Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (28 page)

MALA BHATTACHARJEE

D
/S, BDSM, S&M … there are a lot of letters that come to mind when discussing the sexy doings of erotic fiction. Two that you may not know about? The capital “F” Fandom and the lowercase “f” fandom. Capital “F” Fandom is the all-encompassing term for the entire culture of primarily internet-based fan communities who participate in individual lowercase “f” fandoms. E. L. James was a celebrated member of Twilight fandom, whose success with
Fifty Shades of Grey
would eventually turn the floodlights on Fandom as a whole.

Fandom, you see, is like Fight Club. The first rule of Fandom is that you don’t talk about Fandom. It’s a subculture, like any other, that operates largely under the radar of mainstream society. Sure, you may use Facebook, you might have a Tumblr or a Twitter account, but engaging in discussion and creation
of fanworks with others is a whole different level of interaction. There’s a secret handshake, a subtle head nod, a sense of being a part of something that spans time zones and countries and languages. It requires a certain amount of mutual respect (and often some mutual disdain as well) and trust. It’s a trust that no one is going to laugh at you for liking
My Little Pony
. It’s a trust that someone else understands what it’s like to watch BBC’s
Sherlock
and think Benedict Cumberbatch is the hottest thing since sliced bread. It’s a trust that you can write whatever you want and someone, somewhere, will find it wonderful.

When E. L. James altered her wildly popular Edward and Bella alternate universe fanfic “Master of the Universe” and published it with a new title and new character names, she broke one of Fandom’s oldest social contracts: Thou shalt not profit from thy fanfiction. A “rule” instituted long ago, primarily for legal purposes—studios and publishing houses were far more “cease and desist”–happy than they are now; it would’ve been a given that Stephenie Meyer’s people would take on
Fifty Shades of Grey
—it also serves the purpose of keeping fanworks
for the fans
. “Going pro” with your fic means going public—and involving people outside the fan community. Once you involve a showrunner, actors, an author, or the media, it’s like someone standing over your shoulder as you organize your stamp collection—or your sex toy collection. You’re being judged for your geekery, for your “mommy porn” (heaven forbid!), and your autographed season two cast shot of
La Femme Nikita
. It changes the fannish experience.

Why is that such a big deal? Because the fannish experience, for many, is a deeply personal one. For a lot of women, it’s a way to explore their creativity and their sexuality without facing scorn and censure. There’s a long-standing joke about the internet known as Rule No. 34: if it exists, there’s porn about it. There is nothing under the sun that hasn’t been written about and posted in fanfiction forums, on journaling sites like Live-Journal.com, or on large-scale fiction archives like FanFiction.
Net. A lot of the so-called “porn” is written by women and consumed by women.

Similar to the published romance and erotic fiction industry, fanfiction is a haven for self-expression, for exploration of kinks and tropes that you can’t necessarily talk about with your friends over a glass of wine. You don’t have to be ashamed if you like forced seduction or May/December romance or ménage—you’ll find a group or an archive or an anonymous meme that’s into the same thing. Because of the relative anonymity of internet handles and commenting systems and the ability to present yourself however you see fit, it is all done in a way that makes the writers
and
the readers feel safe. And there’s no money being traded in the process. It’s done for pure enjoyment, for the satisfaction of sharing a story and perhaps receiving a few comments in return.

Sometimes, fans receive even more. The CW’s
Supernatural
acknowledged vocal portions of their fanbase in meta commentary–laced episodes featuring Becky the fangirl. The team behind MTV’s
Teen Wolf
was entreated to involve characters in a same-sex relationship. And while many authors, like Anne Rice, Diana Gabaldon, and George R.R. Martin are vocally anti-fanfiction, still others—E. L. James’ inspiration, Stephenie Meyer, among them—are openly supportive of fanworks. Fandom advocate and bestselling author Naomi Novik (the Temeraire series) even continues to
write
fanfiction.

At the core, fanfiction and participation in Fandom is about a shared passion for the source material. So when E. L. James put a price tag on something that was previously free, it changed the very
intent
of her stories. “Master of the Universe,” something written for fellow Twilight fans, turned into something that needed—no,
demanded
—a wider audience. One that was willing to pay for what previously had been shared with a select community of readers. It doesn’t matter if you wrote under a name like Snowqueens Icedragon (James’ alias) or SamDean-Fan42: when you shed that persona and outgrow the audience
who supported you when you wore it, a certain amount of hurt feelings ensue. It’s as though positive comments aren’t enough—as though tangible profit has become a bigger draw than the give-and-take of your favorite fandom. And that, to some, is yet another broken rule of the fannish Fight Club. (It should probably be noted that I’ve broken several just by writing this.)

Mainstream media, in their lurid, almost viciously gleeful coverage of the Fifty Shades phenomenon, have tarred legions of female readers with a torrid brush. They’ve called out the women who hunch over their Kindles on the subway, laughed at the library hold lists that number in the hundreds, and offered a general sense of bewilderment at the idea that women might find something with adult content enjoyable to read. But for decades, even before the advent of the internet, Fandom was welcoming such women with open arms: bring us your tired, your poor, your kinky masses. Creating this constantly shifting and expanding home for the sexually curious is not a professional, paid endeavor but a philosophical one. Consequently,
Fifty Shades of Grey
’s success, and the ensuing media circus, has a lot of people who have lived in the virtual neighborhood for years shaking their canes and muttering, “Get off my lawn,” at those who come in wielding cameras and waving microphones.

After all, women were successfully indulging in their fantasies online, and off, long before Christian Grey handed Ana Steele a contract and started monitoring what she ate. This isn’t
new
. Spanking, beating, toys … I can guarantee that everybody from Harry Potter to Buffy Summers to the members of ‘NSync have been chained up and flogged into next Tuesday because someone thought it might be hot … and because it was perfectly acceptable within the confines of Fandom to do so. Fanworks have never been “mommy porn.” Fandom is not a skit on
Saturday Night Live
or a set of buzzwords in every newspaper’s competition to boost their sales—and it’s certainly not over 20 million copies sold and counting.

Fandom is like Fight Club. The first rule is that you don’t talk about it. But, rules and regulations be damned,
Fifty Shades of Grey
certainly started one hell of a conversation about women, reading, and sex.

ANNE JAMISON

“I
T’S NOT JANE AUSTEN.”

My mother’s blanket critique of all books, excepting the six of which it isn’t true, applied with equal disapproval to Samuel Beckett and, I would imagine, to
Fifty Shades of Grey
, although my particular mommy is not likely to make it through the first page of
that book
. (As in, Mom, I’m in the
Wall Street Journal
. —how exciting, what for? Amateur BDSM erotica, what else? —is this about
that book
again?) My mother would apply her phrase equally to
Twilight
, which she’s also unlikely to read, although Stephenie Meyer claims a “classical inspiration” for each of the saga’s books and identifies the first volume with
Pride and Prejudice
. Presumably, Meyer has in mind the basic structure of “Boy meets girl. Boy hates girl. They are destined to be together,” and less, say, elements of style.

I often teach Jane Austen. I also taught “Master of the Universe” (or MotU), the fanfiction version of
Fifty Shades of Grey
(names changed to protect the copyrighted), which was loosely based on
Twilight
, which was loosely based on Austen. I confess,
however, that I teach Austen in courses labeled “literature” and taught Snowqueens Icedragon, now better known as E. L. James, in a course labeled “popular culture.” While Jane Austen would qualify as pop culture (now with more zombies!), Fifty Shades is unlikely to be designated as literature in the critical hive mind anytime soon. E. L. James would probably agree. She may have name-checked
Tess
, but she knows it’s not what she’s writing.

“It ain’t Kansas.”

A phrase from a popular 1980s T-shirt, featuring “New York” with a picture of a gun. I sometimes fanfic it in my mind: “Twilight. It ain’t Austen,” with a picture of hands holding an apple (the original New York reference retained in a big apple, because that’s how fic evolves, a series of echoes). Or now, “Fifty Shades. It ain’t Twilight,” with the Twilight hands bound together by understated (grey) handcuffs, no sign of New York or its echoing apple. The original referent long gone, only the basic structure remains.

Retelling known and loved stories is nothing new. Jane Austen’s ne’er-do-wells Mr. Wickham and Willoughby are recognizable reiterations of “The Rake,” a stock character in Restoration drama. Does that make it fic? What is the difference between revisiting or revising myth and the writing we refer to as fanfiction? Does the distinction rest on how closely the revised vision resembles its source, or on whether the source is in the public domain, not copyrightable? Or does it simply come down to a label and finances: if you can earn money from it, it’s no longer fanfiction—a commercial distinction that makes no claims about literary value (whatever that is)? Is a text simply fanfiction when it is labeled as such, this label, in turn, proclaiming amateur status?

I taught Twilight fanfiction in a course that examined genre in both the traditional and popular sense of the word. In the more traditional literary critical sense,
genre
means simply a kind or category. If certain formal, stylistic, or thematic elements are
common to a group of stories, these stories constitute a genre. In contemporary and popular usage, however, “genre” fiction refers only to certain genres, which are also understood as distinct from “literary” fiction, and as a term it is often used pejoratively. The course was dedicated to “genre” in this sense, as well: the Western, science fiction, detective fiction, and … Twific. We looked at all-human (no sparkly vampires), alternate universe, novel-length, Edward/Bella fanfiction as a stand-in for the romance genre, but also in order to pose questions about genre in both senses. Was this body of work simply another variation on an established category? Did it behave enough like a genre to be one in its own right? Or was it something else entirely?

During the class, though, we kept returning to the same broader question: What makes fanfiction different from
any fiction?
I asked a group of contemporary novelists, all participants at a 2010 Comic-Con panel on retelling myth, what besides copyright separated the work they did from fanfiction. One jumped in faster than the others with an acerbic single-word answer: “quality”—and this wasn’t a
New Yorker
panel. This was
Comic-Con
.

Such attitudes, even in geek culture, are remarkably entrenched. If genre fiction is something like literature’s ugly cousin (from literature’s point of view), and romance is sci-fi, fantasy, and detective fiction’s annoying
girl
cousin, a tagalong picked last for the team, then fanfiction has long been the ugly cousin’s stepfamily’s misshapen mixed-breed dog, the one everyone is too ashamed to let out in public but unable to quite put down or even neuter.

One goal of my course was to examine the assumptions that underlie our understandings of categories like “literary,” “genre,” and, particularly in the case of fanfiction, “originality.” Students soon identified one of the primary assumptions people have about a “literary” or “original” work as its autonomy. It’s the kind of myth that the literary economy is so reliant on, it does not matter how frequently or systematically each top-selling work of
fiction gives it the lie (pitches read like this: “It’s
Emma
meets
Terminator
!” And not: “You’ve never read anything like this before”). It’s one of those myths we simply know is true: work is more valuable if it originates with its author and afterwards can stand on its own, and less valuable if it is derived or in any way requires propping. A copyright holder owns the rights to derivative works. They cannot stand on their own: it’s illegal.

When we read fanfiction, though, this question of a work standing on its own is not at issue. Although an individual fic may be
able
to stand on its own (be read without knowledge or consideration of its source), it
doesn’t
. Fanfiction invites readers, collectively and collaboratively, to
join in
. Clicking on a fanfiction link is like joining a perpetual online writing and reading party, a party that celebrates, consumes, and jubilantly re-creates a loved (or at least a known) work. Fanfiction identifies a particular taste and promises satisfaction—a particular kind of satisfaction, with warnings for plot twists that may seem to deviate. (A typical warning from a summary: “Edward starts out with Tanya, but don’t worry! This fic is Bella/Edward all the way!”)

When E. L. James/Snowqueens Icedragon wrote for this system, what did she get out of it? How is what she did different from sitting down to write a novel, alone in a room? If Fifty Shades started as fic—and it did more than start that way, the text is all but identical—is it still fic after selling (at current count) over 20 million copies? How does the way the narrative was produced, self-consciously derivative and interactive, affect the end result or how we judge it?

Like a Dickens novel,
Fifty Shades of Grey
(and the whole Fifty Shades trilogy) retains traces of its serial origins—a looser, more sprawling structure, but also more cliffhangers. Certainly, in the case of Fifty Shades, more climaxes. Can these serial rhythms and even the book’s perceived flaws help explain its popularity? In many respects, Fifty Shades is the antithesis of more than a century of narrative and stylistic orthodoxy: say only what you must to get your point across, to get your character from A to B,
and not more. Less is more. These are values that have been associated with literary fiction and commercial storytelling alike, as it happens, and these qualities are often what we mean by “good” writing. Fanfiction, on the other hand, and Fifty Shades in its wake, is founded on the principle that more is more. We are not done yet, fanfiction says; more would be better. Why not? Women like multiples.

Other traces of its fanfic origins mark Fifty Shades—again, at the level of construction. Fan writing, as fan writers who also write “original” (traditionally authored?) novels are quick to explain, allows a number of shortcuts. Usually, new fiction doesn’t come complete with a cast list, but fanfiction based on television and movie franchises does. So, fic tends to catalogue certain perfunctory details of appearance that cue known quantities (Bella: bites lip, stumbles, soft brown hair, smells of fruit, can’t imagine why Greek gods look at her, etc. Edward: sex hair. And other impossible perfections). In much the same way, character names foreshadow plot trajectories: in Twilight fanfiction, you know that no matter how nice that fellow James may seem to be, he’s up to no good. James will betray you; Edward will rescue you. The Jacob character may appeal to Bella and cause a jealous scene, but if the fic has an Edward/Bella label, the reader can rest assured Jacob will not prevail (Jacob fans have their own subgenre).

E. L. James/Snowqueens Icedragon took all these shortcuts. Her descriptions of Christian/Edward and Ana/Bella closely conform to fandom standards, with only the slightest cosmetic changes to the published version. When she took her story from its fanfiction context and published it, though, it turned out that a lot of that “missing” characterization and attention to setting that even high school–level creative writing instruction stresses was superfluous for millions of people. James’ readers simply didn’t need a fully detailed world or finely wrought characters. The Twilight template was working fine for them even without reference to the original. Less is more, in some cases, after all.

I confess, I don’t really read that way. I would argue—somewhat quixotically—that E. L. James’ Fifty Shades was more valuable from a literary perspective when it did
not
stand on its own, even though the fanfiction and the “original” published novel are all but identical. I’m not arguing that Fifty Shades somehow
can’t
stand on its own (20 million+ readers say otherwise), but rather that the same work was more literary (read: more complex, discursive, critical, stylistically motivated) when it didn’t. “Master of the Universe” was more engaging intellectually as part of a complex system of interwoven, mutually commenting fictions and character studies than it could ever be on its own.

As Twilight fanfiction grew more widespread and its community more diverse and sophisticated, it drifted farther and farther from its Twilight source, often revising or reversing it very pointedly. Bella’s not graceless, she’s a ballerina, or a gymnast—but still, undeniably, this poise is understood in relation to that initial annoying stumbling, a reversal of a known quantity we’re reminded of every time we read her name. Those revised fanfiction stories end up functioning as commentary: reversing grating characteristics or, alternately, imagining what circumstances could have led to the
Twilight
characters’ troubling passive (Bella) or controlling (Edward) behavior. Fanfiction Edward, for example, often grew up emotionally stunted after watching his mother die in some horrible way—whether culminating years of abuse or neglect, as in “Master of the Universe,” or violently curtailing an idyllic Oedipal bubble. Would this be enough damage, each successive fic asked, to explain Edward’s withholding, controlling tendencies? What trauma could lead Bella to her perpetual state of passive acceptance, her lack of self-insight, of basic self-worth? This was a fandom game my students loved to watch: What exclusively human trauma would make the behavior of Twilight’s main characters seem psychologically earned? A different take on these traits could be found in BDSM Twific: Bella’s a sub; this isn’t psychological trauma, this is sexuality, and Bella can be self-aware about
it, assertive and proactive about her desire to be controlled in the bedroom, without having these desires take over her whole personality and life.

Fifty Shades, then, grew not out of one source—Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga
—
but out of a system of mutually derivative and transformative texts. In fact, another reason for teaching “Master of the Universe” was that it
was
so multiply derivative: The “Office” genre. “Mogul” Edward. The BDSM fic. The more-assertive Bella (submissive Bellas were
always
depicted as more assertive than Meyer’s original characterization). The dial-a-childhoodtrauma game. “Master of the Universe” read like a pastiche of all these established moves.

This isn’t cheating. Drawing obviously and explicitly from other fics is standard practice in fan writing communities. Watching it happen is like watching genres develop at warp speed. Someone writes a popular faniction—take “The Office” by Tby789. Edward is a corporate type—a CFO—and Bella is his assistant. They hate each other. They have sex. A LOT. They are destined to be together. (The
Pride and Prejudice
template—now with more sex! Etc.) This fiction takes off, inspires countless variations on a theme.

When I first became interested in Twilight fanfiction in 2009, “The Office” was one of
the
stories people were talking about, and it had just been taken down from the web by its author. At that time, it had over 2 million hits on FanFiction.Net. The fandom assumed the author was trying to publish it (she wasn’t), and this was already causing anger and rancor. Although the original “Office” story was “gone” (officially, but old fanfictions, even “Master of the Universe,” are never really more than an archived PDF away), its mark was everywhere. By the time I finally got a copy of the story, I had seen it recycled, recast, retold so many times, I felt like I was rereading it.