In the spring of 2015, in an undergraduate course entitled Desire and Transgression in the Eighteenth Century, my students and I read Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). It just so happened that around the same time, Fifty Shades of Grey was hitting the movie the- atres after the enormous publishing success of the novels of the same title. Having read the novels, I was struck by the similarities between the Twilight fan-fic of E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey and Richardson's game-changing novel. I was pleasantly surprised when several students proposed enthusiastically that Pamela seemed to them to be “the eigh- teenth-century version of Fifty Shades of Grey.” Many of these students professed that Fifty Shades of Grey was currently their “favorite book,” and yet these were the same students who found Mr. B's behavior toward Pamela reprehensible and disturbing. They also found Pamela herself to be annoying, unrealistic, and flat-out unbelievable, for many of the same reasons that Henry Fielding does in his adaptive spoof/critique of Richardson's novel, Shamela (1741). The more we thought about Pamela as a precursor of Fifty Shades of Grey and discussed how both works draw on fairy tales and cultural archetypes, the more students were able to understand the novel and, if not relate to it, understand its appeal. In this chapter, I explore how my students positioned Pamela as a precursor to Fifty Shades of Grey, how our juxtaposition of these texts in discus- sions brought out new and potent types of cultural commentary from the students, and how such a conversation could be further deepened with the inclusion of concepts from adaptation studies.

Student Reactions: Fifty Shades of Grey as Context for Pamela

In literary studies, Pamela has often been discussed as an important develop- ment in the rise of the English-language novel in the eighteenth century, with a focus on its representation of interiority as well as its reification of domestic femininity. For undergraduate students, however, Pamela reads strangely; Pamela herself is difficult to sympathize with, and undergraduate reactions to Mr. B ranged from “creepy” to “gross.”