The Loinfire Club doesn't read.... Twilight

Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer

When 17 year old Isabella Swan moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father she expects that her new life will be as dull as the town. But in spite of her awkward manner and low expectations, she finds that her new classmates are drawn to this pale, dark-haired new girl in town. But not, it seems, the Cullen family. These five adopted brothers and sisters obviously prefer their own company and will make no exception for Bella. Bella is convinced that Edward Cullen in particular hates her, but she feels a strange attraction to him, although his hostility makes her feel almost physically ill. He seems determined to push her away ? until, that is, he saves her life from an out of control car. Bella will soon discover that there is a very good reason for Edward's coldness. He, and his family, are vampires ? and he knows how dangerous it is for others to get too close. 

The Chronicler feels she really needs to get some more horrible books to bash, or perhaps better books to gush over. Mediocrity is really quite difficult comment on and even more difficult to read. After a while the mind numbs to the dull prose and what nuggets of interest are only interesting in comparison.

Mrs Giggles wrote that Stephanie Meyer created "the most potent kind of pornography for teenage girls in Twilight - the Mary Sue epic love story." And, preamble aside, the Chronicler maintains that this assessment is the most succinct, witty and accurate assessment of Twilight possible and that anything she can add is really just flogging a dead pony. Elizabeth Hand dissects all four books with great wit and brevity... But the rambling habit never stopped me. Neither will the fact that Twilight has already received numerous awards (The 

Anthropologist remarked that she never heard anyone scream "Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year" with that much horror).

Incidentally, the cover of Twilight is really pretty. Proverbs and pronouncements aside, it was in fact the reason why The Chronicler owns a copy of the book. That and there is something compelling about the blurb:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him — and I didn't know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Of course, when you think about it harder there are holes to pick at and the promise of unconditional love is all well and good in concept, in quotes, but it is often makes for a perplexing – if not alienating – read. Dark, twisted obsession makes for a fascinating read, but the trap of romanticising it so often ensnares the author and the reader is presented a picture of dubious relationship practices as an ideal rather than a compelling perversion.

Isabella "Bella" Swan moves into Forks, which we are assured to be the most damp and overcast little town in all of America, and meets Edward Cullen, the sparkliest, most beautiful vampire ever. In the last quarter or so of the book, something resembling a plot kicks in and some vampire by the name of James decides he wants to hunt Bella for sport, but that is really inconsequential to the True Love that exists between Bella and Edward.

The opening chapters are interminable and shows again all the weaknesses of a first person narrative.* Meyer has an eye for incidental detail and one is torn from seeing it as clutter and seeing it as building a believable – if dull – character. Bella calls her father "Charlie" and her mother "Reneé". The Anthropologist theorises latent and repressed resentment or that they're "hip" parents who insist on being called their first names. However, Bella calls them "Mom" and "Dad" in speech and emails thus the "voice" of her narrative seems somehow... off.

Bella's description of her new truck makes me wonder if she's aware that the indomitable Toyota Pickup is foreign:

Plus, it was one of those solid iron affairs that never gets damaged — the kind you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.

But much of Twilight shows a great blind spot in general knowledge, such as when Edward tells Bella that his favourite blood is that of a mountain lion and "Grizzly [Bear] is Emmett's favourite." He adds:

We have to be careful not to impact the environment with injudicious hunting. We try to focus on areas with an overpopulation of predators.

The Balance, ever the voice of reason and conservation biology, notes that this would mean nowhere. Whilst neither the grizzly bear nor the mountain lion is currently listed under "threatened" by the World Conservation Union, both populations are somewhat precarious. "Near threatened" is hardly a green light for vampires to start wrestling down mountain lions and draining them of blood.

But maybe the world of Twilight is completely different from our own when it comes to this and has a real problem with predator overpopulation...

The Anthropologist notes that Meyer seems to recycle common vampire tropes by substituting in less famous names in hopes that this obvious filing off of the serial numbers would give the impression of an original idea. Instead of Navajo skin-walker werewolves, she has them as Quileute. Instead of Michelangelo and Raphael Sanzio being inspired by Vampires to paint, it's Francesco Solimena, also of the Italian Renaissance. The new names doesn't make it feel more fresh or original.

Meyer struggles with creating the obliviously beautiful heroine – the ugly girl who is simple a pretty girl with glasses:

I should be tan, sporty, blond — a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps — all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun.

Instead, I was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete. 

"Ivory-skinned" is in no way a derogatory descriptor. Neither is a soft slenderness. In fact, all one can get from the passage is that she is conventionally attractive. She tells us both her height (5' 4") and weight (110lbs), conveniently allowing us to work out her Body Mass Index, which we, of course, proceeded to do. (The Anthropologist was rather gleeful about this since she'd never been given the information to do this to a romance novel heroine before.)

It rather difficult to actually give Bella's claims of being an unpopular outcast any credence. She soon has a plethora of male admirers and multiple female friends (most of whom are nice but mildly jealous of her).

On the other hand, it is perhaps quite easy to see why she hadn't many friends back in Phoenix as she goes through her first day making unsympathetic snap judgements on the people who are nice to her:

When the bell rang, a nasal buzzing sound, 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.

It's not even that I don't like snarky people, but Bella's brand of sarcasm comes across as unpleasant, borderline misanthropic and not particularly incisive (or funny, for that matter). She is also utterly oblivious to the possibility that she may be doing something wrong in her inability to communicate and sympathise with her peers.

(Incidentally, we never do discover whether or not "Chess Club Eric" is actually member of any chess club – or if there is a chess club at this school – he is given this label by Bella and it is used forevermore.)

Meyer claims that Bella's sudden surge in popularity in Forks high school is based in part on her own ugly-duckling-now-swan university experience. Of course, there is quite a big difference between switching from one high school to another and from high school to university. Usually, the case of "stock surge," as Meyer put it, is caused by there simply being more people at college and exposure to a greater number of people. The Anthropologist also quips that Meyer's anecdote is probably coloured by the fact that she attended Brigham Young University, where the beauty is measured by willingness to become a happy housewife. (The Anthropologist would like to add that she was being very snarky at this point and doesn't mean it literally.)

Probable or not, it's immensely hard to sympathise with the self-proclaimed unattractive girl who finds herself being asked by three (not including the hero) boys to the "girls' choice spring dance." Which is really reason enough to reject them since they blatantly fail to grasp simple concepts (and will no doubt have trouble with concepts like "consent" later on in the evening.) Bella takes her new friends and admirers very much for granted. She doesn't even seem to care much about them and they start blurring together into this faceless, chattering mass, which really doesn't recommend the character to me.

The same applies to most of Twilight, there is a great distance between the showing and the telling. As readers, we're told repeatedly that Bella is clumsy to the point of endangering herself, yet we little evidence of this in her actions. I understand the need for comic hyperbole, but the "joke" of Bella's clumsiness needs to be reinforced with some actual correlation with reality. I don't know, she could get hit by a volleyball more. Or walk into a lamppost whilst reading. We're told Bella is bookish, yet she is rarely shown reading and it seems never to surface in her conversation – surely any seventeen-year-old who has wild imagination and a bookish way can come up with something more creative than "Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker" in an entire month. For that matter, "Bruce Wayne" is a stupid explanation for Edward's supernatural abilities since Batman has none; he's just really, really rich. 

I had decided to read Wuthering Heights — the novel we were currently studying in English — yet again for the fun of it...

I know I've odd opinions about the Brontës, but who reads Wuthering Heights "for the fun of it"? It's an immensely emotionally draining book. (Unless, of course, you find it alienating, messy and dull, which is another popular opinion.) It's really quite dark and unlike, say, Jane Eyre, it's quite difficult to overlook the dark bits – the murderous hero, the unapologetically selfish heroine... But perhaps this attitude to the events of Wuthering Heights will explain her later reaction to Edward's vampirism.

 

But yes, the vampires of Twilight, the main attraction... they are quite possible the least subtle ones this side of serious literature. They are aloof, never talk to any of the students and sit by themselves in their little huddle in the cafeteria:

[They] were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel.

(At this point, the Chronicler hastens to add that she clearly doesn't mean any of the medieval masters...)

Not only that, but they all have:

dark shadows under those eyes —purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose.

...which you'd think would crimp their perfect, perfect beauty. It's explicitly describes as being more like an injury rather than overly enthusiastic eye-shadow application. But clearly Bella (or Meyer) is of the opinion that abuse victims are hot.

The deathly pale complexion, unearthly beauty (despite adopted) and uniformly bruised eyes aside, they also don't eat. They all sit there with their food in front them, looking at nothing in particular ("away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell") and not eating. They then proceed to throw away their uneaten food. And this happens, we could but assume, every day. Wasting the food aside, it seems inane that no one has noticed this. Especially since I'm sure anorexia is quite a problem in high schools (one that is looked out for) and the girls look like "Sports Illustrated" models, which implies underweight to me.

I hope you're getting a full image here, dear reader: inhumanly beautiful, deathly pale clique with uniformly bruised eyes sit together, not looking at anything, not eating, every lunch time at the cafeteria. I wouldn't suspect vampires, but cult would be high on the suspicions list.

Bella and Edward stare at each other, a lot. Edward stares at her with a "hostile, furious" expression on his face. And she shies away from his gaze, but stare at him when he's not looking. This game of stares goes on for far, far too long. The blurb makes no secret of Bella and Edward's eventual relationship so it really begs the question why it can't cut to the chase, especially when the misunderstandings and double-meaning really gets on my nerves. 

Edward heavy-handedly hints at how very dangerous he is and the reader is in on the fact that he's a vampire, but Bella isn't and... suffice to say, the Belief Turnstile is badly handled. It's a very, very long time before Bella finds out that Edward's a vampire and the whole sequence lacks suspense (since the reader already knows he's a vampire and is impatient for the revelation) and momentum, let alone actual believability. Bella hears about vampires from Jacob Black, a family friend and then ends up googling it. She then ponders if Edward could be. Later, he confirms this... it's just dull. And never does she actually feel threatened by him.

Of course, it's never clear what Bella's worldview was, pre-vampires. She swallows the website wholesale and moves on to speculate whether the Cullens were vampires. She doesn't need to, well, fit them into an emerging picture of the world she lives in. If someone were to prove to me that vampires exist, then the next question is whether or not other folkloric creatures exist and which versions of the folklores are most accurate. Then is the question where they fit in the universe: Is there a heaven and a hell? Do we have souls or not? Etc, etc...

Bella's just incredibly uncurious. She asks Edward about popular culture vampires, but neglects to ask him about the three pages of Wikipedia reading she did.

I felt a spasm of fear at his words, and the abrupt memory of his violent black glare that first day… but the overwhelming sense of safety I felt in his presence stifled it.

Their relationship is described with self-contradicting hyperbole and never does the reader glimpse the "heart" of the relationship, how the two characters actually function together as a couple. Bella falls in love with him without really interacting with him in any meaningful way beyond stares (and they're not even meaningful stares, the sort the allegedly pierce the heart and make one feel truly understood) and a few words of cryptic conversation. We never find out the contents of her Edward-filled dreams, since she doesn't really know enough of his personality to extrapolate what interacting with him would be like (unlike he, who was probably busy listening in on every conversation she has via mind-reading). Besides his statuesque beauty – literally, actually, since vampire skin resembles marble in its texture and hardness – he seems to have little to recommend him.

The most remarkable conversation is this one, early in their relationship:

I couldn't remember the last time I'd talked so much. More often than not, I felt selfconscious, certain I must be boring him. But the absolute absorption of his face, and his never-ending stream of questions, compelled me to continue. Mostly his questions were easy, only a very few triggering my easy blushes. But when I did flush, it brought on a whole new round of questions. 

He asks her questions like "What music is in your CD player right now?" and what her favourite gemstone/flower/colour/book/movie is. It 's even likened in the book to psychoanalysis. It's baffling, since most hold these topics to be conversation starters, where there is an exchange of opinion and discussion as opposed to a one-sided interrogation. One could read this as how a vampire (due to being dead) is utterly unable to really experience real preference and opinion, thus is leeching of her vivid and exciting life experience, but it's not really the way it's presented to one. Plus, Edward does actually have opinions and is functionally the same as a normal human.

The Anthropologist posits that it's because the teenage female desires a teenage boy who inundate them all the questions like those on facebook and myspace, desiring to know all those pointless preferences like a "which angel are you?" quiz, because that is their standard of meaningful correspondence.

 

Meyer uses Edward's bloodlust as an odd metaphor for sexual desire – Edward's sexual desire is equated to his desire to drink (and kill) Bella – which gives the whole book an odd allegorical side, which Meyer explicitly point to. But it's a tightly-controlled-yet-overpowering desire which Bella can never understand, neither does she feel anything akin to it – really quite repulsive, outdated sexual politics, in my opinion, but it's found in trace quantities in at least half the romance novels on the market, so I'll not harp on that too much. Elizabeth Hand finds in Meyer "unrequited female erotic yearning", but it's hardly the case. There's nothing even vaguely erotic about Bella's yearning. She's a good girl. Her admiration of Edward, though isn't physical – or so she insists. It's what's behind the face, she tells her friend, she's fascinated by the idea of a redeeming monster.

But Bella (unlike Jane Eyre, for example) isn't the agent of his redemption, she's remarkably passive throughout the story. Edward is already well on the road to redemption (set on by Dr. Cullen) when he meets her. Pillywiggin goes as far as calling her the "meatbag" Edward wheels about the place and refuses to let talk. Edward notes that he feels the most "human" when around her, but it's never really explained what that means.

(Actually, Dr. Cullen's backstory is really odd. It takes him, literally, months to develop the philosophy to drink animal blood instead of human. Seriously. How thick is this founding father of vampire "vegetarianism"? In addition, after a few centuries of self-control, he manages to resist bloodlust so much he can work in a hospital.)

Still, telling her that she must stay absolutely still when he kisses her, or else, he'll accidentally kill her, seems a bit much.

There really was no excuse for my behaviour. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn't seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck, and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure

Edward's declarations of his immense skull-crushing strength is weird:

"If I was too hasty… if for one second I wasn't paying enough attention, I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don't realize how incredibly breakable you are. I can never, never afford to lose any kind of control when I'm with you."

With that kind of strength... well, surely he'd be accidentally putting holes into walls, breaking doorbells, stamping through floors... telephones must be a nightmare as he accidentally punches them apart with his fingers. But of course, this sort of strength only applies when with Bella (or alternatively, Bella is just made of tofu).

Speaking of kisses, the book also boasts of what Pillywiggen has branded the most unsexy kiss she's ever read:

He seemed unaware of his watching family as he pulled my face to his, lifting my feet off the floor. For the shortest second, his lips were icy and hard against mine. Then it was over. He set me down, still holding my face, his glorious eyes burning into mine.

Bella is rather frail, she faints at blood (especially inconvenient when dating a vampire) and later faints at Edward's kisses. She has a special scent that only Edward can smell (no, I don't know why, or how he knows this) though she is still immensely attractive:

"If you didn't smell so appallingly luscious, he might not have bothered." [...]

"I thought… I didn't smell the same to the others… as I do to you," I said hesitantly.

"You don't. But that doesn't mean that you aren't still a temptation to every one of them. If you had appealed to the tracker — or any of them — the same way you appeal to me, it would have meant a fight right there."

After Bella is told that she is to inform her father that she's going out with Edward (so that he has an incentive to bring her back), she promptly decides to not do so, since if Edward succumbs to bloodlust and kills her, she doesn't want to get him into trouble.

It's probably common knowledge by now and barely worth mocking, but Meyer's vampires literally sparkle:

His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday's hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare.

The Anthropologist has much snark concerning how this conforms to teenage female aesthetics, but it's really getting too easy...

 

There is something compelling about the lion-in-love-with-the-lamb trope, and Meyer does milk it for all its worth, but she doesn't let the story darken or deepen. Edward really isn't a very objectionable vampire. Vampires being harmed by holy water and daylight reinforces as metaphysical acknowledgement of their inhuman, inherently diabolical nature. By getting rid most of the traditional vampiric trappings, Meyer's vampires just aren't very monstrous. Or scary. 

There is nothing that isn't immediately forgiven by Bella. She isn't repulsed by the fact he doesn't drink blood, or that he has killed numerous people (admittedly serial killers, rapists and muggers) in the past in order to drink their blood. Her acceptance of him, this unconditional love, doesn't seem tested by his revelations. She takes it all in her stride. Monstrous, Byronic heroes work only if the heroine, the author, the reader, the rest of the cast, all acknowledge that he's actually monstrous.

It's telling, perhaps, in the phrasing of how Meyer says that Edward is based on Jane Eyre's Edward Rochester, because both "see themselves as 'monsters.'" It's the self-perception as monstrous, but Meyer, however sees Edward as a gentlemen, full of "olde-worlde charm." Of course, the Chronicler often finds that the world seems to reading a different book than her. Rochester is monstrous, in many ways. He was ready to commit bigamy (no small sin in Victorian England), he's got his wife locked up in his attic, madness aside, he's not really giving her any decent care or treatment. He also had mistresses (also no small sin in Victorian England). Jane is drawn to him, but she cannot forgive him and cannot marry him, so she runs away from temptation. But the point is, Rochester is a man weighed down by his past inhabiting a world that acknowledges his sinfulness. He's genuinely haunted by that past. Edward Cullen, on the other hand, flits about his teenage classroom. His decade of murdering murderers is brought up only once and never again, not even by Bella (seriously, that more than half her age spent drinking blood). Bella's absolute faith in Edward to control himself, to not kill her simply adds her mind-numbing naiveté and solidifies Edward as "just misunderstood."

Perhaps it's because he's so very well-controlled that Edward comes across as an automaton. Meyer speaks of "sacrifice" and she relates it to her college experience at Brigham Young University... It's as though she's not really aware that when most people write about "sacrifices" made for love, they don't mean "no sex before marriage" or "no alcohol at college." They usually mean things grander, more epic, shall we say. That Edward's sexual/bloodlust struggle is rather too dull to be placed at the fore of the book... well, we know he's not going to succumb. Bella's hardly going to die by his hand.... So where's the tension?  Bella doesn't have graphic fantasies of him gnawing her neck off and doesn't really actively tempt him beyond just existing.

Meyer also notes in the same interview that "Edward goes to great lengths so nothing bad happens to Bella, she is cared for so much. A lot of the book's appeal is the thought of being loved to that extent [...] There has been some antagonism from men about Edward. They are jealous because they don't want to try that hard."

Of course men don't want to try that hard. And no man should. It's creepy. Edward seems to do nothing else but stalk her (and hunt for food). He spends all his sleepless nights sneaking into Bella's room and watching her sleep, seemingly immune to boredom. (Pillywiggin theorises that Bella's a one-woman radio station in her range of sleep-talking, but I doubt that's what Meyer has in mind.) He stalks her, literally following her about and finding out where is by reading the thoughts of those around her. And this is all before they actually get together and declare their love and all that.

Yes, Edward can hear the thoughts of everyone around him (except for Bella) and has no qualms eavesdropping on her conversations with other friends and acquaintances. Bella simply cannot talk to anyone about him, cannot confide in anyone without him finding out. It's creepily invasive.  Worse, Bella doesn't have a problem with this. She doesn't feel as though her privacy was invaded, neither does she discourage him doing so beyond a jokey reprimand and she also doesn't feel that perhaps her friends wouldn't want creepy century-old vampire crawling all over their thoughts, making her come across as thoughtless and sociopathic. 

At the end of the day, Edward looks seventeen, but why is he condemning himself to year after year of high school education? This is never elucidated in the book, but as Mrs Giggles points out, "I can only shudder as I imagine how vapid Edward must be to enjoy being a permanent teenage kid." But he doesn't act like a seventeen-year-old. Hand describes him as "an obsessively controlling adult male," more father than boyfriend, and she's not far off the mark.

"You are my life. You're the only thing it would hurt me to lose."

I know, you're seventeen and you've no idea what to do with the rest of your life yet. But to anchor your entire existence on someone else is creepy and unhealthy. Has she not thought of her parents, her friends, her studies. Has no other hobbies that would be inconvenienced due to her vampirism? Perhaps it's because Meyer's so very de-fanged her vampires there's really not much choice. Being a vampire is just better. Eternal youth, supernatural strength, agility, perception and beauty.... There simply aren't any downsides. White Wolf's vampires, for example, have no creativity and all that they feel and create is merely a reflection of their alive years. Admittedly it's ridiculously angsty, but at least, it's a tangible downside. "I want to be a great artist, but I also love you, dear vampire" is a reasonable (if angsty) plot.

In conclusion, it's bad. And boring. Bella is infantile, passive and spineless. Edward is annoying, holier-than-thou and inhuman. As a bonus it also contains ideas about sex and relationships that I'd rather teenage girls didn't make into the stuff of their daydreams.

 

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* A first person narrator is limited to narrating what he or she sees. It is through this character's eyes that the reader perceives the world – a great asset when the character is interesting and has an idiosyncratic world view, but also an immense weakness when the author imperfectly hides behind this persona and starts puppeting characters about or worse, when unintentional voyeurism, sadism or masochism is created through lingering descriptions of things.