Loading ...Judging a crepuscular abomination
With the cinematic release of ‘New Moon’ this month, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight franchise continues to grow. Despite their purple prose and awkward dialogue, the books that started it have gained a massive audience. The basic recipe for Meyer’s success is obvious: a pathologically dull and ordinary girl, who describes herself as ‘so clumsy I’m almost disabled’, accidentally ensnares the heart of a vampire boy we are told is ‘dazzling’, ‘perfect’, ‘flawless’, ‘angelic’ and even ‘god-like’.
It’s pure lovesick teen wish-fulfilment – yet the protagonists are denied sexual fulfilment until the very last book. Bella can’t even kiss Edward too passionately, in case the scent of her blood overpowers him and provokes a violent feeding-frenzy (she’s got especially attractive blood – his ‘own personal brand of heroin’, we’re told). And perhaps it’s this theme of temptation and self-control that resonates so strongly, providing an obvious metaphor (and warning) for teen relationships in general: be careful, girls – no matter how nice he is, bad things will happen if you get too close. Unsurprising, perhaps, considering Meyer’s Mormon background, where abstinence before marriage is the status quo.
Sexual themes are nothing new in the vampire novel – to give two examples, the titular character of Carmilla (1872) has a passionate lesbian desire for the heroine Laura, and Dracula is positively brimming with sexuality. Lucy goes from delicate virgin to voluptuous temptress when the Count converts her, the lady vamps are femme fatales throughout, and the scene where Dracula hypnotises Jonathan into submitting to his fangs has been read by critics as a scene of coded gay seduction. Significantly, it’s emphasised that all the vampires possess seductive red lips disguising their sharp teeth. In the language of lit crit, it’s Freud’s vagina dentata – inviting penetration but threateningly able to penetrate in return. The vampires, despite being dead, are more sexually alive than the human characters – and much more transgressive, questioning ideas about gender and sexuality in a way that would have been considered immoral at the time.
So where does Twilight fit in with this tradition? Like Dracula and Carmilla, Edward is supernaturally, hypnotically attractive to humans – but in contrast with their overt sexual display and purring sensuality, Edward is like ‘marble’, with lips described as ‘pale’, ‘cold’, and ‘unyielding’. What makes Edward attractive to Bella is not the voluptuous sexuality of his vampiric precursors, but his aura of purity and unattainability.
This, naturally, heightens the wish-fulfilment element of Bella actually getting together with him – but that’s not the only reason he resembles a marble angel. It’s been suggested (by an ex-Mormon, no less) that there’s a religious element to the fetishisation of his dazzling whiteness, relating to beliefs about how skin colour reflects moral perfection. But on another level, Edward isn’t a traditional, seductive vampire with sexy red lips, because (as far as Meyer is concerned) he’s the ideal boyfriend.
Edward is characterised by angst-ridden restraint of all his raging desires: to kill people who annoy him, drink Bella’s exceptionally tempting blood, or just get jiggy with her. He’s her guardian in more ways than one – not just saving her from falling over, being hit by cars, or being attacked in dark alleys, but her moral guardian, spurning her passionate advances and keeping their relationship strictly PG.
Traditionally, the vampire’s role has been to attempt to seduce the protagonists (and reader) into sexual transgression, before being roundly expelled by crosses, holy water, and righteous fire. But the problem (and the interest) is that seductive villains do ensnare the reader, to a degree – they make sinning sexy. So Meyer redeploys the figure of the fascinating vampire for her own purposes – he makes chastity sexy. He is not there, Dracula-like, to ensnare you into a demonic dalliance, but to make Mormon morality and marriage look more enticing. Dracula and Twilight have essentially the same result – a reaffirming of conservative sexual mores – but Twilight lacks the troubled, ambiguous relationship with its own sexual politics that makes its literary forebears so fascinating.
What is highly troubling about the sexual politics of the Twilight series is that the central relationship, held up as an exemplar of perfection, is in fact anything but. Bella is presented as utterly incapable of managing anything in her own life – Edward is constantly brought in to save her from her own incompetence, and indeed, to control the minutiae of her life in a relentless, even abusive, way. On top of this staggering imbalance, he sneaks into her room and watches her sleep every night (and when she finds out she’s flattered!), he immobilises her car so she can’t visit a male friend, and he gets ragingly jealous at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile, Bella is apathetic about her friends, family, and school – after knowing Edward for two months, she is ‘unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him’, and wants nothing but to become a vampire and live with Edward for all eternity, even though it means abandoning everyone else she knows. When he temporarily leaves in New Moon, Bella is reduced to a zombie-like state for months before deciding to attempt suicide to induce Edward to save her. The bizarre list could go on. Their relationship is obsessive, all-consuming, and staggeringly unbalanced –a hollow infatuation put on a pedestal and presented with stunning naïveté about what it takes to have a functional relationship with another person. While it admittedly is an escapist fantasy, what’s so worrying is that anyone would want to escape to it.
Because of the abstinence message, there’s a feeling among some readers that Twilight is about a respectful, healthy relationship. But at heart, the Edward-Bella dynamic is just as twisted as any horror story.
