Exotic Romance: The Doubled Hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik

Abstract

I was born too late in the twentieth century to have my romance-reading fires lit by The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) or The Sheik (1919). My generation learned the structures of romance from Gone with the Wind (1939). Margaret Mitchell’s two heroes were actually two different men, not a doubled one; they did, however, appeal to the curious virgin and the managing mother in Scarlett, and in me. When I saw Leslie Howard play Ashley Wilkes in the film version, I knew why Ashley attracted me as much as Rhett, and wished they were both one hero; when later I saw Leslie Howard star in The Scarlet Pimpernel on late-night television I saw my doubled/unified hero in the flesh and went hunting the original novel. Little did I know at the time that this romanticized version of Englishness was written by a Hungarian émigré, that the 1934 film version I saw on television was produced by the Hungarian émigré Alexander Korda, and that its Regency dandy star was the grandson of a Hungarian.

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Yeats, “Leda and the Swan,” ll 19–23 (1923)

They seek him here, they seek him there,

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere;

Is he in heaven? is he in hell?

That demmed elusive Pimpernel.

The Scarlet Pimpernel (99)