by Kelly Weaver
If E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey was written 20 years ago, Fabio would have been on the cover; chest hair gleaming and locks a’ flowing, and the book would have sunk into the sea of the Harlequin section at Barnes & Noble. The tradition of the romance novel, which a friend and I lovingly referred to in our teens as the “crotch-novel,” sees nothing new in Fifty Shades. I know, I’ve read them.
My adolescence was spent rousing over the pages of my mom’s Harlequin collection that she paid little attention to. With an intro studies in Cosmo education at the age of 11, I had found myself on the fast track to Harlequin 101. I will admit one or two of the “crotch classics” snuck in between Catcher in the Rye and 1984 during my teens, but mostly, I abandoned my “education.” It wasn’t until recently that I summoned the forgotten passages of those novels to study the cultural phenomenon that is Fifty Shades of Grey. I was surprised to see that the books from my dark adolescence had resurfaced and taken center stage, sweeping the nation, and not just for the married and middle aged. I had to find out, what’s so different about this one?
For decades, authors have pushed the boundaries of sex in romance novels. Anne Rice is most notably one of them. In 1985 Ms. Rice took a break from her famous Vampire saga to detour into the underground world of bondage, dominance, and sado-masochism that would’ve made the Marquis blush. The book is titled Exit to Eden, published under her pseudonym Anne Rampling. The title character Lisa Kelly is not only the owner of her own sex club, she’s the headmistress of bondage, fearfully referred to as “the law.” Lisa is a far cry from James’ stifling submissive that is Anastasia Steele. She commands her sexuality, wielding it for herself rather than for someone else’s fantasy. The sex scenes are graphic (to say the least), and usually end in the utter humiliation of her boy-toy Eliot Slater, who she falls in love with at the end of the novel. Eliot is the picture of masculinity, as they always are, but the uncharacteristic quality about Eliot in this novel is that he relishes in being emasculated by Lisa. Rice subverts the traditional master role in Exit to Eden, placing her female protagonist as the master of her male lead.
As revolutionary as Fifty Shades of Grey may be considered for shedding light on female desires and making popular what was once confined to the bottom shelf, the dynamic between Christian and Anastasia is no different from the normative gender roles that emerged from the Victorian Era. Anastasia Steele is submissive, and it is abundantly clear she likes pain. Enter Christian Grey; he likes to inflict pain, thus becoming Anastasia’s master and guide to her sexuality. Might I remind the reader that James’ stories emerged out of the omnipresent Twilight series fan-fiction, novels that directly conform to normative gender roles within society, paralleling vampirism with sexuality, imprinting the message on countless young girls that there’s no biting until marriage! It would appear then that Fifty Shades of Grey reifies these attitudes by preserving the same hierarchies of the masters and mistresses of the Victorian past.
A recent conversation with my childhood friend brought us to the subject of the Fifty Shades Phenomenon, I asked her, “do you see anything different from our “crotch classics” in Fifty Shades?” To which she replied, “Nope. Just the same old crotchy-crotch we’re used to, except they tie each other up more.”
California Journal of the Heroine 