1. In class, we discussed the final scene between Ahmed and Diana as crucial to the novel: the final chance that E. M. Hull has to ease our anxieties, deliver a happy ending, and revise our sense of this couple as a neatly hierarchical master / slave or dominant / submissive pair. Write an essay on that final scene, with attention as needed to earlier material and to the various quotations I posted on Blackboard. Show how E. M. Hull tries to establish some sort of mutuality, or even equality, between heroine and hero before the novel ends.

2. In class we began to explore the psychological motivations of both Diana and Ahmed: specifically, the childhood of each, and how each was shaped, however unconsciously, by the relationship between and / or death of her / his parents. Write an essay that explores this topic in more detail. Show how each of these characters works through that early trauma through this new love relationship, and how each comes to find in the other some reassurance and healing, however twisted (or pleasantly twisted) the process or final outcome may seem.

3. One of the marvelous things about The Sheik is the author's ability to maintain tension throughout the book, notably by multiplying the barriers—both external and internal, or psychological—that keep our heroine and hero apart. Write an essay that focuses simply on this structural element of romance (the barrier) in The Sheik. Moving through the novel sequentially, from start to finish, discuss the various barriers we encounter in the book and, as each comes down, how new barriers rise to take their place until the final moments of the text.

4. Tania Moleski has written of the "self-subversion" of romance heroines, and of the way that female readers are encouraged to accept, or even embrace, this "self-subversion." Certainly Diana would seem a perfect example of this tendency in action, moving as she does from independence to submission over the first half of the novel and never quite recovering. But is she, really? Write an essay that argues against Moleski's theory, based on a close reading of The Sheik. Think about the ways in which this novel might be said to empower or delight its reader without making her embrace her own oppression. Feel free to draw on the material I posted to Blackboard to build your case; think about the possibility that the reader does not identify simply with Diana, but also in part with Ahmed; or that Diana is not quite so self-subverted by the end of the novel as she seems.