Dressed in flowing Bedouin robes, Rudolph Valentino, the swarthy Italian star of silent Hollywood, prepared to deflower the virginal English heroine of The Sheik (1921). Kansas City censors banned the film for its rape scene, yet the movie passed muster in most of America. The scene was ambiguously edited, leaving what occurred to the imagination of the beholders. Perhaps conscience halted Valentino’s Sheik in the final instant? Most censors apparently thought so. The Sheik became a signature film of the 1920s, an influence on Hollywood depictions of the Middle East for decades to come.
The Sheik may have been at bottom of everything from Elvis Presley’s Harum Scarum to Bo Derek’s Bolero, but the movie had long roots in Western European Orientalist romance fiction. Originating in the Crusader-era verse of troubadours, the genre encompassed literary masterworks such as Sir Richard Burton’s translation of Scheherazade and the 19th century pornography of The Lustful Turk before climaxing in the bestselling novel by British author E.M. Hull, The Sheik.
In Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels (University of Texas Press), Hsu-Ming Teo chronicles and analyzes a genre that thrives today in the “bodice ripping” of women’s romance fiction and continues to influence Western pop culture conceptions of the Middle East. Lingering in the background, behind the terrorists and fanatics of recent times, sits a pasha or a sheik on carpets in a gilded tent, casting an appraising eye on any American or European beauty that strays into his clutches. Fifty Shades of Sand, anyone?
Teo, a cultural historian at Australia’s Macquarie University, is a knowledgeable and non-judgmental guide, examining her often-steamy subject with the scientific detachment of an insect collector mounting specimens on a board for display. Not for her the one-way polemics of Edward Said, whose 1978 book Orientalism gave lemming-like academics something to follow. Said’s point, that virtually all Western depictions of the Near East during the colonial era intentionally cast the region’s inhabitants as depraved or inferior and fit to be conquered, has come under increasing criticism for missing something obvious. Yes, some Orientalist paintings and novels (and later, movies) explicitly put Arabs and others on a lower social or racial rung than the Anglo-Saxon imperialists. And yes, like most the world’s cultural production, Orientalist artists conveyed unexamined prejudices. And yet, Orientalism also offered 19th and early 20th century Westerners an alternative to the industrialized drudgery of their own civilization. Teo shines in finding the multiple meanings possible within the same story—not only meanings we might assign to a novel or film a century later but in the (often unconscious) intentions of their authors.
The long tradition of female captivity narratives, culminating in The Sheik, had overtones of sadism, masochism and sexism, yet sometimes they might also have represented women’s fantasies of freedom and sexual agency, a critique of gender relations. To many Americans a century ago, the Near East afforded an imaginative departure from work-till-you-drop Americanism. Teo examines the influence of the recreated Eastern villages and bangled belly dancers that outdrew the newly invented Ferris wheel at the Chicago World’s Fair (1893). “While it depicted the Middle East as exotically primitive and racially inferior, it was also a playful cultural discourse through which modern Americans could indulge the pleasures of the senses and experiment with alternative forms of sexuality, gender relations, and mystical rituals.”
In transliterating The Sheik from book to screen, the producers were faced with problems more subtle than whether to show the rape of their heroine. In the U.S. white was right and the full benefits were largely restricted to the whitest shade of pale, Americans of Northern European descent. Irish, Greek, Polish, Lebanese and Italian immigrants all had to struggle to prove their whiteness in America’s racial caste system. Rudolph Valentino’s popularity represented a turning point. He had been restricted to playing villains in an era when D.W. Griffith’s Italian Blood (1911) depicted Italians as racially inferior, little better than the blacks who populated his infamous justification for the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Casting Valentino as a dangerous romantic lead, even in a film with such racially charged implications as The Sheik, helped “redefine and broaden American masculine ideals.” Dark, sexual and romantic became possible and the fantasy of the fabled East provided the imaginative space. Thanks to The Sheik, the Hollywood stardom of Antonio Banderas became possible.
