Fifty Shades of Grey is an almost caricatural version of a gothic romance in its use of such familiar themes: the innocent and virtuous but opinionated young woman who works for a rich man who behaves to her in a seemingly hurtful way, with the novel progressively revealing his tangled past, his vulnerability, and his uncompromised devotion to her.
Since the eighteenth century, and most definitely since the nineteenth, with the institutionalization of the private sphere and of the emotional family (defined as a unit whose vocation is to forge and maintain emotional bonds between its members), romance novels have given expression to women’s search for love and matrimony in a pleasurable formula in which the heroine meets an attractive but dark and threatening man, who later reveals himself to love her and be devoted to her (Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a prototype, and even Samuel Richardson’s bestseller Pamela may be viewed as an initiator of this genre). Without a doubt, the book enacts contemporary women’s fantasies.īut what exactly are “women’s” fantasies? The novel treads highly familiar ground for women. Because a lot of the eye-rolling at this book feels like the usual attack on women and the things women like and the usual underestimation of our ability to know our own minds. Perhaps, I’m really defending myself and other women who read the book and didn’t hate it, or actually loved it, or whatever. This opinion is shared by the readers themselves, as illustrated by the author of a book blog: I enjoyed 50 Shades of Grey enough to pick up the next book in the series, but I never dreamed I’d spend 1,000 words defending it. It’s been most popular with women, especially moms, leading many to call it (dismissively or worshipfully, depending on their point of view) ‘mommy porn’” (North 2012). An article published on the web stresses the point aptly: “The bondage-inflected romance novel 50 Shades of Grey has topped the New York Times bestseller lists for 10 weeks, followed at numbers two and three by its two sequels. It contained some of the worst writing I have ever seen and a plot that made my toenails curl.
As a German man living in London whose reaction I solicited through e-mail put it: “My girlfriend was fascinated by the book and told me that she believes ‘every man should read this book in order to understand what women want from a man.’” With such a ringing endorsement, I flicked through a few pages of the book, then put it aside. This is a women’s novel, written by a woman, read (mostly) by women, clearly marketed to women, and more appreciated by women than by men.
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