Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A quick recap of the entire Twilight Saga and the relevant characters, plus a closer look at the male gaze.
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?
Twilight is not my favorite book. I am, however, unconditionally and irrevocably obsessed with it. I read it as a middle schooler and went through the same obsession that everyone went through when it was published in 2005. I had a friend whose mom bought her every book and then I would borrow it and read it under my desk in 6th grade. I was team Edward for the first book and then team Jacob pretty much as soon as he got a storyline.
I saw the movies at midnight, I cried at all the key plot points, and I imagined what my life would be like with a perfect soulmate.
Then, like everybody else, I decided it was tacky. I’d see clips of Twilight with those god awful guitar riffs and I would cry laughing, wondering how it was that puberty managed to convince me that these movies (all five of them) and books (all 2,446 pages of them) kept me so captivated that I thought of nothing else for years.
It was all fun and games as a college student making fun of the intensity of Edward’s gaze and the repressed gay Kristen Stewart as desperately heterosexual Bella Swan until you realize that for every moment that Twilight was pitiful, you were right there equally deserving of pity.
I feel qualified to judge the Twilight series not just because it’s been such a big part of my life but also because when I went to a university with a 97% acceptance rate, I managed to get on course to only take classes where I could watch movies and read books. Some say it’s a wasted degree but I say there’s no one better to do this series. Plus, I’ve read all the gender studies staples: the Feminine Mystique, the Second Sex, Sister Outsider, The Body Keeps the Score, Cunt, and I will list these all in the description. You can read some of these yourself or take my word for it that they provide insight, although I don’t actually recommend taking my word for anything. As a listener, you get to hear me take Twilight very seriously but please fight me in the Instagram DMs. I’m really not that serious of a person but I’ve spent months of my life putting this project together by gathering source material from Twilight, cross referencing the relationships and antics with those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and finding support for my arguments in other feminist literature so at this point I sound serious because… I’m kinda serious about this.
When I re-read Twilight as an adult a couple years ago, I realized that the relationships depicted in the Twilight series are more than just cheesy… they set a really horrible example of “love” and check a lot of boxes for emotional abuse. Hulu put all the movies up a few months ago and with nowhere to go during quarantine, I watched them all back to back to back and my jaw was on the floor with how absolutely disgusting these characters are as role models. Then Midnight Sun came out in August, which is Twilight written from Edward’s perspective. It is shot for shot the same exact story as Twilight, but it takes you inside the mind of the vampire gaslighter himself. I thought I was done after that. But a recent trip to Barnes and Noble led me to discover Life and Death, yet another retelling of Twilight shot for shot but with a totally gender swapped cast of characters featuring Beau instead of Bella and Edythe instead of Edward. That’s about when I decided that I had to start lining up the discrepancies between the portrayal of men, women, and relationships in Twilight from the vantage point of a queer afab adult, on behalf of the confused and desperate middle schooler that first read these books.
It’s unfair to say that the series is outright bad because it’s not. The books sold over 100 million copies and the five movies had a combined box office of over 3.3 billion dollars. It also spun off into the 50 Shades of Grey series, in case you didn’t know. 50 shades started out as Twilight fan fiction. Google it. And clearly, it can still hold my attention. In fact, I’m so engrossed that I made this podcast series to help sort through some of these dark revelations I’m having about the story that has been embedded in my mind for just about 15 years. Considering the impact Edward and Bella and Jacob had on my early romantic years and considering that this story has been around for more than half the time I’ve been alive… I have no reservations saying…
Stephenie Meyer ruined my life.
3 min 11 s
—- intro music —-
So this is the first episode of an eight part series going into the depths of all the elements of Twilight and its influence. I suspect that if you’ve made it this far, you’re one of the millions of people who are familiar with the Twilight saga but I would like to warn you that every single episode will contain spoilers of the entire movie series and all the books, including Midnight Sun and the gender-swapped rewrite Life and Death. I’d also like to let you know in advance that in order to really go over why I am both addicted to and repulsed by the Twilight saga, I will be going over some hallmark traits of verbal abuse, emotional manipulation, and other forms of domestic violence. If you’ve seen Twilight, you’ve already witnessed these things but there’s your trigger warning.
Originally, there are four books and five movies. The book titles are Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. The Twilight book cover, for anyone who needs a refresher, has a pair of ivory skinned hands gently holding a bright red apple. New Moon has the same color scheme, this time with a dangling white ruffled tulip with red edges. Eclipse has a frayed piece of red ribbon and Breaking Dawn has a chess board with a white queen and a red pawn. For the ten year anniversary of Twilight, Stephenie Meyer released Life and Death, which has a green apple in one masculine hand. And if you haven’t seen the cover of Midnight Sun yet, it has the goriest photo of a pomegranate I have ever seen printed. When the movies were released, Breaking Dawn was split into two parts, similarly to how the final installation of Harry Potter was split into two parts the year before. Since Breaking Dawn has 756 pages, it really is possible that it was split up to make sure everything was covered but it’s pretty much equally possible that they split the last movie to milk the cash cow for another year. When I refer to any of these books or movies, let it be known that the story is exactly the same. Stephenie Meyer worked closely with the creators of the movies. Pretty much anything that happens in the movies also happens in the books. She knew that the die-hard fandom that was born out of the books had high expectations for the movies and she wasn’t okay with letting them down. The book series and the movie series are deeply intertwined and all of them help compose the greater Twilight Saga.
Twilight primarily takes place in Forks, Washington where it always seems to be raining, the perfect cover for a family of vampires who cannot go out into the sun. Forks is a small place. It’s also a real place, with a population of about 3,900 people at the time of this recording. It’s a little bit over four square miles and it didn’t even officially become a town until 1945. The Quileute Tribe ceded their land sometime in the 1880s and were forced to live on the Quileute Reservation in nearby La Push, which also comes up in the Twilight Saga and is also a real place with a real history. Though the Quiluete don’t come up a whole heck of a lot in the first book, Jacob Black and the Quiluete Tribe play a huge role as werewolves in the Twilight saga because of their treaty with the local vampires who are hell bent on violating their boundaries. The only time it really comes up in the first book is when Bella and her friends make a trip to La Push beach and Jacob tells Bella the lore that Edward and his family are “cold ones” aka vampires.
Bella Swan is a high school junior who moves to Forks to live with her police chief dad Charlie, after life with her mom in Phoenix gets a little too chaotic and depressing to keep working. She figures that since she’s spent a good chunk of her life only seeing her dad for a visit every summer, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to spend the rest of her high school career with him. Her mother Rene and her step dad Phil do a lot of traveling because Phil plays minor league baseball so it’s not like she’s got too normal of a home life in Phoenix to begin with. Bella loves her mom and will do anything to make her happy, almost constantly putting her mother’s needs before her own. Now maybe it’s because Stephenie Meyer had some time to think on Bella’s relationship with Rene before writing Midnight Sun and Life and Death but those later stories dwell a whole lot more on the parentification of the child (the internet calls these early stories prequels but “rewrites” is honestly a more accurate description). I have plenty more theories on why the first Twilight book neglects to point out Bella’s flawed relationship with her mother, but those come next week in the Bella episode. For now, Bella is just a high schooler with high school problems.
The high school in Forks is normal. Bella is used to some big Phoenix high school where it’s pretty easy to blend in and not get noticed. Bella doesn’t like to be noticed. She doesn’t have a strong sense of self and, as Edward is quick to point out, she doesn’t seem to value her own safety. Basically, she prioritizes being agreeable and has a hard time putting up boundaries so she does better avoiding people all together. In Forks, it’s rare to get a new girl and everybody is obsessed. She makes friends super fast and has a whole mixed up crew of other high school kids that do very high school things, like help her study and go with her to buy a prom dress. By book two, they have all but vanished off the face of the Earth, but she does start out as a kid with a healthy social life. It’s hard to say if Bella is pretty. She’s insecure and describes herself as average and the book is written in first person so we kinda have to take her word for it. In Midnight Sun, Edward disappointingly agrees with the first telling of the story that Bella is unremarkable and he doesn’t really get what the school-wide obsession is at first. Her movie portrayal is someone plain—obviously Kristen Stewart is stunning but she dresses inconspicuously and rarely emotes, so again, she’s not a runway model or anything. She’s average.
Edward, on the other hand, is drop dead gorgeous. He’s strong and tall and looks like he was chiseled out of stone. To hear him tell it, vampires are naturally appealing to humans to draw them in close enough for the vampire to suck their blood. All the vampires in the series are technically flawless, without pimples or bruises, and they apparently smell good and dress well. They are people who look like they were airbrushed and ripped from the pages of a magazine. This is the first of many contemporary updates Stephenie Meyer gives the vampires in the Twilight saga: any of them could work at Hollister, which is not something Nosferatu could say for himself. Twentieth century teen vampires usually wear a lot of leather and long coats but the Cullens wear cashmere. Edward is clean cut but something about him gives off bad boy vibes. The humans can tell he’s dangerous if they look long enough, and even compared to the other vampires, Edward is the only one of his coven who exudes super toxic energy. They’ve all got baggage from walking around on Earth as immortal killers but Edward takes the cake for most upsetting to be around. I’m sure it’s because Edward can read minds. He gets everyone’s unfiltered opinion at all times and he can hear dozens of people react in a room all at once. I think of it like if I were to go through all my close friend’s text messages to see what they were saying about me, except that I wouldn’t want to do that because they have a right to privacy. Edward doesn’t have the choice to give people their privacy. He’s used to it. He was turned into a vampire in 1918 and has had decades to figure out how to use this skill to his advantage. At this point, he’s just annoying to be around because his family can communicate little messages in secret without ever having to open their mouths. He’s also not in the habit of asking anybody how they feel or what they want, which becomes an issue when he meets the one person whose mind he can’t read: Bella Swan.
The crux of the story is that Bella wants to become a vampire, mostly for the purpose of being with Edward forever and ever. They argue pretty much continuously for 4 books about what is best for Bella. Edward insists that Bella will mourn her human life if she changes and Bella, who is a teenager, obviously jumps at the chance for immortality and undying romance. It’s sort of frustrating that Edward doesn’t get why Bella wants to be a vampire. There are pretty clear pros and cons from an outside perspective: as a reader, there were certainly moments where I wanted to be a vampire. The vampires in the book are beautiful, strong, and they don’t sleep, which gives plenty of time to read books and watch movies. I’ve also personally known at least five goth kids who would opt in to becoming a vampire if given the chance. Edward doesn’t get it. He can’t read Bella’s brain so he doesn’t understand. God forbid he tried to ask. At the same time, it’s frustrating to see Bella in a position with zero life plans beyond high school. She’s not worried about giving up goals related to career or family because her aspirations vanish when she meets Edward. The whole damn story more or less hinges on will she or won’t she become a vampire and it makes ya wish there was a character who could see the future… like Alice.
Alice can see the future. She sees that Bella will become a vampire almost right away. Edward, being able to see straight into Alice’s brain, also sees a vision of Bella becoming a vampire right away. Honestly, that’s one of the coolest parts of Midnight Sun. Stephenie Meyer really gets a chance to play with the science fiction aspects of Alice’s visions and Edward reading them and it’s pretty fun to read. If you’re at all interested in reading Midnight Sun, that’s the best part. Alice is Edward’s more mature counterpart. While Edward easily falls into rage, Alice is composed and thoughtful. As a human, she was committed to an insane asylum and forced to do shock therapy and she doesn’t remember her human life at all. Alice’s backstory feels like one of Stephenie Meyers’ underdeveloped feminist nods. There’s a rich history of women in the United States and elsewhere being called crazy for being smart or creative. Sylvia Plath comes to mind. Rosemary Kennedy, who has a lobotomy in part because she had mood swings, comes to mind. Obviously mental illness has been handled very poorly for all genders, which is why you get “insane asylum” as a common theme for haunted houses. Then there’s also the point that healthcare in the U.S. has been historically classist and racist and still is so people don’t get the help they need. When it comes to Alice, who as a vampire is a small and mighty force of magic, it’s not terribly surprising that she comes from a place of being undervalued but still able to access *some* healthcare as a human white woman. I say it’s underdeveloped because our author, who loves moon metaphors and antique wordplay, could have done a lot with the word “lunacy” which is applied to women originally as “luna” means “moon” and the moon calendar is correlated with the menstrual cycle, which makes people who menstruate “lunatics.” Also since Stephenie Meyer seems obsessed with biology and human’s animalistic nature, I feel like we could have made some ties between “hysterical” and “hysterectomy” but… we didn’t get an Alice Cullen book. We got Twilight from Edward’s perspective so let’s move on for now.
The rest of the Cullen coven are as follows: Jasper, who is Alice’s mate and former soldier on the confederate side of the US Civil War (side note: even Jasper doesn’t fly a confederate flag or put confederate flag stickers on his truck and he literally fought in that war); Dr. Carlisle Cullen and his wife Esme, who are effectively the parents of the household; Emmett, who is a meat head jock type with the emotional range of a frat guy; and Rosalie, my second favorite vampire after Alice.
Rosalie is dope. I’m pretty sure her special skill is just being a bitch, but that’s not necessarily a bad skill to have. Rosalie died young, as a victim of rape and murder. Carlisle found her nearly dead and turned her into a vampire, knowing that she had no other healthcare options. That’s Carlisle’s thing: he turns dying humans into vampires to save their lives. Carlisle is a nice guy, capable of doing no wrong, and I therefore don’t find him super interesting. Anyway. Rosalie. After she was turned, she went back and murdered all the dudes who assaulted her. This, quite frankly, is the dream. The only other comparable assault revenge story that comes to mind is the newest Halloween movie where Jamie Lee Curtis gets to fight Michael Myers as a middle aged woman with severe PTSD. Rosalie is the exact opposite of Bella in this way: she hates being a vampire. She wanted to be a mother and live a life and watch her youth fade. Instead she’s forced to be a hot, young, super strong vampire for all of eternity. She wanted that average fade-away thing Bella has going for her and never got to have it.
Alright, buckle your seatbelts because we’ve got a lot of feminist buzzwords coming your way. Bella and Rosalie both deal with huge amounts of self-objectification because of the male gaze. The male gaze is a pretty well known concept at this point. It refers to the unreciprocated objectification of a woman’s body, originally coined by Laura Mulvey to describe the cinematic angle where a man is staring at a woman. From a greater cultural perspective, it refers to the psychological understanding women have of themselves from being objectified where they start to lean on an outside understanding of who they are rather than by an inside understanding of how they feel. As women place more emphasis on how they are seen from the perspective of the male gaze, surveys have shown that there’s a negative impact on well being. The more objectified a person feels, the more likely they are to lose touch of their internal body cues and have anxiety and body shame.
It’s safe to assume that Bella had the typical teenage girl amount of male gaze before moving to Forks. Edward is her first love interest and the first male who really gazes at her up close and personal. When you read Twilight, and it’s in Bella’s voice, you can feel that male gaze in every movement Bella takes. It’s always “I glanced over to see him studying me” or “his eyes were fixed on my face.” In Midnight Sun, it might have made sense to talk about Bella’s gaze but instead we get lines like “I stared at Bella” and “I smiled my careful, human-soothing smile” and my personal favorite “I watched her sleep.” That’s right, Edward spends 8 hours a day simply watching Bella sleep. When you read Midnight Sun, you learn that he also spends a great deal of time hiding in treetops and behind buildings to where he almost always has eyes on Bella. I don’t think Stephenie Meyer meant for anybody to read Twilight and Midnight Sun and Life and Death all at the same time but lemme tell ya, if you want to chase Edward out of Bella’s life with a broom. Get a life, dude. Let Bella live hers. This man is a hundred year old dead body standing in a teenager’s bedroom reinforcing her paranoia that she needs to try harder to impress him. Get out of there, buddy!
To be totally clear, women are also completely capable of perpetuating the male gaze. Our author is a self-identified woman and feminist and she male gazes all over the place when writing these books. It’s most evident when you read Life and Death side by side with Twilight and Midnight Sun. In the introduction to Life and Death she explains the gendered changes she made with these estimated percentages: 5% of the changes are because Beau is a boy. 5% of the changes are because Beau doesn’t have as much of a chip on his shoulder as Bella does. 70% are wording changes because she’s thrilled she got to do an edit ten years after the initial release. Honestly, good for her. Most authors don’t publish a second version, let alone a third version. If you’re gonna put out the same exact book 3 times, you might as well clean it up. 10% are added concept ideas and 5% are cleaned up mythology mistakes. Then another 5% random miscellaneous changes. I know these numbers are a little bit arbitrary and considering Stephenie didn’t have to explain herself at all, I’m grateful to see where she’s coming from. I’m doing a very close read of all three books and I’m not going to provide any examples that may fall into simple edits or concept revisions. For example, there’s a moment where Edward agrees to bring Bella’s truck back to her house after she gets sick during a biology lab. In Twilight, the chapter ends on Bella gazing after Edward’s volvo as he drives away. In Life and Death and Midnight Sun, the chapter ends on the vampire character sneaking the car key out of Bella’s pocket. This seems like plotline maintenance to me, not like some hidden statement about gender. I’m doing a lot of reading between the lines but I’m not inserting anything that isn’t there.
The first thing I noticed while reading Life and Death is that women are explained… differently than the men ever were in Twilight. Jacob and Edward are both Bella’s love interests but she has more wholistic descriptions of them. The women are often reduced to their parts. Recall Bella’s first time in the cafeteria with her friend Jessica. “Who are they?” Bella asks, looking at the lunch table where all the vampire kids sit. Here’s an excerpt.
As she looked up to see who I meant--though already knowing probably, from my tone--suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at my neighbor for just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine.
That’s Bella’s description of Edward Cullen. In Life and Death, the same passage exists but all the pronouns are switched across the binary because the main character is teenage boy Beau Swan and his friend is Jeremy instead of Jessica, etc etc. He’s going all goo-goo eyed at some breathtaking girl vampire, more specifically the girl version of Edward, whose name is Edythe. The passage reads like this:
As he looked up to see who I meant--though he could probably guess from my tone--suddenly she looked at us, the perfect one. She looked at my neighbor for just a fraction of a second, and then her dark eyes flickered to mine. Long eyes, angled up at the corners, thick lashes.
By the way, Jessica giggles in embarrassment as she explains the Cullens. Her male equivalent Jeremy mutters under his breath. Life and Death also gets an entire added paragraph to say
I glanced sideways at the perfect girl, who was looking at her tray now, picking a bagel to pieces with thin, pale fingers. Her mouth was moving very quickly, her full lips barely opening. The other three looked away, but I still thought she might be speaking quietly to them.
For good measure, here’s the same scene from Edward’s perspective in Midnight Sun
Reflex reaction. I turned to the sound of my name being called, though it wasn’t being called, just thought. My eyes locked for half a second with a pair of large, chocolate brown human eyes set in a pale, heart-shaped face.
Okay, so. In these descriptions, Bella and Edythe are eyes and lips and fingers. Edward is young and boyish. These are written by the same author. Stephenie Meyer says explicitly that neither Bella or Edythe wear any makeup, so it’s not like they’re doing anything to draw attention to their eyes or lips. I might be able to excuse Beau being drawn in by Edythe’s eyes if there were a blanket rule that vampires have compelling eyes but there’s not. Bella often comments on Edward’s fluctuating eye color because it gets darker or lighter depending on how badly he needs to feed but we are never blessed with a description of his lashes or eye shape.
Take also Bella’s first meeting with Jacob. It’s different. Twilight says
A few minutes after Angela left with the hikers, Jacob sauntered over to take her place by my side. He looked fourteen, maybe fifteen, and had long, glossy black hair pulled back with a rubber band at the nape of his neck. His skin was beautiful, silky and russet-colored; his eyes were dark, set deep above the high planes of his cheekbones. He still had just a hint of roundness left around his chin. Altogether, a very pretty face.
This description is more flowery than the description of Edward. For one, Steph has to address the color of Jacob’s skin because she’s doing the thing authors tend to do: if a skin color isn’t announced then they are presumed white. Edward is both light skinned and a literal dead body but we don’t get a comment on his skin tone on first sight. Edythe gets described as pale in that bonus objectification paragraph and Bella’s first impression also doesn’t require any comment on skin tone. Don’t get me wrong, all the white folk have their skin extensively described as beautiful and pale at some point but not in the exposition where their appearance is being described to the reader.
Alright, now here is the description of Julie, aka girl Jacob, in Life and Death.
A few minutes after Allen left with the hikers, Julie came over to take his place by my side. She looked fourteen, maybe fifteen, and had long glossy black hair pulled back with a rubber band at the nape of her neck. Her skin was really beautiful, like coppery silk, her eyes were wide-set above her high cheekbones, and her lips were curved like a bow. It was a very pretty face.
The differences between Jacob and Julie are that Jacob is russet-colored while Julie is copper. Jacob has a hint of roundness left in his face while Julie has full lips. I think this is a pretty predictable change and I’d be lying if I said there was a whole lot to unpack here. If anything, russett refers to a utilitarian cloth or a potato while copper is a metal and is more often applied to American indigenous people. The boy is rough and the girl is shimmery.
I believe strongly that Stephenie Meyer isn’t trying to pull one over on all of us when she writes this stuff. She doesn’t write in a vacuum. The Twilight Saga appealed to a lot of people and made a lot of money. However, in the way that life imitates art and art imitates life, Stephenie Meyer also influenced a lot of people. Gender is, as you may already know, a social construct. The biological differences between human males and human females are socially negligible beyond reproduction and do not account for the nuances of intersex people or the spectrum of sexuality or presentation that realistically happen in nature. Like the fact that people with penises are statistically taller and people with uteruses tend to have thicker thighs doesn’t biologically indicate anything about who they are, their trustworthiness, intelligence, etc. Any discrepancies that exist in perceived personality because of appearance are taught from being baked into culture and written between the lines in books like Twilight. In my life, I tend to assume that biology has very little impact on who a person is, what their gender is, and pretty much no impact on their personality but it’s not a secret or a surprise that Stephenie Meyer is a firm believer in gender. I’m calling the descriptions of Jacob and Julie a wash because even among the queer community there’s agreement that jawlines are considered masculine and full lips are considered feminine. So be it. That doesn’t account for the fact that Edward slips out from the grasp of objectification over and over throughout the series. He’s the one watching, not the one being watched.
Now, it is possible to negate some of the ideological male gaze that culturally seeps into your life, both as a vampire’s love interest and as a regular human reading young adult romance novels. In Simone De Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex, she suggests gazing at yourself in a mirror as a way to take back the private understanding of your own image. God, what I would give for a scene of Bella contemplating her own face in the mirror, wondering what else she is capable of. I would love to hear Bella’s description of herself, even if she wasn’t looking in a mirror. We get a lot of what Edward thinks and what Bella thinks Edward thinks but pretty much the only thing Bella thinks about herself is that she’s clumsy.
But get this. That line in The Second Sex got me when I read it with an eye for vampire socialization. Rosalie can’t take Simone De Beauvoir’s hot tip about gazing in the mirror because, that’s right, vampires don’t have reflections. This is one of those vampire lore things that doesn’t really come up in Twilight but it isn’t ever proven wrong so I think it holds up. Vampires don’t have reflections and they don’t appear in photos. Once someone is a vampire, they are eternally reliant on other people’s understanding of what they look like and who they are. In Bella’s rush to abandon her humanity, the rush that Rosalie despises for so many reasons, she is also abandoning her own gaze. Imagine looking in a mirror and seeing no one or walking past a pond and only getting a reflection of the trees. It would do something to you. As I mentioned earlier, all the vampires have varying levels of baggage regarding their vampire existence. It seems like the most comfortable ones (Alice, Carlisle, maybe Emmett) either had a solid sense of self before changing or have an entirely vampiric sense of self. At the point in time when Bella and Edward are introduced, it would be dangerous to change her into a vampire. She’s not in a strong place mentally, like she’s a literal high schooler. Edward was also changed pretty young and he still acts pretty young and dumb decades later.
Also, no offense to the year 2005, but it’s strange to imagine being stuck with 2005 sensibilities for the rest of forever. Edward is very old fashioned and an alleged gentleman because he learned about romance during the first World War and never really experienced it. Bella is into his old time fashions, I guess, because she reads a lot of Jane Austen and other classics. She’s an old soul and according to her mother, she was born 35 and gets more middle aged every year. She listens to DeBussy. This no doubt appeals to Edward because he’s an elderly man. He doesn’t have to get hip to any of her interests because her interests are conveniently archaic. Absolutely no shade here, just facts. I think this is also a smart marketing move to prevent the book from aging. It’s bad enough that Bella has a dial-up computer for googling the word “vampire” so it’d be even more cringe to read about an obsession with Mariah Carey or the Black Eyed Peas if she had one. It’d just be a different book. Props to our author on knowing how to appeal to a broad audience.
It’s kinda funny that Edward and his family are completely contemporary in every other aspect except gender and romance. They don’t sleep in coffins or flinch at the sight of a silver cross. They don’t turn to ash when the sunlight hits their skin. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s brushed off like “oh no, that’s just how Dracula was written. That’s not how real vampires exist.” This is fun, of course, because vampires and werewolves have already been written about extensively and Stephenie Meyer had to keep it fresh. But somehow Edward is allowed to wear sweaters from the Gap instead of a long cloak because he’s “fresh” but he’s also allowed to be overbearing and controlling in his relationship because he’s “from a different time.” K.
Finally, before I wrap up this week’s episode, I’d like to offer up some recommended reading on the topic of language in fiction. There’s a Wall Street Journal article called “Men Shout and Women Scream” that statistically analyzed what different words and phrases are used for men and women in fiction, like how men characters are written to shout and women characters are written to scream. Another example is that women murmur and men mutter. In fact, the five most disproportionately used verbs for women are murmured, shivered, wept, screamed, and married while the five most for men are muttered, grinned, shouted, chuckled, and killed. I think reading this article when it came out in 2017 contributed to my obsession with finding petty faults with Stephenie Meyer’s writing. Plus, she gave me a gender-swapped rewrite to work with so I owe her nothing but thanks for the word nerd gold mine she’s provided.
Next week we’re talking about why reading these three books side by side made me less Team Edward or Team Jacob and made me almost completely Team Bella.
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.