This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at San Francisco chapter.
You may have heard how the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, written by E.L. James, is in fact a parody of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, and both could hardly be closer. Fifty Shades began as a Twilight based work, a fan-fiction named Master of the Universe, rewriting Edward and Bella stories in a vampire free universe in which Edward and his vampire family are recast as ordinary humans.
After several complaints about the racy content of her books, E.L. James changed her original story and came up with the characters of Christian Grey and Anna Steele.
So of course you will find endless similarities, both Anastasia and Isabella -or Anna and Bella- have long brown hair, are smart but mousy and uncoordinated while Edward and Christian are predators who tried to stay away from the women because they are dangerous for them, but remain so old fashioned that they asked dads for permission to marry the women of their lives.
But it doesn’t stop here! If you strip off the layers of porn, Fifty Shades actually reveals an old fashioned romance between the innocent girl and dangerous man.
Bella loves Edward not because of his craving for her blood, but despite it, and Edward’s longing to kill the woman he loves more than anything is a cruel twist of fate, but it doesn’t lessen his passion for her.
“Stay away from me”, “I’m not good for you”, “I’m dangerous” … We all heard Edward warning Bella many times, but did she stay away ? Well we all know the answer.
Like Edward Cullen, and the libertine heroes of a thousand romances before him, Christian Grey knows he has desires that will hurt the heroine, and scruples enough to warn her away. And like Bella, Anastasia is too transfixed by love to be smart and leave this dangerous guy alone.
As Fifty Shades was originally a naturalistic reworking of Meyer’s vampire story, E.L. James has to find a real life analog of the vampire’s violent and forbidden desires as well as his irrational protectiveness that make him such a good romance hero.
Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism, Masochism.
What better choice than BDSM ?
Edward is scary and lethally dangerous, but he’s also flawlessly loving.
Christian on the other hand is a sadist.
Yes, he loves Ana, but it’s made clear that he gets a kick out of hurting her too, which is one kind of fantasy very different from what Edward is. If your hero is a psychologically-troubled BDSM addict, the romance can only come out a lot less wholesome than Twilight’s because submission and violence are the very fabric of the desire between Christian and Anna
And Ana is herself complicit of this fantasy. She does ultimately stop letting Christian inflict her serious pain, physical or emotional, but she is still turned on, in ways she doesn’t entirely understand. By handing her lover absolute power over her, she lets him truss her up, spank her, reduce her to abject vulnerability, as part of their sexual play.
No wonders many feminists see the trilogy as a fantasy glorifying women’s vulnerability and victimization by the men they love.
But the as the series progresses, it becomes clear that the idea behind the books is an attempt to show that sexual play revolving around fantasies of bondage and domination are compatible with a healthy, loving relationship grounded in equality and trust. Clearly Ana likes it rough and is literally asking for punishment while Christian’s love for her has modulated his pleasure in hurting her into a taste for role playing scenarios of punishment and domination.
Whether she succeeds in making this love story plausible probably depends on the reader but it’s a trilogy worth the reading as it opens new perspective about the unknown world of SDSM and kinky sex. And don’t miss the movie, released on February 14th, 2015.