Spreading the Word: What Fiy Shades of Grey
Means for World Literature
Waiyee Loh, Department of English, Kanagawa University, Japan, waiy[email protected]
How does the global popularity of bestselling romance novel Fiy Shades of Grey complicate David
Damrosch’s seminal denion of World Literature as ‘literary works that circulate beyond their
culture of origin,’ and which are ‘acvely present within a literary system beyond that of [their]
original culture’? By oering a formal textual analysis of a novel few would call ‘literature,’ I explore
how Fiy Shades provides a test case for rethinking what World Literature is, how it travels, and how
we study it. With its ‘digital-like’ form and celebraon of aecve labour, Fiy Shades encourages
readers to publicise the novel by spreading fragments of its content through online social media
networks as a form of unpaid labour. This ‘spreading’ of the novel compels us to reconsider World
Literature in the light of digital media and fan parcipaon.
C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Wrings is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Open Library of
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OPEN ACCESS
Loh, Waiyee. 2023. “Spreading the Word: What
Fiy Shades of Grey Means for World Literature.”
C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Wrings 10(1):
pp. 1–24. DOI: hps://doi.org/10.16995/c21.4802
Journal of 21st-century
Writings
LITERATURE
2
Introducon
Much of the scholarship surrounding E. L. James’s bestselling romance novel Fifty
Shades of Grey (2012) expresses a striking reluctance to analyse the novel as a literary
text. Published in three volumes (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades
Freed) spanning a total of 1,625 pages, the novel presents critics with the challenge of
explicating a text that is so thick with content yet seems so thin in terms of its meaning.
In a special issue of Sexualities on ‘Reading the Fifty Shades “Phenomenon”,’ IQ Hunter
(2013: 969) writes:
After only ninety dreadful pages of the first book, I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t
think of anything worth writing about it, let alone anything scholarly and original....
my excited anticipation [had been] deflated by a close up and personal encounter
with a book far more engaging as a phenomenon than actually to read.
Hunter’s comments are typical of existing research on Fifty Shades of Grey (henceforth
Fifty Shades). Many scholars and cultural commentators give little weight to close
readings of the novel and focus instead on considering Fifty Shades as a social
phenomenon, examining the novel’s larger significance for the publishing industry;
the ethics of publishing fan fiction for commercial profit; reader reception; and what
the novel reveals about what women want, do not want, and should not want.
1
In other
words, many critics prefer to explore the social relations that connect the novel to
readers and publishers, rather than analyse the formal qualities that characterise Fifty
Shades as a literary text. Some of these critics also criticise Fifty Shades, or mention
that it has been heavily criticised by others, for its ‘bad writing.’ In a feature article
for Newsweek, Katie Roiphe (2012: 28) concludes that ‘what [is] most alarming about
the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena [sic], what gives it its true edge of desperation,
and end-of-the-world ambience, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are
willing to tolerate prose on this level.’
2
While hardly intending to do so, these critics
give the impression that it is not worth paying close attention to the form of Fifty Shades
because the novel is so badly written. The novel’s repetitive plot, flat characters, and
often painfully awkward choice of expression certainly tried this author’s patience.
Nevertheless, this article argues that attentiveness to literary form yields insights into
the ways in which the novel’s infamously ‘bad’ form has actually helped Fifty Shades to
become a global social phenomenon.
1
See, for example, Jamison (2013); Shaw (2012); Jones (2014); Deller and Smith (2013); and van Reenen (2014).
2
See also Jones (2014: 2–3); Deller, Harman, and Jones (2013: 860); and Hunter (2013: 971).
3
In fact, analysing the novel via close reading helps us to understand how and why
Fifty Shades and other similar works of contemporary fiction are read so widely around
the world. Circulation-oriented theories of World Literature often examine how literary
texts travel through translation, and some scholars have focused in particular on how the
formal qualities of a text might contribute to its being translated. Rebecca Walkowitz’s
‘born-translated’ novel, for example, self-consciously calls out for its own translation,
whereas David Damrosch’s ‘global’ literature deliberately erases local cultural
dierences to facilitate the process of translation.
3
In a radical variation of this approach
to World Literature, Franco Moretti calls for ‘distant reading’ – namely, the large-
scale quantitative analysis of data – to discern how literary forms, rather than specific
texts, travel across geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
4
The first part of
this article, however, makes a case for close reading as a productive means of analysing
how aesthetic form plays a crucial role in enabling Fifty Shades to transcend its original
context of production. The notoriously poor quality of E. L. James’s prose (repetitive plot,
verbatim repetitions, simplistic temporality and narratorial voice, formal incoherence,
and so on) enables readers to take the novel apart easily, and to disseminate or ‘spread’
fragments of its content online to other Internet users. The novel thus functions as an
example of what Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green have called ‘spreadable
media’ (2013). The second and third parts of the article build on this formal analysis to
explore 1) how Fifty Shades dramatises the concept of aective labour through the romantic
relationship between the two protagonists, and 2) how this romanticisation of aective
labour sheds light on the role of fan labour in ‘spreading’ media content. The work that
fans do in spreading word about Fifty Shades online represents an ambivalent example
of participatory culture: fans contribute to E.L. James’s commercial success by lovingly
remixing the novel through online forums, discussions, parodies, and commentaries, yet
they have not been given due credit for supporting Fifty Shades’s transformation from
Twilight fan fiction to international bestseller.
In particular, Fifty Shades introduces a new digital dimension to Damrosch’s (2003:4)
seminal definition of World Literature as ‘literary works that circulate beyond their
culture of origin,’ and which are ‘actively present within a literary system beyond that
of [their] original culture.’ Fifty Shades circulates widely around the world via digital
networks. This is not only because the e-book format oers a high degree of portability
and privacy (Shaw 2012), although these are important factors. Fifty Shades was initially
published online as the Twilight fan fiction story ‘Master of the Universe’ and then as a
print-on-demand digital book, before being picked up for mass publication by Vintage
3
See Walkowitz (2015); and Damrosch (2003: 18).
4
See More (2005; 2013).
4
in 2012.
5
While James and her publishers claimed that she had significantly revised
‘Master of the Universe’ for publication as Fifty Shades, fan accounts of the novel’s
controversial publication history suggest otherwise (Brennan & Large 2014: 29–30).
6
Fifty Shades appears to be an almost identical reproduction of its online fan fiction
precursor. These digital origins might explain why Fifty Shades’s stylistic form aligns
so closely with that of digital media – even in the print version of the novel – but it is
dicult to establish such a causal relationship without access to the author’s drafts,
reader comments, and online chapters of ‘Master of the Universe,’ which James took
down so that she could publish the work commercially. James’s removal of these online
records limits our ability to trace the evolution of Fifty Shades from a digital text to a
print novel that resembles a digital text. Nonetheless, the novel’s ‘digital-like’ form
encourages and enables readers to engage in a form of unpaid aective labour when they
share short passages of text from the novel through online social media networks, even
when this ‘born-digital’ text is translated into print. By applying the practice of close
reading to a novel few would call ‘literature,’ I use Fifty Shades as a test case for revising
our understanding of World Literature in light of digital media and fan participation.
From Naon to Social Network
As literary studies increasingly shifts its focus ‘from nation to network’ (C. Levine
2013), the global popularity of Fifty Shades draws our attention to digital media as a
paradigmatic example of networked literary production and consumption. Fifty Shades’s
infamously clunky prose actually makes it highly ‘spreadable’ (Jenkins, Ford & Green
2013) via digital social media networks such as fan forums, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook.
The judgment of bad writing that detractors of Fifty Shades have levelled at the novel
might be seen as a stylistic form that embodies the experience of reading digital texts.
This ‘digital-like’ form, which is embedded even in the print version of Fifty Shades,
encourages the reader to fragment the novel into bite-sized pieces for ‘sharing’ and
discussing online, thereby facilitating the novel’s circulation via social media.
Fifty Shades looks like bad writing because of its ambivalent relationship with the
nineteenth-century realist novel, to which it frequently alludes. Not only does Fifty
Shades invoke the marriage plot in its depiction of the romance between Christian Grey
and Anastasia Steele, it also cites canonical nineteenth-century texts and authors as a
shorthand for presenting the female protagonist ‘Ana’ as a bookish young woman who
miraculously wins the aection of a rich and handsome man, like a latter-day Jane Eyre.
Christian begins his courtship of Ana by giving her a first edition copy of Thomas Hardy’s
5
See Brennan and Large (2014) for an overview of Fiy Shades’s publicaon history.
6
See also Lie (2012); and Boog (n. dat.).
5
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which he knows is one of the ‘classic British novel[s]’ that Ana
loves to read (James 2012a: 6). Christian’s copy of Tess comes in three volumes, which
mirror the number of volumes that make up Fifty Shades. In Fifty Shades Freed, the third
volume of the novel, Ana’s personified ‘subconscious’ busies herself with reading The
Complete Works of Charles Dickens (James 2012c: 33, 49, 121) and Jane Eyre (James 2012c:
346), while her libidinous ‘inner goddess’ enjoys sex with Christian. Readers who are
familiar with nineteenth-century novels, however, will quickly realise that Fifty Shades
appears to lack the formal characteristics of complexity, coherence, and character
development that literary scholars typically associate with nineteenth-century British
realism.
7
Unlike Thackeray’s Vanity Fair or Dickens’s Bleak House, Fifty Shades shows a
general lack of interest in ‘[w]hat connexion [there can] be’ (Dickens 2003: 256) between
events in the plot, and between the various people and places that appear in the novel.
The plot of Fifty Shades is extremely repetitive and monotonous. Christian and Ana
undergo the same cycle repeatedly: Christian tries to dominate Ana, Ana rebels and
they fight, Ana feels guilty and apologises for rebelling, and they make up by having
steamy sex. The novel also includes a large amount of inconsequential detail about
Ana’s thoughts and actions, which adds to its tediousness. Ana’s internal monologue
reads like a series of diary entries describing nitty-gritty everyday activities that do not
add meaningfully to the plot. For instance, in a scene that occurs close to the end of the
first volume, Christian takes Ana out to an International House of Pancakes café for
breakfast. They exchange innuendoes, the waitress is embarrassed by Christian’s good
looks (like all the other women in the novel), and they proceed to discuss their BDSM
contract, which, 450 pages into the book, the two protagonists are still contesting.
The scene comes to an end, and the IHOP café does not appear again in the rest of the
novel. This repetitive and pointless nature of many of the novel’s scenes means that the
reader does not have to make an eort to remember what comes before, and to make
connections between dierent parts of the text in order to understand what is going on.
Even on a syntactic level, Fifty Shades employs repetition to reduce the need for
the reader to make connections. The novel is written entirely in the first-person from
Ana’s perspective, and her narration is solely set in the present. Time in the narrative
therefore moves forward only in a linear direction, which makes narrative time (or
‘plot’) essentially coterminous with chronological time (or ‘story’). Instead of using
7
Scholars of nineteenth-century realism have acknowledged that, while it is very dicult to formulate a clear-cut den-
ion of realism’s formal properes, it is possible to idenfy several characteriscs that make up what Caroline Levine
(2012: 84–85), following Amanda Claybaugh, calls the ‘syndrome’ of Victorian realism. See, for example, G. Levine
(1981) on complexity; Williams (1974) on ‘organic’ coherence; and More (1987) on the socialisaon of the modern
subject in the bildungsroman.
6
flashbacks, the novel literally repeats phrases and sentences from earlier parts of the
text to indicate that Ana is thinking about the past:
As I lie staring into the darkness, I think of all the times he warned me to stay away.
Anastasia, you should steer clear of me. I’m not the man for you.
I don’t do the girlfriend thing.
I’m not a hearts and flowers kind of guy.
I don’t make love.
This is all I know. (James 2012a: 230)
Immediately some of the things he’s said spring into my mind.
I don’t want to lose you . . .
You’ve bewitched me . . .
You’ve completely beguiled me . . .
I’ll miss you, too . . . more than you know . . . (James 2012a: 398)
In both of these instances, the novel reproduces Christian’s words verbatim, literally
quoting itself to remind the reader of Christian’s contradictory expressions of love for
Ana. The novel uses this same technique to repeat information about the BDSM contract.
The contract is printed in full on pages 165 to 175, and then parts of it reappear on pages
255 to 258 and 499 to 500, as Christian and Ana negotiate the contract’s terms and
conditions. Once again, this practice of verbatim reproduction minimises demands on
the reader to hold the dierent parts of the narrative in his/her memory so as to articulate
the relations between these parts. Reading instead becomes quick and eortless.
Lastly, Fifty Shades’s multiple literary allusions also contribute to the novel’s lack of
formal coherence. The references to Hardy’s Tess in the first volume do little more than
position Ana as a virginal young woman and Christian as a composite figure combining
Alec d’Urberville’s debauchery and Angel Clare’s punishment of Tess for not living
up to his ideals. Rather than engaging with the tragic rape of Hardy’s heroine – Ana’s
response to Tess is summed up in the statement ‘Damn, that woman was in the wrong
place at the wrong time in the wrong century’ (James 2012a: 21) – the novel invokes Tess
rather perversely to celebrate its female protagonist’s growing desire to be ‘punished’
sexually by a domineering man. Like many other postfeminist heroines, Ana exercises
her autonomy by actively forsaking that autonomy, again and again.
8
Ana consistently
obeys Christian’s commands both in and outside of the bedroom. ‘I do as I’m told,’
she tells the reader repeatedly (James 2012a: 428). Unlike the nineteenth-century
8
For discussions of poseminist media, see Gill (2007: 258–61); and Tasker and Negra (2007).
7
bildungsroman that focuses attention on a single, highly individuated protagonist who
finds his/her place in the world (C. Levine 2012: 90), Fifty Shades presents a narrative of
character regression instead of development, with Ana becoming more submissive with
every iteration of the cycle (I will say more about this in the second section of the article
on female aective labour). After approximately three-quarters of the first volume, the
references to Tess disappear and are replaced by a plethora of literary references ranging
from Robinson Crusoe (James 2012b: 47) and The Little Prince (James 2012b: 223) to The
Complete Works of Charles Dickens (James 2012c: 33). These references have nothing in
common besides functioning as a kind of name-dropping that supposedly demonstrates
how cultured and intelligent Christian and Ana are. The novel thus thwarts attempts to
read it as a palimpsestic rewriting of earlier literary texts, presenting the reader instead
with a jumble of floating and fragmentary literary citations.
Fifty Shades thus comes across as a badly written novel because it flouts the
expectations of formal cohesion that E. L. James’s consistent employment of
intertextuality raises. On the one hand, the novel makes frequent allusions to the
tradition of nineteenth-century realism. On the other hand, the form of Fifty Shades
does not match conventional critical perceptions of realism, which, as Elaine
Freedgood (2019: ix) has recently argued, often imagine the ‘Victorian novel’ to be
‘integrated, coherent, and conservative.’
9
Yet the novel also does not align itself
with the avant-garde aesthetics of modernism, or the linguistic and epistemological
concerns of postmodernism. What makes Fifty Shades dierent from both realist and
non-realist forms of literature is its fragmentary form, which detractors of the novel
have neglected to analyse in detail because of its association with ‘bad writing.’ While
there are certainly suggestive parallels between Victorian serialised fiction and Fifty
Shades’s genesis as serialised fan fiction online, the fragmentariness of Fifty Shades is of
a dierent order. All serialised narratives are fragmentary insofar as they are consumed
in parts, but Fifty Shades strikingly lacks what Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund
(1991) have described as the Victorian serial’s abiding concern with steady, continuous
development over time. In this sense, despite its serialised nature, Fifty Shades is also
very much unlike contemporary ‘complex’ television serials which, as Jason Mittell has
argued, foreground development, unity, and craftsmanship. Mittell (2015) claims that
‘complex TV’ shows such as ABC’s Lost (2004–2010) and HBO’s The Wire (2002–2008)
avoid giving explicit storytelling cues, thereby compelling viewers to pay close attention
to how the story is told, and to piece together evidence in order to make sense of the
story’s enigma. Such TV narratives ‘ask [viewers] to trust in the payo that [they] will
eventually arrive at a moment of complex but coherent comprehension’ (Mittell 2015:
9
Freedgood (2019: xi) argues that, from the 1850s to the 1960s – before the nineteenth-century realist novel became
instuonalised as a ‘great’ form of literature – the Victorian novel ‘was not always imagined as formally coherent or as
realisc in a good way.’
8
50). Fifty Shades, on the other hand, de-emphasises ‘continuity and a sense of long-
term memory,’ and does not display a ‘depth of references’ or ‘details that require
the liberal use of pause and rewind’ (Mittell 2010: 4). With its repetitive and episodic
plot structure and small cast of characters, Fifty Shades more closely resembles earlier
forms of ‘non-complex’ serialised television which, Mittell (2010: 4) argues, sought
to ‘create episodes that could be viewed in any order by a distracted viewer with only
casual attention.’
In other words, the piecemeal quality of Fifty Shades encourages a speedy and
fragmentary mode of reading that echoes not only how we used to watch television,
but also the ways in which we read digital texts such as online news stories, tweets,
Facebook posts, and YouTube videos. The novel in fact reproduces the experience of
reading email and mobile phone text messages, by presenting the messages that
Christian and Ana send to each other in a typographical format that mimics that of
actual emails and text messages (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Chrisan and Ana discuss the BDSM contract via email (James 2012a: 180–81).
9
The novel presents what Christian and Ana see on their screens directly on the
printed page. This sense of immediacy is especially prominent in parts of the novel
where Christian and Ana send emails back and forth, and the emails are reproduced on
the printed page in a continuous sequence. Moreover, these verbatim transcriptions
of emails and text messages (as well as excerpts from the BDSM contract and even
quotations from Tess of the d’Urbervilles) break the text up visually, thereby making it
easy for the reader to skim the text quickly, and to even skip over sections to get to the
sex scenes or other passages that seem more interesting to the reader (Figure 2).
Repetition, inconsequential detail, narrative fragmentation, and the emails and
text messages in Fifty Shades collectively invoke a mode of reading digital texts that
Katherine Hayles (2012: 61) calls ‘hyper reading.’ Hyper reading is a form of superficial or
‘surface reading’ that is the opposite of close reading. Hayles (2007: 187–88) describes
this opposition as the contrast between ‘deep attention’ and ‘hyper attention’:
Figure 2: Christian’s quotation of Tess, as well as the publication details of the book,
visually break up the narrative into fragments (James 2012a: 54–55).
10
Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is
characterised by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by
Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single informa-
tion stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is
characterised by switching focus rapidly among dierent tasks, preferring multiple
information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance
for boredom. The contrast in the two cognitive modes may be captured in an image:
picture a college sophomore deep in Pride and Prejudice, with her legs draped over an
easy chair, oblivious to her ten-year-old brother sitting in front of a console, jam-
ming on a joystick while he plays Grand Theft Auto.
It is not a coincidence that Hayles references nineteenth-century realist novels by
Austen and Dickens as exemplary texts that require ‘deep attention,’ in contrast to Fifty
Shades, whose ambivalent relation to realist conventions primes the reader to engage in
‘hyper reading’ instead. In his polemical article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, Nicholas
Carr (2008) describes a similar opposition between deep reading and Internet reading
in more explicitly spatial terms: ‘My mind now expects to take in information the way
the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in
the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.’ Whereas formalist
critics in recent years have proposed ‘surface reading’ as an alternative to historicist
and theoretical approaches to literary criticism, the mode of ‘surface reading’ that
Hayles and Carr describe completely rejects close reading, whether ‘deep’ or not.
10
This
digitally-inflected mode of surface reading deploys techniques such as skimming and
scanning, filtering by keywords, hyperlinking, and ‘pecking’ (pulling out a few items
from a longer text) to engage in what James Sosnoski refers to as ‘reader-directed,
screen-based, computer-assisted reading’ (qtd. in Hayles 2012: 61).
Rather than encouraging readers to take the time to make careful connections
between the dierent parts of a text, surface reading compels readers to fragment
texts in order to find the information they want as quickly as possible. Fragmentation
is key to Fifty Shades’s widespread circulation via online social media. New media, in
Lev Manovich’s seminal theorisation, are inherently open to fragmentation. Digital
10
Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus rst introduced the concept of ‘surface reading’ as an alternave to the ‘hermeneucs
of suspicion’ in their introducon to the 2009 special issue of Representaons on ‘The Way We Read Now.’ See also Love
(2010); and Levine (2015). These forms of ‘surface reading’ are essenally modes of close reading that focus exclus-
ively on tracking the development of formal paerns across the surface of the text. As such they have been cricised
for privileging descripon over interpretaon, and for creang a spurious antagonism between formal and contextual
analysis. See Tanoukhi (2016: 1426–29); and Goodlad (2015: 268–94).
11
media texts are ‘modular’: in other words, they are composed of discrete units of
information that can be combined into larger objects without losing their fundamental
separateness (Manovich 2001: 30–31). Manovich (2001: 30) gives the example of a
video clip inserted into a Microsoft Word document. Because of its modular nature,
the video clip can be edited or removed without impinging on the surrounding written
text. Likewise, in invoking surface reading, Fifty Shades invites the reader to treat
the novel as if it were a Word document that can be fragmented into discrete units of
information. These units can then be extracted and ‘shared’ online without aecting
the overall architecture of the novel’s plot and meaning. In Spreadable Media, Henry
Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (2013: 198) emphasise ‘portability’ as one of
several strategies for creating media content that is more likely to ‘spread’ online.
Echoing Manovich’s principles of digital media, Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013: 198)
argue that, for media content to be ‘spreadable,’ online users should find it easy to
pick up the content and insert it elsewhere (for example, in a Facebook post). Despite
being a printed text, the form of Fifty Shades embodies this principle of modularity
characteristic of digital media, thereby facilitating the novel’s ‘spread’ via online social
media networks, albeit in fragmented form. Compared to the nineteenth-century
novels that Fifty Shades cites, and to more contemporary plot-driven forms of genre
fiction, it is much easier to ‘share’ and discuss fragments of Fifty Shades online without
having to connect the dierent elements in the text to make sense of it. Discussants
of Fifty Shades do not have to worry about ‘sharing’ too little of the novel for fellow
online users to understand what the novel is about. Nor do they have to worry about
‘sharing’ too much to the extent that they give the plot away and inadvertently spoil
the pleasure of reading the novel for others. By ‘sharing’ fragments from the text and
thereby spreading awareness of Fifty Shades, online users pique the interest of other
users, and encourage them (intentionally or not) to read the novel so that they too can
join in the conversation.
A brief look at online discussions of Fifty Shades demonstrates how the novel
circulates through this practice of ‘sharing’ extracts. In response to the question
‘What made you read Fifty Shades of Grey?’ on the Oh Fifty! A Fifty Shades Fansite forum,
a fan with the username ‘Felicia’ wrote that she bought all three volumes of the novel
based on a single excerpt from the first book, which she had found online. There is
also an entire thread in the forum in which fans list and discuss their favourite quotes
from the novel. More recently, fans on Twitter shared quotes from the novel to
build anticipation for the Fifty Shades Freed movie adaptation, which was released in
February 2018. For example, a user named @Fiftys_Fitties marked Day 257 in a year-
long countdown with a tweet asking fans what song they would put on Christian’s
12
iPod. The tweet includes an extract from Fifty
Shades of Grey, the first volume of the novel,
presumably as a starting point for discussion
(Figure 3).
Even critics of the novel engage in the same
practice of fragmentation, extraction, and
citation, but for the purpose of panning the
novel for its poorly written prose. The Honest
Trailers parody of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie
on YouTube, for example, lampoons both
adaptation and source material by listing several
‘horrible lines from the book that thankfully
didn’t make it into the movie.’ As Umberto Eco
(1986: 197–98) writes in Travels in Hyperreality,
a text’s openness to fragmentation is crucial in
determining its popularity:
What are the requirements for transforming a
book or movie into a cult object? The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not
enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote char-
acters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world.... I
think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break,
dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their
original relationship with the whole.
With its ‘digital-like’ stylistic form, Fifty Shades particularly invites fans and foes alike
to dismember the novel and spread its fragments far and wide, thereby contributing to
the novel’s ubiquity in the transnational networks of online digital culture.
Loving Work: Fans and Aecve Labour
Like all forms, the form of Fifty Shades has its ‘aordances’ (C. Levine 2015: 6–7),
but form alone does not ensure that a text will circulate widely. Fifty Shades became
popular worldwide not just because of its ‘digital-like’ form, but also because the
romance between Christian and Ana resonated with the kind of labour that fans often
engage in when showing aection for their favourite media texts. In Spreadable Media,
Jenkins et al. (2013: 19–21) take issue with the metaphor of ‘going viral’ because of
its denial of human agency in spreading content. While media producers can enhance
Figure 3: Tweet by @Fiftys_Fitties.
13
their content’s potential for spreading, Jenkins et al. (2013: 196) argue that online
users ultimately spread content because they want to do so. Fans, in particular, spread
content out of love, whether it is love for specific personages (such as idols) or specific
narratives (such as films, TV shows, and works of popular fiction). Fans of Fifty Shades
performed this labour of spreading the novel online – and in doing so they made use of
the novel’s capacity for fragmentation – partly because the marriage plot in the novel
idealises women’s participation in aective labour, of which fan labour is a significant
part. In celebrating aective labour in the context of post-Fordist capitalism, Fifty
Shades eectively celebrates the fan labour that has made its production and widespread
circulation possible. Reading Fifty Shades against the grain helps to illuminate the
nature of fan engagement with the novel.
The conventional marriage plot of the nineteenth-century novel usually ends with
the female protagonist subordinating herself to a man through marriage, in exchange
for her freedom from waged labour in the domestic sphere. Nancy Armstrong (1987:
41–42) has famously argued that domestic fiction naturalises this ‘sexual contract’
by presenting this exchange as a matter of private, romantic relationships rather than
a political and economic structure of power. Like its nineteenth-century precursors,
Fifty Shades romanticises the sexual contract – quite literally – but also updates it to
naturalise a highly exploitative relationship between capital and aective labour, which
is now both waged and unwaged under the conditions of late capitalism. Fifty Shades
appropriates the glamour of Christian and Ana’s BDSM relationship to glorify not only
Intimate Partner Violence, but also a particularly extreme form of capital’s domination
over labour.
11
Christian repeatedly invokes the idea of work in his romantic relationship
with Ana, blurring the boundaries between sex/love in the private sphere and paid work
in the public sphere. ‘Do the work,’ he commands Ana, ordering her to research BDSM
practices on Wikipedia as if she were one of his many employees at Grey Enterprises
Holdings, Inc. (James 2012a: 186). When Ana refuses to work in his multinational
corporation, Christian buys the publishing press that she works for, so that she ends
up working for him anyway. Moreover, the BDSM contract that constitutes the crux
of Christian and Ana’s relationship bears an uncanny resemblance to an employment
contract, with its stipulations about designated hours and conditions for dismissal
from service. Christian and Ana thus represent the positions of dominant capital and
submissive labour respectively. In this new version of the sexual contract, female
11
While Margot Weiss’s 2011 study of a BDSM community in San Francisco reveals that the BDSM subculture oen
enacts exisng instuonalised systems of dominaon in its role-play scenarios, it is open to debate whether ‘erociz-
ing . . . social inequality’ (Weiss 2011: 24) is equivalent to reproducing it. From the perspecve of many BDSM prac-
oners, Fiy Shades grossly misrepresents BDSM relaonships as abusive. See S. James (2012); and Smith (2015).
14
labour willingly subordinates itself to capital in exchange for both material wealth and
success in the workplace. Christian not only showers Ana with expensive gifts; at the
end of the novel, he makes her the owner of his publishing company.
Like the heroines of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Ana achieves upward
socio-economic mobility precisely because she does not desire it. In fact, Ana attains
success in both love and work because she actually enjoys subordinating herself to
Christian/capital. In Fifty Shades’s rendering of the relation between capital and labour,
the labour that Ana performs is doubly aective. Firstly, Ana engages in aective labour
when she submits to Christian’s will, thereby producing feelings of pleasure in Christian
and rearming their exploitative relationship. Aective labour, according to Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004: 108, 150), is ‘labour that produces or manipulates
aects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion,’ and
that, in doing so, produces and maintains social relations.
12
Aective labour is a major
component of the kinds of work carried out in the childcare, healthcare, hospitality,
professional cleaning, and other service industries that focus on making people feel
comfortable and happy. As the exploitative relationship between Christian and Ana
demonstrates, this form of labour takes up all of the worker’s time and penetrates
all areas of the worker’s life. In The Soul at Work, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2009) argues
that, as post-Fordist capitalism comes to focus more on communicating mental states
and feelings than on transforming physical matter, production becomes increasingly
structured as a global network in which workers create, process, and transfer digital
information. Workers cannot step back from this continuous flow of information for
fear of becoming irrelevant (Berardi 2009). As a result, the worker must be prepared to
receive commands from the network at any time, often through a mobile phone, which,
for Berardi (2009: 89–90), is the quintessential digital device that makes this state
of perpetual readiness possible. Fifty Shades dramatises (and idealises) this complete
co-optation of the worker’s time in the form of Christian stalking his Submissives.
Christian, representing the interests of capital, gives Ana an array of IT gadgets
(an Apple MacBook Pro laptop, a BlackBerry, and an iPad) so that he can track her
whereabouts and contact her at any time he wishes. Despite complaining that ‘[she is]
overwhelmed with technology’ (James 2012b: 115), Ana happily accepts these gadgets.
She willingly integrates herself into the digital network of production and its demand
that she provide aective labour whenever and wherever Christian/capital needs it. Ana
gladly subordinates herself in this way because she is aectively invested in her work
of producing aect. Giving pleasure to Christian gives her pleasure. For example, when
Ana has sex with Christian for the first time, she proclaims that ‘[she] will do anything
12
See also Hardt (1999); and Hardt and Negri (2000: 292–93).
15
he wants’ (James 2012a: 113), which apparently includes having instantaneous orgasms
at his command:
‘You. Are. Mine. Come for me, baby,’ he growls.
His words are my undoing, tipping me over the precipice. (James 2012a: 121)
Seen in this light, Ana loving Christian becomes an allegory of ‘loving one’s work of
loving.’ Ana thus embodies what Kathi Weeks (2011: 69–70) calls the ‘post-Fordist
work ethic,’ which drives workers in the new service-oriented global economy to
devote ‘not just the labour of the hand, but the labours of the head and the heart.’
Ana’s aective investment of time and energy into her ‘work’ for Christian parallels
that of the fans who spread media content from and about Fifty Shades online, not to
mention the fans who gave feedback and helped to edit the work when James was writing
it as ‘Master of the Universe.’ Fifty Shades thus celebrates the aective labour that has
contributed to its success. Fans of Fifty Shades demonstrate their love for the novel not
only by ‘sharing’ fragments extracted from it, but also by reworking these fragments
to accommodate their particular interests, such as in the case of the Twitter user who
‘shared’ an extract to start a discussion about Christian’s iPod playlist. This practice of
‘textual poaching,’ as Jenkins (2013: 3) puts it, is a labour of love that ‘mak[es] meaning
from materials others have characterised as trivial and worthless.’ Even detractors of
Fifty Shades engage in a kind of aective labour when they too participate in ‘textual
poaching,’ albeit for the purpose of criticising the novel. In their study on Fifty Shades
and ‘snark fandom,’ Sarah Harman and Bethan Jones (2013) reveal that ‘anti-fans’ of
the novel invest just as much time and energy as fans do in reading and talking about the
novel, but with a dierent objective in mind. For example, the ‘50shadesofWTF’ anti-fan
community on the blogging platform LiveJournal close-reads selected passages from
Fifty Shades to mock the novel for its gross misogyny (Harman and Jones 2013: 957–61):
I employ an exceptional team, and I reward them well.
KET: (Grey): With my dick.
GEHAYI: (Grey): And my riding crop.
KET: (Grey): At the same time.
GEHAYI: Do you suppose he ever gets them mixed up?
KET: He starts whacking away at some poor underling with his penis, leaving mush-
room-shaped bruises for days . . . (Ket Makura and Gehayi, qtd. in Harman and Jones
2013: 958)
16
In a twist on more straightforward fan communities, these anti-fans derive pleasure from
‘sharing’ extracts from the novel in order to satirise it. Although they dislike Fifty Shades
intensely, these anti-fans too engage in aective labour in ‘spreading’ Fifty Shades via
global online networks. Also, like their fan counterparts, they point to the convergence of
aective labour and fan labour under post-Fordist capitalism, and to the implications of
this convergence for how we approach World Literature as an object of study.
Digital Media, Fan Parcipaon, and World Literature
The ‘spreading’ of Fifty Shades online by fans and anti-fans provides an opportunity
for rethinking what World Literature is, how it travels, and how we study it. In a world
increasingly connected by digital networks of communication, how do we define what
counts as a ‘source culture’ or a ‘receiving culture’ (Damrosch 2003: 283)? Furthermore,
what does it mean for a digital or ‘digital-like’ text to be ‘actively present within a
literary system beyond that of its original culture’ (Damrosch 2003: 4)? Fifty Shades has
travelled from its ‘origin’ in an online Twilight fan fiction community to other online
social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, which cut across national boundaries
and span wide geographical distances. Fifty Shades’s perambulations suggest that, in
addition to examining how texts migrate from one geographical location to another,
perhaps we should look at how texts are now produced and consumed in online
social spaces that are divided along the lines of language use rather than national
and territorial boundaries. Fifty Shades has been translated into many languages, and
it certainly qualifies as a World Literature text in this regard. However, the novel’s
circulation in Anglophone online contexts suggests that a text can be ‘worldly’ even
when it travels in a single language. A similar situation applies to the phenomenally
popular Chinese Internet novel Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation). Even
before the ocial English translation was released in December 2021, the novel and its
multimedia adaptations had garnered many fans in the online Sinophone world. Texts
such as Fifty Shades and Mo Dao Zu Shi might not win the Booker Prize or be included
in the Norton Anthology of World Literature, but they deserve the attention of World
Literature scholars nonetheless, and not simply as sociological objects of analysis.
Besides reconfiguring existing definitions of World Literature, Fifty Shades also
prompts us to reconceptualise how World Literature moves around the world. The
transmedia travels of Fifty Shades demonstrate that World Literature in the age of digital
media circulates not only in the form of digital media adaptations – such as the video
game adaptation of Dante’s Inferno that Damrosch (2013) discusses in ‘World Literature
in a Postliterary Age’ – although the movie adaptations of Fifty Shades certainly contribute
to the hype. Neither does World Literature in the digital era necessarily circulate in the
form of electronic literature that is ‘born digital’ with no printed counterpart, such
17
as the poem-videos created by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and discussed in
Walkowitz’s Born Translated (2015) and Jessica Pressman’s chapter in Damrosch’s World
Literature in Theory (2014). As a novel that bears ‘the mark of the digital’ (Hayles 2008:
161), even the print edition of Fifty Shades travels through digital networks in the form of
textual fragments. These fragments point back to the novel in its entirety (for instance,
in the case of the fan who bought all three volumes after reading an excerpt online),
but also point forward to readers ‘remixing’ the novel in fan discussions, critical
commentaries, parodies, and so on. Furthermore, reader participation in ‘spreading’
these fragments of Fifty Shades on social media suggests that we might think about
circulation in World Literature not only in terms of literary influence or book sales, but
also in terms of online discussions and debates. When the first book of the Fifty Shades
trilogy took the world by storm in 2012, the American comedy TV programme Saturday
Night Live promptly lampooned both women readers of the novel and the online delivery
company Amazon in a parody of an Amazon Mothers’ Day advertisement (Figure 4).
‘This Mothers’ Day,’ the voiceover intones, ‘go to Amazon.com and get Mom what
she really wants.’ The comedy sketch was then uploaded onto YouTube a year later,
where it has since been viewed more than 5.6 million times.
13
One of the top-rated user
comments on the YouTube video laments that the user’s mother had bought a Kindle
simply in order to read the Fifty Shades trilogy: ‘She eventually gave it [the Kindle] to
me. The only books on it were all three Fifty Shades books >.>’ Many of the people who
talk about Fifty Shades online might not have read the novel in its entirety or at all,
but they are still able to understand the jokes in the Saturday Night Live sketch, and to
make further jokes about ‘Mommy Porn.’ Fifty Shades has travelled far and wide, but
not in the ways that scholars of World Literature conventionally consider. The fact that
13
“Amazon Mothers’ Day Ad,” YouTube. URL: hp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFte46jVFOg&t=4s (last accessed 13
March 2023).
Figure 4: SNL pokes fun at both Amazon and women readers of Fiy Shades.
18
Fifty Shades has become part of a common vocabulary suggests that we need to rethink
a text’s ‘activ[e] presen[ce]’ in world literary systems (Damrosch 2003: 4) from the
perspective of digital media and reader participation; in other words, what Jenkins,
Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd (2016) call ‘participatory culture in a networked era.’
This brings me to two final observations on how literary scholars might
approach a text such as Fifty Shades as World Literature. Firstly, in the early years of
World Literature’s emergence as a field, its most prominent proponents called for
scholars to examine not only source texts but also their permutations as they travel
across geographical and cultural borders. Damrosch (2003: 283–92), for instance,
foregrounded the transformative process of translation, while Moretti (2013: 50–59)
argued that literary forms from core areas of the world literary system become hybrid
when they make ‘compromises’ with local conditions in peripheral cultures. Fifty Shades
and other similar texts with a strong online presence not only rearm the need for
World Literature scholars to study both the source text and its transformations, but also
reveal that source texts are increasingly being adapted to the needs, the interests, and
even the political leanings of various transnational online constituencies. In the hands
of the ‘50shadesofWTF’ anti-fan community, seemingly romantic descriptions of
Christian and Ana’s relationship become tools for feminist critique. These adaptations
of Fifty Shades open up new areas of research that go beyond territorial notions of
cultural dierence, translation (whether linguistic or cultural), and hybridisation.
Secondly, studying source texts and their permutations in an online context
requires a careful approach to assessing fan labour, and especially to gauging how
much power readers (broadly understood) actually have in producing World Literature.
Digital social media enable readers to participate in selecting which works of amateur
online fiction get picked up by major publishers, and which of these books go on to
become international bestsellers. Fifty Shades would not have become the publishing
sensation that it is today had it not been for fans discussing James’s Twilight fan fiction
online, as well as for readers spreading word about Fifty Shades after the novel was
formally published. As Katy Shaw (2012) has observed, Fifty Shades’s success suggests
that power in publishing is shifting away from editors and the literary elite to readers
and grassroots communities. However, this increase in reader participation does not
necessarily mean that digital social media have made readers genuinely empowered in
producing World Literature. Fan participation in promoting Fifty Shades online serves
not only fan interests, but also the interests of the global literary publishing industry.
In the same way that Ana’s aective labour is plugged into an incessant communication
flow of emails, text messages, and phone calls, fan labour is integrated into the digital
network of capitalist production; in this case, the production of World Literature. While
many fans of Fifty Shades seem happy to do their ‘work’ of promoting the novel for free,
19
authors and the publishing industry benefit from their unpaid labour. Anne Jamison
(2013: 224–25) points out that James often downplays the fan fiction community’s
contributions to the success of Fifty Shades, even though she ‘benefited directly and
tangibly from the feedback, encouragement, interaction, and publicity [her] readership
oered.’ For Christian Fuchs (2014: 64), this counts as exploitation even though it does
not feel like it. Fuchs (2014: 56–57) criticises existing discussions of participatory
culture for being too celebratory, arguing that ‘[a]n Internet that is dominated by
corporations that accumulate capital by exploiting and commodifying users can in
the theory of participatory democracy never be participatory.’ Jenkins, Ito, and boyd
(2016: 1) express similar reservations when they begin their recent reassessment of
‘participatory culture’ by asking: ‘Does participation become exploitation when it takes
place on commercial platforms where others are making money o our participation
and where we often do not even own the culture we are producing?’ Apart from the
issue of Internet corporations such as Google and Facebook monetising users’ private
data, growing corporate interest in harnessing users’ participation for economic gain
(Jenkins, Ford, & Green 2013: 47–84) raises doubts about how much and what kind of
power readers possess in participating in world literary production.
While it is useful to avoid championing reader participation as an end in itself,
scholars of World Literature should also consider how the reading communities that
have developed around Fifty Shades and other similar texts online might provide what
Jenkins calls an ‘alternative’ to the digital network of capitalist production and other
forms of social inequality. Jenkins recognises that niche communities today are often
commercialised, and that they are seldom overtly resistant or oppositional (Jenkins,
Ito, & boyd 2016: 16). Nonetheless, they represent alternatives in the ways in which
they organise knowledge, structure social relations, or define their norms and values
(Jenkins, Ito, & boyd 2016: 16). Janice Radway makes a similar argument in Reading
the Romance (1991), where she examines the reading practices of a group of women
in the small American town of Smithton. Although the women often bought and read
romance novels, they were conscious that the novels did not adequately address some
of their desires (Radway 1991: 49–50). Like the readers of romance novels interviewed
in Radway’s study, fans of Fifty Shades read the novel in ways that the author and
publisher cannot fully control. While the ‘spreading’ of Fifty Shades has helped the
publishing industry to market its product, it has also given rise to online communities
of readers who problematize the status quo, such as the ‘50shadesofWTF’ anti-fans
and readers who criticise James for removing her fan fiction work from the public
domain to profit from it.
14
These online reading communities demonstrate that, in
14
See Jones (2014: 2–4); and De Kosnik (2009: 118–24).
20
Jenkins’ words, ‘[n]o matter how participatory culture is pulled towards dominant
practices, it cannot close o space for other, less mainstream interests if it is going to
remain truly participatory’ (Jenkins, Ito, & boyd 2016: 21). Although these communities
contribute to the ‘spreading’ of Fifty Shades in the service of the publishing industry,
they simultaneously divert the flow of information in small ways away from the
digital network of capitalist production towards the creation of social relations that
refuse to participate in commercialising fan labour or degrading women’s sexuality
for profit. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, Berardi (2009:
217) argues that we need to deterritorialise our points of contact in the digital network
of production, so as to break free from the network and form new connections and
communities. Perhaps, in producing Fifty Shades as World Literature, readers are also
subverting Fifty Shades’s exploitation of aective labour, and producing transnational
forms of community that can eect change for a better world.
21
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the readers who have commented on various dras of this arcle over
the years, including Ross Forman, Michael Gardiner, Anne Jamison, and the two anonymous peer-
reviewers.
Compeng Interests
The author has no compeng interests to declare.
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