Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight": Erotic Romance of a Particularly American/Trashy Sort

Lizzie met her at the gate

Full of wise upbraidings:

‘Dear, you should not stay so late,

Twilight is not good for maidens;

Should not loiter in the glen

In the haunts of goblin men.’

-Christina Rossetti, Goblin Men (1862)

  

I have a philosophy. It goes: It’s all well and good to be dismissive of commercial fluff, but let us not be too dismissive, lest we allow something truly malignant to fly in under our radar.

    Case in point: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. For it is not its ardent devotees—the so called "Twihards"—who confound me the most, but rather the blithe apologists who shrug off its phenomenal popularity with the words, “Who cares if a few confused teenagers and emotionally stunted housewives misread it as an endorsement of abusive relationships? It’s not literature. It’s just entertainment.” (And yet these same people condemn dozens of Hollywood action movies each year for their misogyny, their homophobia, their racism and their hyperviolence. Why the double standard? If Twilight’s status as “mere entertainment” gets it off the hook for its warped psychosexual politics, why not the James Bond franchise or Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen? But I digress.)

    Twilight’s unpardonable crime is not that it defends, and at times even seems to preach, submission on the part of women, or that it portrays a victim of abuse’s silent and patient suffering as proper and her abuser’s possessive and domineering behavior as chivalrous and romantic. These are crimes, yes, but they would be pardonable if they were in the service of art. Its unpardonable crime is that it refuses to compensate for these offenses by being well-written. Its unpardonable crime is that it is not art.

    You see, contrary to the apparent opinion of those aforementioned apologists, a work of art’s being recognized as Literature does not make it more dangerous to society. In fact it makes it less, as Literature, being that it is taken seriously, is more likely to be scrutinized, analyzed and dissected. Just think how many papers have been written, to cite one particularly germane example, on the incongruity of Heathcliff’s reputation as a romantic hero in popular culture when Emily Bronte herself denounced him as a monster, one who stands unredeemed at the end of the novel of which he is the central character.

    This marks an important difference between the imaginative, psychologically astute Bronte, and the hackish, narcissistic Meyer: Bronte knew she was creating a monster. Meyer thought she was creating the perfect man. And in that she is more like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein than the reverent sculptor Pygmalion, though I have compared her to that figure in the past, for even now her creation is rampaging across our cultural landscape, wreaking havoc upon the psyches of our daughters, nieces, sisters, wives and girlfriends. Meyer’s transparent coattail-riding in the form of her repeated references to Wuthering Heights in her own novels only serves to show how much she missed the point of that far superior work, which she has presumed to cite as an influence.

    She would do well to pay attention to the passage in Chapter 10 in which the mercurial and independent Cathy corrects her naïve and adolescent sister-in-law, whom she has discovered is infatuated with the brooding antihero:

I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.

    Never has a more succinct and devastating repudiation of the myth of the Sensitive Bad Boy been written! And yet, were she alive today, poor Miss Bronte would be mortified to see a whole generation of women mistaking her rejection of that myth as just another entry in it.

    Worse than the idea that Meyer’s ears were simply deaf to Bronte’s words of warning* is the idea that they pricked up to them in titillation. The similarity to the above passage of some of the imagery from her own novel—lines like, “I felt like a bird locked in the eyes of a snake” and the oft tattooed “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb”—support that theory.

    Here is an excerpt from a review by Tim Brayton off his blog Antagony & Ecstasy:

This is a film About Sex . . . a very specific kind of sex: the erotic charge of death and danger. The [type of predator] trappings that make the movie seem like something entirely else are only there to facilitate the development of a character who is quite unambiguously aroused by the constant threat of being butchered . . . At the center of this sexual fantasia . . . is a maddeningly opaque heroine . . . At the film's end, we understand nothing about her other than her actions . . . This fact about [name of film] makes it perhaps more challenging than might be strictly necessary: we like to have sturdy protagonists to sink out teeth into, and [name of protagonist] is a defiantly blank slate. At the same time, I can't imagine the film working the same way with a "stronger" lead. It is at heart the story of a non-existent personality being filled up with dark sexual energies . . . and in order to work, [name of protagonist] must be an empty vessel at the start.

    Now suppose I asked you to restore the omitted pronouns. I’m betting you would substitute “vampire” for “type of predator”, “Twilight” for “name of film” and “Bella Swan” for “name of protagonist”. Am I right?

    Well, imaginary internet reader, you’d be wrong. The name of the film is In the Cut, by director Jane Campion, the type of predator is “serial killer” and the name of the protagonist is Frannie Avery (Brayton’s use of the phrase “sink our teeth into” is purely coincidental).

Notice any similarities?

    Still, it is uncanny how well the summary applies. “The erotic charge of death and danger” is in fact exactly what Twilight is about, whether it knows it or not, and Bella, as has been pointed out by many critics before me, is in fact both a “maddenly opaque heroine” and a “defiantly blank slate”.

    Therein lies the single most important distinction between the two works: Jane Campion set out to make a movie about that subject. Stephenie Meyer wrote a series of books about it completely by accident. The whole thing is one big Freudian slip. Meyer betrays her own submissive, borderline masochistic tendencies again and again, not just with the two lines I quoted above, but with others that comingle the concepts of fear, physical powerlessness and sexual arousal with equal reflexivity: “[H]e turned slowly to glare at me—his face was absurdly handsome—with piercing, hate-filled eyes”, “I was still frightened of the hostility I sometimes felt emanating from him, and I was still tongue-tied whenever I pictured his perfect face”, “I studied his flawless features in the limited light . . . until it occurred to me that his expression was murderously angry”, “If I’d ever feared death in his presence, it was nothing compared to how I felt now”, “I sat without moving, more frightened of him than I’d ever been . . . He’d never been less human, or more beautiful”, “I knew at any moment it could be too much, and my life could end . . . and I couldn’t make myself be afraid. I couldn’t think of anything except that he was touching me”, “He held my hands between his. They felt so feeble in his iron strength”, “His arm created an inescapable snare around my waist”, “I sat very still, the chill of his touch a natural warning telling me to be terrified. But there was no feeling of fear in me. There were, however, other feelings. . . .”

    ...etcetera ad nauseam. (For further evidence of the fact that Edward's hostile and predatory behavior is an integral part of what makes him so attractive to his fans, consider that the poster they most commonly hang on the walls of their dorms and bedrooms is a closeup of the character as portrayed by Robert Pattinson staring directly into the camera not lovingly, or seductively, or even forlornly, but utterly fucking furiously.)

    I could compile similar lists of every time Bella describes feeling like a child in the presence of an adult when she is with Edward, or every time he “commands” or “orders” her to do something and she obeys, or every time he responds to her anger, frustration or confusion with laughter, or every time he speaks to her “patronizingly”, “condescendingly” or “mockingly”, or every time he warns her that he is “dangerous” or “one of the bad guys” and cautions her to “stay away”, warning that it is “stupid” and “unwise” of her to be his friend—a practice of which the implication, as Lucy Mangan of the British newspaper the Guardian perceptively points out in her essay Dangerous Liaisons, is that "Bella chooses to put herself in danger and the further implication of which is that she must therefore bear full responsibility for the consequences”, which she goes on to say “smacks uncomfortably of the ‘asking for it’ defence [sic]” and makes Edward “less an ideal boyfriend than a proto-rapist”, an observation with which I couldn’t agree more—but those lists alone would take up pages, and this essay is already shaping up to be longer than I intended.

    I will, however, point out the fact that whenever Bella is in a car with Edward--on which occasions it should go without saying she is permanently consigned to the passenger seat--he drives perilously fast, ignoring pesky things like stop signs and traffic lights and prompting panicky requests from her to slow down, which he of course then flippantly ignores—at least until he becomes so annoyed with her for not trusting in his superior reflexes that he firmly instructs her to “relax”.

    And the fact that the incident which sparks their relationship—which, in point of fact, marks their very first sustained interaction—is his pushing her out of the path of an out-of-control minivan, during which passage she recounts in loving detail the sensation of Edward’s body “pinning” her to the ground, and of his hands “dragging” and “spinning” her around “like a ragdoll”, holding her against his body in an “iron grasp” and pushing her back down when she attempts to stand not just once but twice.

    Oh, and the fact that the bulk of the second book concerns Bella’s attempts to win back Edward—who has broken up with her, as he does so many of the things he does, for her "own good”—by repeatedly placing herself in mortal danger under the logic that it was that which brought him to her side in the first place, as when she was nearly struck by that minivan in the beginning of the first book, or when she was nearly raped by a gang of ruffians in—well, slightly later in the beginning of the first book (the absurd number of mishaps, accidents, injuries and attacks to which Bella falls victim over the course of the series provides Meyer with the chance to engage in a truly marathon bout of what Bidisha, also of the Guardian, calls "the fetishisation of female victimhood", a subject that, again, I could spend pages on, but let me not get sidetracked).

    It’s not just that she expects Edward to turn up in the nick of time and save her, you see, but that when she is in a state of mortal danger—when she has suffered a severe injury and her veins are pumping with adrenaline—she forms a sort of psychic link with Edward, and can feel his presence, as if he is right next to her, as if he is inside her mind.

    If that’s not a metaphor for sadomasochistic sex, I don’t know what is.

    Add to that the facts that 1) Edward explicitly warns Bella that, were they ever to have sex, he would almost certainly become so crazed with pleasure that he would lose control and slaughter her, 2) that this not only fails to deter her but seems to make the prospect more enticing, and 3) that when they finally do have sex it is so rough that Bella loses consciousness, only to wake up a few hours later covered in bruises.

    If that’s not literally sadomasochistic sex, I don’t know what is.

    But most disturbing of all is the central premise. By now everyone knows the story: a plain teenage girl and an impossibly beautiful teenage boy immortal vampire must struggle to overcome the latter’s overwhelming desire to have sex with kill and eat the former before they are married before she too has become a vampire and hence also immortal. This would be slightly less disturbing if the vampire was of the sort who routinely surrenders to his instincts and goes around killing and eating people indiscriminately, only making an exception in the case of his beloved because he loves her.

    But he is not that sort of vampire. He is the vegetarian sort of vampire, the sort who has vowed to resist his killer instincts out of respect for the sanctity of human life, only to find it oh so much more difficult in the case of his beloved because she smells so damn delicious. In fact that is the very reason he loves her: because she smells, as Meyer has him put it in yet another unconscious invocation of the pseudo-sexual mystique of high-risk behaviors, like his “own personal brand of heroin”.**

    “Wait a second," you ask. "If Edward routinely killed and ate people, that would make it less disturbing?”

    That's right, imaginary internet reader. Allow me to explain.

    If Edward routinely killed and ate people, and only made an exception in Bella’s case because he loved her, then that would mean his desire to kill and his desire to love were fundamentally separate and conflicting instincts, as they would be in any emotionally well-adjusted person. But if he refrains from killing and eating everybody, and finds it more difficult in Bella’s case because he loves her, then that means his instinct to kill and his instinct to love are linked.

    It’s no secret that Meyer, like so many authors before her, uses the vampire’s lust for blood to represent carnal lust. That is the central metaphor of the series. But if we follow Meyer’s logic—if we accept that the desire to drink somebody’s blood, to devour them, is the same as the desire to have sex with them—then it follows that in the Twilight universe, sex equals death and vice versa.

    Sex equals death. The desire to copulate, and especially to deflower, equals the desire to kill. There is no difference between the two. Thus, if Edward were to give into his desire to sleep with Bella, a virgin, then he would both literally and symbolically become her murderer, and if Bella were to give into her desire to allow him to (I say “allow him to” because there is no question that in Stephenie Meyer’s idea of sex the female is passive and the male the aggressor) it would be tantamount to suicide.

    There’s a name for this portrayal of sex. It’s called Death and the Maiden, and it hasn’t been this prevalent in our society since the Renaissance, when it was a common motif in paintings and frescoes (though in truth it dates all the way back to medieval times, a variation on the Danse Macabre or Dance of Death).

    The imagery is always the same: Death, sometimes in the form of a black-winged angel but most often a skeleton or a decaying corpse, embraces, often forcibly, a pale and voluptuous young woman whose expression is somewhere between revulsion and intense sensual pleasure. Occasionally, Death stands just outside the woman’s door or window and watches her sleep (this should be familiar to readers of Twilight as Edward does this very thing on more than one occasion). In the latter case, the door or window is a symbol for the woman’s hymen, or “maidenhead”, the intended metaphor being—well, by now it should be obvious what the intended metaphor is.

Pictured: "true love"

    The motif made its way from the fine arts into myths and folklore (such as the story of Little Red Riding Hood***, in which the titular garment represents the hymen, or, in its chromatic resemblance to blood, the beginning of the menstrual cycle, and the wolf a seducer or sexual predator who threatens the heroine’s virginity); classical music (such as the Death and the Maiden Quartet by Franz Schubert); and even onto the stage (the play Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, which was adapted into a film in 1994 by Roman Polanski, who was himself convicted of the rape of a minor in 1977, but that’s a topic for another essay).

    Joyce Carol Oates gave us her take on the motif in 1966 in the form of a short story—in fact Death and the Maiden was the original title, though she later changed it, one presumes in the name of subtlety, to Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, a lyric from the song “Tangled Up In Blue” by Bob Dylan, to whom the story is dedicated—in which a teenage girl, alone in her home, is terrorized by a mysterious and seductive stranger named Arnold Friend who lingers on her front porch, threatening to wait for her parents to return home and then kill them if she does not let him through the door.

    In an essay she wrote for the New York Times in 1986 (actually a review of the film Smooth Talk, adapted from her short story by director Joyce Chopra that same year, but I’ll get to that in a moment) Carol Oates describes how she got the idea from an article in Life magazine about the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as “The Pied Piper of Tucson”, who, between the years 1964 and 1966, killed three teenage girls in Tucson, Arizona, and buried their bodies in the desert.

    When Schmid was arrested in 1966, it came to light that several other teenagers in the community had known he was the murderer and neglected to go to the police. This had not been out of fear, but out of admiration for the killer, who had attained the status of a local folk hero, especially among young girls, by hanging around the high school, offering students pearls of his aged wisdom (he was in his early 30’s), providing them with drugs and alcohol and hosting parties at his parents’ home while they were away. He had even, it seems, rather actorishly affected the slang, dress and mannerisms of the youth of the day, going as far as to dye his hair black, apply pancake makeup to his face and stretch out his lower lip by the repeated application of a clothespin to better resemble his idol, and the darling of many a teen girl’s heart, Elvis Presley.

    In the words of Carol Oates, he was “a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype, sheer artifice, comedy, cartoon.” She explains that it was not he himself that intrigued her but rather the fact of his above described exalted position among the local youth. It was this phenomenon, she says, that she endeavored to explore in her story, inventing the character of a teen girl who, in her words, “is seduced by way of her own vanity; she mistakes death for erotic romance of a particularly American/trashy sort.”

    Here we come back to Smooth Talk: In talking about the film, she observes—as many critics did at the time—that actor Treat Williams’s performance as Friend is an uncanny impersonation of James Dean—“or is it James Dean regarding himself in mirrors,” she muses, “doing James Dean impersonations?”

    Speculative meta-impersonations notwithstanding, I submit for your approval a collection of excerpts from various publications’ reviews of the 2008 film adaptation of Twilight:

“[Bella is] Natalie Wood to Edward's James Dean.” -Richard Corliss, TIME; “Edward shivers like James Dean without his jacket.” –Ty Burr, The Boston Globe; “The dashing vampire Edward Cullen [has] James Dean hair, golden eyes, [and an] eternal stricken look.” -Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly; “[Edward] cops a James Dean attitude.” -James Berardinelli, Reelviews.com; “[Edward Cullen] is rebel cool incarnated—the James Dean of the un-dead.” –James Wolcott, Vanity Fair

    But the similarities between the character of Edward Cullen and the Charles Schmid/Arnold Friend amalgam don’t end there...
    Like Schmid, Cullen hangs around the local high school despite being much too old (again, Schmid was in his 30’s, Cullen well into his 100’s); Cullen displays a preference for teenage girls (Bella is, after all, a mere 17 at the start of the series); Cullen, as he freely explains to Bella, has an appearance specifically designed to draw in his prey (though his defenders will no doubt argue that in his case it is involuntary, a side-effect of his transmutation into a vampire****); and then of course there is their common thirst for blood (yes, Cullen resists his urges while Schmid succumbed to them, but surely when one is going to live forever, one is eventually going to lose one’s constant battle with one’s overwhelming urges, and anyway, isn't the important thing that one has them?).

From left to right: Charles Schmid, Treat Williams as Arnold Friend, Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen

    I know what you're thinking, imaginary internet reader. You're thinking, “Man, has this guy read way too much into this.”
    Let me make myself clear: By no means do I mean to suggest that Stephenie Meyer deliberately based her creation on Charles Schmid, or, indeed, that she has even heard of him. And I certainly do not mean to suggest that either a fictional character or the author who created him could ever be as dangerous, or as deserving of hatred and condemnation, as a flesh-and-blood psychopath. Of course not. The families of Schmid’s victims would undoubtedly attest to that.

    Nor do I mean to suggest that Stephenie Meyer has read Joyce Carol Oates’s short story—or that she has listened to Franz Schubert’s quartet, or seen Ariel Dorfman’s play or Jane Campion’s film, or viewed any of those paintings or frescoes. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Stephenie Meyer has never even heard of the Death and the Maiden motif (though I must be fair and admit it is possible; the woman did graduate from Brigham Young University with a bachelor's degree in English, where she claims, mindbogglingly, to have written most of her papers from a feminist perspective).

    But do I think she meant for her novels to be a study in that motif? No, I absolutely do not. Again, I think she made them that completely by accident, not in the pursuit of any artistic or scholarly objective, but simply by being, innately and unconsciously, exactly the type of maiden who is that motif’s subject, one who would likely have fallen for the wiles of serial killer Charles Schmid, precisely because, like the protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, “she mistakes death for erotic romance of a particularly American/trashy sort.”

    Why do I think this instead of giving her the benefit of the doubt? Because she has stated time and again that she considers the story of Edward and Bella to be a sweet, even wholesome love story, going as far as to boast in an interview with the Volterra Television Network in 2007 that she believes theirs is a healthier relationship than Romeo and Juliet’s, Wesley and Buttercup's (of William Goldman's The Princess Bride) or even Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett’s (an act of hubris which Janeites like my girlfriend will surely regard as nothing short of blasphemy). Because she has strongly implied—and there is abundant evidence in her novels to support this, not the least of which is her physical characterization of Bella—that she based the character of Bella Swan on herself and the character of Edward Cullen on her own private erotic fantasies.

    On that point even Robert Pattinson, the actor charged with playing Edward in the films—and who has therefore, one feels safe in assuming, met and spoken with the woman on at least one occasion—agrees. Here is what he told a reporter for E! in 2008:

"When I read [Twilight] I was convinced Stephenie was convinced she was Bella and it was like it was a book that wasn't supposed to be published. It was like reading her sexual fantasy, especially when she said it was based on a dream and it was like, ‘Oh I've had this dream about this really sexy guy,’ and she just writes this book about it. Like some things about Edward are so specific, I was just convinced, like, ‘This woman is mad. She's completely mad and she's in love with her own fictional creation.’”

    Oh, did I forget to mention the idea came to her in a dream? How’s that for proof that it springs from a deeply ingrained, Jungian place in her unconscious?

    But even more telling than Meyer’s frequent public defenses of Edward and Bella’s relationship is the following fact--and pay attention, children, because here is the absolutely most crucially important difference between the Twilight series and every other work I have mentioned: whereas at the end of all those works the protagonist ends up either A) rejecting or being rescued from her respective incarnation of Death having learned a valuable lesson or B) dead (as in dead dead, not dead in a way that’s exactly like being alive only more awesome because now you have superpowers and sparkle), Bella ends up married to and living happily ever after with her incarnation of Death with absolutely no negative consequences whatsoever.

    Now, it’s tempting to read this as a sign of progress. After all, in these enlightened times the loss of a young woman’s virginity—her sexual awakening, if you will—is no longer viewed as a tragedy: bittersweet, perhaps, but normal and healthy, even necessary for her development into a sexually empowered and well-adjusted adult. But there is nothing healthy about a girl embracing the loss of her virginity as long as she continues to equate that loss with death, for as long as she equates sex and death she will ascribe to situations and activities that present a risk of death a perverse pseudo-sexual mystique, and what’s more, she will perceive her suitors and romantic partners as predators and aggressors, and as a result expect them to behave as such, as I have no doubt Stephenie Meyer herself does.*****

     “What makes you an authority on the unconscious workings of Stephenie Meyer’s mind? Do you really think you can glean that much about a person just by reading something they wrote? A fantasy about vampires and werewolves?”

    My, you're mouthy today, imaginary internet reader! But yes. Ask any practicing therapist and they’ll tell you they’ve gained volumes of insight into the minds of patients just by reading pieces of creative fiction they’ve written, or, say in the case of child therapists, examining pictures they’ve scribbled in crayon. (Am I a practicing therapist? Far from it. But when the clues are as blatant as they are in Meyer’s writing you don’t have to be.)

    Oscar Wilde, in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, writes, “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter.” In other words, any work of art—be it visual, musical, cinematic or literary—reveals more about the artist than it does about its subject. This is true even of commercial art, true even of bad art—both of which, it goes without saying, are categories into which the Twilight series falls.

     “But wait, didn’t you say Twilight wasn’t art?”

    You got me there, imaginary internet reader. Yes, yes I did. And I hereby retract that statement, for over the course of this essay I have convinced myself that anything written with such obvious pathos, and from as obviously personal a place as Stephenie Meyer wrote it—indeed, anything that taps into such timeless themes, even unwittingly, or succeeds in provoking as impassioned a response as mine, even a negative one—must be called art. Bad art—awful, terrible, insultingly bad art, offensive not just in its perverse philosophies on love and sex and gender roles but in its astonishingly incompetent craftsmanship: its clumsy syntax, its purple prose, its reliance on clichés, its counterintuitive, uneven structure, its refusal to develop its protagonist beyond her obsessive affection for Edward, its transparent bid for literary merit by means of constant allusions to older classics and a comically evident overuse of the thesaurus—but, in the end, art.

    Perhaps, after all, there is no such thing as art that is not Art. Perhaps the distinction between Art and Not Art is a false one. Perhaps the only true distinction is between Good Art and Bad Art.

    Aldous Huxley said, “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”
    Of course, John Ruskin said, “Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books,” and I’m inclined to agree, adding, if I may take a moment to proselytize off topic, that it is better to watch a valuable film or television series than it is to read a valueless book, the myth of the automatic intellectual superiority of the written word to the moving picture being particularly offensive to this cinephile.

    But, again, all of that is a topic for another essay.

  I must now, for the purpose of coherency, return to that thesis to which I was purportedly going to return several paragraphs ago: Is analyzing and worrying over the societal effects/implications of commercial art—what we have up till now been calling “mere entertainment”—a waste of time? Does a work of art’s being perceived as “mere entertainment” mean its effects on/implications concerning the cultural landscape and the minds of its consumers are negligible and irrelevant?

    I maintain that the answer is no. Indeed, I believe a work of art’s status as “mere entertainment” makes its effects more penetrating and injurious, for we lower our defenses in the face of what we perceive as “mere entertainment”—we switch off our critical thinking, and that makes us more susceptible. And for that same reason I believe that the “mere entertainment” in which we choose to indulge reveals more about us than the so-called Serious Art for which we profess appreciation, for whatever regard in which we hold a work of art consciously, it is our unconscious that responds to art.

    Or to apply the Freudian model (because nothing sets my pen a-wagging like Freud, and just imagine the fun he would have with that statement): whatever universally agreed upon literary classics or politically conscious Oscar-winning films of which our Superegos approve, it is “mere entertainment” that speaks directly to our Ids.

    That is what makes it so frightening that so many women’s Ids are responding so ecstatically to Twilight. If there is truly nothing artful about the prose (which there isn’t) then it can only be the themes—the images, impulses and desires that Stephenie Meyer unconsciously embedded in that prose—to which they are responding.

    And what an unsettling set of themes for our nation’s daughters, nieces, sisters, wives and girlfriends to be responding to! Not just responding to but identifying with! To think how many of these women consider Bella, this victim, this masochist, to be an admirable heroine, strong and brave in her stoic endurance of the strife she suffers in the name of love! To think how many of these women see themselves in Bella, who is so submissive, so evidently aroused by death and danger, by the feelings of utter powerlessness and physical vulnerability she experiences in the presence of her potential killer! And to think how many of these women consider Edward to be the perfect man! This predator, this villain, who is so possessive, so patronizing, so manipulative, so menacing, at times even physically abusive! Who routinely reminds Bella of how, at any moment, he could easily destroy her, and what’s more, how much he longs to!

    What does that say about our society? What does that say about how we are raising our daughters? What does it say about us that despite all this we encourage them to read the books because we imagine they teach abstinence, as if that were the most pertinent consideration?****** And what does it say about us that, on May 7th of last year, when the Social Security Administration released its annual list of the year’s most popular baby names, number one on the girls list was “Isabella”, and near the top of the boys list were the names “Jacob” and “Cullen”, the former being the name of Bella’s werewolf suitor, and Edward’s competition, Jacob Black, and the latter of course being a reference to both Edward Cullen himself and the whole vampiric Cullen clan?

    As Julie Weiner at VanityFair.com put it, “the repercussions . . .  are almost incomparable. This means that generations other than this one will be forced to justify the existence of Twilight. Twilight is literally congenital.”

    Like Joyce Carol Oates was not so much disturbed by the serial killer Charles Schmid as by the regard in which his teenage cohorts held him, I am disturbed not so much by the novels themselves—which I consider to be, to again quote Carol Oates, “a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype, sheer artifice, comedy, cartoon”—but by their exalted position among their legions of mostly young, impressionable female readers, not because I worry that Twilight will teach them to mistake visceral physical attraction for true love, or to be so flattered by the attentions of older men that they will endure all manners of abuse in order that they might continue to receive them, or even to romanticize all this as a means of coping with the resultant damage to their self-esteem—after all, how can it teach them what it is already their nature to do?—but because it validates this way of thinking, because it teaches its readers that if they can only endure the abuse a little longer then it will eventually stop and they will get the fairy tale ending they hope for, when what literature aimed at teenage girls ought to do, and what the really good literature aimed at teenage girls always has done, is hold a mirror up to these immature and self-destructive tendencies in a way that reveals them for what they truly are: immature and self-destructive.

     “So what are you saying? That the primary function of art is to instruct?”

     In the grand scheme of things? No. Of course not. The primary function of art is, always has been and always should be to move—to elicit a response in its audience. But when it comes to art, and especially literature, aimed at young adults, then yes, I think the primary function, or at least one of the primary functions, should be to instruct, to assist in the delicate process of coming of age--or at the very least not to derail that process in the name of mere entertainment. After all, it is possible to move, to instruct and to entertain all at the same time—just look at the works of Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, Meg Cabot and J.K. Rowling.

    “But why hold art aimed at young adults to a different set of standards than any other kind of art?”

    Because young adults, like I said, are impressionable. Because life, particularly the lives of teenagers, imitates art. Because teenagers define themselves by the books they read, the movies they watch and the music they listen to. Because they will look to any and all external sources to help them to form their still developing senses of self. Because it takes a village to raise a child, and our pop culture is our village.

    “Are you saying we should censor Stephenie Meyer? Burn her books in the streets? I thought liberal elitist intellectuals like you thought censorship was a bad thing!”

     We do, imaginary internet reader, we do! That is why, as much pleasure as it would give me to personally take a blowtorch to a whole stack of copies of Twilight (and it would, imaginary internet reader, it really would), I am not suggesting that we censor Stephenie Meyer or her writing—only that we as a society consume her books as we consume other potentially harmful recreational substances: responsibly, in moderation, and taking care to educate our children as to the dangers of mindless indulgence.

    And yet, most adults have turned a blind eye to the phenomenon of Twilight’s popularity, to its pervasiveness in our culture, seeming to adopt the attitude that because it is commercial art it is not worthy of prolonged examination, not worth getting riled up about, as if to consider its deeper implications—indeed, to even admit that it has deeper implications—would be beneath them.

    Or perhaps they’ve simply convinced themselves that because the series’ fan base is made up mostly of teenage girls, and because teenagers are by their very definition naïve and oblivious, then even if it does have deeper implications they must not be aware of them, and what they don’t know can’t hurt them. Presumably these adults have never heard of a little thing called subliminal advertising.

    The truth is you do not need to be versed in literary traditions, criminology, Jungian psychology or the motif of Death and the Maiden to get out of Twilight everything that I have described in this essay. Those schools of thought did not invent these images, impulses and desires—they merely gave names to things that had already existed within us for millennia, buried deep down in the darkest, most primitive corners of our collective unconscious. You need not even realize, or even agree for that matter, that you are getting these things out of the novels. Like I said, it is our unconscious that responds to art. And all the glossy cover art, the purple prose, the paranormal trappings, the pink and purple teen magazine spreads and the protestations on the part of its fans that it is all in good fun, “mere entertainment”, is just so much packaging, and, like Edward Cullen’s sparkling skin, conceals something far more sinister beneath.

*Some of my savvier readers will point out that it is not Bronte herself who delivers these words of warning but Cathy, and that authors do not always share the philosophies of their fictional creations—after all, Shakespeare cannot have been as psychotic as Macbeth, nor Fitzgerald as naïve as Gatsby, nor Updike as egocentric as Rabbit—but I think it stands to reason that this particular author agreed with this particular fictional creation in this particular case, as Cathy’s sister-in-law (whose name, in what can only be the source of a perverse sort of fantasy-fulfilling homage on the part of Meyer, is Isabella) disregards Cathy’s advice, marries Heathcliff and subsequently learns the error of her ways when she is made to suffer repeated verbal, physical and (it is heavily implied) sexual abuse at the hands of her husband before finally fleeing his house for somewhere "south of London".

    Incidentally, during not one but several passages in the third installment of the Twilight series, Edward Cullen, while discussing Wuthering Heights with Bella (it is her favorite book), expresses sympathy for Heathcliff, whom it is important to note is guilty not just of spousal abuse but also of child abuse and quite possibly (again, it is heavily implied) murder, while Bella herself, in a profoundly troubling echo of the oldest abuse-excusing rationalization in the whole long, sad book, insists that “Catherine is really the source of all the trouble, not Heathcliff,” as it is the fact that she is “so selfish” that drives him to commit these evils—the selfishness in question presumably being that she chooses to marry whom she pleases, for her own reasons, instead of him.

**Another explanation for the “heroin” metaphor, which has become one of the most celebrated lines from the series, might be that some young women enjoy thinking of dysfunctional love affairs as things that might not be smart, and might not be good for them, but feel good anyway and are addictive. Like a drug.

   Romantic? Perhaps, in a morbid sort of way. But hardly a tendency that a series aimed at teenage girls ought to be endorsing.

***Inevitably, the folktale has recently been given the “Twilight treatment” in that it has been reimagined as a gothic romance in which the wolf is now a werewolf and the heroine is in love with him. (I bet his eyes and teeth aren't the only body parts that are surprisingly big, wink wink nudge nudge.) The film is called Rid Riding Hood (predicted tagline: “This little girl isn’t little anymore”) and is slated for release in March 2011. And surprise, surprise, it’s from the director of Twilight.
    You can watch the trailer, complete with multiple shots of the heavy breathing protagonist and significant looks delivered across crowded rooms by the brooding and be-pompadoured love interest, here.

****This constant excusing of Edward’s abusive behavior with the rationalization “He can’t help it, it’s his nature, he’s a vampire” is one of the most troubling trends of the series.
    An anecdote: A woman I once spoke to at party confided that she had once tried to read the books and had to stop halfway through the first one because it was giving her panic attacks. It seems she had had an abusive boyfriend of her own in high school, who had even on one occasion attempted to strangle her, and Edward and Bella’s relationship reminded her so much of that relationship that she could not read on. Specifically, she mentioned this constant rationalization, recalling that it echoed eerily what she would tell herself whenever she was faced with the task of justifying her ex’s own abusive behavior: He can’t help it, it’s his nature, it’s just who he is.

    Now, some argue that the fact that it actually is in a vampire’s nature to be predatory, whereas a real life human being presumably has no such excuse, is a meaningful distinction. Indeed, some argue that to apply naturalistic moral standards to a novel about supernatural characters and events—to analyze and pass judgment on the psychosexual dynamics of a relationship in which one of the parties is a vampire—is a waste of time because vampires do not exist, as if the fact that they are alien means the issues that confront them must also be alien and hence irrelevant to our lives. Those people are advised to look up the word “allegory” in the dictionary.

*****Such behavior’s correlation to the enjoyment of Twilight is not a correlation I have worked out solely through theoretical reasoning; I have also observed it in practice, as the overwhelming majority of Twilight fans that I have known in private life (and yes, I am aware that there is a word for what I am making and that word is “generalization”, but when speaking about social phenomena one must speak in generalizations, for it is generalizations, or as sociologists call them, “trends”, that matter, and not the exceptions to the rule, or “anomalies”, of which admittedly there have been a few) have been just such girls: girls who display a greater willingness to conform to patently degrading social conventions than non-Twilight fans and/or enter into dysfunctional relationships more frequently than non-Twilight fans and/or find themselves the victims of psychological and/or physical abuse more frequently than non-Twilight fans.

    Now certainly, as any first-year philosophy major will tell you, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but even if Twilight does not cause, or even exacerbate, these behaviors—the latter of which, let the record show, I still maintain it does—that there is a correlation between being predisposed towards such behaviors and enjoying Twilight can hardly be denied. Therefore, the sheer number of women who don’t just enjoy Twilight but are driven to distraction by it—naming it as their favorite book or movie, wallpapering their bedrooms with posters of Edward Cullen’s scowling face, tattooing lines and images from the novels on their flesh, commiserating about their mutual obsession with it on websites like mylifeistwilight.com, and even physically attacking those who dare deride it in their presence (or "Antis" as we are called in the "Twiverse") with knives, baseball bats, flare guns or, if none of those things are handy, their bare fists and fingernails—ought to have a lot more people a lot more concerned about the state of women in this country than it currently does.

******What these parents fail to realize is there are far graver losses than the loss of one’s virginity, like the loss of one’s independence or the loss of one’s self-respect, and the brand of self-respect Stephenie Meyer peddles by perpetuating the idea that enduring abuse in the name of love makes a woman noble is an illusory brand of self-respect, one that will wither and disappear when her readers grow old and find themselves locked into unhappy marriages—or worse: raped, murdered and buried in the desert by a man who reminded them of Edward Cullen.