Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925

5. The Imperial Erotic Romance

152 Chapter Five The Imperial Erotic Romance I f the romances of Orczy, Barclay, and Glyn secularize and psychologize the romance genre in the first years of the twentieth century, then what we might call the “imperial erotic romance”—the white woman’s love story in a colonial setting—explicitly racializes the genre. Scholars have long noted that the masculine adventure romances of the period, such as H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), feature orientalist or primitivist versions of the nonEuropean Other.1 The term imperial romance has commonly been applied to “a complex group of fictions appearing in Britain between the 1880s and the 1920s, which were devoted to narrating adventure in colonial settings.”2 This is a familiar subgenre of the romance, one that emerged well before the turn of the century; alongside Haggard and Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, and others were in this period extending and transforming the tradition of “boys’ own adventure” that was developed earlier in the nineteenth century by G. A. Henty, Mayne Reid, Frederick Chamier, Frederick Marryat, and R. M. Ballantyne. This masculine strain of the romance has sparked recent scholarship on the ideological hybridity, the mesh of conservative and progressive discourses, that constitutes these subliminally anxious texts and on the continuities with modernist experimentalism, particularly in the imperial erotic romance 153 the cases of Conrad’s primitivism and Forster’s A Passage to India. Postcolonial criticism on the imperial romance has brought to our attention the protomodernist interrogations of the bourgeois subject, generated by narrative explorations of the non-Western Other, that began to appear in imperial romances from the 1880s and thereafter.3 But critical attention has only recently turned to those European constructions of colonized non-European peoples that appear in imperial romances by women writers. Here I look primarily at three such texts, published in the years bridging the decline of the moralizing Victorian romance and the rise of the mass-market woman’s romance: Victoria Cross’s Anna Lombard (1901), Ethel Dell’s The Way of an Eagle (1912), and E. M. Hull’s The Sheik (1919). To understand the popularity of these three romances, we have to reimagine the structure of feeling that came with being British subjects of a global empire—or, more generally, anglophone readers of European descent, subject to the ideologies of empire. I argue that libidinal investments in racial fantasies, on the part of author and reading audience, provided the narratives with much of their energy and suspense; ideologies of race fueled the combustible discourses of desire.4 Informing each narrative is a complex of tensions between a willful British woman and an exotic or “Othered” man; resolution arrives with the “taming” or domestication of the white woman and with her disarming of the thrillingly dangerous element represented in an “exotic” male lover—whether through his death (Anna Lombard) or through the emergence of his “better” self, as nurtured by the heroine’s love (The Way of an Eagle, The Sheik). Bringing to bear some of the more recent articulations of postcolonial theory, we find in these romances both implicit critiques of discursive constructions of the feminine and an ambivalent fascination with the “ungovernable” Indian or Arab male. The elements of “uncivilized” or non-European masculinity, portrayed as at once threatening and attractive, may be seen to test the independence of the New Woman heroines and, in the case of Dell’s and Hull’s novels , to refract through the “barbaric” side of the white male heroes. In all three romances, the fear of rape by the “native” male is balanced , as on a knife-edge, with the libidinality of the encounter with a romanticized, “primitive” masculinity. Almost entirely missing from the triangulation of signifying nodes—“white woman,” “dark man,” “white man”—is the figure of the “dark,” or non-European, chapter 5 154 woman. This absence is doubly symptomatic of new developments in the early twentieth-century romance mode. First, it suggests the discursive confluence of what Jenny Sharpe, in her groundbreaking study of the same name, calls “allegories of empire”;5 and second, it indexes these novels’ economies of desire, which would come to characterize the mass-market women’s romance. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to exploring these interlinked phenomena, through readings of works by three of the preeminent authors of the imperial...