Deborah Lutz
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Wikipedia
Featured:  |
Deborah Lutz[1] is the author of The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative published in 2006 by The Ohio State University Press, Columbus. [2]
- The beauty of erotic death is replayed in another classic dangerous lover narrative, as well as an early and influential erotic historical — Edith M. Hull’s The Sheik (1921), considered by some to be the first romance of the twentieth century. The sheik of the title kidnaps, rapes, and holds captive an aristocratic English girl. Again the inexorable divide: the mysterious, ruthless leader of a roving band of Arabs and the subjugated, enslaved English girl. The sheik has “the handsomest and cruelest face that she had ever seen. . . . He 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” (56–57). She observes that “ . . . his face was the face of a devil” (141). His subjectivity has the hiddenness of danger: “The man himself was a mystery. . . . She could not reconcile him and . . . [the] dozen incongruities that she had noticed during the day crowded into her recollection until her head reeled”(79). He has exiled himself from his aristocratic English origins; he wanders the desert incessantly. Redemption from self-inflicted loneliness comes finally through true love. His only escape must be from outside, through a transcendence which he can’t possibly see beforehand because it is so exterior to any kind of solution he could find for himself. The lover brings the caesura, the utter surprise of an interruption of restless being. As an outsider love narrative, The Sheik ends with the declaration of love signifying a pact to wander together as homeless voyagers.
- The Sheik makes fast the chain that links the erotic historical with pornography (and we will see everywhere these links between the dangerous lover romance and pornography, particularly in the nineteenth century). Even though Hull’s story is not sexually explicit—in fact, on the page we only read about kisses—she rewrites and romanticizes a popular nineteenth- century pornographic narrative.8 The darling of nineteenth century pornographers, the story of an exotic foreigner—a Turk, a sheik, a pirate, a brigand—enslaving and raping a pale and supplicant English virgin provided the ultimate titillation for the English gentleman reader. The anonymous The Lustful Turk: Scenes in the Harem of an Eastern Potentate, published around 1828, provides us with a famous example of a pornographic version of The Sheik. The narrative of The Lustful Turk, up until the all-important ending, is essentially the same as the sheik romance. Of course, with the romance the ending is everything: in The Sheik, the transcendent sphere of love “redeems” the brutality of the hero, casting a rosy glow of forever back on all sadistic acts. The pornographic version merely repeats, unrelentingly, the act of penetration, of possession. No transcendence here: meaning flattens out into a repetition which could sustain itself forever.
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Deborah Lutz" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
