From the New York Times:   

Indeed, when Ms. Taylor-Johnson read “Fifty Shades” for the first time, she did not see it as “mommy porn,” as some have called it, nor as an unlikely story full of clunky prose bogged down by a strangely chirpy narrator prone to referring to her “inner goddess,” as some reviewers have complained. Instead, she read it as “a deep, dark, romantic adult fairy tale,” she said. “I thought, I haven’t seen anything cinematically like what I was reading for a long time, if at all,” Ms. Taylor-Johnson continued. “It felt like a very deep romance and a love story the likes of which felt quite unique.”

Marina Warner links Fifty Shades of Grey to the Bluebeard story, but a version of the story in which revenge “eludes the protagonist . . . and the female author chooses to let Bluebeard have his way.”

In Secrets beyond the Door, a book I wrote many years ago about the story of Bluebeard and his wives, I focused on the charismatic appeal of the Bluebeard figure, a man who is wealthy, mysterious, sexually seductive . . . controlling and violent.   The Bluebeard story “begins on the outside–in the realm of the familiar, common, and quotidian–and moves to the inside–the exotic, dangerous, passionate, and barbaric.”  What I discovered in the course of my research is that Bluebeard is one of those stories that will not go away, it ferociously repeats itself, as if it were entirely new.  Fifty Shades of Grey is the latest cultural inflection, and now I have my work cut out for me: reading the trilogy and watching the movie, then making a contribution to a shelter for victims of domestic abuse.

http://cnsnews.com/commentary/john-henry-westen/fifty-shades-grey-will-lead-spike-abuse-women