Deconstructing Twilight Part Five - The Road to Womanhood! Meyer Style

Today, on Deconstructing Twilight: Meyer shows us why Bella Swan is such a FABULOUS model for young women. Fuck being smart, as long as you're pretty. Fuck college, as long as you can marry a hot guy and instantly spit out babies. Fuck having a life of your own, because if your boyfriend leaves the room you will fall into DEEP EMO ANGST. Being a hot rich sparkly monster is ALL THAT MATTERS IN LIFE!!!

Education? Pshaw. I'm gonna sparkle like a discoball.

Did I mention yet how much I hate this series?

L concurs.

The female characters in Twilight are presented as shallow, superficial and dependent, and have no interests other than having a man, a family, and a domestic life of eternal wealth and beauty: ‘Confined in cages, like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock-majesty from perch to perch’ (Wollstonecraft 1769, 130). Bella is depressed without Edward around: ‘Disappointment flooded through me... Had he gone home? I followed the still-babbling Jessica through the line, crushed. I’d lost my appetite – I just wanted to go home and sulk’ (Meyer 2005, 74), ‘...I couldn’t stop the gloom that engulfed me as I realised I didn’t know how long I would have to wait before I saw him again’ (Meyer 2005, 96), ‘There was no sign of Edward...desolation hit me with crippling strength’, ‘…spiralling downward in misery’/ (Meyer 2005, 126). After Edward’s departure in New Moon, she falls into a catatonic state for four months – with only the names of the months and blank pages left in the book to show the passing of time. She has no interests or life of her own, and has become so reliant on Edward for happiness that she is an empty, emotionless ‘zombie’ without him, only recovering when a new man – Jacob – enters her life as an emotional crutch. This reinforces Meyer’s clear message that a woman can only be content and fulfilled when she is with a man.

Bella discovers that putting herself in danger conjures hallucinations of Edward, and throws herself into suicidal situations such as cliff-jumping to be able to hear his voice: ‘I was addicted to the sound of my delusions. It made things worse if I went too long without them’ (Meyer 2006, 310). Addiction is not a decision but a psychological need, a dependency, revealing that even when Edward is gone, Bella believes he still has sway over her free will. This dependent, helpless, suicidal state that Bella cannot recover from even months later is inarguably a harmful lesson on how to deal with a teenage breakup – if the boyfriend leaves, the girl’s life is not worth living. (Hear that, ladies? Your life is WORTHLESS without a hot rich man. If he dumps your whiny, irrational, co-dependent ass, you might as well sulk in your bedroom and listen to Linkin Park and cry tears of blood and slit your wrists.)

Wait - wrong crappy emogasm of a story.

After meeting her handsome, wealthy boyfriend, Bella’s singular goal in life is to become his beautiful, wealthy wife, setting aside any and all other vocational or educational pursuits: ‘College was Plan B. I was still hoping for Plan A, but Edward was just so stubborn about leaving me human....’ (Meyer 2006, 12). Readers are told that Rosalie Cullen has an interest in cars and is an excellent mechanic[1] – an interest which does not conform to stereotypical ‘feminine hobbies’. However these facets of her personality are never shown; instead all we learn about Rosalie is that: ‘She had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room’ (Meyer 2005, 16) and that ‘Rosalie was thinking, as usual, about herself. She’d caught sight of her profile in the reflection of someone’s glasses, and she was mulling over her own perfection. Rosalie’s mind was a shallow pool with few surprises’ (Meyer 2006, 1). Even when Meyer creates a potentially progressive, interesting female character, she undermines these positive traits by demeaning her as vain, shallow and selfish.

Bella often shows herself to be a small-minded heroine: ‘I guess my brain will never work right. At least I’m pretty’ (Meyer 2008, 374). (I love this quote SO MUCH, because it pretty much sums up in ONE FUCKING LINE everything that I hate about Bella Swan, Meyer, and Twilight. A lot of Twitards defend this line on the ground that Bella was 'joking', which would be a viable argument if Bella hadn't spend the entire fucking series saying this exact thing in subtler phrasing. Remember, this is the girl who saw college as something to do ONLY if she couldn't marry her hot rich boyfriend. And even if it WAS a joke, it's pretty fucking offensive).

She frequently belittles her classmates about their appearance: ‘a gangly boy with skin problems and hair black as an oil slick leaned across the aisle to talk to me. “You’re Isabella Swan, aren't you?” He looked like the overly helpful, chess club type’ (Meyer 2005, 14) (Note the implicit message that friendly boys who are polite to you are EW and GROSS but bipolar guys who treat you like crap are HAWT!). When admiring the Cullens and pondering their status as the town’s outsiders, Bella posits: ‘Their isolation must be their desire; I couldn’t imagine any door that wouldn’t be opened by that degree of beauty’ (Meyer 2005, 28), implying that she believes, and therefore the reader is encouraged to agree, that it is only beauty, not personality or any other traits, that matter in life. This is the shallow mindset that Mary Wollstonecraft was warning about when she wrote: ‘Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.’ (Wollstonecraft 1792, 116)

Esme Cullen serves no apparent function other than fulfilling the maternal role of the housewife; unlike her husband Carlisle, Esme is never said to have a job, her hobbies and interests are never mentioned, and her only power is described to be ‘that of unparalleled capacity for passionate love’[2] (BWAHAHA! Someone drew the short straw!); a stereotypically feminine and arguably weaker power than Edward’s mind reading abilities and Emmett’s enormous strength. Alice Cullen boasts the powers of precognition, but again her strengths falter where the men’s do not; her visions are unreliable (there's an understatement. My magic 8 ball has better precognitive powers than Alice) and her powers do not extend to the shape shifters, while Edward is free to read any mind. Bella’s power following her transformation in Breaking Dawn is a ‘mental shield’[3] which protects her friends and family; not only a defensive and passive power in comparison to the male’s primarily offensive and active powers, but also limited, as she is unable to protect against physical attack. Even Meyer’s super powered women are presented as redundant and flawed beside the men, and are only granted power when vampirized by the men (Bella by Edward, Alice, Esme, and Rosalie by Carlisle). Twilight shows none of the depth of progressive, contemporary vampire texts where the female becomes the heroine by developing her own powers, such as Buffy’s role as The Slayer, and Sookie Stackhouse discovering her fairy heritage[4].

Twilight is congratulated by Oprah Winfrey[5] for harking back to the literature of the nineteenth century, when women were damsels in distress and men were Byronic heroes; but what is old-fashioned and romantic for many readers is misogynistic and outdated to others. That Bella is so lacking in a personality and a mind of her own – is literally a tabula rasa – is unsurprising, as Meyer herself has admitted that creating such a blank slate female protagonist would allow the reader to ‘more easily step into her shoes’[6]. However, such a protagonist is hardly a strong female role model when compared to Elizabeth Bennet or Jane Eyre.

Bella Swan, along with most of Meyer’s female characters, is shown to be physically incapable, dependent, unintelligent, sneering, and completely willing to allow male figures in her life to physically and emotionally intimidate her because she finds such behaviour romantic. Bella is ‘everywoman’ (a moral sermon acted out[7]), deliberately constructed so that everyone can better imagine themselves as her. This coupled with the overarching themes of morality, suggests that Meyer is not only presenting women as content to be dominated but encouraging readers to agree with this depiction, accepting Bella’s passive mindset and the patriarchal rules of her universe. This makes the Twilight series not only an offensive presentation of women, but a troubling influence as even in this time of supposed gender equality, many young girls

Logic has no effect on them!! Bring out the Death Rays!!!

and their mothers

Twilight Moms - hope their daughters grow up to find a man as respectful to woman as Eddieboy.

seem to be happy to worship Edward Cullen through Bella’s eyes, and like the female characters of the Twilight world, never question Meyer’s obsolete moral standards or demand gender equality.

That's all she wrote, folks. Or at least, that's the end of the essay. The snark of Twilight will keep coming :D

[1] http://twilightsaga.wikia.com/wiki/Rosalie [Accessed 23/5/11]
[2] http://twilightsaga.wikia.com/wiki/Esme_Cullen [Accessed 22/5/11]
[3] http://twilightsaga.wikia.com/wiki/Mental_shield [Accessed 22/5/11]
[4] http://southern-vampire-mysteries.wikia.com/wiki/Sookie_Stackhouse [Accessed 22/5/11]
[5] http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Twilights-Rob-Pattinson-Kristen-Stewart-and-Taylor-Lautner [Accessed 22/5/11]
[6] http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight_faq.html#bella [Accessed 23/5/11]
[7] http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/Everyman.html [Accessed 23/5/11]