Archive for the ‘Print’ Category

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.

For those select and enlightened individuals who have set forth on the path of virtue, i.e. enrolled on an English degree and disavowed all things numbered and overly factual, I must extend my heartiest congratulations. Welcome my friends to the land of the free, home of the wild. It pretty much rocks.

Well, apart from one minor detail: there’s a lot of reading. Slightly. As in, minimum four books a week, slightly. Well if you’re up for it that’s all good, but for those who are either too busy, lazy or don’t want to kill the subject with the workload, there is an alternative*.

As a veteran of the degree, below is a list of just a few of my favourite dosser’s websites that saw me through many a seminar

Project Gutenberg
www.gutenberg.org
The poor student’s bible, Project Gutenberg is the online database of free e-books for cultural texts out of copyright [public domain books]. Here you’ll be able to download literature free and fast, including most classical works. Very easy to use, with a simple search engine. An absolute godsend for those of us who can’t afford to buy a shipload of books but attend a university that, in its immense wisdom, reckons one copy of each book is sufficient to cater for its hundreds of literature students.

The Victorian Web
www.victorianweb.org
As the name suggests, brilliant for all things Victorian. And guilt reduction too – I’ve had a lecturer recommend it, so it’s not completely clear of the academic realm either! Good place for summaries, critical commentaries, author biographies and a host of other useful stuff. Came in really handy for both A-levels and university.

Google
www.google.co.uk
Professor Google needs no introduction. In a word: essential. Search out everything from critics to core texts at the click of a mouse and enjoy. Especially good for searching out quotes – Google Books has many a book scanned, and can locate things in a second.

Squashed Philosophers
btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed
As great for information as for amusement. This legend of a website has summaries of most major classical works, in modern English. Plenty of amusement distilled throughout too. For Example: “The Very Squashed Version of the First Philosophers: Diogenes of Sinope “The Cynic” (c355BC): Known as ‘the dog’, he lived in a barrel, and was unbelievably rude to everyone, including Alexander the Great.” Glyn Hughes is sheer genius.

Spark Notes
www.sparknotes.com
Yes, I know they’re American and can’t spell, but these people are great for plot synopses and short commentaries on texts, authors and characters. A brilliant place for introductory knowledge, especially for Shakespeare with its ‘No Fear Shakespeare’ page of original Shakespearean works with modern English translations. Bit limited with the range of wider authors and books, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Wikipedia
www.wikipedia.org
The founders of this site need a Nobel Prize. Seriously. These guys have an entry for ‘Anything Under The Sun’. So you can only imagine what they have for famous texts, or authors like Dickens and whatnot. Very informative and often detailed, though always bear in mind the question of reliability and interpretation.

Dictionary.com
www.dictionary.com
The OED Online can go boil its pompous head. Dictionary.com is reliable, easy to use and accessible, with clear layout, short and sweet definitions, phonetic spellings and with recorded pronunciations you can play out. It also has a thesaurus and encyclopaedia on the same site. OED is a more ‘academic’ site, of course, so use that if you’re out to quote definitions and cite sources in essays.

Routeledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online
www.rep.routledge.com
Finally, an academic source [for philosophy, no less] that makes it all perfectly clear and understandable. Literary theory is a tricky subject, but this site makes it all accessible with minimal jargon and clear language. And it’s a trusted academic source, so entirely citeable. You’ll need your Athens password to access it, though.

But I’m sure you’re all responsible students who love the reading as much as the subject in general, so go for it and read the books themselves – pick your modules well and the reading lists will be well worth it!

*Bearing in mind you don’t entirely depend on these sites [and aren’t too bothered about getting the first, which you probably should be so don’t listen to me)