Grey Is the New Black
FADE 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?
• • • • •
FADE 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).
• • • • •
DOES 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:
It is a very fresh and modern tale.
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.
We also get classic romantic tradition.
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.”
Anastasia Steele went out there an understudy … and she came back a star.
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.
Christian Grey is a romantic hero.
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.
E. L. James is redolent of the great doyennes of romance.
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 Shades, 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 …
• • • • •
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.
KATHARINE SANDS is a literary agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency in New York City. Katharine represents a varied list of authors who publish a diverse array of books. She is “the agent provocateur” of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye, a collection of pitching wisdom from leading literary agents, and has written for Writer’s Digest, The Writer Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Times.
For Katharine, watching ideas turn into books is magical—as if elves make them. Highlights include XTC: Song-Stories; Mom’s Choice; Hands off My Belly: The Pregnant Woman’s Guide to Surviving Myths, Mothers and Moods; The Unofficial Guide to House, MD; Dating the Devil by Lia Romeo; The New Rules of Attraction by Arden Leigh; Make Up, Don’t Break Up with Oprah guest Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil; Writers on Directors; Taxpertise; Under the Hula Moon; The Complete Book on International Adoption: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Your Child; Ford model Helen Lee’s The Tao of Beauty; Elvis and You: Your Guide to the Pleasures of Being an Elvis Fan; New York: Songs of the City; and SAT Word Slam, to name a few.