Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (8 page)

It is a beautiful thought that love really can conquer all, and it is obvious that Fifty Shades is an erotic, modern fairy tale complete with happy ending (no pun intended). However, merely establishing that Christian Grey is a Byronic hero and discussing the overall appeal of these characters still does not explain the insane obsession with him. He is just one on a list of many dark, sexy, brooding literary hunks.

So why the astounding, inescapable popularity of the Fifty Shades series? The novels are not well written; in fact, many would argue they are poorly written. Grammatical and punctuation errors abound, Britishisms pop up all over Seattle, and redundancy runs rampant. Yet, much to the chagrin of many academics, literary critics, and general condemners of erotic fiction, this series is resonating with people unlike any book I’ve ever seen. When I taught Effective Reading to college freshman, I would always tell my students: “If you think you don’t like to read, you just haven’t found the right book.” Whether we like it or not,
Fifty Shades of Grey
has become “the right book” for millions of people, the majority of whom are women. Am I advocating its addition to the literary canon? Do I think it should appear on every Brit Lit reading list? Of course not. Actually, I shudder at the thought. But just because it isn’t on par with Shakespeare or Austen and Brontë doesn’t
mean it isn’t valuable.
Fifty Shades
is clearly meeting a need in the literary market by giving its reader exactly what she wants: sex and lots of it.

This series is successful because James has given the reader her ultimate fantasy: experiencing the Byronic hero in the bedroom. What woman wouldn’t want to read (in explicit detail) what happened after Rhett carried Scarlett up those stairs? Or what Darcy and Elizabeth’s wedding night was like? Jane’s sex life after Mr. Rochester regained his sight? Christian Grey epitomizes the sexy, brooding hero that women want and the love life that goes along with him. It is no longer left to our imagination. We get to hear the rip of every condom packet, every moan, every breath. We get to feel every touch and relish each caress. For the first time we get the hedonism along with the happily-ever-after. Cliché? Sure, but the cliché exists because of our common desires. Christian Grey is all of our fantasies wrapped into one.

As it turns out, deep down we’re all a little “sex mad and insatiable.” We want it all. We want the love and the lust. We want a man who will dance with us to Sinatra, take us soaring, and buy us our 12,000-square-foot dream home overlooking the Sound. We want the guy who can say, “I want you sore, baby” one minute and make love to the music of Roberta Flack the next. The guy who will whisk you around the world, drench you in diamonds, outfit you in designer duds from Louboutin to La Perla, reenact the piano scene from
Pretty Woman
, and make you come on demand. (Seriously, he says, “Come on, baby,” and poof, magic orgasms!) A loving, committed relationship with a hottie billionaire who is good in bed? Who turns out to be a spectacular father and still thinks you’re sexy when you’re bloated and pregnant? Who only asks for the occasional spanking in return? Hello!! Where do I sign up? With Christian Grey, we get to fall in love with the reckless bad boy who wants us mind, body, and soul, and we get to experience him in the bedroom. Dreams really do come true, “kinky fuckery” included.

KATHARINE SANDS

F
ADE IN:

Somewhere …

In a fantasy far, far away …

We see Carrie Bradshaw’s
Sex and the City
apartment (circa the TV show), New York City.

Next to a copy of
Fifty Shades of Grey
, we see Carrie Bradshaw’s fingers whisk across the keyboard as sentences form on her backlit computer screen.

What is all the fuss about regarding this book?

Why is Grey the new black?

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F
ADE IN
:

Somewhere …

In
your
fantasy life—your place, present day …

Christian Grey’s long, tapered fingers lace his silky silver tie tightly around you, the weave from his tie imprints your flawless
skin. You inhale his freshly washed linen scent in a sharp intake of breath as his fictional persona imprints on popular culture and you anticipate the smart of his hand smacking your (roll fantasy sequence, it goes here).

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D
OES THIS AROUSE
… your interest, Miss Reader?

Honey, take a number—these days we’re all “in the kink.”

Fifty Shades of Grey
hit the 20 million mark the week I’m writing this and author E. L. James is signing them from Comic-Con to Costco.

Never before has one throbbing manhood held a nation in such sexual thrall.

What is his hold on our collective carnality, uh, I mean, our imaginations?

Looking at it as a literary agent—one of fifty takes on
Grey—
my thoughts center on why this is happening. This is the fastest-selling book of all time, yet it might not have been published on its merits alone had it been submitted to an agency slush pile. I decided to look deeper at why the bondage-themed novel is spanking the bestseller list and sparking a publishing phenomenon. What is it about this book that hits the sweet spot: the tipping point where culture really pops?

Here are a few thoughts on why
Fifty Shades
really hits the G-spot:

Fifty Shades
tells an erotic story of desire and boundaries, love and dysfunction, trauma and trust issues. Anastasia Steele—who has never known a man’s touch—or noticed she has a clitoris—meets Christian Grey. When Mr. Grey’s steely gray gaze alights on Miss Steele, romance ensues. Guy meets girl. Girl is spirited to his millionaire man cave. Girl is deflowered, awakened, impassioned. Guy offers girl his hand in bondage.

Girl with spirit and pluck meets man of property is ever a panty-peeling premise in the Victorian novel. Literature is riddled with submission/dominance themes. The very tales of literary heroines that
our
literary heroine, virginal Anastasia Steele, has been steeped in.

An expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s novels, Susan Greenfield, calls this hot title
recycled literature
. Indeed,
Fifty Shades
revels in the classic romanticism of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, and the plot specifically references Thomas Hardy. Echoes of each reverberate through
Fifty Shades
like the convulsions Christian expertly wrings from Ana with those long tapered fingers … um, where were we?

Oh, yes, so Ana’s trio of literary heroines: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jane Eyre, and Elizabeth Bennet form a sort of
Sex and the City
–like posse for the virgin-turned-BDSM initiate. As she and Grey discuss their contract language and deal points to begin her new life as his submissive, Ana tells the reader, “[Austen’s] Elizabeth Bennet would be outraged, [Brontë’s] Jane Eyre too frightened, and [Hardy’s] Tess would succumb, just as I have.”

Steele and Grey have joined the all-star cast of literary couples. The S&M-crossed lovers were first conceived as Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, the
Twilight
duo written as fanfiction for the Twilight fandom. For the literary zeitgeist, we could say that as the erotic trilogy draws on its precursors’ influence, you start to see how
Fifty Shades
could be called Next Generation Jane Eyre or the literary lovechild of Lizzie and Darcy. We might call them the new Carrie and Mr. Big or something meets
Pretty Woman
(and that other rich corporate raider guy).

After all, these are the shades that launched a thousand ‘ships.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles
, referred to throughout the novel, put me in mind of the idea that perhaps the true origins of this
trilogy were a term paper that James repurposed; the theme of a woman locked in soulful struggle over passion and power is a clear parallel between the tales. Ana has angel (her inner goddess) and devil (her subconscious) perched on each slender shoulder. While her inner goddess delights, her subconscious judges; when her inner goddess cheers at Ana’s “OMG, he likes me, he really likes me!” attraction for a guy with “scary vices,” her subconscious sneers. They haggle over his hard/soft terms, veering between sense and sensibility—so to speak. Tess, demeaned by a libertine (her cousin) and deified by an idealist (her husband)—true to Hardy’s day, her story says “death before orgasm”—is now updated and re-created in Ana’s conflict.

Love of
Pride and Prejudice
prompted Helen Fielding to modernize its plot for her novelization of her “Bridget Jones’s Diary” column. With her mission statement being “simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth,” with the couple as her “chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or rather courtship.” The viral votes are in: Christian and Ana could now be said to be the new chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or rather courtship.

Actually he is a very classic Romantic hero. And he is also a Byronic hero in the classic sense. This means Christian Grey is the quintessential hero of the Victorian literature that Anastasia is studying when the novel opens. He has every requisite for a Byronic hero: he is complex, he is a troubled soul, damaged from—and haunted by—a dark and mysterious past; he is extremely passionate, he exists outside the realm of the “norm.”

Christian Grey seeks solace and control through micromanaging bondage-style sex. Christian Grey, CEO of Grey Enterprises, may be an all-powerful Pacific Northwest twentysomething magnate, but the vulnerable master of the universe has never known a genuine love connection and he is a virgin, too—to vanilla sex. Until he meets
her
—and then it is through Ana that Christian seeks sexual redemption.

In
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
, Blogcritics’ Barbara Barnett describes Byronic heroes as “charismatic characters with strong passions and ideals, but who are nonetheless deeply flawed individuals who may act in ways which are socially reprehensible, and whose internal conflicts are heavily romanticized. They are self-destructive and difficult at worst; courageous, intelligent, and noble at their best. Irresistible and magnetic.”

So we can look to classic literature for the reason why the trilogy has us all by the nerve endings. This is also the answer to why this has become an internet sensation and why
Fifty Shades of Grey
is being read and embraced by girls coming of age in our era of economic anxiety and hot-mamas-turned-mommies are furtively downloading during the spin cycle.

Blame it on the Brontës. Charlotte’s
Jane Eyre
and Emily’s
Wuthering Heights
—Cathy and Heathcliff, Jane and Mr. Rochester—are in our romantic DNA. Christian Grey, literary heir to Mr. Rochester (Mr. Rochester hides his wife, the madwoman, in the mansion attic; Mr. Grey keeps his secret BDSM stuff in the man cave playroom), is the Byronic hero for our time.

Putting aside, of course, that Christian Grey’s phantom-like menace is a portrait of the most literary stalker since Humbert Humbert’s loins lit up for Lo-li-ta. But
Fifty Shades
is at heart a Cinderella story—perhaps we should think of it as the lost sex scenes of Cinderella.

Author James likes to say in every interview that she knows she is not a great writer. But she sure knows how to rip a bodice, and she does it old school. Reading
Shade
s, Georgette Heyer would have swooned from reading such explicit content; Barbara Cart-land would have had the vapors from the fainting couch. But the cleavage-heaving greats would still have to agree E. L. has chops and craft, and holds her readers as the tension mounts …

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So what if feminists decry the erotic lure of the powerful male over the vulnerable heroine thing? So what if you tend to nod off while waiting for the next sexually charged scene to get pulsing? So what if the book editors seem to have tossed aside their red felt pens and reached for their vibrators?
Fifty Shades
“gives new meaning to reading for pleasure,” crows Vintage, an imprint of Random House, the publisher of E. L. James—as well as Flaubert.

Somewhere … in a bookstore, not far from you …

Madame Bovary just rolled her eyes.