With Fifty Shades of
Grey, a different reading public has emerged. Their arrival is timely, interesting, and maybe a bit
unsettling. For the passionate
reader, it is easy to be snobbish about Fifty
Shades. It started off as Twilight
fan fiction, it’s mommy porn, it needs an editor. The heroine’s interior monologue is annoying, her vocabulary
limited. The hero’s controlling personality and his contract for sexual
services would frighten off a naïve woman, like our heroine, where, a mature
woman would whip out her red pen, negotiate a better deal, and then we would
have a real story. The prose is
redundant, the characters are boring and stupid, etc.
Passionate readers have denounced the series with zingers
and witticisms to display their superior taste, as well they should.[1] Criticism is part of the pleasure of
reading. Romance readers have
soundly thrashed the series, so to speak.
The sub-culture of romance readers, the bondage/sado-masochism crowd
(BDSM to those in the know), have been even more merciless with their denunciation,
and will direct you to Anne Rice’s Beauty
trilogy, if you are looking for a writer who brings on the pain, which she
does. In summary, Fifty Shades is a waste of 1500 pages of
your life you will never get back again.
Yes. Quite right. Absolutely. But let’s take a closer look.
Think of a woman. She is in her thirties or forties, she has
a college education, a job, a husband, or an ex-husband, and children. She works, probably full-time, and raises
her children. Children are the center of parents’ lives. Their needs dictate the adults’ daily
routine and their choices of entertainment –the restaurants, the vacations, the
movies, the video games, and the books.
Our woman is not an unhappy person per se, but her life is not entirely
hers.
Her reading life is spare. She does not have much time for books, and she was never a
big reader anyway. She read or skimmed what was assigned in college, and she
reads what she needs to for work.
The book club became a movie club because nobody read the books. When the children were small, she read Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket. When
they got older, she bought Hunger Games,
Twilight and other serial books for
the children to read on their own.
Maybe they did, or maybe they decided to wait for the movie, too. She
read them because she wanted to make sure the books were appropriate before exposing
the children to something scary, which is a pity, or because she wanted to have
something to discuss during the interminable car rides from one activity to
another, or because they were the only books in the house when the cable went
out.
For much of her adult life, her reading diet has consisted
almost entirely of children’s books and books about child-rearing. She barely left childhood before she
was back to reading children’s books again.
Children’s novels construct a world in which parents are
either negligent or dead. For a
successful children’s series, best kill off the parents in volume one, chapter
one, page one, sentence one. It’s
absolutely essential because nothing fun, dangerous or naughty happens when
parents are around. Their job is
to keep the children clean and safe, which is death to a children’s story.
“Get away from that dirty rabbit
hole.”
“No, you may not fly out the
window with the fairies. Back to bed.”
“Sorry, pet. We can’t afford the
tuition at Hogwarts. Here is a
clarinet instead.”
Children’s literature works best when children rule the
world, and its first hook for a young mind is escape. Escape from your dull
life into one more desirable and dangerous, without school, soccer practice, or
chicken nuggets. A world where
children set off for the Arctic circle and talk to bears and battle evil, or
take on wizards and battle evil, or fall in love with vampires and battle evil,
or… battle evil. If the book is
set in an ordinary place such as a school, it better be invaded by aliens right
away. In the course of the series,
the children grow up, as they will when left to their own devices. They begin to notice and take an
interest in the other sex. They begin to notice and take an interest in
sex. They move through their
awkwardness to a shared stare, a brush of the fingertips, a first kiss. When done well, it’s sweet and lovely
and makes for a decent read.
Haven’t we forgotten someone? Why yes, we have.
Our woman is still with us. Our woman has been reading over the children’s shoulder all
this time. The children are off to the next thing, playing video games,
watching movies, imbibing high fructose corn syrup. She is still with us.
Her husband is a wonderful man[2]
with his own tastes in movies and television. She watches what he likes because
if she doesn’t, she will never see him.
Or, her ex-husband is a perfect bastard, and she is quite happy never to
see him.
For the last decade, children’s serial novels have dominated
the bestseller’s list: Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight. There is a
large reading public of adults who read children’s books regularly, and seldom
read a book written for adults.
Contemporary children’s literature does not shatter forms, reinvent
language, or challenge values.
That arty nonsense can wait until adulthood. The books are laid out neatly. The plot is economical, the sentences have proper
punctuation and nouns and verbs and adjectives are where they should be. The
hero will prevail in the end, one, or three, or seven books later. The adult does not need to read with
great care, her eyes need only pass over the words. The adult does not struggle to understand the story or grasp
the allusions, nor does she need to consult a dictionary.
Contemporary children’s literature has raised a generation
of adults who read like children.
We should not be surprised that Fifty
Shades is badly written. Of course it is badly written; our woman would not
read it otherwise. Her reading
life has been informed by children’s books, and Fifty Shades assumes the form of a bad children’s series.[3]
Our woman is still with us. When she reads a children’s book, she lingers over the words
“fingertips,” “blush,” “kiss.” If
she thinks about it carefully, she can recall the sensation of fingertips on
her warm wrist, but when was the last time she blushed? Did her pulse spike when her husband
kissed her? In that moment when
life’s noise is a dull hum, when finally the mind drifts, when she reads, she
desires something both familiar and unknown. She too wants an escape from daily
life. She too desires a little
danger. Her book must pick up
where the children’s book ends, where she insists it must end. She has been reading these goddamn
things for years, which have brought her to the edge of adult life and left her
there. She wants to walk through
that door to her own escape where she battles evil, lives by her wits and wins
in the end. And she wants a glass
of wine and a good fuck for her trouble.
Let’s construct the escape for our woman. As with the children, her escape does
not include soccer practice or chicken nuggets. Please be sure to pitch the children, the husband – that
most wonderful of men – the job, the house, the bills, the aging relatives, the
competitive parents, the after school activities, the teachers, the bosses, the
employees. Ditto the teeming
voices reciting a catalogue aria of the ways she is failing her body, her
family, her country and most likely her god as well. Perhaps, but what of it? Oh, but rest assured mothers have the most important job in
the world and you go, Girl!
What is left?
Sex and possibly time travel.
It’s time to have fun.
The hero is loverboy handsome. Gorgeous women flirt with him, and he
only has eyes for the innocent heroine who thinks she is plain, but isn’t
really. He is rich, but his empire
makes little claim on his time. He
is ready for sex round the clock and he has an alarmingly short refractory
period. (He has a gynecologist
available for Sunday house calls, but he should probably put an urologist on
the payroll, too.)
He has a discreet and heavily armed domestic staff, a
helicopter, a plane, a yacht, and a house in Aspen. He insists that the heroine does not eat enough, and
provides bacon and pancake breakfasts daily. He plies her with presents and wine. He would like her to give up her job
and stay home, but he also buys a publishing house and so
she can have her dream job. He
encourages her to spend money. He
has no other friends, doesn’t care about sports, politics, or television, he
has no competing interests. His
family is attractive, loving, devoted, wealthy, and they stay out of the
way. He bathes her, brushes her
hair and plays the piano in a nighttime, post-coital mist. He is a non-smoker. To the outside world, he is a
winner. In private, when he
reveals his true self only to her, the little lamb is wounded. His outlet for his psychic pain is BDSM
and he has a well-appointed room for the purpose. He is not much of a Dominant, and the Submissive heroine is
in control, even when she is in shackles.[4]
Beautiful, rich, randy, monogamous, adoring, attentive, and
emotionally shattered: isn’t he too perfect? Our heroine, armed with her knowledge of British literature,
her natural talent for fellatio, and her self-defense training is the only
woman who can save him.
Let’s leave them to it.
When we are children, the adults shape our life, and that
includes our reading life.
Teachers, librarians, parents, and other dictators decide which books we
may read and when. They usually
make a hash of it. Some go out of
their way to stultify a child’s desire to read. Who in their right mind hands a fourteen-year old Wuthering Heights? Some of us are fortunate to have loving
or lazy wardens who leave us to read what we like; others realize quickly that
the adults will leave you the hell alone when they see you reading, and that is
worth the price of admission.
Once the business of education is over, we are not required
to read anymore. We may claim we
read because it enriches the mind, exposes us to new ideas, expands our consciousness
and whatnot. I suppose that’s true
for some people, but I doubt self-improvement is the prime motive for
reading. Our time is too
precious. A passionate reader is a
hedonist and reads purely for her own pleasure.
It is damn exhausting to be an American sometimes.
You are inundated with information about Things that Are
Good for You. First you are told
that everything you like is bad, but then it’s good, but only if you do it in
the proper way and by the way, you are doing it all wrong. It’s not enough that something is
pleasurable, it requires a justification to prove that you are not personally
tearing holes in the fabric of the universe. Kissing minimizes the appearance of wrinkles. Dancing cuts your risk of Alzheimer’s,
diabetes and rickets in half.
Cooking for your family reduces the odds that the husband will gamble
away the house, or that the children will become spinning ether addicts. Chocolate simulates the sensation of
falling in love, red wine is packed with antioxidants, and sex reduces levels
of cortisol in the blood. For an
American mother, the data overload is that much worse because she is held
responsible for her family on the molecular level.
Doing something good because it’s good is all well and good,
I’m sure. Must that be the reason
to do everything? Must it always
be nutritious, educational, and beneficent? Must life be like PBS?
Must we wallow in wellness, whatever the hell that is? It’s true that apples are full of fiber
and phytochemicals, but that’s not what I think about when I sink into a Macoun
or a Jonathan, or a Northern Spy.
I taste New England autumn in the cold, crisp flesh. Please do not remind me of the apple’s
nutritional benefits. It doesn’t matter and I don’t care because for a moment,
I have claimed a small, private pleasure from the day. Now be so kind as to leave me alone,
and I will pay you the same courtesy.
In these troubled times, an American will not cop to doing
something solely because she enjoys it, but because it is good for her. And for an American mother, it is not
enough that something is good only for her, it should also be good for her
children, her community, her political party, and the global economy. One gets rather fed up after a while.
Consider Fifty Shades as
an expression of frustration after a decade of God, country, family, and
children’s books. If fan fiction
is a loving gesture to the original text, Fifty
Shades is the angry hate sex of fan fiction. I suspect that E.L. James wrote the books out of frustration
with Twilight, a rather strange
treatise of sexual conservatism.
Its wild success indicates that it speaks to women who are frustrated,
too. They don’t necessarily hate
their lives or the choices they have made. They are tired of doing their best and being told that they
are failing all of the time. How
did this group express their frustration?
They didn’t camp out and bang on buckets, or condemn anyone for who they
love or how they love, or hurl bricks through shop windows, or question anyone’s
birthplace. This group withdrew
from the noise and the nonsense for a spell. This group read a silly book. This is admirable.
An adult’s reading life is pure pleasure. A reader chooses her book and lets it
have its wicked way with her. She
may read what she likes when she likes.
If the book does not satisfy her, she tosses it aside and reads another
one. If it does, she reads it
again. Where else in life does she
exercise such control? Where else
does she submit to the imagination of another and allow herself to enjoy
it? Fifty Shades offers the reader a tantalizing fantasy: Christian
Grey, that perfectly formed male, finds her perfect. It’s a 1500 page Prince song, unabashed and voluptuous. Admitting to doing something solely for
one’s pleasure is not the way of the world these days. It is selfish, embarrassing, and, a bit
childish.
I am happy to report that Fifty Shades has no redeeming social, economic, educational,
nutritional, or moral value, which is quite a feat on its own. I am glad that the BDSM fans scoff at
the books; novels are not meant to be instructional manuals, after all. And I am pleased as punch that during
the vicious Presidential campaign season, when our would-be leaders and pundits
decried normative sexual behavior, and proudly demonstrated their ignorance of
women’s sexuality and contempt for our personal liberty, that the voters they
are so desperate to reach tuned out their palaver and submitted to Christian
Grey.
An astute politician, businessman, or other peddler should
be a bit worried by the Fifty Shades
phenomenon. What will these new readers do next? I am not sure. What do these women want? It’s safe to say that you don’t have
it, Baby.
You go, Girl.
[2] A strange trope has risen out of the blogosphere. When blogging women mention their
husbands they are frequently described as “the most wonderful man in the world.” It does not matter what the subject of
the blog is – knitting, animal husbandry, cheese-making, archery, necromancy.
Every blogging woman is married to the world’s most perfect man. Strange, dubious, impossible that there
be more than one, and a subject for another day.
[3] Not all children’s serials are bad, but Twilight is dreadful.
It was bad enough having read it, I cannot bring myself to write about
this ghastly series, too.
[4]
This is the point where the BDSM crowd
will pipe up with the rejoinder “the submissive is always in control. You don’t
know anything about BDSM!” Got that out of your system, did you? Let’s continue.
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