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It’s London, 1988. At the Old Vic theater, director Jonathan Miller is staging a production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” The Old Vic is no stranger to Shakespeare, but something’s a little different about this one.
Instead of submitting to Prospero’s words as he leaves his enchanted island, Ariel, his magical servant, retrieves his destroyed staff and puts it together again, raising it above his head. Now, a play about colonial rule is about the transfer of political power in a postcolonial society.
Fast forward to 2011, when writer E. L. James’ self-published erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” becomes a worldwide bestseller.
It was also, famously, “Twilight” fanfiction.
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So what do “Fifty Shades of Grey” and a production of a Shakespeare play have in common?
JEN COMERFORD: I’m Jen Comerford. I’m currently a visiting assistant professor in the English department at Northwestern this quarter. I’m teaching a class called “Fans and Fictions: Adaptation as Critique in Literature and Film.”
Professor Comerford considered both of them when she was putting together her class syllabus.
JC: My class is largely about thinking, thinking about how, as the title suggests, how adaptation is a different mode of critique, so alongside something like literary criticism. And so part of this is thinking about like how we can kind of expand or put pressure on the kind of traditional ideas of what the literary canon is.
Using canonical texts like Austen and Shakespeare, Professor Comerford’s class explores the limits and possibilities of adaptation.
And, as its name suggests, it also asks if fanfiction, or fanmade stories about characters from books like “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games,” count as part of the legacy of adaptation.
And although they’re not exactly the same, Professor Comerford pointed out that there’s certainly a lot of overlap between fanfiction and adaptation and why they come to exist.
JC: Adaptation or fanfiction or things like that are indicators that these texts aren’t, you know — there are things in these texts that aren’t giving everything that people need or want.
To get the student perspective, I sat down with two Northwestern students who have read and written fanfiction. Here’s Abigail Jacob on why and how she first found fanfiction.
ABIGAIL JACOB: I don’t know if you know the “Legend” trilogy by Marie Lu — I was really into that when I was in middle school. And spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read — it has a very bittersweet ending, and that, like, emotionally wrecked me. So it’s like, okay, there needs to be a different ending. So I go online, I search up, like, you know, book name, alternate ending, and I find this magical site called fanfiction.net. That was the beginning of everything.
Sometimes fanfiction happens because readers want to explore new possibilities. But other times…
JC: There’s this adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” that we’re going to be reading part of called “Longborn,” which is told from the perspective of the servants in the household. So, I mean, already, you know, there’s a lot of criticism about, you know, the way Austen kind of attends to a very narrow range of, like, social classes, right? So, like, the servants don’t really pop up that much. And so it’s interesting, from that standpoint, already, to be paying attention to, okay, what are the servants doing? And that changes, for instance, the way that I then look at “Pride and Prejudice,” because I’m a little bit more attuned to pay attention for the moments when the servants do pop up.
Like Professor Comerford, NU student Asha Mehta has a piece of fanmade fiction that felt significant for how it interacted with the source material. This one is about the recently rebooted television show “She-Ra,” specifically the romantic relationship between the characters Catra and Adora.
ASHA MEHTA: There’s this story called Don’t go. It’s about 5000 words, and it’s sort of this, like episode, I don’t know, episode nine and a half of season five of “She-Ra.” Basically, you know, Catradora, they’re like a lesbian relationship that wasn’t able to be like, fully realized in the show in the same way. It’s not smut — it’s just like a romantic fanfic about like, them getting closer and sort of processing everything they’ve been through. And it wasn’t, you know, probably allowed to actually be included in the show. So whether or not ND Stevenson, the show runner, is the one who wrote that, I think either way, it was a really beautiful piece of fan things.
Jacob had a similar experience with a Sarah J. Maas book.
AJ: So I read “Throne of Glass” in middle school, and, like, it was like, both, like, my thing, but also not my thing. I like, a lot of problems with it. It was hard to find people who, like, had my same opinions. Like this could be improved and this could be improved. So then I find like, this fanfiction online, basically pointing out all, like the moral dilemmas and like plot issues and stuff that I had issues with. And they were like, rewriting it to, like, actually, like, talk about, like the issues of slavery and, like, multiracial identity and stuff like that. And I was like, you know, like, it was like, the instance where fanfiction is doing it better than the actual book, in my opinion.
Fanfiction is often considered adaptation’s weird younger sibling – it’s unregulated, not traditionally published, and to be honest, varies a lot more in quality.
But I asked Professor Comerford about why she thinks it’s still worth it to give fanfiction its flowers. Here’s her answer.
JC: I think that one of the things I feel like that doesn’t get given a lot of credit, or it’s not thought of as being super critically engaged in literary studies, is this like idea of like, enjoyment or pleasure in reading. Like, that’s kind of besides the point. Everyone kind of assumes sure if you’re you’re here, you probably like to read, but like, whether or not you enjoyed the text is not the kind of main question, and I think fanfiction, maybe this is part of why it gets slightly denigrated, in some ways, is because it kind of leans into this question of, like, how, how can we enjoy what we’re reading? Or like, make it speak to us in a different way? And that, I think there’s a lot of value in that that we don’t necessarily always give credit to.
So fanfiction and adaptation share a lineage: although they start from, and are sometimes bound by, source texts, they provide the opportunity for a piece of literature to become something more than what it was. They’re a chance for readers to not only listen to a piece of writing, but to speak back to it – a book is the start of the conversation, and not the end.
Also, in case you were wondering, stage productions aren’t the only adaptations of Shakespeare out there.
AJ: I just remembered that I did read Shakespeare fanfiction at 12.
For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
