It’s not true to say that only bad books make the bestseller list. But it is a little bit true, and it is always the case that bad books greatly outnumber good ones at the top end of the charts. Sometimes, too, you come across an example of pure negative correlation between the quality of a book and the level of its sales — John Lanchester, “Short Cuts,” London Review of Books
Mr WH (a handsome Hugo Speer) teaches Fanny Hill (Rebecca Knight)
Lord Charles marries Fanny Hill (2007 mini-series)
Dear friends and readers,
On my WWTTA list-serv and Women Studies, we came to some explanation this week to explain why E. L James has had a stunning financial success with a pornographic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey. The kernel paradox and realiti wrtr offered by Gail Dines in Counterpunch. Marge Piercy commented:
Marge Piercy commented:
Good piece. The controlling obsessed behavior of boyfriends is so often misinterpreted as romantic love and then when the woman has had enough and tries to get free, he shoots her and often any kids they’ve had as well. Possessive behavior is NOT love. It’s possession. You belong to me. So don’t try to get away.
The problem with both Dines and Piercy’s responses was first, they immediately corrected and walked away from the fantasy. The dream is a good handsome money-making (or having) man who will protect a woman from the marketplace forever. He will cherish and love her no matter what if she can make the sex good enough. We need to see the fantasy clearly. The fantasy does not — not at all — include an ending in a shelter for abused women and children.
And second, they did not see this against a perspective of the history of literature. Fifty Shades of Grey works precisely analogously with the way Austen’s Pride and Prejudice ends. The fantasy is you harness man who will protect you from the marketplace forever. He himself is a total success at the marketplace. He comes home to you, he buries himself in you, he will cherish and love you no matter what — if you can make the sex good enough.
Matthew Macfayden and Keira Knightley: Bliss it is to be Mrs Darcy, Mistress of Pembergley (2005 P&P)
That’s it. Now Austen is not explicit about the sex but she implies enough in her chaste way. A modern sequel of soft-core porn is Nights at Pemberley. Remember the close of the 2005 P&P movie by Joe Wright, which was originally excised, then played to US audiences and then added on for UK consumption. The two sitting on a disk in deep night in front of a lit palatial residence in a vast private garden. She is Mrs Darcy forever.
If you can make the sex good enough. So many of these numinous stories (apparently numinous) present the queen as all powerful because she has sexual attraction. From Mary Queen of Scots to the modern day star. We may see it as compensatory victim-hood but it’s the same fantasy. You’ve got to keep your eye on that out of the marketplace forever. Where everyone has a hard time making it, but especially women.
On Womens’ Studies, one member who argued for a larger perspective pointed out the similarities of the in its time equally stunning succees, Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded: this is a book whose titillation was early on recognized (and parodied) where the heroine’s sexuality brings her riches and security and a kind protective Lord B.
I’m here tonight to cite many other books quite close to Pamela in plot-design: to begin with, an early semi-respectable pornographic novel, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill as it’s better known. It has an analogous outline to Pamela, except Fanny does not have to be coerced too strongly; and it’s much clearer when at its close Fanny too marries a kind generous noble Lord who we can see will be protective and loving for the rest of their lives (and has an enormous estate) that the driving force for Fanny’s success has been her sexual attractiveness and power.
Jennifer Ehle & Colin Firth: allow me to tell you how much I admire, I adore you … (1995 P&P by Andrew Davies)
The feminist scholar, Nancy Hill, has written a book, The Heroine’s Text, which brings Pamela and Fanny Hill (among others, e.g., Marivaux’s Marianne) as euphoric texts; 50 Shades is would be the modern descendent. The obverse is the tragic heroine’s text (her sexuality does her in — Richardson’s Clarissa, Rousseau’s Julie, LaClos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses). 50 Shades is the modern descendent of the euphoric side as Pride and Prejudice is the chaste variant. The obverse is the tragic heroine’s text (her sexuality does her in). I’d be tempted to say too bad we don’t have a Henry Fielding to write a Shamela for 50 Shades, exposing it, except Fielding’s take is misogynistic; Shamela is a hypocritical man-trapper, a sham.
50 Shades did start out as fan-fiction, put straight on the Net for no fee; it was fan knock-off of the Twilight books, with their emasculated protective vampire male and beautiful icon, Isabella, and my understanding is that the author changed the characters’ names and small details to disguise the origins.
The topic is important for the semi-insane construction of motherhood as rightly attacked and exposed by Elisabeth Badinter in her recent The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women depends on the notion that there will be this super-kind protective permanent husband there.
It should be noted that such constructions are equally unfair to men; they demand an equally unreal norm of masculinity, plus powerful financial success and stability rarely available any more.
To conclude the paradigm I’m outlining with 50 Shades as a statement of it, the modern attitude towards abortion which insists women are traumatized if they have an abortion, that a baby is there from conception, is another nail in this coffin. An important recent and good play I saw this week in the Capital Fringe festival, Elizabeth Heffron’s Mitzi’s Abortion mirrors the over-wrought morbid state of mind engendered by such ideas (and an American culture made up of egregiously unjust social and economic arrangements). I wrote an outline of the play in the first paragraphs of a review of the play (skip paragraphs 1 & 2)
Mitzi (played by Nancy Cutcher)
It includes one character who doubles as a mid-wife burnt at the stake as a witch and a modern insurance agent who informs our heroine that her insurance will not pay for a termination as that is not allowed. (Barbara Ehrenreich has shown that hat one strand of these witch trials shows a later 17th century all-out effort to end women working as midwives.) But the insurance people will pay for care of a full-term anancephalic baby as it lies dying, which it must. She says she hates these rules, but there they are. She suggests to Mitzi that had she not been attached to a machine to test the fetus, Mitzi would not have known for sure anything was drastically wrong (as sub-theme the play exposes how technology works against women), simply carried the nearly stillborn baby to term, and then it would have died. So go ahead and do that as the cheapest easiest thing. But our heroine does not find this easy nor an escape route.
Lest I be misunderstood and people think I’m endorsing the fantasy as I’ve outlined it, I’m with an 18th century woman poet, Mary Wortley Montagu, who highly unusually wrote a poem preferring Queen Elizabeth I to Mary Stuart on the grounds Elizabeth had real power, real power is not in fleeting sexual enjoyment. I like it so much I’ll quote part of it:
Epilogue to a new play of Mary Queen of Scots [never finished], design’d to be spoke by Mrs Oldfield:
What could Luxurious Woman wish for more
To fix her Joys, or to extend her Power?
Their every Wish was in this Mary seen,
Gay, Witty, Youthful, Beauteous and a Queen!
Vain useless Blessing with ill Conduct joyn’d!
Light as the Air, and Fleeting as the Wind.
What ever Poets write, or Lovers vow;
Beauty, what poor Omnipotence hast thou!
Queen Bess had Wisdom, Councel, Power
How few espous’d a Wretched Beauty’s Cause!
Learn hence, ye Fair, more solid charms to prize …
If you will Love, love like Eliza then,
Love for Amusement like those Traitors, Men.
Think that the Pastimes of a Leisure Hour
She favour’d oft — but never shar’d her Power …
It ends
… .be faithfull to your Interest still,
Secure your Hearts, then Fool with who you will.
Actually she has been saying secure your pocketbook (your income), then …
Ellen
See also Andrew O’Hagan, Travelling Southwards (from the LRB), though he, like Fielding uses the book as an occasion to denigrate women readers.
For Lolita discussion, see the comments.
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
From discussion on WWTTA:
Actually 50 Shades of Grey started its life as an infamous Twilight alternate universe fanfiction, which basically means the author gave the names of Edward and Bella to two characters that might be construed to be the equivalents of them(good AU fanfic usually has more similarities to the original characters than that, but this is not good AU fanfic). Explicit sex scenes are par for the course in fanfic, but it is actually generally considered proper to write them well if you have the ability. This fic was mocked considerably on communities set up to mock badfic and/or bad sex writing before the author decided to file the serial numbers off and make money.
Isobel
From Women’s Studies:
And, as I am surely not the only literary scholar on the list to have remarked upon, this is not at all a contemporary phenomenon … Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), exploited exactly this same power dynamic between a straight wealthy (in that case not just entitled, but literally titled) older man and a nubile heroine (a maidservant) who plays her sexual cards right in titillating scene after titillating scene of domination, bondage, and (in this case attempted) rape. The rape attempts themselves cause Pamela to “fall in love with” her master/captor, while he becomes further enamored of her the more she tries to escape him. A difference from the similar contemporary narrative: Pamela emerges with her virginity intact. It all ends in marriage into the aristocracy for her and a sequel of tedium as she attempts to fit in to aristocratic society. This was a bestseller; women loved it! I am not at all sure that the contemporary addition of the heroine’s enjoyment of bdsm or rape significantly changes this basic plot. At base, a sexy young woman debases herself (or is debased by someone else) for a man, but in a way that is different from what he can get from a prosititute, and she is eventually rewarded with wealth and social position. Oh, and “love,” whatever that is in these cases.
As one might expect, some literary scholars have read this novel too as one in which a young woman exercises power. Others of us might not
Brenda
Also Womens Studies, citing Tania Modleski’s cult-crit book about romance, Loving with a Vengeance
There is still no definitive account of this but a major part of girl’s
socialization is *sexualization,* this “training* to be pleasing to men, is a training in pleasure as well–and in the age of porn, the rehearsal from day one to find a fake transcendence within “active- passivity” (as Beauvoir plus Nietzsche might kind of sort of say) — easily translatable to masochism — is hyper-driven to enormous proportions. Torture itself must be learned as pleasurable and exciting. This is both political and deep in the marrow of psychosexual development. Deep structural changes must happen for the manufacture of this kind of desire to also change. I’m not surprised at all by the wild popularity of 50 (or however many) shades of gray– which i see subway travelers reading all the time, men and women. mostly women. Look at the popularity of Twilight.
Kathy
An interview for Third Place, a community radio show. In the interview June Pullam, suggests some alternatives – young adult fiction that has some positive representations. It’s about 30 minutes long. It is highly accessible and would be good for an Intro class or a general or high school audience.
3dP.2012.Episode.18 by Third Place (3dp) on Mixcloud
Laura
I’ve read two of the three 50 Shades books–not because I liked the story, but because I wanted to engage in the discussion so I needed to know what was going on. I’m somewhat dismayed by the apologists for the books, by the excuses given for why it’s ok for women to like them. The core premise is that the protagonist is a virginal naive girl (22, yet still a girl maturity-wise) who is completed dominated physically and mentally by a man just few years older than her, who was psychologically damaged by a drug-addicted mother and sadistic step-father who abused him in awful ways. The entire basis of their relationship is his lust for her the minute he meets her–there is no meaningful conversation or getting to know each other, he’s got his hands on her as soon as he can and he wants to dominate her life in every way he can. The fantasy is that a rich guy will come out of the woodwork and want to dominate every aspect of a woman’s life, including hitting her. He traces her cell phone and gets her bank account number…that is not normal behavior, that is criminal behavior. It might be fun to dress up and play sexual games, but for a woman to allow herself to be treated as nothing more than an object, pulls us back into the dark ages before we could have private ownership of anything, before we had control of our lives. I have two daughters and if I found that a man was treating either of them this way and/or that they were allowing themselves to be treated this way, I’d do everything I could to try to stop it. This is a story of abuse, possibly of battered woman’s syndrome.
Interesting comparisons, Ellen. Somehow while I’ve heard of Fanny Hill I knew nothing about it. I had no idea it was contemporary with Richardson’s novels. I may have to check it out. I wonder just how obscene it is. I was quite disappointed when I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover for not being spicy enough – not at all like the Marquis de Sade’s Justine.
Interestingly, here in my little town of 20,000 people, the owner of the bookstore told me he has sold more copies of 50 Shades of Grey than any
other book in their history. It’s a small chain store and he told corporate the book wouldn’t go over here. The next big town of about 10,000 has sold even more copies at their store than here. Apparently our conservative little towns are secretly starved for this kind of book.
Tyler
To respond just to one thread of your reply, Tyler: the style of Fanny Hill is highly euphemistic. It’s almost amusing the contorted language Cleland goes through; it made the book far more respectable and is typical (except that it’s so persistent) of many pop novels of yesteryear (as in Frank Yerby) and apparently) soft-core porn today.
Pamela was a super-hit; Forever Amber who ended up rich and protected; so why should not Anastasia Steele (perhaps an echo of Lucy Steele there?).
Ellen
Just to clarify, for my readers, myself I’d never read 50 Shades — to me it’d be a waste of time. Fanny Hill has some merit in the first half and has historical importance; for my part I’ve always disliked Richardson’s Pamela (when I read it for the first time at age 14 I really thought it sick and strange). This is by way of introducing another article by Gail Dines which connects to my blog, this one on Cosmo:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/07/cosmopolitan-false-promise-awesome-life?commentpage=2#start-of-comments
Gail’s last paragraph voices the fantasy myth that both _50 Shades_ and Cosmo are selling:
“Learning how to give men great orgasms on their terms does not sound to me like a recipe for living an “awesome life” …”
with the difference that the novel says the way to live the good life is the wonderful man/husband, not the wonderful/sexed up career.
Ellen
From Penny:
I really hope this never becomes a movie but then Hollywood has its
issues and this wood make money for them without much capitol expense etc.
As for Cosmo, I haven’t read it since 1976. Apparently it hasn’t changed.
I did read both Fanny Hill and Pamela. I just can’t seem recall anything about the former and like you hated the latter. I forget which Richardson wrote first this one or Clarissa. I can see why Fielding wrote Shamela although the only thing I remember about that is laughing so I will read it again. And of course Joseph Andrews because I think he is meant to be Pamela’s brother? Another satire on Richardson? I read Fanny Hill more than 25 yrs ago which might explain why I don’t remember it. Unless I am confusing it with Moll Flanders/Defoe’s work. But then I remember reading the author was Cleland, so it must have been Fanny Hill. I had so much more time in the day then.
My reply:
Maybe when I was 14 and reading Pamela for the first time and saw it as sick and strange I had a healthy true response which I should be sure not to forget. i have a way of saying I was innocent to have such a response; maybe I was rather not inculturated to see how central virginity is to others and how evil this is.
Will 50 Shades of Grey become a movie? Joke alert: they ought to ask Andrew Davies to do it; he’d turn it into an innocuous romp the way he did Fanny Hill and then it would pass the censors too. Davies turned a number of scenes into broad jokes.
E.M.
Fanny Hill wasn’t written for women, but to titillate men. Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t titillate women, but that wasn’t it’s intention. I gather 50 Shades is intended primarily for women and concerns domination. I’ve not read it. But the only BDSM in Fanny Hill is men on the receiving end. Fanny accepts a beating once only to satisfy this particular craving after the guy gets his and doesn’t enjoy it. I’m not sure the comparison works here.
LB.
If one set of details is not parallel, that does not at all mean the context I set up and comparison is useless. My context was large and general, and the parallel depended far more on the ending (girl ends up happy with rich husband) and the means (sexual favors), plus the set of norms and expectations all the works share: women exist to please men sexually and they are rewarded for doing so.
Dear Ellen,
I’m sure someone has already sent you this article in The Guardian about 50 Shades.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/24/fifty-shades-grey-domestic-violence-campaigners
A women’s shelter expert condemns Eloise James’s books as a manual for domestic abuse. The article is interesting, but I didn’t finish the book, so I can’t say whether or not she’s right: I read 50 pages and found it literally nauseating. I REALLY don’t have those SM fantasies, so I couldn’t read it as sexual fantasy, because it’s all about being a victim.
Kat
Yes, and it’s the Guardian, a mainstream publication, Alison Flood:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/24/fifty-shades-grey-domestic-violence-campaigners
Here’s a woman who runs a woman’s refuge shelter has spoken out, e.g., “It really is about a domestic violence perpetrator, taking someone who is less powerful, inexperienced ….
I wanted also to say this review brings out the paradigm of Lolita in the book. Lolita has been praised as a great book using the framework of a claimed ironic narrator. I think the ironic narrator is transparent mask for Nabokov to elaborate on his sadistic fantasies too – and that’s how it was presented Kubrick’s movie.
Ellen
Thanks for shading the article. Ironically, despite the fact that the novel is poorly written & (in my opinion) not worth all the fuss, the discussions around it are quite stimulating.
Although I agree with Claire Phillipson that the novel is “an instruction manual for an abusive individual to sexually torture a vulnerable young woman”, I am apprehensive of her call to literally burn copies of the novel. In addition to presenting the publisher with free publicity, this will be like opening Pandora’s box. If we all agree that this is just a terrible work of art (and not all of us do, for too many praise it), who is to decide the next work worth of burning and/or banning?
In my opinion, the main problem is neither that such a work (reminding me of Stockholm syndrome) has become a selling phenomenon, nor that it will corrupt the coming generation of women; what strikes me the most is the number of readers (especially women) who accept this novel as a modern version of an acceptable love story with an erotica twist. That says a lot about where we are heading.
Best regards,
Nada Ramadan, PhD
English Department
Faculty of Arts
Alexandria University
In addition to Nada’s excellent points, do feminists really need to act like fundamentalist Muslims upset by Salman Rushdie and other modern authors, the Spanish Inquisition or Nazis purging the library of books by Jews? it is hard to think of a book burning that didn’t telegraph bigotry, ignorance, autocracy.
Obviously this book strikes millions of women as fun and exciting. Why not try to figure out why? For example, ask the women who read it! It’s always surprising to me that the “trust women” mantra disappears when women
do something the truster doesn’t approve of. Then, it’s women are brain-washed. this is exactly what anti-feminists say: women choose abortion
because they’ve been brainwashed to think it’s no big deal, etc. Reader response theory, where are you when we need you?
Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt says it well- we are joining the club of book-burners when we condemn a book based on “dislike.” Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Teheran is a good example and a way to contradict–she used Lolita as a text for a clandestine class for women when they (as she) were banned from the University in Teheran.
Dr. Anne Mills King
Azar Nafisi’s book is a right-wing book — as someone else just pointed out that we need to listen to right-wing people I point this out. Her book reminds me in a myriad of ways of the memoirs written by French aristocratic women after the “terror” which are used by so many to condemn the French revolution — that’s why they are in print still.
There she is with her lovely coffee and croissants entertaining her selected-out girls with the “joys” of Pride and Prejudice. Don’t misunderstand me, I like Nafisi’s book, at least some aspects of it (and have blogged three times in its favor), but there are places where she’s dead wrong.
It’s telling to me that when one places 50 Shades with say Pamela or Fanny Hill, not a murmur, but trot out Lolita …
E.M…
Over on Women Studies there was an immediate objection to my skewering 50 Shades by likening it to Lolita; yet worse was my critical attitude towards Azar Nafisi. I wish I could reprint some of the defenses of Nafisi. They were demoralizing, as well as citations of the film with Katha Pollitt bringing in a chorus on behalf of sympathizing with pop culture and how she’s tired of these refusals to understand …
If others know how to get into the archive, they are there for yesterday. I’ve never been able to figure that one out. Joan Korenman understandably tries to protect the list.
I wrote the following about Nafisi and since it’s in a different spirit than most of what I wrote when we were reading her book and the more personal follow-up share it here. I did “re-think” her and after 3 times did stop assigning her.
*****************
I’ve assigned and taught Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Teheran about 3 times so I am aware of its strong merits as a book about how women were treated during the phases of the Iranian conflicts; Nafisi also extrapolates out from that to make effective generalizations about what she regards as “western” literature and ways of life and how women are abused and punished there too. It is, however, highly problematic in a number of central ways.
For a start, there is a monolithic “east” v “west” in the book. She just about never acknowledges the economic bases for the uprising against the Shah or later phases of the revolution and war with Iraq. Her dissertation was on an American Marxist, and he is the occasion for socialist-bashing. On every occasion she is a cheering squad for capitalism, not very ameliorated. In fact she takes the same general approach to economic systems as she does religions. It is central to know her father had a very high position during the Shah’s time, how much her family lost, and that when she came to the US she had no problem whatsoever getting a good tenured job. Her books functions in the way Gertrude Himmefarb’s work (and that of her husband and son) do.
Dabashi, Hamid (“Native informers and the making of the American empire,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue 797, June 2006) is probably an unfair (it’s certainly vitriolic) diatribe against Nafisi, but not so .Donadey, Anne and Huma Amed-Ghosh Azar, “Why Americans Love Reading Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Teheran, Signs, 33:3 (2008):624-646. Americans love Nafisi’s book for many of its complacencies and its celebration of an idealized account of the “US system” and way of life.
Her attitudes of mind influence strongly the way she reads her books, not only Lolita, but Great Gatsby (she’s much in love with Daisy and Tom and luxury), and Pride and Prejudice (which she regards as a sheerly happy book – it’s basically her thrust) and just wonderful. P&P is archetypal romance and (as I tried to suggest) has some central suppositions that are those of 50 Shades. In my first postings I by no means ignored the content of 50 Shades and did say how it promises riches, sexual joy forever, power based on sexual success with rich good men. The intricate analysis of ironies is a distraction when regarded against the larger causes of misery, and this is what she loves to go over best. Not that I’m against it; her book has its uses: a high regard for reading as a way of examining ourselves and life is one of my basic reasons for using it the three times I did. And of course Americans do love it; it easily goes over well in a classroom. That’s why I’ve used it — and assigned with it, though Daisy Miller.
It should be noted that except for P&P and some references to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Nafisi’s “great books” curricula is all by men. She identifies herself with Jean Brodie.
As to the analogies with the French women life-writing that emerged in the 1790s, yes Gouges was and is still in print; so too Madame Roland (both beheaded let’s not forget), and there are a couple of other radical or pro-Revolutionary principles (and even behavior) but the overwhelming preponderance of books is by the aristocratic women who laments the horrible injustice of the way her family was treated and “everybody” was so unfair. Read Marilyn Yalom’s Blood Sisters and count. Because an analogy does not work at all points, does not invalidate its usefulness. It’s (to say the least) counterproductive to talk about amounts of blood poured out, misery, and death and destruction but the 1790s was small (as Twain told us) in comparison with the long centuries of egregious injustice; in fact more died in the 1870s on the streets (a ferocious few years hardly reaching US radar),and with our hindsight today into the results of the Arab spring, Nafisi’s book becomes more untenable by the day. There has been a spate of books like hers (no problem understanding why they easily find publishers), most poor and thin, often churned out quickly (e.g. Marian Nemat’s childish unquestioning Prisoner of Tehran). The French women at least produced large volumes which took time and reflect the ancien regime culture for real and fully in some ways.
I enjoy Nafisi with all her faults (as I do the French women’s memoirs, aristocratic, Girondist and Jacobin too), but she is not to be cited as an authority on anything she writes, much less without qualification.
And there are limits to he usefulness of entering sympathetically into understanding pop culture. There really are cultural objects that are bad for us and it’s important to point this out. Recently in the US we had a particularly large massacre at a theater in Aurora playing a batman movie. There was almost a resolute refusal to enter into the parallels between the man with his assault weapons and costume, and the film itself, and the people in the theater who came at midnight in droves (with young children too) to see it. An honorable exception is Stuart Klawans (I recommend his “Daylight Answers” in a recent issue of The Nation). I would dare say (though I know it will rile people) that anyone who finds much to defend in Lolita had better try 50 Shades and think about the close analogies. One strong difference is that Lolita is well written so it can fool people easily — very much a 1950s book, a male wet dream (Nabokov is very disdainful of traditional heroines in books by women in his criticism — I wonder if people here have read much of his criticism).
Ellen
Another article from The Observer, “Fifty Shades is Not About Fun, It’s About Abuse” by Sophie Morgan touches on the question of pleasure and submission, domestic abuse, and the relationship between fiction/cultural representation and lived experience
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/25/fifty-shades-submissive-sophie-morgan?INTCMP=SRCH
Jacqueline Ellis, Associate Professor
Women’s and Gender Studies
< Since _Lolita_ came up, and I have not read _50 Shades_ (though I have a
good deal, not all, of _Lolita_) I'm struck again by a similarity of language or event details: the hero "a much richer, abusive older man who beats her up and does some dreadful things to her sexually." This reminds me of _Lolita_ far more than _Pamela_ or _Fanny Hill_.
It's nothing like Lolita. Lolita is about a 12-year-old girl who is preyed upon by an older man. He's obsessed with her, does everything he can to set up a situation where she will have sex with him, and incredibly even convinces himself that she seduced him. It's a rich and chilling portrait of the pathology of victim and victimizer, all laced together with Nabokov's astonishing language. 50 Shades is a shlockily written piece of pulp, to the point that the two books hardly even seem to be written in the same language. It's about a young woman (not a child) who is turned on by submitting to a dominant man. That is absolutely not Lolita; in fact, it's almost the opposite. You'd have to think hard to find two books that are more different. All that "Holy Cow! If he takes off his belt, I'll – I'll – explode! Oh my GOD! He IS taking off his belt!" stuff might be from another planet than Nabokov's writing. (Although one of Nabokov's themes is satirizing cheap American culture and writing.) 50 Shades is soft S & M titillation. Lolita is a subtle psychological study of abuse of power and its effects.
Comparisons can go wrong and become absurd when you haven't read one and a half of the two books! (I should say that I didn't read 50 Shades for my
own diversion; it was a work assignment.)
Still, I suppose it's only a matter of time till 50 Shades is on the curriculum somewhere; heck, I bet it is already. Curriculums have deteriorated
that much.
Diana
I would agree with Diana that Nabokov (whatever personal issues I have with him–he certainly misreads MP imho, and, I agree, can be misogynist) uses language beautifully in Lolita, so beautifully it could make you weep, especially is service of such a twisted subject. I read the first two (or so) paragraphs of 50 shades in a book store. Idiotic is the word that jumps to mind–prose that is
banal at best, and I am being generous (based only on two paragraphs, of course). It’s puerile.
We never do get Lolita’s voice in Nabokov’s novel. I too deplore that the estate has blocked the novel depicting Lolita’s pov. (How have they managed that? I thought McGraw-Hill or was it Macmillian won a landmark case when they were able to override the Mitchell estate and publish The WInd Done Gone, telling the GWTW story from Mammy’s (?) pov.) To her captor, Lolita is primarily an object and only incidentally and inconveniently a human being–she is primarily an object to be consumed, used up and discarded as soon as she becomes incapable of serving her captor’s desires (ie when she begins to develop breasts and hips and to look like a woman). Lucky for her she grows up!
But Nabokov allows the reader glimpses into Lolita’s distress–we are put in the position of being smarter (morally wiser) than–what was his name, Humbert Humbert (?)–and are able to see from his offhand descriptions, how she suffers–well, that is saying too much–we don’t see how she suffers–but we get glimmers: she cries a lot and he has to work harder and harder (bribe and threaten her more and more) to get her to do what he wants. She hates her life and what he has done to her. Nabokov lets us see Lolita as as a human young girl, even if her captor cannot. Anyone with any imagination must be nauseated and distressed at what is being done to her. But as Ellen
says, the potential for misuse of the novel is chilling–it is a playbook for a pedophile in how to find and isolate a victim. For that reason, though I too object to censorship, I have issues with the book.
Diane R
I suppose it’s the potential for misuse I’m talking about and my argument is partly that the movie brings out how the common reader read the book and
why it sold so widely — as _50 Shades_ is selling. Nabokov’s estate had
better lawyers and _GWTW_ does not have the cachee it once had. It is a
woman’s book, remember 🙂
I do admit though that I also can’t stomach Nabokov. Pompous, pontificating, self-satisfied, the voice of Humbert Humbert is heard in his criticism. But then I can’t stand Naipaul either — or D.H. Lawrence (who salivates over women’s behinds instead of their thighs). I really think Nabokov at some level is having a great joke on his intelligent readers.
Ellen
[…] blog, I have expended many electrons discussing the novels this book is like and its meaning: a daughter of Richardson’s Pamela and Cleland’s Fanny Hill, sister to Nabokov’s Lo…; here I thought I’d try the pictures is worth a thousand words […]
[…] should have mentioned at the opening of the book the characters have all heard of Fifty Shades of Grey, and they have no trouble understanding why it is so popular: it is the same dream as this book, a […]