NOTE: the following essay was written by Yours Truly nine months ago, in December of 2010, as a research paper for Writing 122. The subject is not political but social, and the hype surrounding the subject has thankfully faded (though it will surely come back when the fourth movie comes out). However, I've decided to publish this here because, in my opinion, the social (that is, the personal) is political, as has been observed by others. Passages by other authors quoted herein are of course their own property and copyright, not mine, and are reprinted here for journalistic purposes.
Teenagers are
curious beasts. In their own vernacular,
to say that something “bites” or “sucks” is to paint that thing in negative colors. By this logic, a vampire, a creature that
both bites and sucks, ought to be roundly rejected by their demographic. Yet the Hottie Du Jour of the moment is a
vampire, one Edward Cullen of the popular TWILIGHT saga by Stephenie
Meyer. This is not as contradictory as
it sounds, for Edward is a curious beast of a vampire. He is famous for
abstaining from both biting and sucking, having sworn off human blood. In fact, Edward is famous for abstaining,
period. Although his human girlfriend,
Bella Swan, is hot to jump his sexy hundred-year-old bones, Edward insists on
waiting until they’re wed before deflowering her.
Yes, Edward is
the very model of a modern teenage vampire:
vegetarian, Victorian, and virginal. And that is what is wrong with him: although it was during the Victorian period
that vampires became a part of popular culture, they were a rebellion against
that culture’s mores, not a reflection of them.
Worse, since vampirism is a supernatural metaphor for the dangers of
sex, a virginal vegetarian is no real vampire at all, just a sexually-repressed
hunk with fangs. Edward is an anomaly,
and is recognized as such by other popular purveyors of bloodsucking. Alan Ball, the creator of the HBO series TRUE
BLOOD, says of TWILIGHT, "The idea of celibate vampires is ridiculous. To me, vampires are sex. I don't get a
vampire story about abstinence. I'm 53. I don't care about high school
students. I find them irritating and uninformed."
I confess I have
not read TWILIGHT, nor will I. Several
thousand pages of romantic fiction aimed at teenage girls is not my cup of
blood. But as a writer of fantasy
fiction, as well as a proponent of sexual liberation and a devotee of gothic
philosophy, TWILIGHT is of great concern
to me, for its popularity threatens to influence present and future
generations, corrupting how they view not just sexuality but the dark side of
the human imagination itself.
It is possible
that few others share that latter concern of mine, for the dark side of the
human imagination is not exactly a subject foremost in the society’s collective
mind (although I would argue that it should be, for the sake of our collective
well-being). However, it is certain that
many critics are concerned with how TWILIGHT influences youth in the realm of
sexual identity. These critics—nearly
all women, and pro-feminist—have identified disturbing trends in TWILIGHT’s
characters and storyline, and expressed varying degrees of concern over how
these might be welcomed by an immature and undiscerning audience.
Edward is seen
by these critics as having the qualities of a gentleman, as the description
above illustrates, and if it ended there they might be happy with his
characterization. There is nothing
inherently wrong with abstinence as a choice, however overrated it might be by
the religious right, and abstinence from murder is downright laudable. But Edward, who became a vampire during the
Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, is a moral product of a distinctly misogynist
historical era. Although he has been
undead all through the feminist revolutions of the twentieth century, he
apparently has never heard of the Suffragette movement, picked up a copy of
Cosmopolitan or heard Helen Reddy sing “I Am Woman”; he remains rooted in the
world of his pre-vampire youth, with its presumption of masculine superiority
and feminine frailty. These roots bear
fruits of abuse, over-protective behavior, and insensitivity. In a penetrating essay for the Spring/Summer
2010 edition of Studies in the Novel,
“Twilight Is Not Good For Maidens,” Anna Silver writes,
When he rescues (Bella), Edward
uses language that is more patrimonial than romantic, though clearly, Meyer
blurs the two discourses. For example, after rescuing Bella from a group of
would-be rapists, he tells her to "prattle about something unimportant
until I calm down" (Twilight 169) and then takes her to a restaurant,
where he orders her to eat and drink, his voice "low, but full of
authority" (Twilight 166). In response to his commands, Bella "sipped
at [her] soda obediently" (Twilight 169). Meyer's
diction--"prattle," "obediently"-- clearly connotes a power
dynamic in which Edward makes important decisions and Bella, though often
grumbling and pouting, almost inevitably submits.
Girls, he only
looks seventeen. He’s really your
woman-hating great-grandfather.
These are only
the traits visible on the surface; dig under Edward’s pallid skin, and much
worse is revealed: “Edward is a
controlling dick, a fact that becomes abundantly clear in the leaked pages of
Meyer’s first draft of Midnight Sun, a retelling of Twilight from
Edward’s perspective,” writes Christine Seifert in her article “Bite Me! (Or
Don’t).” “In those pages, available on Meyer’s website, Edward imagines what it
would be like to kill Bella. ‘I would not kill her cruelly,’ he thinks to
himself. Ever the gentleman, Edward. His icy calculation of how best to kill
Bella is horrifying.”
Seifert nails the whole tone of TWILIGHT with the wickedly apt label
“abstinence porn.” In it, the tension of
an intense but unconsummated longing is drawn out over three novels, an endless
blending of fire and ice that may start out steamy but which, like regular
porn, is always in danger of degenerating to a lukewarm puddle. It is as reactionary as ordinary porn; worse,
it is every bit as sexist: “When it
comes to a woman’s virtue, sex, identity, or her existence itself, it’s all in
the man’s hands. To be the object of desire, in abstinence porn is not really
so far from being the object of desire in actual porn.”
Puritanical
prurience is not just an oxymoron; it’s moronic.
However, it just
might be what a confused pubescent girl with a head full of both romantic
dreams and sexual terror is looking for.
A 2010 study by Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, Elizabeth
Behm-Morawitz, and Melissa A. Click of the University of Missouri surveyed more
than 600 teen female fans.“We were shocked by the interest in and praise for
Twilight's message of abstinence. We thought surely teens would find this
message irrelevant and puritanical, especially against the backdrop of the
hypersexualized American media landscape in which teen characters typically
engage in hookups and other sexually permissive activities.”
Quite the
opposite: again and again, the young fans praised TWILIGHT’S message and lauded
its characters. This may not be so
surprising. On the one hand,
abstinence-only sex education is all many of these young students have
encountered during the last decade of Republican-controlled government. Also, while they are well aware that their
culture is “hypersexualized,” children often find it appealing to rebel against
whatever is mainstream … or appears to be.
That this is a reactionary, regressive step backwards rather than a
genuinely progressive rebellion that will help to free up human mores is of no
concern to them. They are not looking
toward their future; rather, they are focused intensely upon the present.
Unfortunately,
these girls may well be absorbing a much more insidious message along with the
admonition to keep yourself chaste until marriage: they may be inclined to adulate or even to
mimic the heroine of the TWILIGHT saga.
It’s one thing to yearn for a handsome, dangerous lover like Edward;
such yearnings are a dime a dozen in the heart of a teenage girl. It’s another entirely to yearn to be the kind
of girl Edward wants.
Bella, put simply, is a cipher, with few of the traits
to be found even in a one-dimensional or “flat” character; she exists to love
and be loved—or rescued, or patronized, or impregnated. She is essentially blank, and it is hard to
understand how she ends up appealing to anyone at all, whether her vampire
lover, the werewolf boy with a crush on her, the circle of friends she manages
to keep even though she ignores them, or the readers of her story. This is one matter where all the critics
agree. Anna Silver notes that Meyer’s
treatment of Bella “ignores individualism in favor of affiliation.” Jan Czech sums up the feminist judgment that
Bella “is submissive to Edward; willing to give up
everything, friends and family and life as she knows it, to be with him forever.” Kim Werker goes further, calling her “a
hysterical, confused and confusing character … a doormat … (with) the
most impenetrable low self esteem of any teen character I can remember ever
encountering ... I ended up hating her as much as I ended up hating Anna
Karenina. That’s a lot of loathing.”
There are reasons why Bella is the non-person she
is. Blame the author, first and
foremost: Stephenie Meyer is a
conservative Mormon, pursuing a pro-abstinence and pro-motherhood agenda in her
fiction, and Bella, by Meyer’s design, is nothing until she is married and a
mother. By her own admission, Meyer has
never watched an R-rated movie, which does make one wonder what drew her to the
subject of vampirism in the first place.
Such conservatism and repression of the imagination may be laudable to
some as personal philosophy, but it is hardly the best recipe for an artist
seeking to create fully-realized fiction … as opposed to someone seeking to
propagandize to a naïve audience.
But a great deal of the blame must go to the
culture at large, and not entirely to the obviously right-wing element therein. In an article for Caterwaul Quarterly, “The
Twilight of Feminism,” Layla Forrest-White explains how the so-called second
wave of feminism itself unwittingly helped to create its own backlash:
Instead
of rights, the second wave concerned itself with choice … this is illustrated
nowhere better than in the rhetoric surrounding the last vestige of popular
feminism: abortion. The ‘feminist’ side of this debate is presented as
‘pro-choice,’ whereas the opposition tags itself ‘pro-life.’ But both forms of
rhetorical legerdemain obfuscate the true issue, which must concern how and why
women are getting pregnant. Once feminism took this path of choice rather than
rights and became synonymous with the sexual liberation movement, choice, as it
were, devolved into one choice, and that choice became whether or not to have
sex. It is as much the failure of feminism as it is the strength of patriarchy
to note that the two options are an equal boon to men. Bound by sheets or
walls, a woman is equally beneficial to men in bed or in the home. The
sad legacy of feminism at this moment is that it has not done away with Rebecca
West’s doormat/prostitute dichotomy, it has only introduced the illusion of a
choice between the two.
Imprisoned by its own linguistics and concerns,
feminism has paved its own path to a phenomenon like TWILIGHT, and has possibly
even bolstered the saga’s enormous popularity, for it is entirely likely that a
young, naïve audience, knowing little of feminism apart from the common wisdom
that it has “triumphed,” may interpret the story as a defense of feminist
ideas. In other words, they may take
Bella for an ideal of a “strong woman” because that is what they have been led
to expect in modern literature. They may
not even have the illusion of a choice.
Time Magazine judged Stephenie Meyer one of the
most influential persons of 2008. One
can only hope that her influence is not lasting, and will fade with time, like
the popularity of her novels surely will.
On a final note, Meyer’s PG-13 worldview has had
its negative influence on the dark side of the human imagination as well—or at
least on the public perception of it. To
the world at large, the image of Goth today is the image of Meyer’s romantic
duo: old-fashioned, cheesy, and, above
all, safe for today’s youth. Goth is a
TWILIGHT Halloween costume, not the honest embrace of the darkness of the
twilight of the human soul. Vegetarian
vampires and tame werewolves are bad enough, but wimpy women are much worse,
for the Gothic movement has always been defined by its strong feminist
presence. Real Goth girls do not swoon,
do not submit; sex is their weapon as much as it is men’s. They are death-defiers, not damsels in
distress.
Darkness, under the influence of Meyer, may have
taken a fall, but the genuine core of Goth will, I trust, prove resistant to
the sway of Edward’s hypnotic gaze and never convert to bland Belladom. Meyer’s viewpoint is ultimately the antithesis
of Goth. It is a fearful retreat into a regressive,
paternalized, God-dominated world of safety and security. It is not, as Goth is, an acknowledgment of
the indifference of the universe to human affairs—an acknowledgment that we are
truly free. That is what Goth is all
about: freedom. For Edward, Bella, and their creator, this
wisdom is unpalatable poison. It is well
summed up in a single lyric by Robert Smith, singer and songwriter for The
Cure. It is the first line from “One
Hundred Years,” the first song on the classic 1982 record PORNOGRAPHY. It is also, in this author’s considered
opinion, the first great Gothic truth:
It doesn’t
matter if we all die.
