Deconstructing Twilight Part Four - or, It's all your fault, woman!!

Today, on Deconstructing Twilight: Lions fell in love with lambs, and woman are to blame for everything in the world ever. So if you get raped, it's totes your own fault for wearing makeup and tempting the guy. Mmkay? Because men are good and moral and don't want your icky slutty girl germs.

We all know Meyer is allergic to research, but this is fucking ridiculous - it only takes 15 seconds to Google 'lion and lamb' and figure out what it means. Stop assraping religion because of your laziness, Meyer!

Sexual withholding and control games provide another opportunity for Meyer to dramatise the marginalisation and stereotyping of her female characters through the attribution of blame. While another critic could argue that Bella is the objectifier and Edward is the objectified, making Twilight a progressive text, Meyer’s presentation of sexual desire embodies double standards: ‘He was too perfect, I realized with a piercing stab of despair. There was no way this godlike creature could be meant for me’ (Meyer 2005, 224). Bella’s constant ogling of Edward (there are 165 references to Edward’s beauty in the first novel alone[1]) is not an empowered reversal of the male gaze but another device to portray Bella as ‘degraded by being made subservient to love or lust’ (Wollstonecraft 1792, 96); a shallow heroine obsessed with looks who feels she is undeserving of Edward’s spellbinding beauty. (We get it, Meyer, you're a bored middleaged woman who wants to vicariously bang her fictional hawt smexy teenage vampire creation through her Author Avatar Sue.)

Presenting Edward as the honourable (pfft) man who refuses the offer of sex outside marriage subsequently presents Bella as morally weak-willed; Edward frequently talks about how Bella is sexually attractive to him, but any of Bella’s advances are quickly chastised. He controls all aspects of their sex life, and demeans Bella when she attempts flirtation. In Twilight, he compares her to heroin, alcohol, and ‘...a demon, summoned straight from my own personal hell to ruin me’ (Meyer 2005, 236), to which Bella merely responds ‘Please don’t worry about offending me’ (Meyer 2005, 235) (Don't worry about offending me! Compare me to drugs, booze and meat! Treat me like shit! I LIKE IT!). It is always Bella’s fault for tempting Edward, never the other way around, carrying a strong biblical intonation of Eve tempting Adam with the forbidden fruit: ‘And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat’ (King James Bible) (Yeah, but she didn't MAKE you eat it. Dick.). Edward reprimands Bella for her passion by saying that he must restrain himself from harming her; he controls all aspects of their sex life by demeaning Bella even when she responds to his advances – and she not only fails to notice how absurd and unfair this is, but agrees that she should ‘know better’:

Then he took my face in his hands almost roughly...there really was no excuse for my behaviour. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn’t seem to stop from reacting...
He staggered back. “Damn it, Bella!” He broke off, gasping. “You’ll be the death of me, I swear you will.” (Meyer 2005, 317)

It would explain the body glitter, the bitchy attitude, and why he pushes his girlfriend away every time she tries to french him.

The themes of morality and the strong ‘no sex before marriage’ message of Twilight is unsurprising, as Meyer is ‘an observant Mormon’[2], but even strongly right-wing Christian fundamentalists find her presentation of gender roles to be outdated. Riess, the former Religion Book editor for Publisher’s Weekly, states that there are ‘rich connections between LDS (The Church of the Latter Day Saints – commonly referred to as ‘The Mormon Church’[3]) theology and Meyer’s writing’, but expresses concerns with the ‘retrogressive gender stereotypes in all of her novels — particularly the ineptitude of Bella. Although the novels repeatedly tell the reader that Bella is smart and strong, what the novels actually show the reader consistently is Bella's powerlessness. These are things that I hope do not originate with Mormonism.’[4] (HA. I love that even the Mormons are trying to disown Meyer! "That creepy housewife with the marble fetish who had a wet dream about a sparkling teenage vampire? Er, no. She's not with us. *cough*")

Bella is ‘made to suffer for and be ashamed of her sexuality’ (Millett 1969/1970, 119); she is punished for sex in the same way Eve is punished – through the pain of a bloody, agonising, and in this case, fatal (not fatal enough for my liking) childbirth. This presentation starkly contrasts with contemporary female protagonists of vampire texts. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon 1997), it is the male character Angel who pays for sex with his true love by losing his soul, while Buffy remains unscathed[5]; and Sookie Stackhouse of the Southern Vampire Mystery novels (Harris 2001) enjoys heightened senses and abilities after sex with her vampire boyfriend Bill. Both Buffy and Sookie lose their virginity and still live to ‘kill the bad guy’[6], while Bella is physically battered from losing hers, calling to mind a scene of domestic violence – ‘…large purplish bruises were beginning to blossom across the pale skin of my arm. Edward placed his hand against the bruises on my arm, one at a time, matching his long fingers to the patterns.’ (Meyer 2008, 82) (Yay rapey sex! Seriously, does Meyer not see how sinister this is??). She also instantly falls pregnant with a child that breaks her ribs and severs her spine (And Edward has to chew through her uterus to get it out. With his teeth. And then inject her with poison. And this is after she vomits 'a fountain of blood.' Whoa, what age bracket is this series marketed at, again?!) .

Even the chest-bursting scene from Alien was less R-rated than this!

The first two texts present female sexuality as natural, healthy and empowering, but Twilight presents it as something to be ashamed of and something to be punished for. This outdated stereotype of the ‘scarlet temptress’ who corrupts good, moral men has fewer similarities with Twilight’s contemporaries, and more with Dracula (Stoker 1897), where sexuality and vampirism were portrayed as evil.

In Dracula the male characters must step in and battle to stop Mina Harker becoming a seductive vampire monster. However, even Dracula attributes less blame over female sexuality than Twilight – Mina Harker survives despite losing her virginity, and though she feels disgusted and ‘tainted’ by Dracula’s mark upon her, the men all repeatedly reassure her that it is not her fault.

Yet another way that Dracula pwns Twilight, in case you needed any more.

Twilight places the blame so squarely upon its female characters that they eventually facilitate this ideology by feeling guilty over their sexuality – Bella’s first response upon waking up following her wedding night is ‘My first instinct, the product of a lifetime of insecurities, was to wonder what I had done wrong.’ (Meyer 2008, 80.)

Next time - the final part! - TWOO WUV is co-dependent and suicidally clingy, and if you have aspirations, hobbies, lives, or even a personality outside of your boyfriend/husband, you clearly have no idea what TWOO romance is about and your relationship can't compare to the DEPTH of Edward and Bella's DEVOTION coz their WUV is TWOO and BETTER than all those posers like Westley & Buttercup and Lizzie Bennett & Mr Darcy and Romeo & Juliet!! (Meyer actually implied this! God, how I wish I was joking...)

[1] http://storywrite.com/column/644 [Accessed 23/5/11]
[2] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1734838,00.html [Accessed 23/5/11]
[3] http://lds.org/?lang=eng [Accessed 25/5/11]
[4] http://www.mormontimes.com/article/8474/Book-editor-points-out-religious-symbolism [Accessed 23/5/11]
[5] http://www.buffyworld.com/buffy/summaries/026_summ.html [Accessed 23/5/11]
[6]http://www.alternet.org/sex/141317/rough_sex_with_vampires:_what_does_%22true_blood%22_tell_us_about_women_and_sexuality/ [Accessed 23/5/11]