a herd of man-eating pigs.
There is a novel (I think a mystery novel) that begins with an English professor who is not normally a romance reader on an airplane reading a romance and suddenly realizing that it has been partially plagiarized from “The Sheik.” I think she eventually confronts the “author” who crumbles and admits to padding her work with Hull’s. I cannot for the life of me remember the book (does it ring any bells for anyone else?), but I remember that scene was funny and satisfying. It now also seems a bit prescient.
Rebecca, I believe you are thinking of “Die for Love” by Elizabeth Peters. I have read it about a dozen times and still cling on to my hardcover first edition and I remember that scene vividly. 🙂 I recommend the book to all who love romance novels.
Re: The Sheik, I hated it without reservation (hated Diana, hated Ahmed, hated the plot, hated the writing, hated the racism and the sexism and the rape). I hated it so much that I ripped the page block out of the old hardcover I’d found in a thrift store for a dollar, and sent the pages to my sister to use for firelighters. I use the cover as a trivet in my kitchen.
I read ‘The Sheikh’ as a kind of ‘archeological’ experience. I didn’t enjoy it, and tried to understand why it was a best-seller at the beginning of the 20th century. I hated not only the rape but also how this young, vibrant, independent girl who rode horses and shoot and behaved as a free spirit was transformed into a silly woman. As if being independent and active was so unwomanly that she had to be tamed by ‘the man’ to be a ‘real’ woman, one who wanted nothing more than be indoors waiting for him.
Were all the books in those times written that way? Or only those for a female audience?
About imperialism, you’re totally right about it. But it has made me think. Isn’t it something that keeps on happening nowadays? How many harlequins with supposedly Mediterranean -or African or Asian- ‘heros’ are, as a matter of fact, of mixed ancestry? Usually, at least one of the parents is Anglosaxon.
When was the last time that a Western character fell in love with someone from a different country or continent?
When was the last time that you saw -in a romance novel- someone from those parts of the world and it was not a cliché? Even people from well-known Western countries as France or Italy are represented as stereotypes.
I think it’s a great idea for a rework. I’ve always liked The Sheikh, though the rape-part and horse-scene is too much even for someone like me that almost can’t get the hero alpha enough. I’ll definitely give it a try. When it comes to colonialism – well, that’s part of the reading experience if you read books from the first half of the 20th century or earlier. I would balk, though, if something similar occurred in a romance written today where everyone ought to know better.