In Sally Rooney's 'Beautiful World, Where Are You,' eroticism is as much mental as it is physical. amil writes
Photo: Hulu There was a moment, ten years ago, when E.L James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey came out and every other subway rider appeared to be head down in the gray-and-black cover, their eyes greedily soaking up each horny, softcore, vanilla-adjacent fantasy.
Where Fifty Shades was almost laughably earnest in its descriptions of desire, foreplay, and intercourse, the Rooney brand of lust is cerebral, detached, and centred on longing. It doesn’t shy away from sex or the build-up to sex, as evidenced by the flushed faces of anyone poring over Normal People.
The sensual appeal in a book like Beautiful World lies in the straightforwardness of the characters’ longing and need for each other, but also in the honesty of their hangups, in the way they admit to everything that keeps them from tearing each other’s clothes off. Their entire being, but particularly their sexuality, is wrapped up in their thoughts about themselves and how they’re reflected in the world around them.
And much like the fiction of E.L. James, there is a sense of comfort in the normalcy of it all. Eileen has to invent a fictional, doting wife, a homemaker, to initiate virtual sex with Simon. “You need a little wife for yourself,” she tells him before asking him to get undressed. Even when Rooney’s characters toy with fetish, experimenting with pain and control like Normal People’s Marianne, there is still a call to traditional partnership, a need to do so within the safety of hetero monogamy.
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