In 2005 fifty-one million 'desert' or 'sheikh' romances were sold around the world, with North America constituting the largest market. [...] They demonstrate the playing out of Western women's sexual and romantic fantasies about 'the Orient', yet, despite the proliferation of these romances since E. M. Hull's novel The Sheik was published in 1919, Edward Said ignored the genre in his discussion of orientalism because his focus was on 'high' literary culture. Nevertheless these novels have probably done more to reinforce orientalist ideas in Western popular culture because of their strong sales and wide readership. This chapter explores the emergence of gender-specific orientalist discourses as elaborated in mass market romance novels over the course of the twentieth century. It looks at historical antecedents of orientalist 'sheikh' fantasies before turning to a consideration of how Western women have shaped the discourse of orientalism in their writings. (241)
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Hull's novel [...] is startlingly modern in the pace of its plot and in its focus on female erotic fantasies. Where discursive sexual titillation is concerned, it appears to draw from the tradition of Victorian pornography, particularly the anonymously published Lustful Turk (1828). (245)
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The casting of Valentino as the ethnic 'other' naturally made this incorporation into whiteness more acceptable. This theme - with its emphasis on American incorporation of ethnic others - would endure throughout the century. Orientalism was reducible to background props and a nod to traditional European orientalist motifs. (249)
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Contemporary sheikh novels continue to construct an arrogant, domineering, chauvinistic, seemingly callous but sexually potent and insatiable sheikh hero who is a hybrid product of Western and oriental race and culture. Almost all sheikh novels have as their heroes an Arab man who either has European blood or has been so thoroughly acculturated to the West through its educational institutions - Oxford, Harvard, Yale - that his mentality is split between East and West. These are hybrid, schizophrenic sheikhs who move through two disparate worlds and seemingly belong to neither. Yet it is this very hybridity that makes them suitable heroes and potential husbands for Western heroines. For, unlike sheikh novels of the 1920s, issues of religious difference, race, skin colour, hybridity and miscegenation scarcely matter. In fact, racial difference as symbolised through skin tone is emphasised and celebrated on the covers of these novels. (250)
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In the end, contemporary sheikh romances seek to rescue the Middle East from the effects of social and technological backwardness and ignorance through education, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned. But they also seek to normalise Middle Eastern people to a certain extent, to celebrate the strength and vitality of oriental family life, and to renew social bonds through the incorporation of ethnic difference and ethnic culture into contemporary Western societies. (260)
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