The Fifty Shades Novels

E.L. James elevated erotica to new heights

“What is it about elevators?” Christian Grey asks as he and Ana Steele emerge from one, just after the first, if interupted, release of sexual tension in the novel Fifty Shades of Grey. So begins the pattern of Elevator innuendo in E.L. James’s phenomenally successful erotic romance. The Fifty Shades trilogy and parallel Christian-POV triplet do hold many surprises. There are many aspects and angles to take if one was inclined to take an analytical stance. If you haven’t read it, or if you’re not me, you may find that statement amusing. “It’s just about kinky sex, isn’t it?” Well, let’s see; I’ll try to enumerate the potential angles. 

There is a beautiful female protagonist who stumbles (literally, falls) into the shadowy and controlled orbit of a beast of a man. He’s beautiful too, but he’s also, to quote from the novels, “fifty shades of fucked up.” Do I need to spell it out? Maybe I do. There’s your Beauty and the Beast angle. I mean, even the name Anastasia has a fairy tale ring to it, and Christian consistently regards himself as a “monster” and an “asshole.”

There’s also the Thomas Hardy angle, which the author makes explicit with her direct references to Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Both Christian and Ana (aka Anastasia) are avid readers of classic literature. As an avid reader myself, I love Ana’s casual quoting of King Lear, as well as Christian’s reference to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Christian even has a personal library full of first editions that includes a set of Hardy’s works. With regard to Tess, it is an open question that lingers between them and taunts the reader—is he her Alec or is he her Angel? Perhaps he is both (fifty shades, after all) or neither. I say it’s a little of both and yet ultimately neither. Christian ends up being far superior—he’s too philanthropic and generous to be an Alec, but he’s also tougher and ultimately taps into more resilience than Angel. He has qualities of both, though, notably Alec’s powers of seduction and Angel’s propensity to put the heroine on a pedestal.

The Fifty Shades universe could be endlessly pondered from a psychoanalytic angle. Physical abuse, sexual exploitation, abandonment, and neglect are are all tied into the characters’ lives, along with divorce and adoption, and these are just a few of the angles that the armchair, and certainly the professional psychologist could tackle. Daddy issues and mommy issues take some part in this twisted tale. Christian refers to his bio-mom as “the crackwhore” (accurate but harsh) while simultaneously exalting his adopted mother, Grace, as the woman who saved him and the best of women. Grace, to him, is like the Madonna of the paintings in his penthouse. From beginning to end, we see Ana alluded to in both contexts, increasingly in the latter as Christian falls deeply in love with her. “I’m a sadist, Ana. I like to whip little brown-haired girls like you because you all look like the crack whore—my birth mother.”¹ That was Christian being ashamed and remorseful, haunted by his past behavior and desperate to immerse himself in Ana’s light. But Ana wasn’t just another “brown-haired” submissive. In the Christian-POV novels, he often notices the auburn shades in her hair, her reddish brown hair and blue eyes offering a counterpart to his “fifty shades of grey.” She’s not just one color either, but many shades and multilayered. 

I’m interested in all of these angles, in all the potential analogies, and more. For this article, I’m choosing the Elevator analogy because it is simple and yet profound, and it offers a through-line to other angles. The Elevator takes the couple from the ground, where they interact reluctantly with ordinary mortals, to the penthouse where the sun rises and sets before anywhere else. So close to the sun, like Icarus, another explicit analogy from the author. They fly, they soar, they ride the Elevator in ecstasy. The Elevator is there at the beginning when she rides it on her way to his office to meet him for the first time, and when she gets back on it after that meeting, her blue eyes intent upon his grey ones. First, the doors open and she walks into his life. Then, the doors close and she’s gone. From that time forward, it is Christian in pursuit. “I’m finding it impossible to stay away,” he told her after their first night sharing a bed (just for sleeping, but still) and shortly before the first kiss in the Elevator, the one where he says “fuck the paperwork” (the legal contract establishing her as Submissive and him as Dominant) and proceeds to attack her tongue with his. That’s the Elevator as a passage, a rite of passage, from one stage of acquaintance to another. 

From that moment, the Elevator is for Christian and Ana both a place of anticipation and a stage for foreplay. We had already seen it as, first, a passage toward meeting, and, second, a conduit to intimacy. They don’t always act on it, but the tension between them is always at its most taut, their magnetism at peak charge in the Elevator. But it is not only a passage. It is also a beginning and an end, a Point A and a Point B. Christian often looks back to Ana walking through the Elevator doors, leaving him, and not looking back. When the Elevator doors close behind her, he is left in severe pain, feeling abandoned and depressed, and from there he resolves to try the relationship her way instead of his. Thus, the Elevator represented not only a passage between physical points but also a transformation or an evolution involving profound interior change. He laments her leaving him through those Elevator doors, but he also recognizes that if she had never left him, he would not have made that transition. 

The Elevator goes both ways. Up or down. You can land at the penthouse or you can land in the middle of something. Fifty Shades Darker, the second book in the series, opens with what is essentially phase two of their relationship. Yet even though Christian is determined now to be in what is—for both, albeit for different reasons—a new kind of a relationship, the past torments, pursues, and taunts him. The darkness pursues Grey as he chases the light, Ana his goal. He calls her his talisman. The nightmares keep him awake unless she is sleeping next to him. 

Even in the light, he feels terrible fear. Even with her at his side, there is the fear of losing her. He fears either that she could leave him or that she could die. Thus, Christian has to learn that loss is an inextricable part of loving. You can’t love so deeply without fearing the loss of the beloved. He exalts Grace as the one who saved him as a child, from hunger and abuse, but Ana has saved him too, from himself. While Ana kissed his wounds, she also held the power to wound him more deeply than any other. That power, of course, like the Elevator, cuts both ways. From Ana’s perspective, the danger is being burnt by the sun. She is Icarus, Christian the sun. She likes some of his “kinky fuckery,” as she calls it; she just doesn’t want him to hurt her. They chase the dawn and the dusk together in spite of the fear that’s always present. Whether it’s the vulnerability or the mercurial, it’s the uncertainty and the risk that makes it so challenging. She likes the “kinky fuckery” and all the shades of Christian: “Oh, I love megalomaniac Christian, too, and control freak Christian, sexpertise Christian, kinky Christian, romantic Christian, shy Christian—the list is endless.” To which he replies, “That’s a whole lot of Christians.” And then she says, “I’d say at least fifty.”²

The universal nature of the Fifty Shades saga is directly tied to its incredible success. E.L. James tells the story in a way that is not only relatable but quite timeless. There is what I can only conceive as a casual formality about the way the characters talk to each other. They are Mr. Grey and Ms. Steele so much of the time, occasionally using their first names, but frequently speaking in a way that echoes an Austen or Brontë novel. The Fifty Shades saga recalls the gothic novels of old not just somewhat in style and substance, but also in the massive attention and popularity that it gained, and no doubt continues to gain, especially since its conversion into a trilogy of major motion pictures. Some might think it’s the sex that draws the massive readership, but I would argue that it’s the love story even more than the sex that makes it so universally appealing. Sex will have a part in any good love story, even a considerably more withheld one than Fifty Shades, but whether the sex is on the page or not, it is the romance that bends the arc. Sex without romance? Or, rather, sex without “hearts and flowers,” to borrow Christian’s phrasing, probably has appeal for some, certainly for those who like pornography, but that’s another genre, or industry….a less widespread or mainstream one, I would hazard to guess. There are just some things that will never change and one of those things is that more people love Jane Austen than don’t love her. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

1. Quoted from Chapter 14, Fifty Shades Darker, by E.L. James

2. Quoted from Chapter 18, Fifty Shades Freed, by E.L. James