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jaceyStephenie Meyer: Twilight
Warning – extreme spoilers ahead. Stop reading now if you intend to read this for yourself.
I admit that I only read this to see what all the fuss was about. I went to see the movie first and stood next to a sixteen year old boy in the queue who was so full of Twilight that it was his second time to see the movie, this time with his sister after buying her the book. It was not only his favourite book, but on further enquiry he didn’t really read fiction at all. The queue started to move before I could ask him: why Twilight?
So what is all the fuss about? I tried to come to this book with an open mind, but I’d already read a pretty damning article in the Guardian about the author’s attitude to the heroine in particular and women’s roles in general. I don’t know that misogynistic is quite the right word. Meyer clearly doesn’t hate women, though she might distrust them to do anything sensible outside the kitchen. Clearly her heroine in Twilight is a wimp. The girl can’t take two steps without being so clumsy she falls over her own feet – and this worries her sufficiently that she wimps out of sports and dancing and even worries about tripping up over tree roots when taking a walk in the forest. And when she goes to the beach with friends she worries about falling in the tidal pools since her super vampire boyfriend isn’t there to fish her out. Sheesh!
OK, deep breath. Start at the beginning.
Bella Swan moves to her dad’s place in Forks WA to give Mom and her new man some quality together-time. Just as she’s starting to make normal friends in school she’s thrown together with oh-he’s-so-handsome-I-could-die Edward Cullen who at first treats her like she’s a bad smell under his nose and then does a yes/no on/off act until he finally admits he’s deeply attracted to her, but warns her he’s bad news. Playing the gorgeous bad-boy of course hooks Bella completely. She’s also pretty impressed when he rescues her from being crushed under a skidding car by doing a superhero act and then trying to get her to believe she didn’t really see what she saw. A bit later he rescues her from some thugs out to mug her (or worse). Eventually she works out that he’s a vampire but – hey – he’s pretty, so that’s OK. When she’s accepted by his vampire family (they’re all sworn off human blood which makes it nice and cosy) everything is rosy until some old-fashioned vamps walk in on a happy family game of baseball and one of them decides he’s going to have Bella for lunch. Hijinks ensue and Bella is manhandled back to Phoenix by Ed’s vamp siblings where they more or less keep her sedated until she acts really stupid, puts herself in mortal danger and is then rescued by Ed, but not before getting some pretty serious injuries that land her in hospital (explained away by a fall – tsk, tsk, clumsy Bella, falling over again, silly girl).
So all the way through Bella is completely ruled by Edward (or even by Ed’s family), she has to restrict her actions to she doesn’t sexually excite Edward in case he goes for the jugular (literally). Because, of course, if he does it will be her fault, right? They can be together but only on his terms. He’s suffocatingly overprotective, but she actually likes this about him. He follows her on a girly shopping trip (which is why he’s around to rescue her from the thugs) and she’s nothing but grateful. He comes into her room at night (without permission at first) and watches her sleeping and listens to her sleep-talking and she actually likes this too. He makes her tell him every little thing she’s feeling or thinking (because she’s the one person whose thoughts he can’t read) and he even listens in to her friends’ thoughts when she’s having a private conversation with them – and she thinks this is normal. How loud can you say ‘stalker’?
At the end of the book Bella’s almost begging Edward to turn her into a vamp and the teaser chapter for the next book shows Bella’s worried about getting older than Ed who is perpetually seventeen.
And the writing? The style is mostly OK, but we can barely get through a page without being told how beautiful Edward and his vamp siblings and ‘parents’ are. This is all from Bella’s point of view, so every time she’s telling us how beautiful they are she’s telling us by implication how she feel very un-beautiful in comparison. By about a third of the way through the book I was beginning to think that if I heard how beautiful the vamps were one more time I’d start eating the pages. And then it came again. Chomp chomp! Until the very last section, when the bloodsucking vamp is hot on Bella’s heels, it’s all s-l-o-w build up. And at 138,000 words (rough count) that’s a hell of a lot of build up. Edward is always telling Bella that he loves her because she’s special and he’s never met anyone like her before, but we never see that. All we see it a clutzy seventeen year old lacking in self-confidence and basic motor skills.
Bella has a little burst of bravery right at the end when she thinks the bad vamp has her mom, but it’s overshadowed by an extreme dose of stupidity when she leaves the good vamps to face the bad vamps alone. Of course Edward comes to the rescue and even saves her from being turned into a vamp by sucking the vamp-poison out of a wound (and stopping before he
drains her dry). Coitus interruptus or what!
Bella never gets the opportunity to grow and you get the impression that with Edward Cullen as a boyfriend, she never will. I may be wrong, but I’m not going to read the rest of the books to find out. One was enough. For me it’s a book about repression and subjugation. Is that what’s turning on teens these days?
Warning – extreme spoilers ahead. Stop reading now if you intend to read this for yourself.
I admit that I only read this to see what all the fuss was about. I went to see the movie first and stood next to a sixteen year old boy in the queue who was so full of Twilight that it was his second time to see the movie, this time with his sister after buying her the book. It was not only his favourite book, but on further enquiry he didn’t really read fiction at all. The queue started to move before I could ask him: why Twilight?
So what is all the fuss about? I tried to come to this book with an open mind, but I’d already read a pretty damning article in the Guardian about the author’s attitude to the heroine in particular and women’s roles in general. I don’t know that misogynistic is quite the right word. Meyer clearly doesn’t hate women, though she might distrust them to do anything sensible outside the kitchen. Clearly her heroine in Twilight is a wimp. The girl can’t take two steps without being so clumsy she falls over her own feet – and this worries her sufficiently that she wimps out of sports and dancing and even worries about tripping up over tree roots when taking a walk in the forest. And when she goes to the beach with friends she worries about falling in the tidal pools since her super vampire boyfriend isn’t there to fish her out. Sheesh!
OK, deep breath. Start at the beginning.
Bella Swan moves to her dad’s place in Forks WA to give Mom and her new man some quality together-time. Just as she’s starting to make normal friends in school she’s thrown together with oh-he’s-so-handsome-I-could-die Edward Cullen who at first treats her like she’s a bad smell under his nose and then does a yes/no on/off act until he finally admits he’s deeply attracted to her, but warns her he’s bad news. Playing the gorgeous bad-boy of course hooks Bella completely. She’s also pretty impressed when he rescues her from being crushed under a skidding car by doing a superhero act and then trying to get her to believe she didn’t really see what she saw. A bit later he rescues her from some thugs out to mug her (or worse). Eventually she works out that he’s a vampire but – hey – he’s pretty, so that’s OK. When she’s accepted by his vampire family (they’re all sworn off human blood which makes it nice and cosy) everything is rosy until some old-fashioned vamps walk in on a happy family game of baseball and one of them decides he’s going to have Bella for lunch. Hijinks ensue and Bella is manhandled back to Phoenix by Ed’s vamp siblings where they more or less keep her sedated until she acts really stupid, puts herself in mortal danger and is then rescued by Ed, but not before getting some pretty serious injuries that land her in hospital (explained away by a fall – tsk, tsk, clumsy Bella, falling over again, silly girl).
So all the way through Bella is completely ruled by Edward (or even by Ed’s family), she has to restrict her actions to she doesn’t sexually excite Edward in case he goes for the jugular (literally). Because, of course, if he does it will be her fault, right? They can be together but only on his terms. He’s suffocatingly overprotective, but she actually likes this about him. He follows her on a girly shopping trip (which is why he’s around to rescue her from the thugs) and she’s nothing but grateful. He comes into her room at night (without permission at first) and watches her sleeping and listens to her sleep-talking and she actually likes this too. He makes her tell him every little thing she’s feeling or thinking (because she’s the one person whose thoughts he can’t read) and he even listens in to her friends’ thoughts when she’s having a private conversation with them – and she thinks this is normal. How loud can you say ‘stalker’?
At the end of the book Bella’s almost begging Edward to turn her into a vamp and the teaser chapter for the next book shows Bella’s worried about getting older than Ed who is perpetually seventeen.
And the writing? The style is mostly OK, but we can barely get through a page without being told how beautiful Edward and his vamp siblings and ‘parents’ are. This is all from Bella’s point of view, so every time she’s telling us how beautiful they are she’s telling us by implication how she feel very un-beautiful in comparison. By about a third of the way through the book I was beginning to think that if I heard how beautiful the vamps were one more time I’d start eating the pages. And then it came again. Chomp chomp! Until the very last section, when the bloodsucking vamp is hot on Bella’s heels, it’s all s-l-o-w build up. And at 138,000 words (rough count) that’s a hell of a lot of build up. Edward is always telling Bella that he loves her because she’s special and he’s never met anyone like her before, but we never see that. All we see it a clutzy seventeen year old lacking in self-confidence and basic motor skills.
Bella has a little burst of bravery right at the end when she thinks the bad vamp has her mom, but it’s overshadowed by an extreme dose of stupidity when she leaves the good vamps to face the bad vamps alone. Of course Edward comes to the rescue and even saves her from being turned into a vamp by sucking the vamp-poison out of a wound (and stopping before he
drains her dry). Coitus interruptus or what!
Bella never gets the opportunity to grow and you get the impression that with Edward Cullen as a boyfriend, she never will. I may be wrong, but I’m not going to read the rest of the books to find out. One was enough. For me it’s a book about repression and subjugation. Is that what’s turning on teens these days?
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no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 08:52 am (UTC)Except that the heroines of Gothic romances, e.g Phyllis Whitney, tend to have more get up and go. I'm not actually that into the modern feisty heroines - I think they're a bit overdone and contrived a lot of the time. But you don't have to write Stepford Heroine either. I remember a novel called COLUMBELLA - the heroine is a slightly mousy school teacher, not at all 'feisty' in the modern sense and the villain is a very glamorous woman who is clearly a psychopath. At a party where the villain plays some nasty mind games on her daughter and then turns on the heroine, the latter grabs her unobtrusively by the wrist and murmurs "I'm strong enough to hurt you badly," at which point Villainess backs off. It's quite an impressive moment, and the heroine later turns out to be really brave, not to get the guy but to protect an uncertain teenage girl. It's stuck in my mind because of the characterisation, which, you know, is still pretty standard romantic conventional, but nonetheless...
I will probably give it a go but it does sound irritating... Will let you know.
no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 10:09 am (UTC)I was a bit bored in the first two thirds but it got better when the plot arrived. I suppose Edward has the appeal of the ( much) older father figure without the downside of looking like a lechy old bloke. I couldn't understand why all these old men went to High School anyway - why didn't they pretend to be home schooled or something as going to High School accentuated their differences rather than making them fit in? I mean why would you want to go back to high school at their age unless it was to lust after desirable young blood banks?
I suspect people read the books not fot Bella who is the HP kind of cipher, but for Edward and his superhuman traits. There is always mileage in unresolved sexual conflict too and it is difficult to get that into a book these days especially with teen protags.
no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 03:06 pm (UTC)She's been hailed as writing about 'the erotics of abstinance' but I found it about as erotic as a bucket of whitewash.
no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 02:54 pm (UTC)Bella is just so needy and dependent, it makes me want to barf. I'm not worried about her being unfeisty - but she doesn't even trust herself to walk without tripping over her own feet.
I can empathise with this. I'm a prize clutz and my mum says that even as a child I could fall over if one blade of grass was higher than the other. This I grok completely. And I'm pretty careful where I take my feet these days - but I wasn't like that at seventeen for goodness sake. I might avoid walking on ice now, cos ice has inherent slip-factor, but I don't automatically assume that if I walk on reasonable ground I'm going to fall or if I stand next to water I'm going to fall in. And even I wouldn't presume that I would find trip-hazards running along a tarmac road. Bella is as nervous as a seventy year old with brittle bones and bad eyesight.
no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 04:05 pm (UTC)The worst thing of all was that the main reason Edward falls in love with her appears to be because she smells nice!
However, this book has sold millions so she has to be hitting something right.
no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 08:42 pm (UTC)Have boys maybe got a romantic streak that never got mined before?
no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 04:25 pm (UTC)I've heard people say Bella 'has agenda' and - at least at the start of the book - there's a point to that. *She* decides to move away- she isn't sent away, it's her decision to excile herself. And Her father gives her the keys to the house, the keys to a car, and otherwise stays out of her way - in many ways she has freedoms that other teenagers don't have (or feel they don't have.)
That is, of course, where it goes terribly wrong; and she turns into a simpering piece of Edward-admiration.
And I should think that going to high school over and over and over is pretty dreary subset of hell - just imagine it. I really don't buy into the premise that they don't pretend to be eighteen and college age - they could at least start learning trades and attend universities all over the world, which would make more sense.
no subject
Date: Feb. 23rd, 2009 08:56 pm (UTC)I did read all of it. I felt I should, firstly because - hey - I'd like to write a book that sells as well as Twilight, but secondly because I didn't want to miss anything. It certainly picks up at the end once the bad vamps appear on the scene, but Bella is still the meat being protected by the vamp family. One of them even has a talent for sending her to sleep, so she spends a lot of her time on the run totally zonked.
I thought I was going to like Bella at first. Yes she made the decision to get out of her Mom's face and go and live with her dad in Forks for a while to give Mom some wuality time with her new man, that was a strong-0minded move (or was it self-sacrifice), but after that Bella's only accomplishment is cooking for her dad. What does that say about her? She sacrifices herself for others and she's good in the kitchen.