THE PUBLICATION OF EL James’s e-book Fifty Shades trilogy has become one of the big cultural stories of the year. It is notable for several reasons, not least because James, a British debut author, has already been listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people.
Having made the journey from digital to print form, her books have been heralded as the saviour of the publishing industry, the sensational success of Fifty Shades’s paperback version a reassurance that there is life in traditional print formats yet. When the trilogy was released in the US, it sold two million copies in four weeks; in the week of its release in Ireland, it reached the top of the bestsellers list.
The success of the Fifty Shades series has also drawn attention to the recent growth in online erotic fiction for women. Mainstream publishers have taken note, with Random House, Penguin and Simon Schuster eager to compete with the more established Mills Boon and Black Lace brands, adding erotica imprints to their lists. It has replaced “chick-lit” as the biggest growth sector in the books industry.
This is particularly significant in an Irish context, where female sexuality has traditionally been culturally repressed. It was only a little more than 50 years ago that Edna O’Brien’s novel The Country Girls was banned by the Irish Censorship Board for its portrayal of the burgeoning sexuality of its dual protagonists, Baba and Kate, while, as O’Brien remembered years later, “the few copies [of The Country Girls] purchased in Limerick were burnt after the rosary, one evening in the parish grounds, at the request of the priest . . . Unbeknownst to me, a heated correspondence passed between archbishop McQuaid of the Dublin diocese, Charles Haughey, then a minister, and the archbishop of Westminster Cathedral, all deeming it filth, a book which should not be allowed in any decent home.”
Compared to the common scenes of bondage that permeate books such as Fifty Shades of Grey, O’Brien’s portrayal of the young women’s relationship with each other and their shared love interest is positively wholesome: “Baba and I sat there and shared secrets, and once we took our knickers off in there and tickled each other.”
The watershed for free sexual expression for women in Ireland appears not to have come from the feminist movement of the 1970s, when activists such as Nell McCafferty rode the Contraceptive Train from Dublin to Belfast and back with bags full of condoms, but with wider global influences and the development of digital technologies, which have connected Irish women to a world beyond the parish.
The enormous success of the American TV series Sex and the City, with its frank representation of female sexual desire, was particularly significant for breaking taboos, while the more recent rise of e-publishing has enabled women to consume and create erotic material while remaining comfortably anonymous.
Traditionally, the covers of erotic romance feature oiled-up male abdominal muscles or provocatively positioned female limbs, but the e-book allows the reader to download books straight to their PC, e-readers or mobile phones without any third-party transactions and to avoid any stigma that might be attached to reading such books in public.
It seems ironic then, that – despite all the publicity about Fifty Shades breaking the niche barriers of erotic fiction – EL James’s books are blandly packaged with generic covers. They feature monochromatic images that do not draw attention to their content, although the objects displayed in the artwork (a neck-tie, key and carnival mask) do play a role in the sexual fantasies and practices of the books’ two main characters, the virginal Anastasia Steele and her worldly, wealthy lover Christian Grey. As Liam Donnelly, manager at Hodges Figgis, explains, the “anodyne covers might belong to any genre and I think that was deliberate on the part of the publisher and one of the reasons why [the books] are selling so well”.
However, the prominent positioning of the Fifty Shades trilogy in Hodges Figgis also belies the books’ “erotic” status. When the books move from their current position, Donnelly explains, they will be filed under fiction (just before Henry James, presumably) rather than with the erotic fiction titles, which occupy a low shelf in the “genre literature” section of the shop. Donnelly says the difference is that the erotic-fiction titles they stock would be “more explicit, closer to pornography”, and cites the infamous Story of O as an example. The Fifty Shades trilogy, Donnelly says, may feature extended scenes of a sexual nature, but that merely reflects a wider cultural trend of sexual openness rather than a desire to arouse the reader.
“We would define the Fifty Shades phenomenon more as popular fiction,” he concludes. “It’s one of those books like The Hunger Games, and you can’t necessarily explain its success.”
EL James doesn’t see her novels as particularly overt in their eroticism. She prefers to call Fifty Shades “a love story, a fantasy”, one that just happens to revolve around a relationship based on the sexual practices of bondage and submission. Indeed, while there is a lot of graphic sex in the book, it is narrated with such pedantic detail for the uninitiated reader that the effect is distinctly unerotic. There is an entire chapter devoted to establishing the rules of BDSM for the two engaged parties, for example, and Anastasia achieves orgasm on nearly every second page, whether experiencing sexual contact or not, which considerably reduces both the credibility and effect of the story.
For Louisa Cameron, owner of Raven Books in Blackrock, “the real question” raised by the success of the Fifty Shades trilogy “is why the books have suddenly got so much press”. Erotic fiction, says Cameron, “is not a new phenomenon, and the attention James has got is in complete disproportion to the quality of the books”.
Raven Books has a section dedicated specifically to paranormal romance, one of the most fertile sub-genres of the new erotic fiction (Kidnapped and Spanked by an Alien and One Bite with a Stranger are two popular titles), and Cameron says that while, typically, erotic fiction in its various manifestations is “narrative-driven, so the writing is not as important as the story, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the books are all poorly written”. The genre has a loyal and discerning readership who also value good writing.
The Fifty Shades trilogy, however, is certainly lacking in literary quality. The books are repetitive, overly descriptive, and bluntly aspirational: the furnishings of apartments, the interiors of cars, and the vintage of many bottles of wine and champagne are lovingly detailed.
Even so, the book manages to be completely bland in its setting: it takes place between Portland and Seattle, but you could substitute the names of any international city and it wouldn’t matter.
James inserts frequent literary allusions into the narrative in an attempt to bring a metaphorical layer to the story. Anastasia is a literature major obsessed with Thomas Hardy; Tess of the D’Urbervilles is mentioned several times as a model for her relationship with Christian, with Anastasia cast as the pure Tess (of course) and Christian as the devilish Alec and the heroic Angel at the same time. However, the attempt to intellectualise their relationship falls flat, as there is no elegance or depth to her prose. Anastasia’s frequent exclamations of “Holy Cow!” and “Jeez!”, and her constant invocation of her “inner goddess” doing a variety of joyous and disapproving dances, bring an adolescent quality to the X-rated subject matter, while the first-person delivery of such lines as “I want to claim your ass” transforms potentially erotic scenarios into comedy. That said, if the effect is unintentionally funny, it is also curiously compulsive.
Irish writers have yet to make a significant impact on the burgeoning genre of erotic fiction, but the impressive international success of Irish women in the popular-fiction market during the Celtic Tiger period suggests a new wave of explicit fiction might be hitting Irish publishers soon. But many of the writers of erotic fiction use pseudonyms, so, if the woman next to you on the bus might be reading the latest saucy Black Lace romance, who knows, you could already know the woman who might be the next EL James.
Mills and swoon
Excerpt from ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’
“He sets me down and, taking my hand, leads me back into the bar. I feel weak, still drunk, embarrassed, exhausted, mortified, and on some strange level, absolutely off-the-charts thrilled. He’s clutching my hand – such a confusing array of emotions. I’ll need at least a week to process them all . . . All these forbidden, unfamiliar feelings that I have tried to deny surface and run amok through my drained body. I flinch, and somewhere deep, deep down, my muscles clench deliciously . . . In my groggy frame of mind he looks so yummy . . . if he wasn’t clutching me so tightly, I’m sure I would swoon at his feet.”
