The article explores how the popularity of sheik fantasies in nineteen twenties Australia reflected the influence of war, cinema, literature, and oriental imagination, revealing how these shaped ideas of romance, masculinity, identity, and the Middle East in Australian popular culture. Topics includes Rudolph Valentino, Thomas Edward Lawrence, Edith Maude Hull, World War One, cinema, romance fiction, popular culture, Australian identity, gender, masculinity, and desert fantasy.
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Several features of Australia's popular culture in the wake of World War I make sheik fantasies worth exploring. While the coincidence of advancing visual technologies and war was similar in many countries, I suggest that three particular factors shaped Australians' responses to The Sheik: pre-war masculinities that were built upon during World War I; wartime experience that was different in key ways to the British experience; and the centrality of visual culture to Australians' war because of their distance from the fronts. (56)
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A key difference between Australian and British experiences of the Middle East during World War I was that almost all Australian troops travelled through the Suez Canal on their way to war and had some time at least in Cairo and Alexandria, making the Middle East a standard part of Australians' war experience. Some, particularly the light horse units, remained in Egypt, joining various desert mounted units and the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. (58)
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Visual culture was central to Australians' experience of World War I, particularly because their soldiers did not come home on leave, as they did in Britain. The prominence of the Middle East in Australia's wartime experiences meant that those at home poured [sic] over maps of the Middle East, became familiar with cities beyond those they had known from their Sunday School education through newspaper photographs, and received letters and photographs from kin and friends describing the desert, Egyptians and 'Arabs'. [...] Audiences at home also saw the desert and the mounted troops in newsreels played before feature films in their local venue. (59)
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George Melford's direction of The Sheik also deliberately echoed the visual currency of wartime images. Diana and Ahmed end the film together, with Diana declaring her love for Ahmed as he lay, vulnerable and wounded in a hospital-style bed after rescuing her. Combatant societies had recently been drenched in visual propaganda featuring wounded men and the final scene of The Sheik plucked at those symbols. (68)
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