‘For you are a man and she is a maid’: Performing Masculinity in Orientalist Medieval and Modern Popular Romance Fiction
Introduction
According to guidelines for their most popular contemporary series, the Harlequin Mills & Boon romance hero must be ‘commanding’, ‘demanding’, ‘self-assured’, ‘passionate’ and have ‘status’ (Mills & Boon 2010: n.p.). As Sarah Frantz puts it, ‘the hero represents patriarchal power in all its glory by being the richest, or the strongest, or the most beautiful, or the most emotionally distant man the heroine has ever known’ (2002: 18). While the alpha male is not the only form of romance hero today, he is one of the most persistent elements of romance novels in recent years. One particular iteration of the alpha male, consistently popular since the early twentieth century, is the ‘powerful, domineering, arrogant, [and] immensely wealthy’ (Bach 1997: 28) sheikh: the hero who rules a Gulf nation, enjoys fabulous wealth due to oil reserves and has a jet-setting lifestyle. The so-called sheikh romance is a love story set in the deserts of North Africa or the Middle East, featuring an erotic relationship between a western heroine and an eastern sheikh or sultan hero.
However, while the sheikh romance hero may seem to be an alpha male, the eastern world in which he lives is, according to Edward Said, associated with ‘feminine penetrability’: a passive, feminine space into which active, masculine, imperial power penetrates (Said 2003: 206). Rather than alpha masculinity, eastern men are associated, as Elizabeth Gargano puts it, ‘with the supposedly “female” qualities of irrationality, emotionality, and childlikeness’ (2006: 177). How, then, is the hero’s alpha masculinity conflated with an Orientalist ethnicity labelled effeminate? It has been argued that Harlequin Mills & Boon sheikh romances challenge the idea of an effeminate east by creating a hypermasculine sheikh hero, ‘destabilising perceptions of the Orient as the west’s feminised other’ (Bach 1997: 12) and presenting a ‘masculinized Other’ (Taylor 2007: 1033). For some it seems that the Orient is repackaged; Jessica Taylor argues that ‘in contrast to statements of the Orient’s overwhelming femininity, then, the Orient in the sheikh romances is a masculine Orient’ (2007: 1042).
It is the contention of this article that the play between ethnicity and gender in the fictional eastern world of the sheikh romance is more complex than has previously been suggested: a complexity revealed by paying attention to the sheikh genre’s medieval history. From 1350-1500, Middle English romance was the most popular secular genre in medieval England. A significant proportion of these romances similarly articulated relationships occurring across east/west boundaries, imagining Orientalist heroes in their eastern surroundings and revealing contemporary concerns and preoccupations about heroic masculinity. Identifying the ways masculinity is constructed and modified in medieval romance can inform an examination of masculinity in sheikh romance, making overt concealed anxieties and, in the process, demonstrating how certain ideas of gendered ethnic identity predate Orientalism as coined by Said.[1] Furthermore, directly comparing medieval and modern romance indicates how deeply rooted the model of alpha romance masculinity is in the western popular consciousness.
Analysing five sheikh romances published in Harlequin Mills & Boon’s most popular series ‘Modern Romance’[2]– The Arabian Mistress (Graham 2000), The Sultan’s Virgin Bride (Morgan 2006), For the Sheikh’s Pleasure (West 2007), At the Sheikh’s Bidding (Shaw 2008) and The Desert King’s Bejewelled Bride (Philips 2009) – alongside the anonymous Middle English romance Floris and Blancheflour (c.1250) this article scrutinizes the politics of gender destabilisation, considering precisely how the romance hero is gendered and ethnicized. I consider first the modern sheikh hero, a hypermasculine, alpha male whose gender identity is, I argue, inextricably bound up with his eastern surroundings. In order to draw out fully how the east impacts upon a hypermasculine male identity, I then turn to Floris and Blancheflour, a tale of cross-religious love, which demonstrates two contrasting models of eastern masculinity. Examining how these masculinities are constructed in and by the eastern world of the romance, I draw on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to explore the effect of deviant gender performance on binary heterosexual gender relations. Finally, I consider the implications of this comparison for a more nuanced understanding of the masculinity of the sheikh hero. Overall, I argue that rather than simply sidestepping cultural ideas of the east as feminine these romances acknowledge and deny the effeminate connotations of the east and their potential for destabilising the heterosexual gender norms of the romance itself.
Defining masculinity: the sheikh hero
The sheikh romance is one of the most enduring subgenres of modern popular romance publishing. Since the publication of E. M. Hull’s The Sheik in 1919 – the novel that inspired the wildly successful 1921 film of the same name starring Rudolph Valentino – the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East and their rugged sheikh inhabitants have provided a consistently compelling backdrop for popular romance stories. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, sheikh romances have become more popular than ever, with more than 150 sheikh novels published from 2000-2009 (Burge 2012: 36). While there have been changes to the sheikh genre over the years, namely geographical settings (Burge 2012) and the characterisation of the heroine (Teo 2012), the sheikh hero himself has remained stubbornly alpha. ‘[R]uthless, tough, even cruel’, the alpha hero is the ultimate ‘man as warrior’: ubiquitous, monolithic, enduring (Donald 1992: 82; Simmons Guntrum 1992: 152). The sheikh hero seems little changed since The Sheik; he is ‘tall and broad-shouldered, wears a heavy cloak and white flowing robes, and he has hard cruel eyes’ (Anderson 1974: 189). Patricia Raub even suggests that The Sheik formed the prototype for all subsequent characterisations in popular romance, with a young, beautiful and sexually inexperienced heroine, and a tall, dark and cruelly handsome hero (1992: 124). The masculinity of the sheikh hero, in line with the romance alpha, is sexualized, violent and dominant, constructed according to heterosexual gender relations which position men as dominant and women as passive (Butler 1990: 141; Jeffries 1996: 76). But the sheikh hero is more than simply a generic alpha hero transplanted into the desert; his alpha masculinity is explicitly constructed in relation to the east in three main ways: the use of the harem motif; the exploitation of a specific animalistic description; and the connection of the sheikh with the culture and landscape of the romance’s east.
The harem is a persistent motif in the modern sheikh romance, representing both the erotic east and, by extension, the sexual acquisitiveness of the eastern ruler. Today’s sheikh heroes no longer have active harems: these are positioned as part of the past (see Taylor 2007: 1041). This does not, however, prevent the harem being deployed as a symbolic feature of the sheikh’s masculinity. In Lynne Graham’s The Arabian Mistress, the hero Tariq proposes to lodge Faye in his palace’s ‘harem quarters’ and even after he ‘gritted’: ‘I do not have a harem’, it is still used by the heroine to describe the treatment of women and eastern approaches to sex (2000: 35, 90). When Tariq sends Faye from the desert back to the palace she equates his actions with those of previous rulers who had used harems: ‘the harem might have been abolished but she could not help thinking of his father who had sent for a concubine whenever he’d felt like one. After only one night, she was to be dispatched back to the palace’ (Graham 2000: 117-18). The connotation of the harem is also used to describe the sheikh’s attitude towards sex with the heroine; in Chantelle Shaw’s At the Sheikh’s Bidding, the heroine vows that ‘she would not allow him to treat her like a favourite from his harem, that she would not be available for sex whenever it suited him’ (2008: 157). The harem, then, seems to symbolize a certain eastern-inflected, dominant male sexuality.
As observed by Amira Jarmakani, Juliet Flesch and Evelyn Bach, the sheikh is further connected with the east as he is described in relation to eastern animals, most often birds of prey or big cats (Jarmakani 2010: 1006-11; Flesch 2004: 213; Bach 1997: 29). In The Arabian Mistress, the hawk is the emblem of Tariq’s family, and he has ‘spectacular lion gold eyes’ with which he regularly ‘surveyed [the heroine] with the predatory gaze of a hawk’, ‘indolent as a sleek jungle cat’ (Graham 2000: 48, 36, 19). Similarly, in At the Sheikh’s Bidding, Zahir prowled ‘the room, silent and menacing as a panther stalking its prey’ (Shaw 2008: 32), while in Sarah Morgan’s The Sultan’s Virgin Bride Tariq appeared ‘like a jungle cat lying in wait for its prey’ (2006: 12). Describing the alpha hero in this way is not unusual; Heather Schell has argued that cultural fictions have embraced an understanding of masculinity prompted by evolutionary psychology that linked male genes with animal genes ‘which carry the atavistic behavioural impulses of our remote ancestors’ (2007: 109). But connecting sheikhs with specific animals is a way to imbue their hypermasculinity with ‘eastern-ness’.
The sheikh’s title fundamentally connects him with the east: in At the Sheikh’s Bidding and The Sultan’s Virgin Bride the hero is a ‘desert prince’ and in The Arabian Mistress Tariq is a ‘desert warrior’. Repetitive title-dropping – ‘Prince Tariq Shazad ibn Zachir, paramount sheikh and ruler’ (Graham 2000: 5); ‘Sultan Tariq bin Omar al-Sharma’ (Morgan 2006: 7); ‘Prince Zahir bin Khalid al Muntassir’ (Shaw 2008: 7) – not only indicates status, but consistently highlights the heroes’ positions as representatives of their nations. Sheikhs are linked with the country’s past via their ancestry; Tariq is part of ‘a desert people’ (Graham 2000: 78) and in Sabrina Philips’ The Desert King’s Bejewelled Bride Kaliq is ‘a proud descendent of the A’zam tribe who had first civilised Qwasir’: his character and control are ‘in his blood, as [they] had been in his ancestors’ for thousands of years’ (Philips 2009: 47, 68). Heroes are connected with the landscape and its sensual appeal; in The Desert King’s Bejewelled Bride ‘the exotic smell of [the hero] and the desert [were] almost inseparable’ (Philips 2009: 90). In At the Sheikh’s Bidding, the sheikh’s character is compared with the setting – ‘Zahir was as harsh and unforgiving as the desert’ (Shaw 2008: 133) – and in The Sultan’s Virgin Bride the sheikh and the desert are explicitly connected in a discourse of desire, as the heroine contemplates ‘the red gold dunes’ which are ‘a place designed for fantasy and dreaming, as was the man standing facing her’ (Morgan 2006: 51). As Hilary Dannenberg argues: ‘the desert is the metaphor of the man and the lover for which the heroine […] longs’ (2008: 74). For Rachel Anderson, ‘“the desert” and “the east” are synonymous’ (1974: 181) and in these sheikh romances it is clear that the desert and the east are often synonymous with the sheikh himself. So while the sheikh shares much of his hypermasculinity with other alpha heroes, certain elements of his gender identity reveal how he exhibits a uniquely eastern hypermasculinity which seems to disrupt Orientalist ideas of the east and the eastern male as feminine: the sheikh is hypermasculine, because he is eastern.
‘Made [into] a eunuch’: subverting masculinity in Floris and Blancheflour
Yet, other romances have a slightly different inflection of masculinity and the east. This is particularly evident when we turn to the ancestor of popular romance, the medieval romance. Medieval romance was a genre obsessed with the east. Many romances refer to Saracens or to the east, drawing on specific tropes that highlight religious alterity (religion rather than race being the main marker of difference in the Middle Ages): Middle English romance is primarily concerned with ‘the war of Christianity against Islam’ (Metlitzki 1977: 160). It has been widely noted that Middle English romance supports a wider medieval literary and cultural impulse to define the east and its inhabitants as essentially abject (see, for example, Metlitzki 1977; Calkin 2005; Akbari 2009). Identifying four stock Saracen figures of medieval romance – the Muslim princess in love with the Christian hero; the Saracen convert; the defeated Saracen ruler; the monstrous Saracen giant (1977: 161) – Dorothy Metlitzki alludes to the fundamental rule of medieval romance expressed in the earlier French text the Chanson de Roland: that ‘pagans are wrong and Christians are right’ (Kinoshita 2006: 15).
What we might call a ‘Saracen hero’, then, might be more accurately defined as a converted Saracen, or one who will renounce his Islamic beliefs by the end of the romance. The Saracen hero features less frequently in Middle English romance, but where he does, it is usually in romances that feature a cross-religious romantic relationship between a Christian and a Saracen, for example The King of Tars or the romance examined here, Floris and Blancheflour. Such a ‘proto-Christian’ has more in common with his Christian heroic counterpart than with the typical violent, intolerant, idol-worshipping and monstrous Saracen. Heroes of medieval romance were usually celebrated for their vigour and military might and are idealized in a similar way to the modern romance hero (Dressler 1999: 154-55). Tania Colwell notes that ‘typically, medieval romances depict brave, handsome knights in search of adventure and, often, a wife and property’ (2002: 137) while Cohen argues that ‘the hero represents a kind of hypermasculinity, an exaggerated and perhaps idealized version of maleness’ (2012: n.p.). In romance, as in life, men had to fulfil certain public roles which defined their masculinity; being a knight, being a husband, being a father, being a priest. Medieval masculinity, then, was performative. But what, then, of a romance like Floris and Blancheflour, where the hero does not display knightly masculinity?
Floris and Blancheflour is a popular romance, extant in four manuscripts, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Kooper 2006: 13), based on an earlier French text Floire et Blanceflor (c.1160). The story of a Christian slave girl, Blancheflour, and a Saracen prince, Floris, who fall in love, the romance centres on Floris’ journey to Babylon to rescue Blancheflour from the Emir of Babylon’s harem, into which she has been sold. The romance offers an interesting perspective on eastern masculinity in its presentation of two models of Saracen masculinity: the hero-who-will-convert, Floris, and the intolerant, violent Emir. The masculinity closest to that of the alpha sheikh hero and thus to the typical knight-hero of medieval romance is not that of the hero Floris but is exemplified in his rival, the Emir of Babylon, who purchases Blancheflour and whose masculinity is violent and sexually avaricious.
The Emir seems to correspond to typical romance masculinity. He is hosting a ‘tournament [justening]’ (581)[3] for ‘150 rich kings [Other half hondred of riche king]’ (582), and wields a sword as a symbol of violent masculinity. The Emir also has a forty-two roomed ‘harem [bour]’ (199) of maidens guarded by eunuchs and housed in an ornate, phallic tower, making him the only virile male in his Babylonian palace. He is sexually active, exemplified in his ‘habit [wone]’ (641, 642) of ‘every year […] choosing for himself a new wife [everich yer […] chesen him a newe wif]’ (642-43) from amongst the maidens in his harem. Vern L. Bullough argues that ‘male sexual performance was a major key to being male’ in the Middle Ages, and that it was important ‘to keep demonstrating […] maleness by action and thought, especially by sexual action’ (Bullough 1994: 41): namely, heterosexual action. The Emir achieves this via a prominent, phallic symbol of sexual prowess in his tower, and the repetitive act of selecting a sexual partner of the opposite gender, thereby drawing attention to his virility and, consequently, to his maleness. The Emir, then, displays a hypermasculinity defined by sex and violence.
Floris, on the other hand, displays a gender identity much closer to the Orientalist stereotype of effeminate eastern masculinity. Floris has been widely recognized as having an unusually feminized masculinity. He weeps, swoons and, to the displeasure of his parents, spends all of his time with a young woman, Blancheflour, with whom he shares a common name: ‘flower’. While weeping, swooning and being compared with a flower do not, in medieval literature, connote femininity in themselves (Wentersdorf 1981: 95), by consistently identifying Floris with Blancheflour I would like to argue that this romance suggests that Floris is feminine because he looks and acts like a certain woman: Blancheflour. Indeed, the lovers are almost physically identical: an innkeeper’s wife notes that Floris and Blancheflour are ‘alike […] in all aspects, / Both in outward appearance and in sorrowful emotion [art ilich here of alle thinge, / Of semblant and of mourning]’ (419-20). Furthermore, in contrast to typical knightly conduct (and indeed, in contrast to the Emir), Floris never fights. An effeminate male hero is not unusual in Middle English romance: Joanne Charbonneau and Désirée Cromwell note ‘exceptions to male hypermasculinity’ in romance, arguing that ‘[romance] is not a genre of simple-minded adherence to a chivalric ethos, but rather one that allows slipperiness and an intense interrogation of accepted values and gendered roles’ (Charbonneau and Cromwell 2009: 99). This slipperiness is centred, I want to argue, on the persistent doubling of Floris and Blancheflour, which conflates masculine and feminine gender performance and disrupts the gender binaries of the romance.