My Inner Goddess
IWANT TO FUCK HIM.
Baldly put. Far too blunt for the average person, much less a young college student such as Fifty Shades of Grey’s Anastasia Steele.
Ana is a week away from her final exams when we first meet her—and when she first meets gorgeous billionaire Christian Grey. She is overwhelmed by everything she encounters at his office, from the battalion of blondes who greet her, to the view, to how Christian strokes his index finger against his lower lip.
It’s clear, from the way Christian responds to her, that something is happening, and Ana has no clue what it is. Neither do we, but both of us are dying to find out.
As their relationship begins, Ana needs to find a way to express what she is feeling when she is near Christian—needs a personification of the newly sprung emotions and desires he summons in her.
And thus her inner goddess is born.
It’s not as though Ana doesn’t have inner thoughts before beginning a relationship with Christian, but her thoughts are not personified by any kind of deity—they’re more along the lines of “Wow” and “Holy crap.” Much more immature and insecure. But as soon as Christian engages Ana in sexual discourse she needs a better spokesperson, hence the development of her goddess.
The inner goddess is not a new concept born of Fifty Shades of Grey—there are an endless number of shops and websites with the name selling goods designed to make you feel more satisfactorily womanly. “Inner goddess,” in that context, evokes images of patchouli, beaded curtains, and women-only bonding sessions.
But those goddesses are not Ana’s goddess.
Ana’s goddess harkens back to a far earlier concept, albeit one that is derided as much as the patchouli people—Sigmund Freud’s concept of id, as part of his larger explanation of the unconscious, comprised of the id and the superego. The id is the part of us that is all about pleasure, sexual and otherwise. The id is the bad boy of our psyche—pushing us to satisfy basic urges, needs, and desires.
Which, in Freud’s terms, is a Bad Thing.
In Fifty Shades, however, it’s a very, very good thing. Ana’s goddess “sways in a gentle victorious samba,” even though Ana herself is, as we know from the first scene with Christian, awkwardly clumsy. Ana’s inner goddess doesn’t wear tie-dye or Birkenstocks; this bitch is decked out in sequins and stilettos, doing her Olympic pole vaults and cheerleader leaps with equal aplomb.
Plus, Ana’s goddess isn’t only about the pleasure principle; she wants Ana to take charge. To be dominant, even if Christian is the Dom.
So she sulks, and pouts, and attempts to be brave as Ana faces the redoubtable Christian.
Ana’s inner goddess is everything that Ana wishes she could be, even though she’s never realized she had the wish in the first place. She is the inner voice that heroes and heroines of romantic fiction listen to when they are in doubt about their own desires—when they doubt those desires’ validity and rightness.
That Ana’s inner goddess espouses positive, helpful action is what makes her a romantic fiction id—as contradictory as that might sound. In literary fiction, the inner voice often encourages self-destructive behavior: “Have another drink,” one might say, or “Go ahead and sleep with your husband’s brother.” Not self-affirming at all, but again voicing secret desires. In romantic fiction, however, the id helps vault the protagonist into positive action—usually falling in love—where the hero and heroine are too foreshortened by their own insecurities, issues, or whatever to allow themselves to take the action on their own. They need support to accomplish their ultimate happiness.
There are numerous examples of heroines, in particular, who can only reach their Happily Ever After if they finally listen to the voices inside their heads, and not in a Three Faces of Eve or Sybil kind of way. In Jane Eyre, Jane escapes from Thornfield Hall and ends up with the Rivers family, two sisters and a brother who are perfect in every way. Too perfect. Jane knows she cannot accept second best by marrying St. John Rivers, no matter how foxy he is; she doesn’t love him, her soul yearns for Edward Rochester. And so, when she hears his voice inside her head calling for her, she doesn’t question it. She takes off, returning to Thornfield Hall where she finds she can at last be his equal partner (that he is now blinded and crippled says something about author Charlotte Brontë’s own sense of self-worth, but that’s a subject for another essay).
These voices are a way for the writer to reveal the heroine’s innermost desires, but they aren’t the only way writers have for doing this. In many early romantic novels, the letter or the diary of the heroine is used to allow the woman’s feelings and thoughts to emerge unscathed from the unconscious. Many literary critics and scholars have noted the diary device in writers of early nineteenth-century literature, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Wilkie Collins to Charlotte Brontë’s own sister Anne. In Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for example, the book unfolds through a series of letters written from Gilbert Markham’s viewpoint, and then segues into a diary written by Helen Graham. Helen’s diary entries not only describe the events, but also Helen’s feelings about them, in a poignant, passionate way. Helen’s “diary” is her only outlet to express how she feels about the deterioration of her marriage, since she won’t allow herself to voice her opinion about what is happening because she feels as though she owes her husband that much respect. But even in the context of her own diary, Helen won’t put words to her own deepest desire. She edges close to what she wishes would happen, but doesn’t state it in so many words.
Of course the best example of diary entry as manifestation of inner voice is in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. If Bridget had not expressed so much of herself within those pages, Fifty Shades—and other books where women get to be sexual, and insecure, and clumsy, and somehow entice an incredibly attractive man into their romantic midst—would never have happened.
Bridget’s diary entries are more a superego/id hybrid, because Bridget herself has so many opposing wishes and desires within herself. She does want things, but she is equally adamant about what she does not want, which Ana’s inner goddess isn’t. For example, Bridget says, “I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomaniacs, chauvinists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts.” If Ana’s inner goddess had suggested that to Ana, that would have ruled Christian Grey out entirely, since his personality fits at least four of those categories. Bridget recognizes her own temptation, though, following that proclamation up with, “And especially will not fantasize about a particular person who embodies all these things.” Neither Ana nor her inner goddess are that conscious—literally—of how Ana’s manifestation of id is acting on her desires.
Let’s return for a moment to Freud, and how he saw the role of the unconscious in guiding a person’s actions. Not to be so presumptuous as to dismiss him as entirely wrong, but Sigmund, you gotta lighten up a little—satisfying “basic urges, needs, and desires” is not a bad thing. Especially when it comes to women, who—to cast a huge, stereotypical blanket over an entire gender—tend to do for others rather than for themselves. “Basic urges, needs, and desires,” when satisfied in a positive way, means great sex (or great chocolate, but again, another essay).
It wasn’t until authors of romantic fiction recognized that women’s “basic urges, needs, and desires” weren’t being met that readers got to meet inner voices like Ana’s inner goddess. Ana’s inner goddess knows what Ana really wants, and tells her in no uncertain terms.
And what does Ana want? Well, she wants to fuck Christian Grey. Many, many times. And harnessing, so to speak, her inner goddess in the service of those wants means that Ana doesn’t have to feel ashamed—or much ashamed, at least—of her desires.
Is it cowardly for Ana to appoint an inner goddess as the mistress of her desires and not speak for herself? Perhaps, but it also makes the book far more compelling. Ana can’t, but her inner goddess gets to dance the salsa, do pirouettes, merengue, sit in the lotus position, jump up and down (both with and without pom-poms), glow, pant, roar, plead, and fall prostrate after Christian has satisfied her.
Who wouldn’t be better with a little more inner goddess waving pom-poms in her brain? Not the inner goddess who would whisper that it’s okay to have the dessert, you deserve it—that’s more like your Aunt Betty, who’s stuck in the house with the cats and the Diet Coke—but the inner goddess who would encourage you to explore what it is you really want. Want to get in a helicopter with a control freak billionaire? Sure! How about inserting silver balls up in your lady business because it sounds like it’d be fun to do? Hell, yeah! Or biting your lip, even though you know it makes that same control freak billionaire crazy? Heck, you want him crazy. Crazy for you, and therefore for your inner goddess, who is your real you.
Where Freud was perhaps too reductive in his conception of the human psyche is in applying moral judgment on what the id, the ego, and the superego do for the conscious human mind. There are nuances here—fifty shades of nuance, to get cute about it—and castigating Ana’s inner goddess as merely being a conduit for satisfying Ana’s needs and desires is simplistic and lazy. Not that one would call Freud either simplistic or lazy; anybody who could be that many shades of fucked up himself is not simple. But his theories don’t take into account the inability of people—such as a certain Ana Steele—to articulate, on their own, what they really want.
Ana’s inner goddess might be annoying at times—she certainly makes her voice heard on far more occasions than some readers might like—but it’s her inner goddess who can articulate what Ana wants to do.
And when Ana gets to do what she wants, the results are very pleasurable. For Ana. For Christian. And for the reader.
MEGAN FRAMPTON writes historical romance under her own name and romantic women’s fiction as Megan Caldwell. She is the Community Manager for the Heroes and Heartbreakers website (www.heroesandheartbreakers.com), lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and son, and usually wears black. She can be found at www.meganframpton.com or at @meganf.