The Sheik/YMMV

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• Complete Monster: The Sheik is initially portrayed as this. After a few days Diana realizes he's decent enough to his people; it's just her he's inventively sadistic with. Not that this really makes it any better.
• Designated Hero: Eventually. For the first half of the book the Sheik is portrayed extremely unfavorably, but once Diana falls in love with him he's treated like a Byronic good guy, even though he continues to abuse her.
• Fair for Its Day: Despite the rampant sexism and racism in the story, there are some interesting elements that manage to twist things a bit:
  • Raoul de Saint Hubert is genuinely horrified at what the Sheik has done to Diana and does not fail to call him out; even the Sheik himself realizes that he has essentially destroyed her -- despite this, they end up together anyway.
  • While the Sheik's true heritage definitely comes off as a cop-out, in 1919 it was unheard-of that a white man would rather be a 'savage' than a 'good' Englishman. Also, Raoul mentions that his father, who knew the prior Sheik and the current Sheik's Spanish mother, thought they ought to marry in spite of the fact that it would be a 'mixed' marriage, which was also unheard-of. Some of the Sheik's justifications for his actions undo most of this, since he flat-out says "When an Arab sees a woman he wants, he takes her." What could have come off as an unusual attitude of respect for another culture is instead reduced to misrepresenting and fetishizing the 'natives' and their 'savage' ways in order to excuse his own bad behavior.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Sheik hops right over that almost as soon as we meet him.
• Periphery Demographic: It's basically a BDSM romance novel from before BDSM conventions existed.
• Unfortunate Implications: Too many to name. Of special note is the end of the novel, when the Sheik tacitly admits he might not fully stop abusing Diana if he gets too angry. He says something like, "You will have a devil for a husband". Not as a threat, mind you, just a statement of fact.
• Values Dissonance: The whole premise, really.