Free Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey by Lori Perkins

mind of the idea that perhaps the true origins of thistrilogy 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
Shade
s, Georgette Heyer would have swooned from reading such explicit content; Barbara Cart-land would have had the vapors from the fainting