by AYA DE LEON
Protestors demonstrating against a tribute to the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in 2012 PHOTO/Carlos FG/Flickr
Boundaries of Taste: Often derided as tasteless schlock, could the Fifty Shades novels actually reflect something much more serious?
Erika Mitchell was born in 1963 to a Scottish father and Chilean mother. During her childhood in Britain, momentous events were taking place in her mother’s homeland. In 1970 Chileans elected Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist president. Allende embarked on an extensive program of nationalization and sweeping social reform. Then, in 1973, General Augusto Pinochet ousted Allende in a CIA-sponsored coup and established himself as Chile’s dictator. The New York Times called it “one of the bloodiest military take-overs in Latin America’s history,” and the coup was followed by an internal crackdown against Allende’s supporters that left thousands dead and included the torture of tens of thousands more at the hands of the state.
Nearly thirty years later, Erika, writing under the pen name E.L. James, published Fifty Shades of Grey. The novel is widely understood to be a kinky domestic tale about two white people, written by a woman widely understood to be a reclusive British housewife, but there may be more to it than that. James’s mother has suggested that her “Chilean fiery spirit” was in part behind Fifty Shades, and while that “fiery” heritage is a stereotype, it’s no coincidence that the Republic of Chile was a real-life bastion of sadism during her adolescence. While some feminists have argued that Fifty Shades is a tale of domestic abuse wrapped up as a love story, it can also be understood as a romanticized allegory of Pinochet’s dictatorship.
When Erika was born there were very few Latinos in England, but by the 1970s a significant immigration boom from Latin America had begun. Britain’s 1971 Immigration Act relaxed rules that had previously only allowed work permits for residents of current or former British colonies. In the first big wave of Latin American immigrants to England after the rule change, approximately 2,500 exiles arrived, most of them from Chile. Many were professionals or students who had fled due to the ongoing political instability, including right-wingers fleeing Allende’s socialist regime. After 1973, a second wave of exiles arrived who were fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship. Many of these Chilean immigrants settled in London.
Erika was ten years old when Pinochet seized power. Given her reluctance to discuss nearly all aspects of her personal life, it is impossible to know the depths of her family’s relationship to the Chilean immigrant community in the 70s and 80s. We do know that she and her mother spoke Spanish together, and that her mother was proud to expose a young Erika to Latin culture. But how long did they live in London? Erika went to high school a little over thirty miles outside the capital. Did she seek out information about her mother’s homeland? Her father was a BBC cameraman, so we can assume that their household was tuned in to the news. Erika herself went on to be a television producer, and she has expressed a love of both TV and film. As a teen, did she see or know about the American drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek? This film is based on the true story of a journalist from the U.S., who disappeared in the bloody aftermath of Pinochet’s coup. The film came out when Erika was in her teens, and was nominated for four Academy Awards, won for best screenplay, and picked up two more awards at Cannes. Missing was banned in Chile under Pinochet, and although neither he nor Chile are ever mentioned by name, the film states explicitly that the screenplay is based on a true story, the names of the people were not changed, and the specifics of two prominent Chilean cities are included. Did Erika pay attention? Did she recognize her mother’s homeland? Did it lodge in her unconscious, then fade into the background of her developing sexuality?
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