What the heck is all the allure surrounding the book “Fifty Shades of Grey”?

There are many book clubs forming to discuss the novel by author E.L. James, and social media feeds seem to be littered with captioned pictures from the novel’s pages. The book has been a hot topic among my friends this summer, but I just can’t seem to grasp the concept of a virgin college graduate exploring her sexuality through an S&M relationship with a young billionaire.

The storyline sounded cheesy and a bit grandiose for a modern erotic love story, but reluctantly I still attempted to read the book before I passed any further judgment.

The first few pages sound strikingly familiar to a previous novel I had read in high school, but I ignored the thought and continued reading.

“Hmmmm, where I have I heard this story before?” I asked myself.

Though I tried to tuck my novel déjà vu away, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had met these characters in an alternate universe.  Somewhere, in my adolescent past, I had read a novel centered around an awkward young girl who found her saving grace through a relationship with a boy found only in fantasy — a hundred-year-old vampire with Adonis good looks and enough charm to swoon Mitt Romney into voting for Barack Obama. I was rereading Twilight. And even after accepting this sad truth, I was unable to put the book down.

The premise is fundamentally the same, except James has changed enough detail to avoid copyright infringement. As I continued to read the novel, I began to have nostalgic feelings of reading Twilight in my confused days as a high school student. Twilight was my escape to a world where relationships worked, and now the fantasy has caught on with adults.

Most “Fifty Shades of Grey” fans were once avid “Twilight” readers in high school, which is a more appropriate life stage at which to become enthralled in such fantasies. As college- educated 20-year-olds nearing graduation, reading James’ novel is a detriment. Apart from the redundancy of certain themes within the novel that ultimately prevented the story from moving forward, the overall concept is nothing more than a 14-year-old’s innermost fantasy.

Our culture embracing lackluster literature and calling it brilliance is unfortunate, as today’s society hosts an atmosphere in which stable relationships are hard to experience as we continously move towards a state of limbo while becoming monogamous. When reality becomes unfulfilling, what’s the best answer? Escapism.

I hate to pin the blame on women, but we seem to be the primary readers of these books. Because love appears lackluster for many of us in reality, we escape into someone else’s life, almost like talking about celebrity issues as if they were our own. What “Fifty Shades of Grey” and “Twilight” have in common is a storyline that allows people, primarily women, to delve into something bigger than themselves. It’s not a pretty reality, but it is an easier pill to swallow knowing that we’re sad and reading the novels for comfort instead of for being intellectually inept.

Even though there’s reason behind the novel’s allure, the fact of the matter is that we are still reading books of little literary merit when good, well-written books actually exist. There are novels that provide great stories with the same amount of fantasy to help anyone escape reality for a short time. However, we don’t want that. The simplicity of the novel is what we crave because we are unable to experience normalcy in our realities. So many people desire a normal dating experience when they meet someone they like; however, it has to be more complicated than a phone call and a first date.

So we continue to cling to the cheesy novels, and in a few years, we will wonder why we became so infatuated over the trend.

— Victoria Wright is a senior in journalism. She can be reached at vwright6@utk.edu.