The “Savage Source” of Desire: White Masculinity, Primitivism, and the Specter of “Miscegenation”
Longwood University
Abstract
[to come]
Keywords [to come]
Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” depicts a young woman lazing in her lawn chair and enjoying “[c]omplacencies of the peignoir” as she devours oranges (66). As she daydreams, the following image comes to her mind:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky. (69-70)
This vision of hedonistically ecstatic regeneration contemplated in a “civilized” setting reflects a common set of images that circulated in the 1920s, all representing white men’s urge to find the “savage source” of their manhood. Yet one question arises in Stevens’s treatment: what race are these “[s]upple and turbulent” men? On the one hand, the lack of a racial descriptor suggests that the men are probably white, since whiteness is ideologically coded as universal, and therefore not “raced.” Further, since white men were the only “civilized” men, according to contemporary racial discourse, they were the only ones who might consciously desire to access their primal nature. But the poem is ambiguous on this point. While the woman could be imagining white men masquerading as savages, she could also be picturing “primitives”—the term “savage” carries an inflection of non-whiteness, suggesting a biological primitivism more likely associated with non-whites in the 1920s. To put it in starker terms, Stevens’s anonymous white woman could be fantasizing scandalously about her “undesirable desire,” to use Carla Kaplan’s term, invoking miscegenative desires as an escape from the tedium of civilized complacency (145). And even if she is imagining white men enacting primitive fantasies to regain their lost virility in a nostalgic moment of fraternal regeneration, that vision also carries a hybrid racial connotation.1 While the discourses of primitivism and desire interact to produce white manhood and assert its power, those same interactions carry racial undertones that must be addressed: “[White American manhood] simply could not exist without a racial other against which it defines itself and which to a very great extent it takes up into itself as one of its constituent elements” (Lott, “White” 476). In either case, the woman’s dream reflects a set of desires that, because of primitivism’s racial connotations, would be termed in contemporary discourses as “miscegenation.”
“Sunday Morning,” first published in Harmonium (1923), is one of many 1920s texts that represent primitivism as a means of regenerating white manhood in the face of an emasculating modern civilization.2 Even as overtly white supremacist writers (such as Lothrop Stoddard, Earnest Sevier Cox, and Madison Grant) proclaim the need for white racial purity and dominance, contemporizing turn-of-the-century beliefs with eugenic science, other authors in the period portray a culturally miscegenative manhood, a hyper-masculinized identity formation that incorporates racialized traits to assert white patriarchal dominance over a multicultural nation and thereby assuage white male anxieties. In popular modernist texts such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and Edith Hull’s The Sheik (1919), male characters willingly adopt the attributes of the racial Other as a means of bolstering white manhood, indulging in what Eric Lott terms “racial cross-dressing” (“White” 475). These texts titillate readers with plots of a miscegenative desire threatening the prerogatives of white masculinity, then block those threats by plotting ways for white manhood to sojourn among and even assimilate to primitivity, emerging triumphantly virile and polished white.
Primitivism in the twenties thus represents a far more ambiguous discourse than critics have previously discussed.3 Eric Lott notes, “The historical fact of white men literally assuming a ‘black’ self, the eternal and predictable return of the racial signifier of blackface, is another matter entirely; and I would argue that it began and continues to occur when the lines of ‘race’ appear both intractable and obstructive, when there emerges a collective desire (conscious or not) to bridge a gulf that is, however, perceived to separate the races absolutely” (“White” 475). The primitive viewed as a mode of blackface construction becomes less a coherent identity formation than a site of ongoing anxieties, terrors, and desires regarding race and gender identities. As such, I think we can expand Lott’s formulation of blackness to encompass nonwhite identities as a whole, for 1920s individuals in the 1920s would have seen whiteness set against an array of racialized identities. “Racial cross-dressing” features race and gender ideologies, racial impurity set against masculine dissipation. Ultimately, these texts work through their fantasies and ambivalences to support (consciously or not) a deeply conservative, white supremacist ideology through the coordinated manipulation of axes of power: white/black, male/female, civilized/primitive. These fantasies efface the exclusionary politics of national identity under the guise of intercultural romance.
Many late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century white men believed in “primitive masculinity” as an antidote to modern culture’s feminizing effects (Rotundo 227). Bederman notes, “Middle-class men linked powerful manhood to the ‘savagery’ and ‘primitivism’ of dark-skinned races, whose masculinity they claimed to share” (22). Evolutionary beliefs suggested that to access one’s primitive nature was to channel an earlier, manly state diminished by years of acculturation. Primitive discourse, then, effected a nostalgic model of human development as a precursor to claims of white superiority. White men, according to this narrative, assimilated primitive attributes not as a psychic regression to an earlier stage of evolution but rather as a complex process of regeneration. Yet, as the texts I discuss reveal, white men derived their manhood not just by claiming these shared primitive affiliations but also through the colonization and appropriation of minority cultures they avowedly despised and secretly admired.4 As such, they distanced themselves from shared biological ancestry while enjoying the fruits of the “rejected” culture, as Edgar Rice Burroughs depicts in Tarzan of the Apes, which originally appeared in 1912. The popular text spawned several reprints and multiple sequels throughout the 1920s.5 In addition, the first of 45 Tarzan movies opened in 1918, introducing to a still wider audience the Tarzan myth as a tale of “miscegenation” translated into assimilation. A central cultural text of the twenties, Tarzan of the Apes rehabilitates white masculinity through its eponymous protagonist who, by assimilating the primitive, assuages the anxieties brought on by the fear of civilization’s feminizing influence as well as the fear of non-native encroachment on American soil.6
Tarzan can assimilate primitive culture because of his biology, clearly marked for the reader from the first chapter’s descriptions of his father: “a certain young English nobleman, whom we shall call John Clayton, Lord Greystoke [. . .] Clayton was the type of Englishman that one likes best to associate with the noblest monuments of historic achievement upon a thousand victorious battlefields—a strong, virile man—mentally, morally, and physically” (6). Readers know Tarzan’s true identity, even if characters do not, because the novel tells the story of his origin, relating the death of his noble English parents, John and Alice Clayton, and his adoption by Kala, a female ape. Tarzan of the Apes centers its identity politics on a biological/cultural distinction that enables those with the correct biological makeup (white male) to assimilate cultural knowledge and identity from others to enhance their own masculinities. This idea of primitivism is particularly insidious in that it co-opts eugenic discourses surrounding biology to support a profoundly cultural process of identity formation. Burroughs viewed white masculine superiority as a given, and he supported eugenic policies that would maintain white male power in the United States. In a 1928 piece entitled “I See a New Race,” Burroughs presents his vision of a better future achieved through the eugenic rehabilitation of Americans. He depicts this utopia’s construction through intelligence testing, sterilization practices, and birth control, leading to an age of beauty and happiness. Readers of the text corresponded with him, and he responded in an October 25, 1928 letter to William Thurston with a comment that seems to describe the world Tarzan inhabits:
Burroughs’s Tarzan exemplifies this fit minority. Tarzan’s physical, mental, and moral superiority in the novels allows him to survive in the jungle and rule its inhabitants. As the only white man, he is in the minority, and constantly must battle the bestial hordes to maintain his power. Yet as a product of superior breeding (as an English lord, he represents the highest level of white manhood), he has an advantage over the “defectives” he rules. Burroughs’s eugenic beliefs regarding racial recapitulation and innate white masculine superiority combine in the Tarzan novels to present another utopian future, where white men rule their supposed inferiors without the bounds of civilization to control them.The result will be, as it always has been, that an inestimable fraction of the world’s population will be fit to survive, and, on the other hand, hordes of the unfit, ruled by ignorance and passion, stand ready upon the slightest provocation to engulf and destroy the minority. It is not a pleasant outlook, but it seems to me to be inevitable just so long as we permit mental, moral and physical defectives to live and propagate. (qtd. in Porges 462)
Though Tarzan’s heritage is English and his biological identity that of a white male, his cultural identity is that of an ape-man: “A personification, was Tarzan of the Apes, of the primitive man, the hunter, the warrior” (90). Tarzan assimilates ape culture and indigenous African customs to enhance his masculinity at the expense of the racialized Other. He combines his own biological superiority with an unmatched ability to culturally adapt, thereby exemplifying Burroughs’s beliefs in white eugenic superiority. For example, Tarzan learns to use a bow and arrow by watching Kulonga, a black hunter from a native African tribe, then steals them so he can kill much more easily. Mariana Torgovnick argues, “In the Tarzan series, the primitive has multiple meanings: Tarzan is himself the ‘personification of primitive man,’ but the apes’ social systems, the Africans in the novels, and some of the lost civilizations Tarzan encounters are also presented as primitive” (45). While the novel does have multiple incarnations of the primitive, Burroughs inflects the term differently when describing Tarzan. He clearly distinguishes between cultural imitation and biological determinism, labeling Tarzan as an example of the former and the natives and apes as examples of the latter in order to maintain Tarzan’s inherently biological whiteness while depicting his cultural appropriation.7 Yet despite this distinction, Tarzan’s cultural adoption invokes the anxiety of primitive manhood’s racial makeup; “savage” equaled “nonwhite” in the 1920s (Bederman 23). Men accessing primitive manhood faced a miscegenative taint that reinstalled anxieties, shifted from gender to race. Thus, Burroughs must assert Tarzan’s racial identity as a means of guaranteeing his masculine superiority to the natives and apes since cultural imitation is dependent on biological determinism in his formulation.
Tarzan’s whiteness distinguishes him as superior, the more so because of intelligence inherited from his noble progeny. As the narrator notes, “There was that which raised him far above his fellows of the jungle—that little spark which spells the whole vast difference between man and brute—Reason” (86). While Burroughs overtly compares Tarzan in this scene to his ape companions, he clearly implies racial and class superiority. Tarzan survives and prospers because of his “superior cunning,” only later gaining the strength he needs to defeat Kerchak, his ape rival; in fact, his first victories come as the result of his discovery of the art of roping. Tarzan’s new feat mimics American lynching practices, for he uses his rope to drag apes, lions, and African natives by the neck into the trees, often killing them. The natives, in contrast, are weak and superstitious, easily fooled by Tarzan’s pranks because of their “primitive” beliefs. Lott notes, “To assume the mantle of whiteness . . . is not only to ‘befriend’ a racial other but to introject or internalize its imagined special capacities and attributes” (“White” 481). Burroughs literalizes this cultural process through Tarzan’s accumulations, which fortify the character’s superiority through appropriation and theft, taking items and practices that enable him to defeat Kerchak and become king of the apes.
Tarzan’s innate intelligence also allows him to learn to read and write without other human contact, thus enabling him to communicate with the other humans when they arrive on his shores. As if instinctively aware of how to communicate with his brethren, he declares his identity through the discourses of whiteness and civilization: “THIS IS THE HOUSE OF TARZAN, THE KILLER OF BEASTS AND MANY BLACK MEN” (94). As Cheyfitz notes, “Tarzan identifies himself to the newly arrived white people in ways that they have no trouble identifying with: asserting his property rights, casually equating beasts and blacks, and declaring his brutal dominance over them” (17). Tarzan can speak their discourse because, Burroughs believes, his biology provides a natural connection.
Burroughs’s descriptions of Tarzan also mark him as physically superior to the primitives around him. For example, the narrator relates, “His brown, sweat-streaked, muscular body, glistening in the moonlight, shone supple and graceful among the uncouth, awkward, hairy brutes around him” (53). In another instance, “His straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled, and yet with the soft and sinuous curves of a Greek god, told at a glance the wondrous combination of enormous strength with suppleness and speed” (90). The narrator idealizes Tarzan’s body and compares it to the ideals of Western civilization, a connection that implies Tarzan’s membership in such a group even despite his primitive behaviors. His narrative presents Tarzan as the standard for white manhood, reducing all around him to inferior status. Tarzan is one of the apes by cultural adoption, but biologically he is a superior human. Though primitivism enhances his masculinity, difference from the primitive, coded as naturalized white male biological superiority, is what makes Tarzan the perfect man. For example, after Tarzan kills his rival Kulonga, he considers eating the ape, for his “primitive” upbringing has taught him to consume his enemy’s flesh. Yet he does not, for the narrator tells us, “Hereditary instinct, ages old, usurped the functions of his untaught mind and saved him from transgressing a worldwide law of whose very existence he was ignorant” (49). Burroughs thus sustains the biological fiction of white supremacy by contrasting Tarzan’s primitivism as cultural. Tarzan’s whiteness protects him even as his adoption of primitive culture masculinizes him.
Tarzan’s assimilations transform him into the superior specimen we see in the battles with Sabor (a powerful lion) and Kerchak, and in the rescues of Jane and D’Arnot. He becomes the exemplar of white manhood, and the text repeatedly channels individual desire toward him. When Tarzan saves his relative Clayton from a lion attack, Clayton watches in wonder: “The man before him was the embodiment of physical perfection and giant strength” (103). Clayton’s gaze equals masculine approval for Tarzan: “From the first sensation of chilling fear Clayton passed to one of keen admiration and envy of those giant muscles and the wonderous instinct or knowledge which guided this forest god” (109). Clayton’s admiration of Tarzan’s physique implicitly acknowledges it as superior to his own, and Burroughs even allows Tarzan to recognize his own status: “the puny white man never could hold mighty Sabor alone” (111). Civilization has diminished Clayton’s body and therefore his manhood. Thus, Tarzan’s primitive masculinity is the antidote to civilization’s feminizing effects.
An important component of primitive narratives is an idealized white womanhood against which to formulate reanimated white manhood. These women not only provide a counterpoint for white masculinity, they also legitimate it through a heterosexual channeling of female desire towards such characters. White women, long used by racist writers to equate black manhood with lustful bestiality, become a tool for the integration of white manhood in the 1920s. Burroughs’s heroine Jane Porter represents feminine desire for the masculine primitive, a desire that legitimates and accentuates Tarzan’s masculinity and his heterosexuality as defined against white womanhood. Jane finds Tarzan attractive: “This man not only surpasses the average white man in strength and agility; but as far transcends our trained athletes and ‘strong men’ as they surpass a day-old babe; and his courage and ferocity in battle are those of the wild beast” (179). She desires him even more when he comes to her aid after Terkoz, another rival ape, kidnaps her. As Tarzan and Terkoz fight, the narrator describes Jane’s reaction: “Jane Porter—her lithe, young form flattened against the trunk of a great tree, her hands tight pressed against her rising and falling bosom, and her eyes wide with mingled horror, fascination, fear, and admiration—watched the primordial ape battle with the primeval man for possession of a woman—for her” (141). Jane responds primally to the battle for her body, gazing in awe at the battle between the two primitives who desire her. The battle scene comes in the aptly titled chapter “The Call of the Primitive,” and Jane’s reaction fits that description. She watches the fight transfixed by Tarzan’s masculinity, itself accentuated by his primal nature. Jane thus must become the primordial woman for him in a scene that naturalizes gender relations: “It was a primeval woman who sprang forward with outstretched arms toward the primeval man who had fought for her and won her” (141). Yet her civilized nature takes over again, and she pulls away. Torgovnick notes in reference to Georgia O’Keeffe that “association with the ‘primitive’ worked differently. Women were seen as trapped in their instincts and limited in intellect by the very structure of their minds and bodies” (121). For the reader, who knows Tarzan’s white identity, this battle also acts as a metaphor for the struggle in Tarzan between his primitive and civilized selves, a struggle re-enacted as Tarzan confronts Jane. Jane’s response, then, accentuates her limitations and, by implication, further demonstrates Tarzan’s masculine superiority. Jane falls in love with Tarzan as the superior man he is; her acceptance confirms Tarzan’s white masculine superiority as natural, but it also seems to set up an interracial romance. Jane and the other characters do not know his heritage, and their attraction focuses on his virile muscular body problematically since it represents a miscegenative desire forbidden by cultural mores. Cross-racial desire, once avowed, must then be modulated to prevent accusations of miscegenation.
As Martha Hodes has demonstrated, miscegenation had become a key issue in the United States by the early twentieth century (2). White supremacists such as Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, and Thurman Rice advocated eugenic policies designed to purify white blood. Thurman Rice, Paul Poponoe, and Roswell Hill Johnson were among the eugenicists who perpetuated this belief, proclaiming the need for applied eugenics as a means of ensuring racial survival for superior white men. But if interracial desire was so repugnant, why were there so many demands for protection from it? Fears of racial mixing in the twenties led to a spate of legislative mandates intended to protect white womanhood from racially illicit desire. Virginia, to cite the most famous example, passed the 1924 “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity” with the support of Earnest Sevier Cox and his fellow white supremacists. The statute read: “It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this state to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian” (qtd. in Sollors 24). Defining white as having no more than one sixteenth Indian blood and no other “non-caucasic” blood, the law mandated the creation of racial registration certificates that would certify an individual’s ancestral purity. The Act to Preserve Racial Integrity was only one of many such statutes across the nation; Peggy Pascoe notes, “At one time or another, 41 American colonies and states enacted them” (183). Arizona’s 1913 Marriage and Divorce act, for example, prohibited marriage between whites and blacks, Indians, or Hispanics, effectively segregating the state’s minority populations (Sollors 24-26). These laws, then, governed racial purity by denying official sanction to interracial unions even though such relationships continued to exist. Yet they also produced the racialized identities and desires that they seemingly protect, as Judith Butler notes: “The law that we expect to repress some set of desires which could be said to exist prior to law succeeds rather in naming, delimiting, and thereby, giving social meaning and possibility to precisely those desires it intended to eradicate” (218). Miscegenation, while a horror to many Americans, was also a secret titillation. Cross-racial desire could be considered in private as long as the desire was publicly disavowed as a part of normalized gender relations. Tarzan of the Apes and The Sheik narrate this process of invoking and then revoking a set of “undesirable desires” to manage the anxieties produced by interracial longings.
As we can see, such desires populate Tarzan’s world. Harry Stecopolous has noted that while Tarzan recognizes his own racial superiority with haughty disdain, he also finds the native life attractive (183).8 He kills black men but also appropriates their culture in “manly mimicry” (Lott, “White” 479). White men, attired in primitive accoutrements as an act of “racial cross-dressing,” gain access to “the mixed erotic economy . . . of American whiteness” while simultaneously asserting their masculinities (482).9 The individual gaze directed at Tarzan becomes a more complex racial maneuver than simple appreciation because it signals civilization’s approval of this theft at the same time as it creates a shadow of miscegenative desire.10 Tarzan’s own need to re-make himself through black culture similarly suggests the splitting of whiteness against itself even as masculinity gains strength. Racial cross-dressing, coded as “ambivalent desire,” therefore requires a re-assertion of the color line achieved through miscegenation displaced and dissipated.11
Tarzan of the Apes depicts supposedly dangerous interracial desires while removing the threat of miscegenation. The novel’s titillating suggestion of cross-racial coupling provides a safe haven for readerly desires, allowing delight in Jane Porter’s forbidden, fantastic desires, rejected as she remains true to her race and to her promise to marry Lord Greystoke. Readers know Tarzan’s heritage, knowledge that erases the fact of miscegenation before it can ever become reality. Tarzan and Jane’s romance, then, features a miscegenative threat that, through biological translation, dissolves into whiteness. Reviewers and readers saw the story as elaborate fantasy and this vision of the novel enables it to perform its work: that the characters do not know Tarzan’s origin allows readers to indulge in miscegenative romanticism without undermining white power.
The problem, however, is that the text vacillates between understandings of identity as biologically determined and as culturally constructed. As Lott notes, “whiteness itself ultimately becomes an impersonation. The subterranean components of whiteness that so often threaten it require a constant, edgy patrolling” (“White” 491). Burroughs therefore provides an alternative miscegenative threat as a means of demonstrating this vigilance and thereby asserting biology as the determinant of identity. Having undermined whiteness through Tarzan’s impersonations, the color line must be re-affirmed in order to shore up its boundaries. In so doing, Burroughs distinguishes between “primitive” or white virility, and “savage” or “colored” virility. While Tarzan can stand temporarily as an ambiguous primitive figure of desire, Terkoz’s bestial miscegenative desires must be repudiated at all costs. Burroughs once again reverts to white supremacist stereotypes, for the ape is figured as black, authorizing the beast’s murder by Tarzan in the role of white protector. Faced with the same situation afterwards, Tarzan resists his primitive urges; he refuses to rape Jane himself.
But the Tarzan-Jane romance, as Cheyfitz notes, also serves as a romance of the nation where the mixed races of the United States are whitewashed out of existence (21). Tarzan embodies the resolution of contradictory impulses in white masculine identity—he is both civilized and primitive, forcing him to achieve reconciliation between these warring sides, to suture his split subjectivity into a coherent identity. Tarzan travels to the United States, hoping to marry Jane: “For your sake I have become a civilized man—for your sake I crossed oceans and continents—for your sake I will be whatever you will me to be” (243). Burroughs chooses the story’s final setting in part as a rejection of effete British culture and an advocate of American popular culture, echoing such tales as Owen Wister’s The Virginian that sport similar race and gender politics. The choice of the United States for Tarzan’s rejection also allows Burroughs to consolidate racial identities. Jane’s rejection may stem from her mistaken belief regarding Tarzan’s identity, but it also demonstrates her decorum and adherence to the codes of racial purity. Tarzan, in her view, is naturally primitive, though the reader knows his true biological heritage.12
Miscegenation thus becomes marked as an “undesirable desire” through the Tarzan-Jane romance. Fears of cross-racial degeneracy postulated in eugenic formulations by Alfred Schultz and others inform Tarzan’s biological determinism. Tarzan’s identity must be established as unsullied whiteness—until the evidence of his fingerprints surfaces, he can only be primitive, and therefore non-white, in her eyes.13 The novel makes clear that miscegenative relationships cannot exist in American culture; they must either dissolve into whiteness or remove to the wilderness. The Tarzan-Jane romance, then, signifies the means for taboo desires to be assimilated into normative ideals. In addition, Tarzan becomes a model for the revitalization of white manhood. White men want to be Tarzan and white women want to have Tarzan. He assuages white male anxieties by re-asserting their superiority through a complex combination of cultural assimilation and nostalgically produced difference.
Burroughs’s novel ultimately supports a white masculine supremacist ideology through such maneuverings as I have described above. White men can take on the attributes of racial others and, in doing so, free themselves from societal restraints and enhance their masculinities. At a time when arguments over the makeup of the United States population and the definition of “American” exposed the ties between national identity and white masculinity, Tarzan of the Apes effaces a reality of cultural assimilation and white masculine power consolidation. Miscegenation shocks and titillates readers and creates a conduit for the resurgence of white manhood’s primitive desires. Crucial to racial cross-dressing is the pleasure it brings the white man not only in his transgression into previously barred arenas but also in his access to racial otherness itself. Tarzan of the Apes presents a version of this fantasy, divorced from United States soil yet constitutive of the nation’s foreign and domestic relations.14 Yet Burroughs constantly denies these pleasures to Tarzan, leaving him with only anxiety for his undiscovered whiteness. Edith Hull’s The Sheik (1919), on the other hand, represents a politics of naturalized racial colonization disguised by masculine regeneration that bears marked similarities to Tarzan. Hull’s novel disguises its racial politics within the pleasures and desires that flow through the text.
The Sheik was a British novel but an international phenomenon. An immediate bestseller in Britain and the United States, it sat on the bestseller list for two years and led to The Sons of the Sheik (1926), a sequel that was just as popular, as well as a film that would launch the career of Rudolph Valentino. Edith Maude Hull was a very private individual, and her personal life was a closely kept secret. She was a British citizen, and she married Percy Hull, a pig farmer, but the other details of her life are unknown; we have only the texts she wrote. Although it was published seven years after Tarzan of the Apes, The Sheik reveals that fantasies of miscegenation and desires for restoration of white masculine identity still resonated powerfully with Americans. Like Tarzan of the Apes, The Sheik also idealizes primitive racial incorporation as a means to enhance white masculinity within what reviewers labeled a spectacular plot. For example, the New York Times review stated that “such a story, viewed from a sane literary standpoint, is preposterous” (“Latest Works” 51). The Sheik incorporates virtually the same miscegenative plot of Tarzan: a white woman (Diana) falls in love with a virile primitive man (Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan) who we eventually learn is actually white nobility. There are key differences, however, that make The Sheik an interesting case study of 1920s identity politics and miscegenation’s secret attractions.
First, The Sheik begins with a profound sense of gender trouble, blamed on modern civilization’s pernicious effects. Hull explores transgressive gender models through Diana Mayo, who is more masculine than feminine, replicating 1920s flapper ideals that subverted gender norms and produced a set of “female masculinities."15 To one American gentleman, “She was sure meant for a boy and changed at the last moment. She looks like a boy in petticoats, a damned pretty boy—and a damned haughty one” (2). Diana’s description reflects the ambiguity surrounding her gender identity. Her body is “small” and “slender,” typically feminine descriptions in the textual economy, yet her body also stands “erect,” a term usually reserved for men. The terms “scornful mouth” and “obstinate determination” partly feminize her but mainly indicate her adoption of masculine will and strength (Hull 4). Though her lashes and eyebrows seem feminine, her short hair gives her a more masculine look.
Diana’s masculine behavior also produces anxiety in the civilized men who surround her, and who seem emasculated in her presence. As such, they seek ways of containing her rebellion. For example, Arbuthnot proposes marriage, but Diana refuses, saying:
Diana realizes that the social institution of marriage, to which Arbuthnot wishes her to submit, is an apparatus of masculine control, an idea that would play well with 1920s feminists who sought economic and political equality for women. These arguments combine with Hull’s depictions of British men who are feminized by their civilization to suggest that Diana is more manly than her male counterparts. Unlike Tarzan, The Sheik registers white masculinity’s unease with 1920s feminism. Its fantasy of gender reversal radically alters normative identity structures through its undermining of biological gender identification, yet the text returns to a more conservative identity politics by the novel’s end.I am very content with my life as it is. Marriage for a woman means the end of independence, that is, marriage with a man who is a man, in spite of all that the most modern woman may say. I have never obeyed anyone in my life; I do not wish to try the experiment. [. . .] A man to me is just a companion with whom I ride or shoot or fish; a pal, a comrade, and that’s just all there is to it. God made me a woman. Why, only He knows. (11)
The second major alteration Hull introduces to Tarzan’s plot, Diana’s imprisonment and rape, eliminates Diana’s gender ambiguity by diminishing her to the sexual object of a hyper-masculine primitive. Through violence perpetrated against the female body, The Sheik erases the erotic display of transgressive identities and desires and reinstalls traditional gender relations. The Sheik’s kidnapping of Diana seems at first to mimic Terkoz’s capture of Jane, as he incarcerates her for his own pleasure. Hull increases the erotic titillation, however, as the Sheik repeatedly rapes Diana over the course of the next few weeks, making her his concubine in a brutal and sadistic fantasy. Whereas Tarzan’s white biology enabled him to restrain himself from rape, the Sheik’s culturally enhanced manhood overpowers his physical genealogy. As a primitive, Hassan would be unable to control his passions while always desiring to breach the citadel of white womanhood. Forbidden legal access to white women, he must use extralegal means to satisfy his desires (kidnapping, imprisonment, rape). Yet his passion is also the source of his masculinity. Simultaneously more virile and more uncontrollable, Hassan’s primitive manhood eclipses the effeminate British and American “civilized” men Diana Mayo has seen previously, and her gender resistance wilts under the power of his passion. When Diana sees the Sheik for the first time, the narrator notes, she cannot turn away from his gaze: “[H]e was looking at her with fierce burning eyes that swept her until she felt that the boyish clothes that covered her slender limbs were stripped from her, leaving the beautiful white body bare under his passionate stare” (56-57). The Sheik’s gaze achieves what none of the men in civilized society could manage—feminizing Diana Mayo. He strips her body of its masculine accoutrements and renders her female again, reducing her to a biological “nature.” In opposition to Arbuthnot’s timid request for a kiss, Hassan enfolds her in a passionate embrace:
Hassan’s masculine strength so overwhelms Diana that she cannot resist: “Helpless, like a trapped wild thing, she lay against him, panting, trembling, her wide eyes fixed on him, held against their will. Fascinated she could not turn away” (80). Diana hates him yet at the same time finds him fascinating. Her desire for the privileges of masculine identity has led her to avoid entanglements in heterosexual relationships; thus, this kiss not only inscribes her gender as feminine but also places her under the conscripts of compulsory heterosexuality, an inscription that further defines the Sheik’s masculinity. Thus, even as Hull extends the range of gender possibilities, she also extends white masculinity’s ability to curtail those options.She writhed in his arms as he crushed her to him in a sudden access of possessive passion. His head bent slowly down to her, his eyes burned deeper, and, held immovable, she endured the first kiss she had ever received. And the touch of his scorching lips, the clasp of his arms, the close union with his warm, strong body robbed her of all strength, of all power of resistance. (58)
The third and most important difference that The Sheik maintains from Tarzan of the Apes lies in the delayed revelation of the Sheik’s racial identity. Hull’s novel obscures the Sheik’s whiteness (for characters and readers alike) until the novel’s end, a choice which accentuates the dangerous fantasy of miscegenation through the Sheik’s attacks and Diana’s unwilling fascination. Hull reflects in Diana the contradictory attitudes of racial disdain and gendered desire prevalent in the 1920s, what Lott calls the “combined vigilance and absorptive cross-racial fascination of North American whiteness” (“White” 482). While United Kingdom discourses on miscegenation differed in focus from United States visions, they did share a common belief in Nordic superiority. Diana sees the Sheik as a “hypocritical, Oriental beast” (65); she compares him at one point to a lion, and later says, “He is like a tiger” (95). His initial advances disgust her, and she despises his comment that she will be like his other conquests:
The Sheik’s conquest and subsequent rapes present a miscegenation of the worst kind, a forced taint that, unlike Tarzan, is not evacuated immediately by extradiegetic knowledge. Evoking the narratives of the bestial non-white rapist common to both the United States and the United Kingdom, and suggesting that white women might actually desire to be raped, Hull produces a horrifying and brutal narrative predicated on cross-racial desires taboo in Britain and America. White supremacist ideals of the type promulgated by Stoddard and Grant enjoyed international appeal; as Jackson and Weidman document, the United Kingdom had its own versions of Nordic supremacists in individuals such as Houston Chamberlain (69-71), so Hull’s text would have encountered such beliefs in both countries.It infuriated her that he could even suggest that she could come to care for him, that she could ever look on him as anything but a brutal savage who had committed a hideous outrage, that she could have any other feeling for him except hatred and loathing. That he should class her with the other women he spoke of revolted her, she felt degraded, soiled as she had never done before, and she had thought that she had felt the utmost humiliation of her position. (110)
Yet though the Sheik revolts Diana, he also entices her in a depiction of “undesirable desire”: “His personal beauty even was an additional cause of offense. She hated him the more for his handsome face and graceful, muscular body” (94). Though she longs for him, she recognizes the social taboo that her desire creates. As the representative white woman, Diana becomes the narrative’s voice of desire, allowing readers to identify with her reluctant pleasures in a titillating fantasy channeled to the masculine primitive: “Diana’s eyes passed over him slowly till they rested on his brown, clean-shaven face, surmounted by crisp, close-cut brown hair. It was the handsomest and cruellest face that she had ever seen” (56). Given the racial politics of the period, this yearning would have been scandalous; white women, as the citadel of civilized behavior, were not to find such racial primitives desirable. Lott notes, “The agenda of pleasure meets that of domination, white male meets imperial subject. Whether it precedes or follows the dominative logic of imperialism, pleasure in the other is in fact its necessary twin. In the case of blackface these two agendas consorted in extremely complex ways, performance legitimating and sometimes subverting the politics of white supremacy” (“White” 482). Removed to the colonial frontier and thus out from under the watchful eye of the law, The Sheik performs a pleasurable domination that subsumes women’s rights and racial equality in a fantasy of willing subjection.
Hull, however, cannot allow her heroine to be so besmirched, however pleasurable or enticing such titillations may appear to be. The forbidden desires of miscegenation are titillatingly extended and then retracted, and the multi-racial fantasy created by the romance of an Arab man and a British woman transforms into another primitivist fantasy for the enhancing masculine identity and assuaging civilized anxieties. Though Diana seemingly accepts her relationship with a “colored” man, we eventually learn that the Sheik (like Tarzan) is racially cross-dressing—he is the son of a Spanish mother and an English father.16 Erotic titillation becomes biological machination. Hull mollifies the text’s portrayal of miscegenation by providing clues to the Sheik’s true identity throughout the text. For example, Diana notices many incongruities in the Sheik’s manner and appearance. She wonders at the “fastidious care he took of his well-manicured hands” and notices that he wears a “black and silver waistcoat” (163). She describes him sitting among sable cushions and riding a jet-black horse while wearing white robes. The juxtaposition of black commodities and white clothes and skin suggests that the Sheik himself is a mixture. The Sheik’s living quarters further demonstrate his mixed identity. As Diana explores the Sheik’s tent, she relates that “the room was a curious mixture of Oriental luxury and European comfort” (61). She discovers his library, a sign of his education that “troubled her . . . It suggested possibilities that would not have existed in a raw native, or one only superficially coated with a veneer of civilization” (68). In fact, Diana has it backwards, for the Sheik is “superficially coated” with a veneer of the primitive.
The Sheik rebels against traditional boundaries ascribed to the racial Other, a transgression that intensifies his masculinity even as it solidifies his colored identity. His miscegenative advances provide titillation for readers precisely because the act blurs racial boundaries and threatens white purity with erotic defilement. Hull, however, erases such transgressions by whitewashing them with Saint Hubert’s revelation of the Sheik’s noble identity. Hull ties this revelation to biology, for Hubert tells Diana when she remarks, “[Hassan’s] hand is so big for an Arab’s” (243). Hubert replies, “He is not an Arab . . . he is English” (243). Once again, biology is supposed to reveal true identity: the Sheik is English, and born of noble blood. Hassan’s genealogy transforms his savage Arab identity into a performance designed to protect his authority. Thus, Diana can now legally be with the Sheik, the threat of miscegenation having been assuaged. The revelation also retroactively revises the text; through the lattice of the narrator’s earlier hints, Diana’s rape becomes romantic lovemaking, and her imprisonment merely courtship: “Her heart was given for all time to the fierce desert man who was so different from all other men whom she had met, a lawless savage who had taken her to satisfy a passing fancy and who had treated her with merciless cruelty. He was a brute, but she loved him, loved him for his very brutality and superb animal strength” (133). His primitive violence seems excused, in her eyes, by his power and strength; in fact, she takes pleasure in his brutality.
And so does he. The Sheik performs a particular construction of desire, masquerading as a primitive not only to ensure domination over his subjects, who, as Elizabeth Gargano notes, are often depicted as ugly, diseased, or deformed, but also because it brings him immense pleasure (178). The power he gains from this cultural assimilation to non-whiteness, unconditioned by civil restraints, gives him the hyper-masculine strength that Diana finds appealing and that he so enjoys. For example, when the Sheik rescues Diana at the novel’s climax, he strangles Omair (his racial Other) in a scene seemingly symbolic of his renunciation of primitive life. Yet this scene takes on a strangely erotic tone: “She had seen him in cruel, even savage moods, but nothing that had ever approached the look of horrible pleasure that was on his face now. It was a revelation of the real man with the thin layer of civilization stripped from him, leaving only the primitive savage drunk with the lust of blood” (230). While the Sheik’s biology allows him to become a kind and gentle lover for Diana, the primitive culture he has assimilated provides him with “horrible pleasure” and allows him to access his own primitive nature, otherwise unattainable under civilized whiteness’s ideologies of self-restraint.
Though Hull reforms the Sheik biologically, cross-racial desire has been broached, requiring Hull to re-establish the color line. With the Sheik’s miscegenation erased by biological privilege, Hull transfers the miscegenative threat to another, one who is not playing colored but who is, in the novel’s imaginary, truly racialized physically and morally: Sheik Ibraheim Omair, Diana’s second abductor. While their actions are the same, the differences between Hassan and Omair clearly reveal the superiority of the former, repeating the Tarzan/Terkoz dichotomy of man and beast. When Diana awakens in Omair’s tent, she notices first that Omair employs “Negroes” as his servants, blackening him in her eyes. But Omair’s appearance is even more racially revealing, as she notes he is “the Arab of her imaginings”:
Omair is the racialized Other against which Hassan’s whiteness shines most clearly. Diana’s vision of Omair as a beast mirrors her original assessment of Hassan, but their contrasting appearances clearly mark Hassan as the “good Sheik” and Omair as a bestial devil, intent only on defiling Diana’s womanhood. Hassan chooses to rape Diana and then chooses to stop raping her; Omair, on the other hand, cannot resist Diana’s white womanhood and attempts to rape her, the text suggests, because of his biology. All of the anxieties that originally reside with Hassan are smoothly transmitted onto Omair, making Hassan a heroic figure and whitening him against Omair’s darkness.This gross, unwieldy figure lying among the tawdry cushions, his swollen, ferocious face seamed and lined with every mark of vice, his full, sensual lips parted and showing broken, blackened teeth, his deep-set, bloodshot eyes with a look in them that it took all her resolution to sustain, a look of such bestial evilness that the horror of it bathed her in perspiration. His appearance was slovenly, his robes, originally rich, were stained and tumbled, the fat hands lying spread out on his knees were engrained with dirt, showing even against his dark skin. (219)
The Sheik’s masculinity depends, then, on a combination of savagery and civilization, and just as in Tarzan, that masculinity thrives in its location at the periphery of the empire. The Sheik is an English lord, yet he chooses to continue racially masquerading, ruling the Arabs as a manly primitive instead of returning to the confines of the emasculating British empire. Lott states, “The domination of international others has depended on mastering the other at home—and in oneself: an internal colonization whose achievement is fragile at best and which is often exceeded or threatened by the gender and racial arrangements on which it depends” (“White” 476). The Sheik represents that mastery, able to control the racial other within or without, gender and racial arrangements always already in place as part of the natural order. Hassan represents the white masculine ideal, free to exercise his passions with little restraint in a primitivist fantasy of racial and gender hierarchy. Thus, race and gender intertwine, mutually determining one another in a complex layering of racial features. These layers were delineated in part by one’s ability to access a primeval heritage, to incorporate a primitive element without succumbing to its bloodlust.
The two authors I have discussed rehabilitate white manhood by incorporating “primitive” attributes to assuage white male anxiety about effeminate civilization, while also invoking and disavowing interracial desires to dispel the “miscegenation” threat inherent in discourses of primitive sexuality. For 1920s audiences, these protagonists represent the strong man because they have conquered the feminizing effects of modern life and returned to a nostalgically triumphant masculine identity. These icons become so popular because they embody a fantasy of physically virile and emotionally powerful men who could control the racial and sexual others seeking to undermine their power. As such, they make themselves desirable not only to their female lovers but also to the men of this time, who are yearning to overcome the stultifying effects of modern culture. The men who successfully assimilate the primitive become even more virile and more “white,” restoring their place in the social hierarchy of 1920s America.
Notes
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