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Violating boundaries is part of being a vampire… it is also part of being an author. This week I look at which lines are crossed in the Twilight saga, including the border of the Quileute reservation and the Mason-Dixon line.
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?
From Twilight and History:
Pg 165: Jasper ’ s role in the Twilight Saga mirrors a compelling historical archetype in American culture: the Southern gentleman - soldier. As Jasper ’ s personal history is slowly revealed over the course of the Twilight series, we are introduced to several historical stereotypes regarding American masculinity and its relationship to violence.
Pg 168: He contrasts this archetype with the Northern ideal, who closely resembles Edward, the male who “ resists change as he resists temptations to sin; he protects the feminine avatar of social virtues instead of seeking the woman of his dark wilderness dreams. ”
Of course Seattle is a contemporary hell mouth with both werewolves and vampires.
Another boundary violation: the treaty the cullens made with the quiluetes. If Edward bites Bella, his family is in a war with the werewolves. Bella doesn’t have a treaty apparently.
https://www.peninsuladailynews.com/news/the-author-on-the-west-end-what-was-stephenie-meyers-original-name-for-twilight-the-answer-hits-close-to-home-2/#:~:text=%E2%80%9COriginally%2C%20the%20first%20draft%20of,to%20go%20in%20her%20life.
https://books.google.com/books?id=-7zBc-pqnGsC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171#v=onepage&q&f=false A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest
https://studybreaks.com/thoughts/twilight-quileute-tribe/#:~:text=During%20the%20height%20of%20%E2%80%9CTwilight,coming%20to%20visit%20the%20reservation.
https://www.burkemuseum.org/static/truth_vs_twilight/facts-01.html
https://twilightsaga.fandom.com/wiki/Imprinting
The Twilight Saga is a story of deception, boundary-breaking, and binaries. It socialized me as a kid and it socialized a million other pre-teens and teens who were trying to fall in love for the first time. Most of the messages in this book are overt and ugly now that I read it back as an adult but there’s one element that exists deep within the lines while also riding the surface: I’m referring to the treatment of Jacob Black and the Quileute tribe. Stephenie Meyer draws a lot of lines just to cross them. This week I’m talking about the border between Forks and the La Push reservation, the personal boundaries of every human who interacts with a vampire, and the Mason-Dixon line with Jasper Cullen standing squarely in the Confederate South. When it comes to representation, Stephenie Meyer is working with an unsettling binary with an obvious line: which side of history does she stand on?
*cue theme music*
Unlike episodes past, today we are focusing mostly on moments from Eclipse, the third book in the saga and the most forgettable movie. In fact, that movie is so slow and boring, I’m convinced you could skip it when watching the movies and not miss a moment of plot. The mountain of information in Eclipse may be basically inconsequential to the action of the story but it is rich with assumptions about the Quileute tribe and the Confederate Army.
Since you probably forgot what’s going on in that movie–no really, try to remember one thing before I tell you–I’ll go through it right quick. Bella and Edward are locked in a stalemate about whether or not they should get married. Bella has seen her parents get divorced and knows that it is an imperfect, perhaps meaningless union that pales in comparison to a commitment like Edward turning her. Jacob is off on his own, picking up the pieces of his heart that Bella shattered in New Moon. All of Bella’s human friends are oscillating in the background, planning for graduation and being normal. The main conflict is introduced and resolved in Eclipse, which is a big part of why it doesn’t totally need to be a part of this saga in my opinion. There are a bunch of scary new born vampires being created in Seattle and they are going on huge, violent, conspicuous killing sprees, threatening the Cullen coven by their very existence and obviously taking innocent human lives. As a result of the vampire spawn hotspot, the Quileute tribe is seeing members transform into werewolves in huge numbers–the wolf generation always corresponds to vampire threat (more on that later). In order to battle the incoming army of uncontrollable newborns, Jasper (former major in the Confederate Army), teaches the members of the Cullen coven and the wolves of La Push how to defeat newborns. Basically, you rip their heads off.
I grew up away from any states represented in the Civil War. Even though a few Republicans fly the good ole stars and bars in Southern Arizona, the history is largely mythological. The state wasn’t even founded until 1912 and there aren’t Civil War era buildings the way there are in the Eastern half of the country. Plus, I’m white, so I likely could have comfortably ignored lingering Civil War racism if I grew up somewhere else. I was pretty well represented in the media as a kid, even if Disney women tend to be built exceptionally skinny with personalities that are impossible to imitate. My friendships and family were reflected back to me in most TV shows, movies, magazines, etc. I was raised with the notion of being “color-blind” to race because it doesn’t matter to a person’s value as a human. Through paying more attention to skin color as an adult (by paying attention to more Black speakers and thinkers), it’s become obvious that even though race doesn’t determine someone’s value as a person… in America, someone’s race or more specifically just their perceived skin color is a huge indicator to their treatment in society.
In Southern Arizona, we have a lot of awareness of indigenous people. Unlike other parts of the country, you don’t have to go far out of your way to try to understand the Native experience. I grew up with a curriculum in elementary and middle school that included Hopi, Navajo, and O’odham traditions and I had kids in my classes from those tribes. My elementary school also had a substantial Mexican population and we had flamenco dancers come to visit for assemblies and bilingual ESL classrooms.
As a kid, I fully thought the entire world was as integrated as the schools and daycares I went to. When I practiced being “color-blind” as a little Girl Scout, I really took for granted that not every acknowledgment of non-white culture was a celebration and I definitely still thought the default of every character was a white man until told otherwise. Socialization is a trip, and a complicated one at that. As I’ve said many times, the Twilight Saga socialized me to believe in a love where the most important thing I could give away was my life–to be the perfect Bella Swan with the perfect balance of innocence and independence required to seduce Edward. Even with what might be considerable exposure to indigenous and latine communities compared to other white Americans, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Twilight’s treatment of the Quileute tribe didn’t bury its head in me like a tick to twist out later.
When I saw Jacob Black in Twilight, I thought then (and still sort of think now) that it was neat to see a Native American character in a movie. I handed over all benefit of the doubt to Stephenie Meyer at the time of the books, as we know, and even though I didn’t understand the Quileute tribe in the far away land of the Pacific Northwest, I trusted that Stephenie Meyer was using decent research and acting respectfully when she wrote about the tribe and developed the character of Jacob Black. But like everything else in this Saga, there’s the digestible surface level story and the deeper dive that makes you sick. On the surface, the fictionalized version of the Quileute tribe is a group of people who stick to their beliefs and traditions and don’t let pesky Cullens onto their beach until the last book creates a life-or-death urgency that forces their hands. Underneath, there’s the bias of one Stephenie Meyer who twists the stories about the Quileute until they look like the controlling bad guys that need to be quelled by the one member of the tribe who wants to get in tight with the white man: that’s Jacob Black.
There are a handful of things that Stephenie Meyer got right, perhaps making the pretend portions even more insidious. First of all, Forks is a real place in Washington and the Quileute tribe are the rightful stewards of that land. Like all other places of industry in the United States, much of the Pacific Northwest that previously relied on logging has been impacted by environmentalist policies that take away a lot of the money making opportunities without replacing them at all. Having a bit of tourism income from Twilight fans is probably not the worst thing to ever happen to a small town, though we all know that tourism is a fragile, imperfect economy, easily pushed over by events like a global pandemic. The visitor book at the Forks Visitor Center went from 74 signatures in 2005 to over 20,000 annually by the time the series was finished. Nevertheless, Twilight could have been set entirely in Seattle, Ontario, or Portland with pretty much the same plot or Stephenie could have invented a town for the setting. Instead, she chose a place whose modern history is inseparable from its tribal history, something that is rare to find in a country that has white washed the pages of almost every history book.
According to Stephenie Meyer, she chose the town of Forks for its name. She saw this as the story of Bella’s big fork in the road and when she heard of the town, she knew it was where she wanted to set her story. In fact, the original title of the book was Forks and her publisher had to point out that it completely lacked romance. Stephenie Meyer also said when she wrote the story and included some of the Quileute lore that she didn’t intend for anyone else to read it. She also says she considered giving the tribe a fictional name once she realized the book would be published. The fact of the matter is that Stephenie Meyers’ intentions and her execution have always been divorced, as we know from experience with her feminism, and she did not change the name or honor the real tribe. She also knew her books were doing well when Eclipse was published with tales of a tribe that she was distorting more and more with every sentence.
Forks was previously known as the unincorporated town of Quillayute and it wasn’t incorporated until 1945. It’s a part of the Quillayute Valley School District. It’s located on the Quillayute river system. It would have been bonkers for Stephenie Meyer to choose the real place of Forks, Washington without including the tribe. A cursory glance at the Quileute Wikipedia page reveals what I already knew: Stephenie didn’t dig very deep when researching the Quileute. According to Pacific Northwest coastal mythology, the Quileute believe they were created from wolves and perform a wolf-dance, among other ceremonies. The modern-day Quileute reservation was established in 1889 and it’s 14 miles west of Forks. Boom. With these few sentences, Stephenie Meyer has all the information she wants to build a family, a tribe, and a plot using a limited section of the available lore. This is no surprise (she also chose the smallest fraction of vampire lore to build off of) but the difference is that vampires are not a real group of people and profiting off of them is ethically sound.
In an interview with Abigail Campos, a Quileute Tribe Member named Ann Penn-Charles talks about the obligation thrust on the tribe to educate the Twilight fans about the difference between their fictionalized wolf characters and the real people of the Quileute tribe. When the heaps of tourists showed up after the success, many of the kids who adored Jacob Black were disappointed to find nothing but a reservation and a cultural history different from the one told by Billy Black in Eclipse.
I’d like to point out an old, complicated saying that I hear a lot in my conversations with queer people about representation: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to Britney Spears in the past 20 years, you might be aware that it’s completely possible to be on the receiving end of some bad press that paints your image in a negative light. I’m bringing this up now because once the Quileute got attention from Twilight, they were able to negotiate a bit with Congress and the House to get their land moved inland to avoid the rising sea levels. It’s a humane request that the US Government shouldn’t have the power to decline to begin with, but the Twilight publicity helped give the government a reason to want to protect the group more than they have in the past. On the much bigger flip side, the fictionalized version of the Quileute tribe is property of Summit Entertainment and not a dollar of it goes to the actual tribe. Unlike a movie like Smoke Signals that was written and directed by natives, the people profiting off of Twilight’s tribe are Hollywood execs and our girl Stephenie. Perhaps the story could have been harmless if Stephenie Meyer really was the only one reading her story but instead she wrote the cultural background of a group for them, created related images of wolves to sell as temporary tattoos at Hot Topic, and then presented it to millions of people to take at face value. In the pros and cons tally of Quileute publicity we have one check in the pro box (some deserved credibility in Washington) and at least a dozen checks in the con box (including the alienation of a group who already survived the genocide of American colonialism).
Now what exactly did Stephenie Meyer do to the Quileute? So far all I’ve mentioned is the abstract idea of representation and we all know that Jacob Black is one of the beloved characters of the series so what exactly is the problem? Here’s the most basic rundown of the situation, with help from an essay called “Biting Bella” by Judith Leggatt and Kristin Burnett. All references to the Quileute from here on out will refer to the fictional tribe of Team Jacob, rather than the legitimate tribe of the same name. In the beginning of the Twilight Saga, Jacob relays some of the Quileute history to Bella. He doesn’t believe the stories but we’re aware of a treaty involving the tribe and the Cullens. Basically, if no vampires bite a human they can remain on the land but if they do, the treaty is void. Another way to break the treaty is if the Quileute reveals the presence of vampires to a human. As you know, both of these elements of the treaty are broken by the end of the saga but the treaty remains in place because of concessions made by the tribe.
In order to really understand the problematic nature of Stephenie Meyers’ story, you have to consider the tribal member Sam Uley, the alpha of the wolf pack. He has access to the minds of the other werewolves and uses his power to force them into submission and basically slavery to uphold the Quileute values and treaty to a T. If the treaty was upheld literally, the transformation of Bella would have meant the end of the treaty and a good reason to rip Edward Cullen’s face off, an alternate ending I completely approve of. Instead, Jacob breaks off to become a new leader of a new pack where no one would ever be enslaved and Jacob becomes a leader with a more Western democratic “respectable” approach. He then, of course, allies himself with the Cullens and gains power as a mediator because of his allyship and it turns out the only way to be a good and proper Indian in this story is to assimilate into white vampire culture. The whole thing is facilitated by Jacob’s invested interest in Bella and he is a-okay with being flexible on a treaty predating him if it means he has a better shot at getting the girl. Or, ya know, imprinting on her infant daughter.
Let’s just get it out of the way now that imprinting does not exist in the real world in the way it does in Breaking Dawn. I tried to research what imprinting really is but I’m no Charles Darwin and my audience isn’t a biology classroom so here’s what I managed to gather through squinted eyes skimming a university research paper. Imprinting is part of the evolutionary process, practiced in many species, involving learned mate preferences to help keep a species alive. For example, someone like Bella with a cop for a dad might be drawn to someone with unwarranted power over her, like Edward Cullen. That’s just how I understand it; I wasn’t invited to the conference where Darwin, Freud, and Stephenie Meyer got together and decided to bring the word “imprint” into the fantasy novel. Whatever Jacob does–the air quotes “imprint” on baby Renesme–is creepy and completely of Stephenie Meyer’s making.
According to Jacob, imprinting is “not like love at first sight, really. It's more like… gravity moves… suddenly. It's not the earth holding you here anymore, she does… You become whatever she needs you to be, whether that's a protector, or a lover, or a friend." The other imprinting that happens in the series (between Sam and Emily, Jared and Kim, or Paul and Rachel) more closely matches the biological origin of the word “imprint,” even though they still make me sort of uncomfortable. All but one of the werewolves in the story are men and the lone girl wolf, Leah Clearwater, doesn’t imprint. The Tumblr twihards have decided that Leah Clearwater is gay but there’s no evidence in the books. With Leah out of the way of ruining my examination, we have a structure where wolf men decide to “imprint” on women, teens, or very young girls, to act as protector and intimate friend until the girl is old enough to reciprocate romantic feelings. Hopefully, I don’t have to explain why this is unsettling or why it’s pretty weird to normalize grooming among the native tribe. How come creepy behavior is tied to culture and tradition when it comes to the wolf pack but goes completely unscrutinized when Edward decides to stalk Bella, a girl 86 years his junior? It’s almost as though Stephenie Meyer wants to grant Edward free will to do whatever he wants but gives the indigenious characters unbreakable rules to imply a monolith of sensibility and an old time mythology at the same time. It’s almost like that.
Bella describes Kim, Jared’s imprintee, in Eclipse.
“My first impression of Kim was that she was a nice girl, a little shy, and a little plain. She had a wide face, mostly cheekbones, with eyes too small to balance them out. Her nose and mouth were both too broad for traditional beauty. Her flat black hair was thin and wispy in the wind that never seemed to let up atop the cliff… But after a few hours of watching Jared watch Kim, I could no longer find anything plain about the girl.
The way he stared at her! It was like a blind man seeing the sun for the first time. Like a collector finding an undiscovered Da Vinci, like a mother looking into the face of her newborn child.”
Here we have the alternate presentation of perfect love, as told by Stephenie Meyer. We also have a line about “traditional beauty” referring to white-European faces. Apparently, the alternative to the Edward-kills-Bella kind of love is a love where the man looks at the woman like an object for his collection or like he birthed her himself. I’ve said in a previous episode that Edward is Bella’s mother and here we have the same principle applied to a totally different relationship. I’m not saying a mother-child thing never happens in romantic relationships but I just think Stephenie Meyer had too much influence to be lacing that particular relationship model into her story so often.
If we take a looksy at the story Billy Black tells around the campfire in Eclipse, we see a bunch of nonfictional tribe names scattered into a story about fictional characters named Taha Wi, Taha Aki, Utlapa, Yut, and Kaheleha. The story speaks about the Quileute using their spirit selves to protect the land and also explains that the Quileute were the only tribe in the area with mystical abilities. They were violent and fought amongst themselves as well as the outside world, and as spirit warriors, they became drunk with power and started taking additional wives, making human sacrifices, and enslaving one another. After a while, the bodiless spirit warriors decided to take over the body of the local wolf and the werewolves of La Push were born. As Bella and the werewolf boys of La Push stare from around the campfire, Billy explains that this isn’t the end of the story. The Quileute started finding human blood in the woods and members of the tribe started to go missing from their homes until one day–the predator was caught. A smelly, cold, stony corpse with red eyes and bloody lips. From there, Billy tells a story about the small war between the Cold Ones and the Wolves and explains the fatalities on both sides through the years. Eventually, he introduced the yellow-eyed vampire (undeniably Carlisle Cullen) and the treaty made with him to allow the vampires to live in vegetarian peace, as long as they stayed off the tribal lands.
The thing about the old legends told by Billy Black is that none of them are true in actual Quileute lore. I know I certainly don’t care if a book invents some history to tell a story. That’s standard novel writing stuff. The problem is twofold: one, it isn’t Stephenie Meyer’s place to invent tribal lore. It’s a matter of staying in your lane and recognizing power dynamics to stay respectful in your writing and she didn’t do it. The section of the book where Billy tells this story is framed as educational and it’s not. It absolutely crosses the line into exploitation of the tribe, and for what? To give the Quileutes importance in a story where they’ve been sidelined. That’s the other half of the problem with this story. Stephenie Meyer frames the wolf lore so it seems the only reason the wolves exist is as a counterpoint to the vampires. Without the vampires, three quarters of the story told by Billy would be cut. In fact, Stephenie didn’t find an opening to tell this story until the army of newborns started threatening the treaty, running around as if there were no boundaries. The fact that the Quileute had to step into this vampire battle in order to keep their land is disappointing. Afterall, the issue was between the Cullens and the newborns, not the tribe. For the sake of the saga, the author has rewritten Quileute lore so they wouldn’t matter without their white foils. On top of that, the dangerous task of protecting the land from vampires, the very task that causes Leah Clearwater to shed a tear at the end of Billy’s story, is written as a biological response. It is unavoidable and even natural for young members of the tribe to risk their health and their lives in response to the vampire colonists. Again, we see the native characters completely stripped of free will while the Cullens could choose any moment to move away. It is somewhat ironic that Stephenie Meyer wrote the Quileute as sitting ducks on the short end of an unbalanced treaty, while relying on the historic imbalance of American history to get away with painting the Quileute tribe as mystic savages.
Jasper’s story is also mythologized but in a much more romantic way. As a young major in the Confederate army, he saw a few fair ladies in need of assistance while he was riding home on his horse one day. Little did he know, the women were vampires and the one called Maria bit him and used him to help make an army. The lore continues to explain that while the Confederate Army fought the Union, there was another war happening in Texas between vampire newborns and… I guess human Texans. Like I said, I don’t mind making stuff up to write a novel. I also like the thought of a cover-up that would prevent us from knowing about the Vampire War in Texas when we learn about the Civil War. The difference is that history books already teach about the Civil War with Confederate heroes like Jasper and vampires don’t exist. It’s okay to insert vampires into history because there’s a good reason they aren’t there to begin with. When we’re talking about tribal history, the vast majority of the readers have never heard of the Quileute tribe before these books, even though they are a completely real people who have been unfairly treated since the arrival of European settlers. That’s the difference.
Jasper’s Confederate upbringing could have been negated any number of ways, but instead he is seen as a noble veteran in his past life. The same way that Edward is a weird flu-ridden virgin, the same way that Alice is a kinda crazy/kinda fun sister to have around, Jasper’s human life directly informs his behavior in the Twilight universe. He’s a well-mannered soldier. An essay by Elizabeth Baird Hardy helps shed some light on what it’s like being the oldest living Confederate veteran. They explain in the essay
“ The use of women as recruitment tools was a shamelessly effective practice, especially early in the war…These tactics clearly played to the use of beauty and sexuality as an advertising tool that has been employed to sell everything from alcohol to automobiles, but it also worked upon something deeper: the Confederate soldier ’ s innate sentimentality, particularly with regard to the “ fairer sex. ”” pg 92
I’ve already made it clear that I think Eclipse is largely forgettable but the subtle messaging of giving Jasper a leadership role while making the natives do the Cullen’s bidding is important to all the subtle messaging of the book. I’ll also say that the concept of men going to war to protect the helpless women is a cultural philosophy we still see today. It’s fascinating to me that Jasper’s own desire to help some feeble women actually turned out to be his downfall. The vampire Maria–one of the only non-white characters in the whole saga–turns him and uses him. It’s got girl boss written all over it but unfortunately, she’s also clearly a villain in the story.
There’s another essay about Jasper Hale and the Specter of the American Civil War by Andrea Robertson Cremer that offers a little more nuance. She says
Jasper ’ s role in the Twilight Saga mirrors a compelling historical archetype in American culture: the Southern gentleman - soldier. As Jasper ’ s personal history is slowly revealed over the course of the Twilight series, we are introduced to several historical stereotypes regarding American masculinity and its relationship to violence.
We know from Jasper’s incident at Bella’s birthday party, among other incidents, that Jasper is the most volatile of the Cullens. The rest of them seem to float around with the ease of upper class living while he’s always jonesing for a kill or forgetting to blink. His volatility threatens the Cullen coven constantly and his magical ability to control emotions of the people around him, can be used for the kind of manipulation Edward can only dream about. Yes, he’s an ideal Southern gentleman who understands humble labor and financial insecurity. But he’s also a violent man who admits he wouldn’t likely be alive without the kind-natured Alice at his side. In the essay, Robertson Cremer ties this understanding of Jasper to a larger understanding of American history: for as long as we base our men on the Southern gentleman soldier, we will also have men with insatiable appetites for violence.
I think it’s close to impossible to tell how much of Stephenie Meyer’s messaging was intentional. There are interviews where she says that the characters wrote themselves and she means it. The natural flow of the story helps keep the reader turning pages and the lack of complexity makes us question our interest when we finish the saga. Eclipse provides as much insight as Twilight, Midnight Sun, and Life and Death do into the mind of the author. As of this recording, Meyer says she isn’t going to write sequels for Midnight Sun, though I’d very much like to see Edward’s treatment of the wolf pack and his look into their shared hive mind. I wonder if he could provide more of Jasper’s story, beyond what he can mumble out to Bella on the training field. If nothing else, the story presented in Eclipse helps rule out the notion that Edward is the only white man to be praised in the story. White characters (men) are the backbone of the saga, despite the lip service paid to the strength of the Quileute tribe and the purpose served by some of the white women.
Next week we’ll back to talk more about Rosalie’s behavior in Breaking Dawn with a look at pro-life vampires, the New York Times bestselling oxymoron of 2008.
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, and share with your friends. I am putting links in the show notes to learn about the Quileute tribe from the tribe itself, rather than through me or Stephenie Meyer. If you like this show, consider tuning in to the sister podcast Jawbreakers 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.