I know it’s not fair to compare 50 Shades of Grey to John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman or Pleasure; or, Fanny Hill. After all, in many
ways, they are completely different; yet, as we shall see, there are some
compelling reasons to consider them together.
50 Shades of Grey
tells the story of a young woman finishing college who is first seduced by a
sexy billionaire, only to turn the tables and become the one in charge. While
the media made much of the novel’s S&M plot twists, in the end, it is
really a novel about how the woman in the relationship, Anastasia Steele, “fixes”
her gentle brute, Christian Grey, changing his sexual tastes from BDSM to “vanilla
sex.” (That’s what the book calls it—I kid you not.) Additionally, the book
initially began as a Twilight fan fic, was written by a woman for other women, and, of course, is a product of 21st-century America.
Fanny Hill, by
contrast, tells the story of a young woman who falls in with the wrong crowd
but eventually comes into her own (pun intended). Initially, she is picked up
by a madam in the hopes that her virginity will fetch the right price; while
Fanny is shocked at this idea at first, she comes around (again, pun intended)
and learns to love and enjoy sex with men (sex with women being a far inferior proposition—of course, 50 Shades of Grey
never even glances in that direction…). Fanny has many different partners over
the course of the novel, has sex for money, engages in orgies, and has no
career ambitions aside from being the loving and repentant wife of her first
sexual partner, Charles, from whom she is parted for most of the novel. The
novel was written by a man for other men, in the middle of the eighteenth
century, in England.
What with the film version of 50 Shades coming out just in time for next Valentine’s Day and the
official trailer finally out, however, I couldn’t help comparing them. Both
novels are by far the most influential erotic tales of their own time, and both
are written in the voice of a young woman who is entering the adult world for
the first time. No matter that Fanny is a teenager while Anastasia is about to
finish college; the difference in age is a minor fact. Additionally of note is
the tone that the two works use: both works insist on a fairly romantic view of
sex and sexual encounters, eschewing words like “penis” or “fucking.” While
E.L. James resorts to a kind of bodily synecdoche to describe sex, as in “he
entered me,” Cleland makes use of a variety of colorful metaphors for the male
member, including but not limited to “weapon of pleasure,” “the engine of
love-assaults,” “truncheon,”, “may-pole,” “pick-lock,” “delicious stretcher,”
“superb piece of furniture,” and “pleasure-pivot.”
Both authors are also quite adamant that S&M is a lesser
pleasure compared to conventional sex between a male and female partner. When
asked to flagellate a man who gets off that way, Fanny acquiesces but is puzzled
by the pleasure the man gets from this act. While BDSM plays a much larger role
in 50 Shades, the novel’s protagonist
Anastasia has a similar aversion to such activities.
Lastly, both novels ultimately champion a single bond
between two (heterosexual) people who marry, in the end, and live a rather
conventional lifestyle—an interesting ending for works so committed to
titillating their audiences. In many ways, however, as a reader, I find Fanny Hill a more stimulating,
entertaining, and interesting read than 50
Shades.
Much has been written already about the many different
ways we can read Fanny Hill. Fanny
enjoys the attentions of Phoebe Ayres, even as she rejects them for not being “substantial”
enough. At the same time, she outright rejects sex between two men as immoral.
She has no problem, though, participating in orgies and watching others
participate in them. She is both a participant and a voyeur, and the
voyeuristic qualities of the novel’s heroine, as well as her evident pleasure
in recounting her past escapades (which she is meant to be confessing to an
unnamed woman….yet another literary question mark) suggest that there are many
pleasures to be found in the novel. Even though the novel ultimately resolves
Fanny’s problems through conventional means—marriage to the man she first had
sex with—there are plenty of different ways to read and interpret Cleland’s
pornotopia.
50 Shades of Grey
is not exactly simplistic, by comparison, but its single-minded focus on “fixing”
Christian Grey and Anastasia’s reluctant dabbling in his BDSM fantasies are
both grating and, frankly, not very pleasurable. The novel takes the point of
view that Christian wants to dominate his female “subs” only because he was
physically abused as a child. Such a point of view is, of course, incorrect.
Many mentally- and emotionally-healthy people engage in various types of
BDSM-play in their sexual lives, and there is nothing inherently unhealthy
about such fantasy play. Of course, the fact that Anastasia cannot “escape” her
attraction to Christian and Christian’s attraction to her is yet another
problematic aspect of the novel lifted directly from the Twilight series: the male must protect his female object of desire
through what basically amounts to stalking even though it is precisely their
relationship that puts the woman in danger in the first place.
This online cartoon pokes holes in the Edward-Bella romance. |
It seems almost as if modern women’s sexual and romantic
fantasies are predicated on this trope of danger and protection 50 Shades and Twilight and heaven knows how many other romance novels propagate.
While Fanny Hill is light-years away
from being a feminist erotic novel, its heroine is able to survive because of
her quick learning abilities. Fanny learns from Phoebe and the madams how to
survive on the streets of London with nothing but her brains and her body to
see her through. Like Moll Flanders and Roxana, Fanny is able to squirrel away
money for later use. Like Pamela, an unlikely but obvious prototype for Cleland’s
heroine, Fanny finally gets what she wants—stability, money and marriage for
love—while having a whole hell of a lot more fun than Samuel Richardson’s
too-good-to-be-true protagonist.
This is not to say that the eighteenth-century didn’t
have its share of dangerous but seductive rakes—cue Richardson’s Lovelace. Or
Jane Austen’s George Wickham. The difference is that in the end, Clarissa would
rather die than be with Lovelace and Lizzy Bennet lets her dumb sister Lydia
fall for the rake. She doesn’t try to “fix”
him; she throws him over and marries the more sensible (and moneyed) option,
Mr. Darcy. Our 20th and 21st century fantasy, according
to money-makers like Pretty Woman and
50 Shades of Grey, is a Byronic hero
with money to burn who just needs a woman’s touch to be the ideal Prince
Charming. Oddly enough, though Fanny loves her Charles, he isn’t Prince
Charming—he’s hardly in the book at all. Instead, Fanny holds first place in
her story as the main actor who controls her destiny.
Am I too biased, being an eighteenth-centuryist? Perhaps.
But since there’s still another month of summer left, I suggest you read these
books and decide for yourself. After all, they are practically the definition
of summer reading.
Beach reading! ...though then again, you might not want to read these books in public... |
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