Hull And The Sheik Analysis

E.M. Hull and travel writing are by no means synonymous. Infamous for her 1920s desert romances, Hull’s 1926 travelogue of her journey in Algeria, Camping in the Sahara, goes virtually unmentioned in accounts of her life and work. Better known for her scandalous desert romances of the “rape-cum-redemption in the Sahara” style (Melman 1988, 91), many of the contemporary (and often scathing) reviews of her fiction assumed Hull’s representations of the Sahara and its inhabitants to be nothing more than escapist fantasy with scant regard for an authenticity of place which could only be achieved through personal acquaintance. Indeed, though Hull’s notoriously virile and ruthless heroes who literally sweep her impossibly complicit heroines off their

Even though Hull’s name is forever wed to The Sheik, the woman herself remains something of an enigma. Firstly, given that there is very little critical or biographical information on Hull and her travels in Algeria, this article aims to piece together available evidence on her journeys. Secondly, with the foundations that I lay here I hope also 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 explored how travel trends to the Sahara in the 1920s were informed by movements in popular culture, I go on to examine how Hull constructs the desert as a backdrop to her own story into which she writes herself as leading lady. Whilst Camping in the Sahara contains resonances of earlier women’s travel accounts (going as far back as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s eighteenth century Turkish Embassy Letters), Hull’s combined literary output is closely affiliated, I argue, with those accounts from the early twentieth-century which, according to Hsu-Ming Teo, broke with the Victorian trend towards demystification and domestication of the Other, in favour of more sexualised and exoticised representations (2002, 76). This exoticism is particularly apparent in the manner in which Hull’s desert in Camping in the Sahara resembles a film set in which scenery is imagined through a camera lens with the people she encounters (inadvertently perhaps) assessed through the eyes of a casting director. This article first looks at the superficial representations of the women Hull meets and their role as sounding board for the story’s protagonist, Hull herself. I then move on to Hull’s depiction of the male figures who can be divided into two distinctive types, the everyday staff that Hull has employed and the hero/villain characters who Hull romanticises. Finally, I will explore the intimate