E.M. Hull and the Valentino cult: gender reversal after The sheik

Here's the abstract:

In 1919 the now largely forgotten popular novelist E.M. Hull sparked a decade of infatuation with the ‘desert romance’ on the publication of her first book, The sheik.The obsession with the genre, fuelled by the release of Melford’s 1921 film adaptation of the book, saw women swooning in the aisles at ‘screen god’ Rudolph Valentino’s starring role. My aim here is to broaden the focus on Hull away from the much maligned novel, The sheik, by suggesting that Hull’s subsequent novels, though never straying very far from the lucrative formula she cultivated with her first novel, were, in part at least, written in reaction to the uproar caused by this novel. I argue that Hull’s representation of androgynous and cross-dressing women allows for her heroines to inhabit positions of relative power in relation to their male counterparts.

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In 1928, as the popularity of the desert romance was beginning to decline, Hull published a fifth novel, The lion-tamer. Though it remains firmly within the romance genre, this novel represents a departure from the Saharan setting. Instead this novel is set within the realm of a United States travelling circus. (175)

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The captive of Sahara (1945) [...] is the most radical of Hull’s fiction. In the novel, Sidi Said ben Aissa, the son of the sheik and brother to Messaouda, forces the English Isma to marry him after she ventures into the desert following his invitation. Isma, whose marriage is never consummated despite the fact that her tenderness for her husband increases, realises she is in love with another man who, though devoted to her, she has left behind in England. Eventually, Isma’s English lover, David Arne, journeys to Algeria to her rescue. (176)

[LV comment - Elsewhere I've seen a publication date for this novel of 1931]

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Set not in the desert of Hull’s earlier fiction,The forest of terrible things is set amongst Africa’s forests and swamps through which Orde leads a hunting expedition who are in search of an elusive breed of gorilla known to local tribes as ‘Terrible Things’. Despite the change of backdrop, Orde begins the novel as Hull’s typical woman-hating hero [...]. Orde falls in love with Ray and, conveniently, her brute of a husband is murdered towards the novel’s conclusion, leaving Orde and Ray free to love each other legitimately. The forest of terrible things is particularly interesting because, like The captive of Sahara, the heroine is represented in relatively comparable terms to the male characters in the novel, and, like Paul in The lion-tamer, Ray’s name is decidedly masculine. (178-179)

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Hull’s thinking is very much constrained by conventional binaries of power and gender. For Hull, power is always masculine; in her novels a woman may wield power but this power always belongs to the masculine order. (179)