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A better look at Bella Swan, who she protects, and how she needs protecting.
Stephenie Meyer successfully inspired a Twilight Renaissance when she released of Life and Death (2015) for the ten year anniversary of Twilight (2005). Since then, a bunch of Twihards armed with the internet started psychoanalyzing her characters and critically obsessing over her books. A second wave of the Twilight Renaissance was born with the release of Midnight Sun (2020).
That’s where I come in. Who is more dangerous in the Stephenie Meyer worldview: men or vampires? And how does Bella Swan survive someone who is both?
Ah, yes. Let’s dig back into the gender binary of the Twilight Saga, a universe that both creates and is created by the culture around it. In this universe, what’s scarier? A vampire or a human man? How does Bella Swan fair against someone who is both? How does Beau’s life differ? Find out now on this week’s episode of Stephenie Meyer Ruined My Life.
This is a friendly reminder the Twilight Saga goes hand in hand with conversations about domestic violence and unhealthy relationships. If you have already read or watched any part of the series, you’ve seen everything I’m talking about in this episode but there are some sensitive topics coming up today and I thought I’d bring it up, just in case.
Bella Swan is an average high schooler. She is working to establish her identity at a new school in a new town. She reads Jane Austen, goes for walks, and tries to make sense of the world around her. Even though Bella seems timid about a lack of relationship experience, she’s seventeen and developmentally right on track for learning about sex and intimacy. Teenagers may be headstrong but even they know that their personalities aren’t set in stone and they’re still working through who they are or what they might become. That’s more or less what Bella’s up to before she meets Edward, or so we assume. After she meets Edward, a lot of her energy goes towards understanding him and processing what it means to be dead, soulless, a vampire, a soulmate, and a bunch of other really intense concepts that might come up in a typical teenager’s life but aren’t the focal point of existing as a teenager.
Of the literally hundreds of gendered word changes I marked in Stephenie Meyer’s Life or Death book about Beau Swan, one thing that stuck out was that Beau is not as obsessed with Edythe as Bella is with Edward. In general, in books and movies, women characters are prone to talking about their relationships with men over pretty much any other topic. Alison Bechdel has a classic trick for rating the representation of women in a piece of work. There is a similar, simple test called the Duvernay Test (after Ava Duvernay) that requires African-American characters to have fully realized lives that aren’t just support for white characters. The Bechdel Test requires that two women characters (characters important enough to have names) talk about something other than a man. That’s it. When I learned about this test, I was mortified that even some of my favorite movies can’t pass it. A lot of movies don’t even have two women important enough to have names, to be quite honest. Twilight does have a female protagonist so it’s easier to pass the Bechdel Test but if you read it side by side with Beau Swan’s experience, it actually doesn’t look too good.
An absolutely perfect example presents itself during preparations for a school dance. Bella in Twilight and Beau in Life and Death (being characters on the same plot line) both skip the dance but agree to take a trip to Port Angeles with friends to do some preparation. In Twilight, Bella goes dress shopping and then to dinner with Jessica and Angela and while shopping, they talk about boys. Bella says she’s never had a boyfriend, Jessica says she enjoyed a dinner with Mike, and it turns out Angela wasn’t thrilled to be going to the dance with Eric. Also, apparently, Tyler has been telling everyone he’s going to prom with Bella. If the names Mike, Eric, and Tyler don’t ring any bells: they shouldn’t. They aren’t important. Regardless of how completely irrelevant the human characters are to Bella’s life, a hot second is spent discussing these boys.
When Beau goes to Port Angeles with Jeremy and Allen, they are looking to order corsages and go to the movies. Ordering corsages seems like an alright substitute. I don’t love that they go to the movies instead of dinner because that sort of implies that the boys are doing an experience-based activity while the girls are just in a restaurant where they can chatter about life and boys but I’ll leave that alone. The more striking change to this scene is that the boys spend no time talking about the girls. Beau doesn’t mention that he’s never had a girlfriend. No one talks about whether or not they like their dates. The closest they come to mentioning them is that the woman working at the flower shop claims women care a lot about the details in a corsage and Beau’s internal monologue suspects that nobody really cares that much about it. So in the scene from Twilight, the men are the center of attention and the girls are high maintenance and in the scene from Life and Death, the men are the center of attention and the girls are high maintenance. This is the same scene. There are other scenes where everything happens just the same in both books, like when Charlie gives his kid a truck or the first day of classes. Other parts of the Port Angeles trip are even the same, like coming across the bookstore and deciding not to go in. But for some reason, Stephenie Meyer felt she had to make changes to this conversation and in doing so, she makes an assertion about what behavior is right or wrong, or even just possible, for a teenage boy. And don’t forget, this is a vampire book. The reader is likely to suspend some disbelief if Beau had wanted to tell his friends he’d never had a girlfriend. As it turns out, some of those conversations about prom and dates that Beau and his friends skip over is just as important to Beau’s storyline as it is to Bella’s. Since Jeremy and Allen are too cool and masculine to address it, Beau ends up having the prom date conversation at school with a girl character where he feels compelled to tell her that he’s breaking “man code” by discussing his friends with her. I was a little surprised that Beau Swan felt like he had to be a certain type of man or adhere to some rigid “bro code.” He’s not really tough, aggressive, hyper sexual, or anything else you’d expect of hyper-masculinity. But he brings up the man code more than once.
Another example of a gendered imbalance is after Bella learns that Edward is a vampire, she needs to take her mind off the situation and goes into the woods with a copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. She tries to read it but one of the main characters is named “Edmund” which reminds her of Edward and how hopelessly in love with him she is. In Life and Death, Beau wanders into the woods of his parallel universe with a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. This change in itself is not a problem to me and it seems like an okay classic literature substitute but here’s the paragraph.
I flipped through the paperback, waiting for a word or phrase to catch my interest—usually a giant squid or narwhal would be adequate—but today I went through the book twice without finding anything intriguing enough to start me reading. I snapped the book shut. Fine, whatever. I’d get a sunburn instead. I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes.
Hello, Beau? Where is the obsessive pining? If Beau is allegedly the same character as Bella, why does he get to have a life outside of his relationship? Every corner of Bella’s mind is filled with Edward from the moment she lays eyes on him but you’re telling me even after Beau finds out Edythe is a vampire, he gets to have a distracted moment alone because narwhals don’t hold his attention today? Side note: while Twilight opens with the Bible verse Genesis 2:17 about the forbidden fruit in the garden of eden, Life and Death opens with a quote by Jules Verne from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The quote is “If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.” Pretty independent minded, comparatively.
Even when I give this section some benefit of the doubt, that it was challenging to work in some connection to Edythe from Twenty Thousand Leagues or whatever the case may be, I’m worried that part of what inspired the dulling of obsession in Beau’s case is that it’s creepy to read about a boy obsessing over a girl. In the Twilight universe worldview, of course it’s agreeable for Bella to have her mind always on Edward because if anyone’s a threat, it’s him. There’s no harm in her being the agent of choice when she’s the one in danger. Even if Bella and Edward were both human, Edward would win in a fist fight.
The dynamic is completely flipped with a female vampire and a male human. Beau is taller than Edythe, bigger, less fragile looking. Descriptions of Edythe, unlike Edward, don’t mention how muscular she is. They focus on her sharp nails, which could be intimidating but not in the same way as a jacked dude bigger than you, ya know? Take this example. When Bella first starts guessing at what kind of creature Edward is, she guesses he is a superhero and he cryptically implies that he is dangerous, the villain and not the hero. That gets locked in right away. She doesn’t want to believe it but yeah, okay, sure. This guy could totally be dangerous, look at him. The quote is
“You’re dangerous?” I guessed, my pulse quickening as I intuitively realized the truth of my own words. He was dangerous. He’d been trying to tell me all along.
However, when Edythe cryptically implies that she is dangerous to Beau, he might as well laugh in her face. He says
“You’re dangerous?” It came out like a question, and there was doubt in my voice. She was smaller than I was, no more than my age, and delicately built. Under normal circumstances, I would have laughed at applying the word dangerous to someone like her.
Then he considers the inexplicable fear he’s felt around her and thinks maybe it could be, explaining
Under the doubt, outside the incongruity of the word dangerous applied to her slim and perfect body, I could feel the truth of the foundation.
“Dangerous,” I murmured again, trying to fit the word to the person in front of me. Her porcelain face was still vulnerable, without walls or secrets.
Okay, porcelain is fragile. Vampires are not fragile. Edward is not once described as porcelain, though is sometimes described as stone or marble. I would love to get into the logistics of why Edward has muscles when Edythe is a twig, but I’m still piecing together evidence about vampire bodies for another episode. Right now, we’re talking about how long it took Beau to perceive Edythe as dangerous.
It isn’t until he is walking along the beach and Julie (who is gender-swapped Jacob Black) explains the Cullens as vampires. He recalls his conversation with Edythe where she says she’s dangerous and thinks, yeah okay. If she’s a vampire, I guess that makes sense.
This brings us to the scene where I really felt like Stephenie Meyer had her work cut out for her. When I first imagined Life and Death after reading the foreword by Stephenie Meyer where she explains the gendered changes by percentages that I went over in the last episode, I wondered what happens in the reverse scene in Port Angeles where Bella is walking alone at night. In Twilight, Bella is surrounded by scary, creepy men who worst case scenario, plan on gang raping her and leaving her for dead. This is the implied fear of being a woman walking alone at night, and the implied fear of this scene, but it’s even more clearly cut out in Midnight Sun where Edward is actually hearing the perverted thoughts of these dudes. Everything implied in this scene in Twilight is explicitly, though not graphically, laid out in Midnight Sun. It is just as bad as you’re meant to believe it is.
If you were to exactly flip the genders in this scene, Beau would be walking alone in fear of being assaulted by a bunch of women. You and I both know without even getting to the scene, there’s no way Stephenie Meyer would go for this. She took a pretty logistical point of view when deciding what she could get away with in this book, which is most clearly illustrated when she doesn’t swap the genders of Bella’s parents on the grounds that it would be unlikely for a father to get full custody of a kid in a divorce. Being afraid while walking at night is a distinctly gendered issue. In the US, 45% of women say they don’t feel comfortable walking at night, compared to 27% of men. When it comes to sexual violence, 82% of all juvenile victims are female and 90% of adult rape victims are female. Other trends exist in sexual violence demographics, including an increased risk statistically for trans people, people in prison, and black and indigenous people. Bella is a middle class, cisgendered white girl in Washington state and Beau is a cisgendered white boy so a lot of those statistics don’t play in here but the issue is gendered. Even in Beau’s eyes, it’s hard to believe a woman is dangerous unless she is a confirmed supernatural murderer.
So no, Beau doesn’t get jumped by a girl gang. He has a run in with a group of people doing drugs (four men and two women) and they mistake him for a cop because one of them has seen Beau riding around in Charlie’s police cruiser with him. Beau is at risk of being hate crimed for being mistaken as a police officer. The only way Beau could be in danger is if the group saw him as a threat and decided to take him out before he used his power to get them in trouble. And to be clear, if Beau was murdered or even just beat up for being mistaken as a cop, Charlie would have found who did it and locked those people up forever. If something happened to Bella, Charlie also would have used the force of the law to take action but I doubt the whole group would be convicted, but I guess it’s possible even though they weren’t all using drugs in a parking lot. After all, Beau is in a protected class as a male but both Bella and Beau are in a protected class as white Americans. Hypotheticals aside, men are dangerous and women are not. This kind of simplification of gender is bad for men and boys, too. All those statistics I listed do have a percentage of victims who are men and they should be just as able to get support and safety without being looked down on for being weak or womanly.
I feel pretty passionately protective of Bella, in part because we are demographically similar and I feel even more protective of and similar to Kristen Stewart as an actor. I know I’m not alone in identifying with Bella--she’s the first person protagonist of the books, after all. People also love Kristen Stewart and she’s been solidifying a career since Twilight, gaining relevance especially with the Christmas movie Happiest Season. People do not, however, love Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan. A lot of reviewers of the movies found her awkward and boring. People were quick to call out the selfish and problematic ways she gets sucked into a codependent relationship, uses Jacob, and abandons her family. Something that’s great about a first person point of view is that you are all the way inside a character’s head. You don’t even have to imagine taking a walk in their shoes because the entire walk is in their shoes. That’s the point of the story. It’s also one of the hardest parts of a movie adaptation: even voice over can’t totally immerse the audience in the first person because at the end of the day, it’s not you on the screen, it’s Kristen Stewart as a teenager making choices that of course you wouldn’t make if you were in her position. The book is just as intense as the movies but we get mad seeing Kristen Stewart so worried in her portrayal of Bella, even though she’s primarily worried and angry in the book.
Kristen Stewart does smile. She’s proven it countless times since the Twilight Saga ended. Her opening monologue for Saturday Night Live in 2017 is hilarious. She talks about Twilight, dating Robert Pattinson, and reads off some of Donald Trump’s tweets because apparently he was abnormally invested in hers and Robert Pattinson’s break up when it happened. By the time she’s doing that monologue, she has cropped and bleached her hair and fully realized a fashion Hollywood goth aesthetic, wearing all black with a black mesh skirt and mesh socks in black high heels. The joke in the second half of the monologue is that the cast members feel the need to impress her by smoking cigarettes and riding motorcycles because she’s so cool. After all, she did drive fast and smoke in a music video for the Rolling Stones. The thing that I think is sort of funny is that her performances in other movies aren’t that different from Twilight. She’s really not overly effusive or preppy and I fear part of the critique of the Bella Swan performance is that teenage girls are “supposed” to be bubbly and fun. Well, tough luck, this teenage girl is brooding and obsessive and so are some real life teenage girls. Not all teenage girls with an attitude problem realize they look good in all black right away--some try to blend in while managing their anger.
Well, there’s a critical oversight on behalf of both Stephenie Meyer and the audience regarding Bella’s upbringing. Most of the people who are critical of Bella Swan’s attitude and decisions fail to realize that Bella is actually behaving exactly how you’d expect someone to behave if they were parentified as a child. Parentification is when a child is asked to take the role of an adult from an early age. You probably know somebody with these traits or know a child that exhibits some of this or, possibly, you were parentified as a child. We have been given the gift of Bella Swan to examine and live through vicariously to learn about this parentification without too much self examination. Thanks, Stephenie. Some signs of parentification according to Psychology Today are that a person grew up feeling like they had to be responsible, they have trouble playing or letting loose, like to feel like they’re in control, pulled into arguments between caregivers, felt like they were given responsibilities that were age inappropriate, often complimented for being so responsible or so good, more likely to be self-reliant than to trust others, don’t really remember “being a kid”, and/or the parents had trouble caring for themselves so they placed the responsibility on the child, all of which leads to the person becoming a caregiver for others, finding caregiving feels good even when it requires self sacrifice, feeling like they have to be the peacemaker and feeling like their efforts aren’t appreciated.
So Bella is intense, right? She gets super weird about doing fun things with her friends and usually uses “I’m clumsy” as an excuse not to do it. She doesn’t want to go to the beach because she could fall, she doesn’t want to go to the school dance because she could fall, and she doesn’t play sports in school because she could fall. You get the point. But if the issue was really some unavoidable curse of clumsiness, why isn’t Bella in the chess club or something? What does she do for fun? Read Jane Austen?
Bella’s parents are divorced and live in totally different states. Supposedly her parents divorced when she was super young but towards the end of Twilight, Bella needs an excuse to run away from home and tells Charlie some string of heart-wrenching comments that she claims her mom also said to him when she left. It comes in a moment where Bella is being tracked by a scary vampire from outside the coven and she needs to cover her bases so that Charlie doesn’t think Edward kidnapped her or something. The scene goes down like this.
I could think of only one way to escape, and it involved hurting him so much that I hated myself for even considering it. But I had no time, and I had to keep him safe. I glared up at my father, fresh tears in my eyes for what I was about to do.
“I do like him--that’s the problem! I can’t do this anymore! I can’t put down any more roots here! I don’t want to end up trapped in this stupid, boring town like Mom! I’m not going to make the same dumb mistake she did. I hate it--I can’t stay here another minute.”
Now... I think we’re supposed to take Bella’s side because she’s so scared of the rogue vampire and she is saying all this stuff to keep Charlie separate from her and therefore safer than if he was near her. A few paragraphs down we get
“I wasn’t being nice,” I confessed, ignoring his attempt at a diversion, looking down at my knees. “That was the same thing my mom said when she left him. You could say I was hitting below the belt.”
Setting aside that Bella just proved really alarming manipulation skills, why did she know all of that well enough to injure Charlie that way? If her parents split when she was an infant, it would take a complete lack of boundaries on her mother’s part to share enough about the divorce for Bella to be able to quote a fight she was barely alive for.
Bella is wired to be a caregiver. She does way more than any child should have to for her family, even though plenty of kids do end up in a similar position. She’s an only child responsible for being a go-between for her estranged parents. Sometimes throughout Twilight, we see Bella preparing meals for her dad Charlie and cracking jokes about how he can’t take care of himself without her. These are tiny moments that honestly, I didn’t pay much attention to when I went through the original series. It felt like a pretty average case of a distant daughter moving in with her single dad who loves fishing and being a cop. I ran it past someone who has recently rewatched all the movies and they agreed with me: Bella isn’t obviously a caregiver or inappropriately filling a parental role.
The person who actually pointed out to me that Bella might be taking on too much is one Edward Cullen. What a guy. Edward, in all his obsessive secret watching of Bella, gives us a lot more insight to who she is when he tells the story in Midnight Sun. It’s more information than we ever really get from Bella’s perspective in Twilight. In both books, Edward asks Bella about her relationship with her mom because he knows that she loves and misses her mother. In Twilight, the scene is brushed over but now that Stephenie Meyer has had 15 years to think of how to elaborate, we get an in-depth answer from Bella in Midnight Sun. She talks about trying hard to make her mom happy throughout her life and says that Charlie needs her. Edward’s response is this
I nodded thoughtfully, sifting through this mine of information. I wished I could meet this woman who had shaped so much of Bella’s character. Part of me would have preferred that Bella had an easier, more traditional childhood—that she could have gotten to be the child. But she wouldn’t have been the same person, and truly, she didn’t seem resentful in any way. She liked to be the caretaker, liked to be needed.
Okay, Edward just defined the parentification of the child and described Bella as a caretaker. Again, I didn’t really get that from the Twilight series but that’s part of what these alternate books are for. Little revisions and clarities. But here’s the next line.
She liked to be the caretaker, liked to be needed. Perhaps this was the real secret as to why she was drawn to me. Had anyone ever needed her more?
There is so much to unpack here. For one, Edward has no idea why he likes Bella or why she likes him except that they need each other. Put all other logistics, preferences, and dreams aside because what matters is they need each other. They are codependent at first sight. It’s a truly frightening foundation for a relationship. Worse, Edward seems to know that Bella likes to be a caretaker and that it stems from this bizarre care-taking relationship she developed with her mother throughout her life. He states clearly that he knows her mother-daughter relationship was difficult and formative for Bella. He knows that she will always put other people first, something that she might not even know about herself. Then in the very next paragraph, he volunteers to be the person she over-exerts herself for. I cannot overstate the toxicity of this passage. This man has had 70 years as a vampire to observe human behavior and relationships. He identifies a caregiving pattern in Bella and then exploits it. I do not care how many times he claims he is trying to avoid selfishness or protect her when the very basis of their connection is that he can take her life from her. And have no fear, there are plenty more examples of Edward doing and saying two different things coming up in future episodes.
Again, I think this whole explanation about Bella’s responsibilities is mostly a clarity revision on behalf of the author. I don’t have any feminist conspiracies about Stephenie Meyer’s failure to include it in the original version of Twilight. There’s a little bit from Bella about how she trusts Phil (her mother’s new husband) to take good care of her and make sure food was in the fridge. The whole dynamic is explained even more because Beau is described much more in depth as a caretaker and his book was written in 2015. Right off the bat, when Beau is leaving Phoenix and his mom at the beginning of the book he says
I’d been taking care of my mom for my whole life. I mean, I’m sure there must have been a time, probably when I was still in diapers, that I wasn’t in charge of the bills and paperwork and cooking and general level-headedness, but I couldn’t remember it. Was leaving my mom to fend for herself really the right thing to do?
Then when he first meets up with Charlie, Charlie asks if Beau feels okay leaving his mom. He says
We both understood that this question wasn’t about my own personal happiness. It was about whether I was shirking my responsibility to look after her. This was the reason Charlie’d never fought Mom about custody; he knew she needed me.
I don’t mean to assert that Bella Swan’s or Beau Swan’s parents don’t love their child. It just strikes me as kind of a bummer that Bella (or Beau) is kind of a commodity that can be passed between parents as needed, rather than a loved one. I believe we’ve got more than enough evidence here to suggest the parentification of Bella Swan.
The consequences of Bella’s parentification are not directly addressed in the Twilight Saga, nor do I expect them to be, but they are written between the lines of a lot of her decisions. Parentification is a form of neglect and kids who experience it are more likely to have mental health issues because of it. They have relational trauma and chronic stress. The more dysfunction, the worse it can be for somebody. Some long-term effects that stick out to me are difficulty functioning independently and involvement in unhealthy relationships. Bella wants to commit to an eternity with Edward because she gets all of her self-worth from how much of herself she can give to others. She wants to give her entire life to Edward. She ultimately would have been a lot better off doing some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy instead of becoming a vampire. Stuff like the parentification of Bella Swan is why I say Stephenie Meyer ruined my life. She wrote a character who is set up to have mental health issues that need addressing but then the character acts out the unhealthy consequences without ever processing them. The reader is drawn into an infatuation with Edward but then allowed to believe the progression of the relationship is normal or desirable or romantic. Neither Bella or Edward are given a chance for self-improvement and the goal is to end up together, no matter the cost. I don’t know if Stephenie Meyer owes anybody characters who are interested in self-improvement but it bums me out when I consider the influence and reach the Twilight Saga had on people, including me, who might have imagined Bella and Edward as relational role models.
The working theory here is that Bella’s love interest Edward leans into opportunities to be comforted by her. Real quick, let’s go back to that scene in Port Angeles. After Bella is nearly attacked by that group of scary parking lot dudes, she gets in Edward’s car and they drive off. Bella asks Edward if he is okay because his expression is murderously angry and he says “no.” He returns the question and asks Bella if she is okay. After all, she’s the one who was nearly attacked. She says yes, she’s alright. Then Edward exhales sharply and orders Bella to distract him. He says, “just prattle about something unimportant until I calm down.” The definition of “prattle” is to talk at length in a foolish or inconsequential way. It suggests the chatter of children, according to the internet. This boy just told Bella—no, ORDERED Bella to prattle on about something unimportant. That is so rude. He acts like it’s her job to help him manage his rage, even in a situation where she is the person whose emotions should come first. He isn’t a source of comfort and even though he just saved her life the way he did from the car that almost crushes her, he’s repeatedly saving her life because he wants to be the one to take it. He is selfish. He is objectifying Bella. Yeah, that’s cool that he’s strong and everything but it is not worth it long term. Just wait until you see how he treats Bella when she’s pregnant.
In a serious contradiction, Edythe takes care of her own emotions when she drives her Volvo up to rescue Beau from the people calling him “pig.” I kind of saw this coming because Edythe apologizes more in the first 200 pages than Edward does in the whole damn series so I expected that she would get some sort of different emotional treatment than Edward, despite the fact the character’s lived experiences mean that Beau would be the caretaker while Edythe is the rage monster. When Beau gets into Edythe’s car, he grabs her arm and doesn’t stop until Edythe tells him to put on his seatbelt. Edward and Bella have the same conversation but Edward commands that she wears a seatbelt and she obeys. Very good. Very Fifty Shades. Beau says Edythe looks pissed. He asks if she’s alright, she says no. She asks him if he is hurt and he says no. Beau never says he’s okay in that dissociative lying kind of way that Bella does but Edythe calls him stupid, which is something she does throughout, and is not something Edward ever does to Bella. It’s mean, honestly.
The frustrating difference between Edythe and Edward here is that even after Edythe admits she has a temper, the same way Edward does to Bella, she also regulates her own emotions and doesn’t lean on Beau to do it. She tells Beau that she needs a moment to herself, asks Beau if she’s allowed to go teach those thugs a lesson, and without much more deliberation, she realizes that Beau’s friends are probably worried about him. She’s taking care of his emotions. This is so disappointing to me. For one, I really thought I was onto something with that whole parentification of the child business, when it turns out that Stephenie Meyer would write any girl character to be a caregiver, regardless of relevant childhood experiences. It’s really not the woman’s job to take care of all the emotions in a heterosexual relationship. It’s really not a bad thing or against bro code for a man to express himself in a way other than rage. In a healthy relationship, both people are able to take care of their own feelings and also provide support when their partner is feeling down. It’s not a woman’s job to parent her boyfriend and any time you hear of a man looking for a partner with the same traits as his mother, that’s taught, that’s not a given. Stephenie Meyer said she made these changes because Beau is a boy but that’s not why she made them. She made some of these changes because she didn’t want to emasculate him but they’re things that don’t have to be emasculating. It’s not an insult to your character as a man to have feelings. I know this is really basic gender studies 101 stuff but again, this book went into the hands of how many people? I’m just disappointed.
Then, at long last, I would like to close out this Port Angeles chapter with a little conversation about holding open doors. Holding a door open for someone is a courtesy that leads to a whole lot of strange gender moments in the real world. I can’t tell you the number of times a man has refused an open door from me, just because I’m a girl and he thinks it’s his job to hold the door. I also had a good laugh once when I saw a guy hold a door open for a stranger who happened to be a woman and then let the door slam on some other guy’s face. Why can’t we just admit that holding the door open for someone is a blanket nice thing to do that has nothing to do with how macho you’re trying to look that day? If someone is carrying a box, hold the door open for them, period.
In this Port Angeles trip, Edward takes Bella to dinner after he rescues her. It’s super straight-forward because it already fits perfectly into the typical gendered hetero outing where the boy takes the girl to dinner and holds open the door and pays for the meal and all that. So, what do Beau and Edythe do? Well, Edythe asks Beau’s friends if it’ll ruin their night if Beau takes her to dinner. She drives but he’s the one awkwardly running to open doors to the car and the restaurant. It’s not hot at all. Part of the appeal of Edward opening the door for you is that he can gracefully move super fast but Beau is still obligated to keep up this gendered norm even as the lanky clown that he is and I think that’s messed up. I think Edythe should have opened the door, simply because she’s better at it. At the end of the meal, Edythe pays because she has all that vampire money from being alive for a hundred years, which Beau naturally protests. Edythe calmly tells him “Try not to get caught up in antiquated gender roles,” and walks away, leaving a one hundred dollar bill on the table for the waiter. What a power move. And then Beau still has the audacity to try to hold the door open. He’s clearly in over his head.
This is all part of the horrible and wonderful world of Twilight. Stephenie Meyer really tried to say that Beau doesn’t have as much of a chip on his shoulder like it was coincidence, when clearly that chip was handed over to Edythe. It’s obvious why Beau doesn’t have the same paper about Macbeth that Bella has when Bella’s chosen topic is “Whether Shakespeare’s treatment of female characters is misogynistic.” Stephenie Meyer knows what feminism is and yet she’s got a fantasy novel series where she doesn’t try to imagine what the world would look like with gender equality. I just don’t get it. She writes such normative characters but doesn’t call out the parts that are unhealthy. There’s so much abuse and no recovery. And when Bella hit the big screen as Kristen Stewart, people were mean about it. There are blogs listing all of Bella Swan’s flaws and I gotta admit, a lot of them are signs she is being emotionally abused. It kind of makes me sick that Edward isn’t totally viewed as a villain or at least a guy with a lot of room for self improvement.
Tune back in next week to learn more about why Edward Cullen’s inability to love himself makes it impossible for him to love anybody else. Can I get an amen?
This podcast was written, recorded, and edited by Susie Shelton. The theme music is by Alexis Lopez. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review, share with your friends, and consider tuning in to the sister podcast Nermer Nermer or following Nermer Nermer on Instagram. You can DM any feedback or questions to that account and I will get back to you. All sources used for this episode are in the description. If you or somebody you know has experienced sexual assault, please know that you are not alone. The number for the National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1-800-656-4673. It is confidential and available 24 hours a day. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline phone number is 800-273-8255. Special thanks to you for listening to this podcast and extra special thanks to Stephenie Meyer for ruining my life.