Fifty Shades by a porn scholar
‘Now punish me!’ she said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the sparrow’s gaze before its captor twists its neck. ‘Whip me, crush me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry out’. (p. 374)
The quotation above does not belong to any of the three Fifty Shades volumes. Although it has sold over 40 million copies worldwide and stirred debates on the intensity of the sex scenes it depicts, the Fifty Shade Trilogy is being wrongly marketed as “pornography”. Don’t be fooled. There is very little pornography in there.
Disguised under a misused BDSM tag, the Fifty Shades trilogy is nothing but a repetition of the same Victorian romantic paradigms, perpetrated by the Harlequin novels: an unreachable, dark, tense hero who gets rescued by the innocent and true love of a naïve young woman. Damaged Christian Grey is constructed as the combination of a traumatic childhood and sexual abuse suffered at the age of fifteen: his origins are mysterious and dark, locked away behind very little verbal communication with the outside world, his sexual preferences a result of being molested by one of his adoptive mother’s best friend – portrayed as a sexual predator MILF – who still haunts his present days. He is hard, distant, constantly disturbed by his inability to process his feelings, which he then transmutes into successive aseptic relationships with his submissives, none of which has ever slept in his bed. His contractual terms involve providing for and maintaining the perfect mental and physical health of his subjects, void of emotional recognition, and although having been adopted by a cereal-commercial kind of family he keeps them at bay from his own private life, resorting to actually connecting to other human beings exclusively inside his Red Room of Pain, which is kept constantly locked. The heroine, Anastasia Steele, is built under all precincts of romantic female protagonists: she is pure in intention, a virgin, innocent, a literature undergraduate who fails to understand that the main message in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles is exactly what she is running towards: Victorian notions of female purity being questioned by the crude analysis and frank look at the sexual hypocrisy of (English) society, and the acknowledgment that the infantilization of women may be even more dangerous than female oppression.
Trapped in the middle ground between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hardy struggled with Victorian ideologies, tradition and innovation.
EL James fails to construct a romantic novel because there is no more tradition to fight. In an attempt to recover some ground to establish the battle which would justify or promulgate the romantic aspect of her novel, she turns to the BDSM taboo in a very misleading way, admonishing it from the start: “I’m fully aware this is a dark path I’m leading you down, Anastasia.” (FSOG, 74). What serves as an attraction and explanation to the commercial success of the book does not follow through until the end: loved by Anastasia, Grey subdues to “vanilla sex” in exchange for her presence in his life. The sex scenes depicted in all three novels border Victorian language: James exhaustively insists on the same metaphors for body parts, leaving out what would be considered harsher vocabulary in detriment of a more “romantic” one. “The second and third volumes of the trilogy which, having moved on from the nuts and bolts of dominant-submissive sex, are basically shopping lists”. (WILLIAMS, 08/15/2012) And it is precisely in this dichotomy between what the book promises and what is actually delivered that lays what might be considered the only significant aspect of this market trend: the fact that all the BDSM is eradicated from the novel’s pages almost instantaneously, being replaced by long, repetitive narrative of more conventional sex which, nonetheless, is always practiced under the safe norms and regulations, with Grey producing condoms from his back pocket even if he is not wearing pants.
To be a true romantic novel, what should evolve around the character of Anastasia, mirroring the centrality of the romantic female protagonist is, in James’ book, a failed attempt to focus on the character of Christian Grey. Still, what Millet dubs temperament, or “the formation of human personality along stereotyped lines of sex category ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’” (MILLET, 1968: p. 26) is so strong within James’ writing that her characters are caricatural, and what should be “based on the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its members cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates; aggression, intelligence, force, and efficacy in the male; passivity, ignorance, docility, “virtue” and ineffectuality in the female”. (MILLET, Ibid) is translated into BDSM terminology by an author who, clearly, feared it too much to really dig into this world even if only through her writing.
Although I agree with Hussein’s concept that “reading a text is not an objective process upon which all readers agree. Each reader has certain tendencies and an ideology which s/he imposes on the text itself, rejecting the old approach of text/reader or author/reader hierarchy.” (HUSSEIN, 2004), it is impossible to regard the Fifty Shades trilogy as contemporary pornography or "female-targeted erotica packaged for the mainstream reader" (FORBES, 3/19/2012). Whether by concentrating on the development of literature written by women (gynocriticism) or by reinterpreting various works written by men (feminist critique), feminist literary criticism contests the eternal opposition of biological and aesthetic creativity. James’ does not write the way she does because she is a woman; in 2011, she writes the way she does DESPITE being one. Ignoring Showalter’s classification of women authored literature under the Feminine, the Feminist and the Female stages (SHOWALTER, 1979), James dives back into the past and goes way beyond Hardy’s or even Bronte’s Romanticism, landing flat on a time where language had no significance other than the accurate description, some light years before literature was invented.
It is appalling nonetheless that James’ novels are being regarded as erotica literature. In an Australian newspaper, a journalist wrote that "There is an absence of good erotic writing in serious literature and a puritanical disdain for literary descriptions of sex." (SIMMONDS, 16/3/2012) I wonder, then, where we should place the works of writers such as Anaïs Nin, Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence, Erica Jong, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer – to name a few. Fifty Shades is being regarded as inaugurating a new found craving for all things ‘naughty in print’ when, in reality, quality literature has been doing it for years, and Harlequin books are not fooling us around, promising BDSM and delivering sparse and condescending use of a few sex toys labeled under poor metaphors for Webber’s herrschaft: “One has to ask if writing about power is always more erotic than writing about penetration.” (MOORE, 7/4/2012)
I refuse to be condescending with James’ work by the use of arguments such as some I have read, that the Fifty Shades trilogy has rekindled marriages and incentive women to explore never-before visited aspects of their sexuality: Sacher-Masoch, Bataille, Catherine Millet and so many others would have done a much better job; even Thomas Hardy, with all the Victorian pressure around him, was able to depict sexuality in a much more palpable way than EL James. “I shall not cry out”, Tess says. Those are Hardy’s words that introduced you to this article. Tess' eyes are “neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; rather all these shades together, and a hundred others” (chapter 14). After all, real literature takes more than 50 shades to be good. Luckily for them, “the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing”.