Fifty Shades of Grey is a Marxist allegory, covering
the development of the protagonist’s class consciousness, while tearing down,
one by one, all non-revolutionary forms or resistance to capitalism generally,
and in America particularly.
Let’s start
by looking at the names of our two main characters: Anastasia Steele and
Christian Grey.Anastasia is her given name,
which is to say, the name her parents chose.They gave her the name of a famous royal, a class to which they do not,
and could not, ever belong, but nevertheless this is how they choose to think
of themselves.Yet the family name is
Steele.The associations between steel
and infrastructure and manufacturing are obvious (she actually works at a
hardware store), and we cannot forget that the labor movement in the United
States grew in large part from the Pittsburgh steel workers. Her name itself is an example of class unconsciousness,
identifying with a class to which she cannot belong (further, it is a class which
is not supposed to exist in America, and the particular royal was part of the
family overthrown in the communist revolution).Likewise, Christian’s given name presents a false front.Obvious connections to the “protestant work
ethic” and the prosperity gospel aside, Christianity promises a moral system,
or some spiritual righteousness.But his
family name is Grey.Shades of Grey
refers to moral ambiguity, not certainty.Grey is in fact unconcerned with morality, Christian or otherwise.And of course the 50 Shades is a pun on 50
States.Grey is the personification of American
capitalism. (There is also some clever mirroring in the names.Besides the obvious “steel grey” pun, Grey is
the traditionally British spelling, which, if we consider America’s heritage as
a royal colony, would mirror his family name with her given name.)
The plot itself begins with Anastasia meeting Christian Grey
for an interview on behalf of her university newspaper. This is the first of a long line of examples
of non-revolutionary means failing to prevent the exploitation of the workers. Neither education nor journalism saved
her. Grey convinces her to sign a
contract to be his submissive sex partner.
This contract dictates what she can eat, where she can go, etc.
etc. This may be so on the nose as to
not need reiterating, but the capitalist convinces the worker to enter a
relationship in which the worker is physically and emotionally degraded and has
their basic life decisions curtailed. Throughout
the continuing degradation and domination, Grey insists that this is love, and
the contract makes them equal partners, right?
Over time, Anastasia begins to doubt this parity, and Christian
co-opts means of non-revolutionary dissent.After the aforementioned failure of education and journalism, he woos her
by buying her a first edition Thomas Hardy novel (thus co-opting art).Christian breaks the contract without penalty
(showing the futility of law). Perhaps the most dense example of this is the “Dom
Jeans.” Blue jeans, invented by a Jewish immigrant for physical laborers during
the California gold rush, became popular in counter-culture and youth movements
in the post-war era.As with much
counter-culture, they were appropriated as a fashion commodity, eventually becoming
banal and innocuous, becoming “Mom Jeans,” something suburban soccer moms would
wear.And thence “Dom Jeans.”Even if it takes time, counter-culture just
becomes another commodity for the capitalist class.
Anastasia grows more and more uncomfortable with the relationship. The novel ends with the two at an expensive
and exclusive restaurant. All food in the
restaurant is made from locally foraged flora.
Food that was grown on public land with no effort or support from the
restaurant is being harvested and commodified. A public and private sphere cannot coexist
without the latter ransacking the former.
It is at this meal that Anastasia breaks up with Christian. In the allegory of the sexual relationship,
she realizes that her devotion was unreciprocated and misplaced; their interests
were fundamentally different. She has
developed class consciousness.
(If you find yourself taking the above seriously, please direct all comments to E.L James.)
Erika Mitchell (1963- ) was born in London. She was raised in Buckinghamshire where her father was a BBC cameraman. She went on to study history at the University of Kent, and later became a television producer. She married screenwriter Niall Leonard in 1987. She became active on fanfiction.net and in 2010 began publishing a series of erotic stories under the username Snowqueen's Icedragon, rewriting Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series with Edward as an S&M billionaire playboy. She originally called it Master of the Universe in what I can only hope is the most bizarre Bonfire of the Vanities reference ever. Mitchell rewrote the series enough to avoid an intellectual property lawsuit and published it under the title Fifty Shades of Grey. The first two books in the series, Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker, were originally published as an e-book or print on demand by Australian vanity publisher The Writer's Coffee Shop, and the third book, Fifty Shades Freed, was published in 2012. The Book:
Well, this was it. From the very beginning, since that first post back in February 2013, this was my white whale. (And I realize I just passed up an opportunity for a 'grey' pun, but no. I am better than that.) While I'd honestly rather have reread all the damn technical chapters from Moby Dick than any of the technical details about Christian Grey's dick, sacrifices must be made. Here goes.
Think about a Twilight erotic fan fiction story where Edward is replaced by a billionaire who's into bondage. Actually, don't think about it. It's awful. I know because I read the result. And the fact is, a lot of the fanfic carried over. Bella Anastasia, the narrator, is clumsy and describes herself as plain and uninteresting (the first and last any reader of 50 Shades can attest to). Though she describes herself as such, for some reason, just like that vampire groupie who shall not be named (lest the Meyer estate sue), every one is in love with her. Seriously, every guy that gets more than five lines and isn't her stepdad wants to bone Anastasia, despite the fact that she is downright awful. She has absolutely no personality. She's an English major in Vancouver, Washington with a part-time job in a hardware store. She and her roommate/best friend plan to move to Seattle when they graduate. So what does Anastasia want to do? She plans to get a job in a publishing firm, but does she want to be a publisher? An editor? What are her opinions on anything besides 19th century literature and Christian Grey's omnipresent gaze.
(And as for the gaze, how many hundreds of times is this specifically mentioned throughout the book? It's like if the billboard of T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby were trying to mentally undress Daisy every other paragraph.)
And Christian isn't much better. Despite what 50 Shades of Grey fans may think, 'well-hung' is not a character trait. He and Anastasia are blank slates for readers to imprint their kinky fantasies on. (On an unrelated note, the copy I picked up from a used bookstore has slight water damage.)
The obvious response is: well, it's porn. To which my response is: Yeah, but it's terrible porn. Anaïs Nin and Marguerite Duras and Henry Miller and, I assume, many others (I don't know much about erotica as a genre), have shown that libertine writing/erotica can still be (gasp!) well-written. I literally just opened up to a random page and found these gems:
"Holy Moses, he's all mine to play with, and suddenly it's Christmas."
"'It's deep this way,' he murmurs."
"I thought I was in charge. My inner goddess looks like someone snatched her ice cream."
I don't mean to be hard on James, though. She was never trying to write anything more than her sexual fantasy (which just happened to star the cast of a YA paranormal romance novel), and when it got some popularity, she thought she'd make a bit of money off it. That it became an international sensation (pun intended) was never anticipated. And I'm not exaggerating when I say international. Last November I was in Prague, and walking down a street I passed a sex shop. I wouldn't have even noticed it were it not for a big poster advertising the author-approved Fifty Shades of Grey sex kit. No, this wasn't some scuzzy central European Taken-esque trap, but an official, very real product.
"You've read the book, now insert it into an orifice!"
There was an attempt at making a porn parody of Fifty Shades of Grey (because apparently everything from the Adam West Batman series to 30 Rock has gotten porn parodies), but the lawyers got it shut down because they argued it was not transformative, i.e. the original was too close to porn anyway. Also, the above links are SFW to youtube trailers, and, I shit you not, the advertisement that played before the latter was for the DVD of 50 Shades of Grey. I can't make this up. (I mean, I could, but I'm not.)
Speaking of the movie, the adaptation was released on Valentine's Day, 2015. It stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan and was directed by Sam Taylor-Wood (her second film, her first being Nowhere Boy (2009)) and screenplay by Kelly Marcel (her second film, her first being Saving Mr. Banks (2013)), because apparently someone thought making a John Lennon biopic and a film about Tom Hanks being charming asWalt Disney was good background for bondage porn. While there may never have been a chance, I'd be remiss not to point out that Bret Easton Ellis (author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero) publicly declared his desire to write the screenplay, but nothing ever came of that.
I'm not quite sure who is supposed to like this movie, besides the executives and their accountants, of course. The whole point of the book is literally being porn, and even a good movie like Blue Valentine barely escaped an NC-17. The whole selling point was, It's a porn book! but that doesn't really carry over to a movie (or, at least not to the type they screen at your local cineplex). On the other hand, the characters range from fucking dull to just fucking, so when you eliminate the latter, you end up with boring characters. From the get-go, there was no way this movie would satisfy any of it fans (pun intended).
In conclusion:
Holy shit, is this bad, but holy hell, is it erotic. I mean, is it erotic? I tend to think there's a difference between graphically sexual and erotic. To steal from Nin, writing to the mysterious benefactor who paid her a dollar a page to write erotica, but constantly demanded 'more sex, less poetry,':
"You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, it's subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements."
So I guess, what I'm saying is, screw this book (and I think I need to point out that this is not a recommendation to literally screw this book).
But seriously, you can derive everything beneficial from the experience by watching the following (SFW, except for language) video.
Bestsellers of 2012: 1. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
3. Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James
4. Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James
5. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
6. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
7. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel by Jeff Kinney
8. Fifty Shades Trilogy Box Set by E.L. James
9. The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan
10. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn Also Published in 2012: The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel Railsea by China Miéville Home by Toni Morrison
Sources:
Boog, Jason. "The Lost History of Fifty Shades of Grey." GalleyCat. Adweek, Nov. 21, 2012. Web.
Brennan, Zoe. "E.L. James: The Shy Housewife Behind Fifty Shades of Grey." The Telegraph.
Telegraph Media Group, July 07, 2012. Web.
James, E.L. Fifty Shades of Grey. 2011. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. Print.
