As Colin G. Calloway notes, "In some ways, of course, the histories of Highland Scots and American Indians are so different as to render comparisons superficial" (10) and a further comparison with the history of Arab sheikhs would have to be even more superficial still. Nonetheless, since the romance genre's depictions of
Native Americans,
Scottish Highlanders and
sheikhs are often based on superficial stereotypes, I wondered if Calloway's research might shed some light on why heroes from these groups have been so popular that they are each recognised as having their own romance sub-genre.
Calloway's book is titled
White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America and examines the similarities and shared histories of Indians and Highlanders.
1 He begins by explaining the source of his title:
In the 1730s the trustees of Georgia colony recruited Highlanders from the north of Scotland to serve as farmer-soldiers on the frontier against the Spaniards and Indians in Florida. When war broke out between Britain and Spain, General James Oglethorpe raised a corps of Highland Rangers to fight alongside his English colonists and his Creek, Yuchee, and Chickasaw allies. The Highlanders spoke Gaelic, wore kilts, and wielded broadswords. Oglethorpe described his force as "White people[,] Indians and highlanders." He offered no explanation for his comment; pairing American Indians and Celtic Highlanders together as nonwhites made sense to eighteenth-century Englishmen, as it did to many Scottish Lowlanders. (xi)
Calloway's book
identifies parallels between the experiences of Highlanders and Indians in their respective homelands; it relates multiple stories of encounter between Scots and Indians when they fought, traded, and married in North America, and it does both within the context of relations with colonial power (whether British or American) and far-reaching social, economic, and cultural changes. (xii-xiii)
Since my interest is in the depictions of Highlanders and Native Americans in romance novels, I will focus here on some of the parallels Calloway identifies. There are plenty of them, as is apparent from the beginning of his introduction:
They were routinely described as wild, savage, barbarous, primitive, lawless, warlike, treacherous, vengeful, lazy, dirty, poor, superstitious, and always in need of instruction and improvement. They were the tribal peoples who inhabited the northern frontiers of Great Britain and the western frontiers of North America. They had more in common than the derogatory terms applied to them.
[...] Some authors identify "a mutual respect and deep affinity" between Highlanders and Indians "based on parallel warrior traditions, a clan-based social structure, and above all a profound independence of spirit." (3)
and
Like Highlanders, Indian people inhabited landscapes that were etched with the experiences of generations, held memories of the past, and were alive with the spirits of their ancestors. They read the landscape like a historical text. (6)
and
Despite differences between clan and tribe, many contemporary observers saw Highland and Indian ways of life as fundamentally similar. They lived in tribal societies with a strong warrior tradition, they inhabited rugged homelands, and they were accustomed to deprivation and inured to hardship. (9)
Many of these parallels also exist between them and the romance genre's sheikhs, as can readily be illustrated by a few quotes from E. M. Hull's
The Sheik:
- Independence - As the Sheik declares: "The French Government has no jurisdiction over me. I am not subject to it. I am an independent chief, my own master. I recognise no government. My tribe obey me and only me."
- Clan - The Sheik's "tribe worship first and foremost their Sheik." And, like the Highlanders and Native Americans described by Calloway, they "are accustomed to deprivation and inured to hardship." In describing their lifestyle Diana also throws in some derogatory adjectives which, as we have seen, have been applied to Native Americans and Highlanders: "The wild tribesmen, with their primitive ways and savagery, had ceased to disgust her, and the free life with its constant exercise and simple routine was becoming indefinitely dear to her."
- Warriors - "The tradition of reckless courage and organised fighting efficiency that had made the tribe known and feared for generations had been always maintained, and under the leadership of the last two holders of the hereditary name to so high a degree that the respect in which it was held was such that no other tribe had ventured to dispute its supremacy, and for many years its serious fighting capacities had not been tested."
- Rugged Homelands - Romance sheikhs generally have a connection to the desert. In Hull's novel Diana Mayo's attraction to the desert is almost as intense as that which she will come to feel for the Sheik himself:
they glanced slowly around the camp spread out over the oasis—the clustering palm trees, the desert itself stretching away before her in undulating sweeps, but seemingly level in the evening light, far off to the distant hills lying like a dark smudge against the horizon. She drew a long breath. It was the desert at last, the desert that she felt she had been longing for all her life. She had never known until this moment how intense the longing had been. She felt strangely at home, as if the great, silent emptiness had been waiting for her as she had been waiting for it, and now that she had come it was welcoming her softly with the faint rustle of the whispering sand, the mysterious charm of its billowy, shifting surface that seemed beckoning to her to penetrate further and further into its unknown obscurities.
Other ethnic groups may have been described as "wild, savage, barbarous, primitive, [...] lazy, dirty, poor" but they have not become popular as romantic and noble savages, even though they share certain characteristics with Highlanders, American Indians, and sheikhs.
Isobel Chase, in her
The Tartan Touch (1972) explicitly compares Aboriginal Australians to Highlanders, and her Scottish heroine begins by articulating one of the prejudices that exist about the former:
"Do the humpies where they live have to be quite so dreary?" I wondered aloud. "Are they just feckless?"
"No," Andrew said firmly. "They're a lost people, and it's mostly our fault."
I sighed, nodding my head wisely. Hadn't I seen the way the crofters were leaving the land at home? "Ay," I said, "it always is the fault of those who don't live on the land. But dirt poverty is dirt poverty and has to be changed." (126)
The Aboriginal Australians clearly have a rugged homeland, but in this depiction they lack both independence and a warlike nature. African Americans, particularly in a historical American context in which they were slaves, would perhaps be considered to lack all four of the features listed above which are shared by what one might term the "noble savages."
I wonder if independence and aggressive/competitive attributes (either in a warlike or business setting) are felt to be particularly necessary in a male non-White character if he is to qualify for the status of romance hero. These seem to be characteristics which are particularly associated with masculinity and the alpha hero.
2Given that in the world of fiction a single author may spawn an entire genre or subgenre, it would be unwise to ignore the importance of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and E. M. Hull in giving us the Scottish, Indian and sheikh romance sub-genres:
What Scott did with Highland Scots, Cooper did with American Indians by portraying noble savages who embodied heroic traditions that were fading away before the relentless advance of a modern civilization. (Calloway 248)
E. M. Hull's
The Sheik wasn't the first book to romanticise the desert and its inhabitants but "the publication of the novel and the release of the film starring Rudolph Valentino in the eponymous role unleashed 'sheik fever' in the western world" (Teo).
Calloway suggests another consideration to bear in mind when trying to understand why particular denigrated racial or ethnic groups have been granted "noble savage" status:
Nations with an imperial past need to explain themselves and make palatable the experiences of the peoples they colonized. Even as Britain and the United States worked to destroy tribal ways of life, they created romantic images of the people and distorted their history. Images of Highland Scots and American Indians were constructed and transformed to suit changing needs and tastes; historical experiences were reconstructed and reremembered. When British and American colonizers and beneficiaries of colonialism looked again at the peoples, cultures, and environments they had assaulted, altered, or destroyed, they viewed them with a kind of "imperialist nostalgia." (240)
Maybe the histories of some "peoples, cultures, and environments they had assaulted, altered, or destroyed" are less easily "reconstructed and reremembered" for incorporation into the romance genre?
A final factor affecting the creation of a "noble savage" stereotype may be the extent to which certain non-White groups can be constructed as White, almost White, or at very least less Black than some other group. As Calloway notes, "Highland Scots had to earn the privileges that came with membership in the white race in America" (234) and E. M. Hull's Sheik turns out to be of European, rather than of Arab origin, though
His mother was a Spanish lady; many of the old noble Spanish families have Moorish blood in their veins, the characteristics crop up even after centuries. It is so with Ahmed, and his life in the desert has accentuated it.
According to Stephanie Burley "a certain amount of ethnic otherness is desirable in heroes, but the boundaries of acceptable otherness are clearly drawn along racial lines" (327) and "The fact that 'Native American' is an acceptable romanticized racial category, where African American is not, gestures towards a color-palette of white desire" (334).
-------
- Burley, Stephanie. "Shadows & Silhouettes: The Racial Politics of Category Romance." Paradoxa 5.13-14 (2000): 324-343.
- Calloway, Colin G. White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
- Chase, Isobel. The Tartan Touch.
- Hull, E. M. The Sheik. Project Gutenberg.
- Teo, Hsu-Ming. "Historicizing The Sheik: Comparisons of the British Novel and the American Film." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).
1 My thanks to Robin/Janet from Dear Author whose mention of this book in a tweet alerted me to its existence.
2 As Calloway notes, Europeans deemed "issues of war and trade" to be "areas of male responsibility" (55). As he observes, however,
Depictions of tribal peoples as inherently warlike and living in a state of perpetual violence said more about the agendas of colonial powers than about tribal realities. Highland men spent more time with crops and animals than with claymore and musket (the last clan battle in the Highlands occurred in 1688). [...] And although war was a regular and important event in Indian society, it was not a normal state of affairs [...]. It became endemic only after European contact generated new motives for fighting and new sources of international and intertribal competition. (90)
The images are:
- a "US Postage stamp, 1922 issue"; image downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.
- "A vintage pack of [Sheik brand] cigarettes that I saw on a shelf in a restaurant in Seaside, Oregon" photographed by Ocean Yamaha and downloaded from Flickr under a Creative Commons licence.
- Thomas Faed's 1865 painting, "The Last of the Clan"; downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.
