Anti-Feminism Affects Vampires Too!
Vampires, true love and... misogyny?
There's no doubt that the Twilight series by author Stephenie Meyer has made a huge impact on the teenage literary population. Its rather original take on the vampire myth has lead many to cite it as a prime example of modern literature, and its themes of true love and devotion are extremely popular amongst many young fans. It is so popular, in fact, that it is being made into a movie of the same title, to be released this fall on an international scale.
To put it bluntly, though, I've never understood the Twilight series. I refuse to call them a saga - Lord of the Rings was a saga. Twilight is not. I've read all four books and slowly have developed a quiet resentment for them, which occasionally comes out as rants - I safely store these on my computer, and most of them have never seen the light of day. To me, the vampire genre died when Buffy and Angel did, and nothing will ever be able to live up to their legacy. However, to summarize: my main reasons for disliking the Twilight series are that it is badly written, embarrassingly cliché, and most of all, anti-feminist - the subject of this article.
Let's summarize the main plot of the Twilight books: Bella Swan, an ordinary seventeen-year-old girl, moves to a small town, and there she meets and falls in love with the dazzlingly beautiful Edward Cullen. Who, surprise surprise, turns out to be a vampire, and then Bella decides that she wants to be turned into a vampire so she can spend the rest of her existence with him.
At first glance, there seems to be nothing wrong with that simple premise. But look further into the details and you'll find some rather unsettling facts in the books, which have set many a feminist alight with fury. For one, there's the simple concept of the character's physical appearances. Edward's beauty is referenced (usually using the phrases "dazzling" and "God-like" ) over one hundred times in the first book alone, while Bella is consistently described as simply "plain" or "normal". While this may only be because the author wanted to reader to relate to the character, many critics have pointed out that it makes it seem like every girl is somehow inferior to her boyfriend.
Then there is the troubling fact of their "love". In the books, it is made very clear that Bella and Edward are "soulmates", or something similar to the concept. However, their relationship is, at maximum, only two weeks old when they decide that they are in love and when Bella decides that she wants to become a vampire. While the idea of true love has attracted many avid fans, many readers have criticized this, pointing out that Bella and Edward never seem to have a real conversation anywhere in the books besides talking about how much they love each other.
It's a well-known fact that relationships don't operate that way, and that people need to share opinions and world views and hobbies in order for a relationship to succeed. But the trouble is, Bella and Edward never actually seem to discuss any of these things, and instead focus on comparing each other to moons and suns and stars whenever they talk to each other. Many critics believe this sends the message that women don't need to work in order to make a relationship succeed, and only need to lie back and wait for their own Prince Charming to come and take them away.
There is also the disturbing detail that Bella's life seems to be completely taken up by Edward, and everything he does. When they become a couple, she distances herself from her friends and family, and all of her thoughts and actions revolve around a boy she's only begun talking to a few days before. Edward seems to be obsessed with following Bella's every move - before they became a couple, he would follow her scent and watch her while she slept (without her permission, which makes it stalking, an illegal act), along with eavesdrop on her conversations by listening to her friend's minds.
This seems like a rather blatant invasion of Bella's privacy, but instead of scolding him for it, these disturbing habits only seem to make her fall more in love with him. It appears that Bella enjoys surrendering control of her life over to Edward, and doesn't even stay angry for long when he takes the engine out of her car so she can't go to see her best friend. Instead, she consistently tells herself that he is only doing these things because he loves her and wants to protect her.
Bella's personality is also a major source of annoyance for many feminists, including myself. She is weak, clumsy, and seems to depend wholly on her boyfriend just to survive. In the first book, she nearly passes out at the sight of blood, and a boy has to rescue her and take her out of the classroom before she completely loses consciousness. Later on, she is almost crushed by a truck and is yet again saved by someone in possession of a penis - in fact, this time it's the borderline-abusive vampire lover boy himself, Edward. And finally, she is almost attacked by a group of shady-looking men while out one night with some friends, but does not attempt to scream, cry for help, or even try to fight back. She considers doing all those things, of course, but then remembers that she is a girl, so apparently trying to defend herself would be pointless - because having a vagina and two X chromosomes is obviously a very good reason for not attempting to struggle when you are attacked.
I found the second book in the series, New Moon, to be by far one of the most disturbing romance novels I have ever read - not the spooky, eerie kind of disturbing, where the suspense makes you keep reading page after page, but the kind of disturbing that makes you want to cry in a corner and mope over the future of literature in general. In this installment, Edward leaves Bella because apparently he has just decided that it is too dangerous for them to be together (at this point, they have been together for an estimated five months, and yet he has only figured this out now).
When he and his family leave, Bella becomes severely depressed, and goes into a catatonic state for three months where she cannot remember anything she does. I think many would agree that this is nowhere near a healthy reaction for a teenage girl, and that this sends the message that a girl's life should solely revolve around her boyfriend and nothing else. Of course, in the end, Edward returns to Bella and everything is okay again (or at least vaguely so--Edward is unreasonably jealous of the male friend Bella made during his absence, and in the following installments goes to extreme measures to prevent her from seeing him). I remember that one scene in New Moon particularly disturbed me - Bella is talking with Edward near the end, and suddenly bursts into tears and begins to sob about how she always knew she "wasn't good enough for him" (low self-esteem is one of her major personality traits, remember).
Edward saves the day, of course, by comparing Bella to a shooting star, and they kiss and make up. Now, I find the very concept of this to be rather insulting to a woman's intelligence. In my opinion, this sends the message that in order to feel good about herself, a woman must have the approval of her boyfriend--and if she doesn't, then she's a cold-hearted bitch. Bella consistently thinks that she is somehow not worthy of Edward, but somehow this does not stop her from going to extreme measures to "hear" his voice during the course of New Moon - at one point, she nearly kills herself jumping off a cliff so she can experience one of her "hallucinations" and "see" him. It's very obvious that healthy relationships probably should not involve risking one's life just to see or hear the voice of one's "soul-mate".
Believe it or not, it doesn't stop there. Bella isn't the only female in the series, but she does seem to share one trait with every other girl - a lack of personality. Rosalie, Esme, Alice, Leah, Jessica and Angela are the only other vaguely important female characters in the series, but none of them seem to be able to break the stereotypical character-with-a-vagina mold. Rosalie is consistently described as shallow, vain, judgmental and materialistic, Esme is the stereotypical kind-hearted maternal figure, Leah seems to exist only to be a pain in the neck and lust after other werewolves, Jessica is the typical superficial boy-obsessed teenage girl, and Angela, the only seemingly decent girl in the series, lacks a personality and barely has five paragraphs to her name.
Alice, the closest thing to a real female character, is actually revealed after a few chapters to only be obsessed with shopping and partying, therefore destroying any hopes of having any kind of halfway realistic female character in the series. And this is what really makes me mad: every single female character in the books has a boyfriend that is stronger, smarter, prettier, funnier, more interesting or just plain better than she is. That's not just bad writing, that's giving into every single anti-feminist cliché there is.
But no matter how many misogynistic plot twists and details pile up in the series, they are never acknowledged or even alluded to in the slightest. In fact, the author has consistently stated that Twilight is in no way sexist and is full of strong, capable female characters (I have yet to pick up on this, but perhaps I'm just slow). Bella never once thinks that perhaps Edward is being chauvinistic, and it never even crosses her mind that perhaps he is abusive in the slightest way.
This is something that makes me very annoyed. I don't mind it when female characters are weak or clumsy or cold or vain or really anything else - characters can be anything. That's the whole point of writing. But to deny something that is blatantly obvious throughout the entire series, and then profess that something like this is actually supporting women's rights is just plain ludicrous and frankly insulting to the entire feminist cause. I am a proud feminist, and I dislike the series not only because I think it is badly written, but also because it only reinforces every single harmful stereotype about the female psyche that feminists have been working to abolish for the past hundred years.
My opinion? Yes, the Twilight series does have an overwhelming amount of anti-feminist details in it, and it is one of the major reasons that I don't like it. However, I don't believe that they were written for the sole purpose of being anti-feminist, I don't believe that Stephenie Meyer is an anti-feminist, and I don't believe that every single Twilight fan out there is an anti-feminist. I think that these misogynistic themes are simply a side effect of the bad writing that echos throughout the entire series, and I think that in no way is Twilight a prime example of modern literature, or in any way even a decent group of books. Mrs. Meyer may believe that she is creating original, realistic scenarios in which woman are portrayed as equal to men, but in reality she is unconsciously reinforcing the long-obselete belief that women are absolutely nothing without their male partners.
But hey, it's only my belief. What do you think? Is Twilight a good example of feminist literature meant to portray women as strong and independent, or nothing but another misogynistic novel for teenage girls? With the movie's release date fast approaching, this series is getting more and more media coverage, and becoming even more referenced in pop culture - is it the next Buffy, or simply a fad that will wear of in the next few years? Your choice.
