The Problem With Classic Novels? Not Enough Sex.
New ebook 'The Great Gatsby Unbound' adds some much needed eroticism to Scott Fitzgerald's masterwork. Oh wait, did we say 'much needed'? We meant 'completely unnecessary, gross'.
Maybe it’s all Fifty of those Shades and all that TV sexposition, but these days, it seems we like eroticism to be pretty arse-smackingly overt in our favourite stories. You know the problem with classic novels? NOT ENOUGH SEX. Like, sometimes the characters don’t even kiss until the end! What’s my other hand meant to do with that? Hold the book? Turn the pages? Gosh.
Luckily, various intrepid publishers have taken it upon themselves to sex up the classics. Just in time for Baz Luhrmann’s box office version of The Great Gatsby comes The Great Gatsby Unbound. This charmless volume takes advantage of the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s musings on the American dream are now out of copyright in order to insert some random sex scenes between Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker, penned by sub-Mills & Boon hack, Karena Rose. Oh, and Gatsby’s legendary bashes are basically swinger parties. As Rose says, “Whatever happens at Gatsby’s stays at Gatsby’s.”
Giving new meaning to the phrase “reading for pleasure”.
Rose had already similarly ruined Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to create the horrible, Jane Eyrotica. Interviewed last year, she hoped readers would consider it “a respectful adaptation that withholds all of the delicacy of the original, whilst spicing things up with additional sizzling scenes. The chemistry with Jane and Mr. R was already there, I just took it a step further.”
She knows that “withholds” means “suppresses or denies”, right? If so, she’s perfectly right. There’s precious little delicacy here.
But Rose is not alone in yielding to the temptation of fucking up Brontë’s novel. Adult e-publisher Total-E-Bound Publishing has released a selection of “Clandestine Classics“, one of which injects ham-fisted raunch into the pellucid prose of Jane Eyre.
“I’ve often wondered whether the Bronte sisters, if they were alive today, would have gone down the erotic romance route,” Total-E-Bound founder Claire Siemaszkiewicz told The Independent. “There’s a lot of underlying sexual tension in their stories.”
Yes, it wasn’t nearly overlying enough! “His lips would be relentless and ruthless; and the taste of him — the smokiness of his cigar combined with his uncivilised power — would render me helpless,” gasps Jane in the revised ebook, leaving me wondering what ‘uncivilised power’ tastes like (it’s the sort of eternal puzzle that could drive a woman mad in the attic).
And there are more laugh-out-loud clangers. This one’s from Pride and Prejudice: “‘Please take me,’ she whispered. ‘I need it. I ache for it.’ Her words were met with only a grunt of approval by Darcy.”
Having given the world Cave-Darcy, the Clandestine Classics move on to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: “When she saw Henry slip into the room, fingers to his lips, she poofed out a sigh of relief.” Ha! Ha!
Honestly. The bar of basic prose quality is set so low with these books that I feel cocky enough to attempt raunching up a few classic novels myself. And speaking of feeling cocky…
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Tryin’ To Catch Me Writin’ Dirty
David Cop-A-Feel by Charles Dickens
Being the picaresque autobiography of a handsy young fellow who first discovers the joy of touch with his childhood friend, Little Em’ly, but as a young man becomes infatuated with the beautiful but childish Dora Spenlow. However, his BFF Agnes Wickfield has long nurtured an unrequited crush on David. How long can Agnes keep her hands to herself?
I found Agnes alone. I sat beside her on the window-seat, and before long I felt the light, sure touch of her fair hand, high on my leg, higher, higher, faster, faster– As I looked at her beautiful face, observant of her work, she raised her mild clear eyes, and saw that I was looking at her.
“You have a secret,” said I, breathlessly. “Let me share it, Agnes.”
She was going away, but I detained her. I clasped her by the waist as she had never been, as I had thought she never was to be! Closer in my arms, nearer to my heart, her trembling fingers exploring territory freshly conquered, my own hands tugging and bunching her skirts, her sweet eyes shining, fixed on mine!
And as with dexterity I completed my happy task, Agnes sighed, in a low, sweet voice, and laid her head upon my breast, and wept; and I wept with her, though we were so happy.
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Moby’s Dick by Herman Melville
“Call me, Ishmael.” In this kinky queer adventure, the bi-curious Ishmael visits a seaside gay bar where he learns of Ahab, a charismatic man who nurtures a fierce grudge against a former lover named Moby. Pale-skinned and of legendary masculine endowment, Moby is responsible for a bondage-related accident that led to Ahab losing his leg. Now, Ishmael goes cruising with Ahab and a motley crew of scene queens, for a final, sexy showdown with Moby. “Thar he blows!”
“A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby’s Dick!”
Diving beneath Ahab, Moby ran his tongue quivering along the livid mark that branded the captain’s skin from crown to sole. Moby sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank so suddenly that had it not been for the bedhead to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed from the sheets. The white brine caking in his wrinkles, the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom. But turning, turning, Moby swiftly shot to the surface again, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.
“Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. THUS, I give up the spear!”
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The Strange Conquests of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
London lawyer Gabrielle Jean Utterson hears that a repulsive man named Edward Hyde has started writing cheques in the name of Gabrielle’s university friend and ex-lover, Henry Jekyll. Worse, Hyde has beaten an elderly politician, one of Gabrielle’s clients, to death with a cane. To unravel this mystery, Gabrielle embarks on a thrilling journey of erotic discovery, rekindling her affair with Jekyll as she finds bestial, amoral pleasure with his mysterious associate.
“Will you do me a favour?” said the lawyer.
“With pleasure,” snarled Mr Hyde. “What shall it be?”
“Will you let me kiss you?”
Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon some sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance. His lips crushed hers, his tongue intruding into her mouth with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness. She felt herself melting onto his hand as it burrowed beneath her skirt with extraordinary quickness. The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next moment, he had unlocked the door and disappeared into the house.
Gabrielle stood awhile when Mr Hyde had left her, the picture of disquietude. Mr Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the inexorable and hitherto unknown lust with which Gabrielle regarded him.
“God bless me, the man seems hardly human!” said she. “O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”
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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She is the founding editor of online pop-culture magazine The Enthusiast and the national film editor of the Thousands network of city guides. Her debut book, Out of Shape: Debunking Myths about Fashion Sizing and Fit, will be published in June 2013 by Affirm Press.