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Abstract
The publication of Camping in the Sahara, seven years after its author E. M. Hull was reluctantly catapulted to fame on the back of her ignominious debut novel, The Sheik (1919), made relatively little impact on her already cemented reputation as a bestselling author of desert “trash”. Nevertheless, her travelogue served to clarify her relative authority on the North African Saharan regions in which her novels were set. Hull's fictional output, abetted by Rudolph Valentino's screen performance in the novel's film adaptation, directed by George Melford (1921), served as a stimulus to the “sheik obsession” which was to capture the imagination of a generation during the 1920s. Even though Hull's name is forever wed to The Sheik, the woman herself remains something of an enigma. There is little critical or biographical information on Hull and her travels in Algeria. This article aims to piece together the available evidence. It also aims to begin to unravel the connection between Hull's fictional and non-fictional writing and to comment on its impact on the desert romance craze of the 1920s. Having examined how travel trends to the Sahara in the 1920s were informed by movements in popular culture, the essay proceeds to explore how Hull constructs the desert as a backdrop to her own story into which she writes herself. Hull's desert in Camping in the Sahara resembles a film set in which the scenery is imagined through a camera lens and the people she encounters are inadvertently assessed through the eyes of a casting director.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Andrew C. Long, for instance, states: “Hull did not even visit North Africa […] or the Near East until she and her family were able to do so with her earnings from the hugely popular novel” (Citation2014, 53).
2. Hsu-Ming Teo writes that “[a]s a child she [Hull] traveled widely with her parents, even visiting Algeria – the setting of her sheik novels” (Citation2010, 9). Susan L. Blake is another of the few critics to mention Camping in the Sahara (albeit in footnoted material). Blake asserts that Hull
had one daughter, Cecil Winstanley, who accompanied her on the Algerian tour she recounts in Camping in the Sahara, Citation1926. The frequently repeated assertion that Hull had not visited the North African sites of her novels before writing The Sheik implies that she knew nothing of them. We do not know when the several previous trips she mentions in Camping in the Sahara took place, but the thoughtfulness of that narrative and the reference in it to her first visit to Algeria as a child (48) suggest long interest in and familiarity with North Africa and Arab culture. (in footnote 1, Citation2003, 206)
3. Hsu-Ming Teo's monograph, Desert Passions (Citation2012), is one of the latest offerings to the field of “desert romance studies” providing a book length study of the genre. Teo notes herself that “the last two decades have seen a growing body of scholarship on The Sheik which have revised earlier hostile opinions, and which have grown increasingly sophisticated in analyzing issues of gender, power, race, and imperialism in the novel” (Citation2010, 5).
4. Further supporting the fact that the publication of Camping in the Sahara helped to dissolve conjecture as to Hull's degree of authority, another review claims:
The originator of the sheik boom was E.M. Hull (Mrs. or Miss), who wrote The Sheik, The Sons of the Sheik, and other desert shrieks, and the lady now comes out with a real description of the sheik region – the Sahara. (Sunday Times, Perth, WA, 13 February 1927, 24)
5. Teo goes on to claim that these representations were linked to the legitimisation of female sexuality in the interwar period (Citation2002, 181).
6. For extensive existing work on the desert romance genre, see Bach (Citation1997), Blake (Citation2003), Chow (Citation199 Citation9), Frost (Citation2006), Gargano (Citation2006), Kaler (Citation1999), Melman (Citation1988) and Teo (Citation2007).
7. This is affirmed also by Mark Lyn Anderson who writes that: “The Sheik established something of a craze for Arab-inspired themes and fashions, and it also introduced the word ‘sheik’ into American parlance to describe the male version of the seductive vamp” (Citation2009, 66).
8. Cherry's observation that in “Algeria a feminist bid for independent mobility […] coincided with the Western voyager's fantasies of solitude” (Citation2002, 112), serves as a reminder that the perception of the desert as a space of liberty for Western women predated the desert romance craze of the 1920s.
9. The review goes on to make much of the fact that Hull and her daughter were unchaperoned women: “One needs to be reminded that the writer is a woman, and that, on this desert Odyssey, she has the company of only one other white person – and a woman at that” (6). The review ignores the fact that the women were well-looked after by a number of Algerian staff. It must be noted that Hull's journey, though undoubtedly requiring a certain adventurous disposition, was not particularly novel. Louisa Jebb's By Desert Ways to Baghdad (Citation190 Citation9), for instance, is one such example of independent women on a similar undertaking.
10. As highlighted by Teo, joining The Sheik on bookshelves in the 1920s were other romances by female travel writers-cum-novelists such as Lady Dorothy Mills with The Tent of Blue (1922) and Rosita Forbes who, according to Teo, “could not resist the temptation to cash in on the popular desert romance genre in novels such as Quest: The Story of Anne, Three Men and Some Arabs (1922), If the Gods Laugh (1925), and Sirocco (1927)” (Citation2012, 81–82).
11. See, for example, the inventory of The Edith Maud Hull papers at the Women's Library, London School of Economics, University of London.
12. This was particularly apparent with Rosita Forbes. Teo writes, for instance, that Forbes's Women Called Wild used the discussion of sexual slavery “to emphasize the benefits of being a free British woman, and to justify British imperial rule” (Citation2002, 183).
13. The reasons for the fact that women feature relatively lightly in Camping in the Sahara could be various. It is likely that Hull would have encountered more men given that women in Algeria were predominantly Muslim and cultural attitudes meant that they were often segregated from men and unable to participate in public life. Additionally, as a romance writer, Hull was largely unconcerned with the native women (her heroines were usually white Europeans).
14. Billie Melman defines, harem literature as a genre of writing produced by travellers (though distinct from travel writing per se), which is “concerned, mainly or wholly, with the material conditions of life and everyday domestic experience of Muslim women”, in which the “narrative of the journey is characteristically subordinated to the interest in customs, manners and morals” (Citation1992, 16).
15. According to Shirley Foster, the eighteenth and nineteenth century harem “was perceived as a site of sexual licence, forbidden territory, a segregated space barred to men and charged with erotic significance, about which ‘knowledge’ could be only voyeuristically obtained and imaginatively reproduced” (Citation2004, 7). See Mills (Citation1993, 60–61) for a further discussion of criticism on the sexualisation of the “native” woman in orientalist discourse.
16. As Foster notes, in contrast to male travellers, “the harem was accessed [by women] somewhat differently. It was not forbidden territory, and hence as a ‘sight’ could, for female eyes, be experientially authenticated” (Citation2004, 8). See Alloula (Citation1986), for an in-depth discussion of photographic representations of the harem in Algeria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
17. It is worthy of note that Montagu alludes to a “true life” abduction experience of one of her acquaintances which could itself be read as an early prototype of the desert romance plot. Montagu briefly relates the supposedly factual tale of “a Christian woman of quality” who was, much like The Sheik's heroine Diana, captured and raped (this time by a Turkish Admiral), and who ultimately chose to take her abductor as her husband (Citation1994, 136).
18. Teo suggests that it is Rosita Forbes who exemplifies this shift: “More than any other woman of her era Rosita Forbes reinvented the harem with an overwhelming aura of erotic (and dangerous) sensuality” (Citation2002, 183).
19. Roberts’ argument is of course made in relation to early texts, more specifically the published diaries of nineteenth-century British women travellers (such as Sophia Lane-Poole, Laura Starr and Lucy Matilda Cubley).
20. Roberts reminds us that postcolonial and feminist theory have of course been instrumental in alerting us to the fact that “the dominant masculine fantasy of the harem is premised on the centrality of the western male viewer whose look commands the visual field” (Citation2000, 32).
21. It is interesting to note that the harem as conceived from the West is very much the product of a pre-existing cultural history. As Melman notes, “Men and women had experienced the Orient literarily before visiting the geographical Middle East; they brought with them to that region images, propagated by a long literary tradition” (Citation1992, 63). See Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Harems of the Mind (Citation2000) for a monograph-length study on the West's “collective fantasizing” of the harem. Also see Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (Citation2004).
22. As Mills writes, it was frequently the case that colonial travel texts dwelt on “the importance of the feminine discourse of clothes, wearing correct clothes, gloves, skirts of a decent length, not riding side-saddle and so on, but also of correct behaviour, of obeying the norms of British society” (Citation1993, 72). Where Hull's references to clothing differ from those of the Victorian woman traveller writer, such as Mary Kingsley (discussed in Mills’ text), is that they do not reinforce the same kind of femininity (for instance, instead of skirts, Hull is in riding trousers). Hull's emphasis on the masculine nature of her clothing might be indicative of a post-war shift away from discourses on proper feminine deportment whilst simultaneously marking her superiority over native women in much the same way that the European Victorian might.
23. See Turner (Citation2011) for a more detailed discussion on androgyny in Hull's novels. Also, see Macleod (Citation1998). For a discussion of Rudolph Valentino, see Studlar (Citation1989).
24. It was not uncommon for women to travel in men's clothes. For instance Gertrude Bell dressed as a man to gain access to spheres not open to women in the Middle East and Isabelle Eberhardt habitually dressed as a man for the freedom it provided her.
25. Tidrick's book provides a fascinating account about the English fascination with the Bedouin. Tidrick writes that
Though the Bedouin had to behave in camp, in raiding his love of fighting could be indulged without restraint. To die in a raid was to die the death of a hero.
26. Hull writes that
having purposely delayed snapping him until he should leave us, and not expecting him to make such a sudden exit, the moment of his going found the camera empty, and he did not care to risk waiting while we delved amongst our kit for a fresh roll of films. (Citation1926, 111)
27. In relation to the Middle East in the late nineteenth century specifically, Ali Behdad maintains that photographic representations of people and places in this region, combined with contemporary ethnographic discourses and those associated with the tourism business, were instrumental in “producing a distinct style of representation that froze aesthetically the people and cultures of the region in a static and picturesque tradition”. Behdad stresses the fact that photographic representations of the Middle East gratified a certain “touristic desire for the exotic and the picturesque” (Citation2010, 717–718).
28. For further discussion of photography as an enactment of technological superiority, see Pinney (Citation1992).
29. As Alan Larson Williams states, L'Atlantide was “one of the silent era's greatest popular hits” (Citation1992, 186). The comparison between The Sheik and L'Atlantide was noted by David Henry Slavin in relation to contemporary receptions of the two film adaptations:
The French reception of L'Atlantide contrasts with that of The Sheik, which premiered in the United States in October 1921, almost simultaneously with the opening of its French counterpart in Paris. Ciné-Miroir devoted its entire first issue to Feyder's film, and never reviewed The Sheik. Theirs was not the only prognosis that missed the mark. (Citation2001, 76)