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Edward Cullen is codependent and a gas lighter... but you already knew that.
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?
I WISH edward required an invitation. instead he’s a walking boundary violation. he can go wherever and do whatever with the only risk being exposure.
Stephenie Meyer’s novels are part fantasy, part young adult fiction, and partly romance. The vampire/human relationship is innately codependent and Stephenie Meyer plays to that like no one has before. Personally, I often find myself trying to twist the fantasy concepts in Twilight into a more rigid science because I want to better understand the changes to vampire lore Stephenie Meyer made. Twilight got so big that all vampire stories that come after are forced to address some of the lore introduced or disregarded by Twilight. So many vampires appear more human than Twilight vampires. Most bleed, get drunk, sleep. Twilight vampires are like chunks of ice or stone. When they get hurt, it’s like an instant scar. They don’t sleep or burn in the sun, and my personal favorite: they don’t need an invitation to enter the house. Edward Cullen is a walking boundary violation and Stephenie Meyer ruined his life.
Why is there even a team Edward? What does Edward Cullen have that everyone wants? I don’t mean Robert Pattinson as Edward. I mean the Edward Cullen that made me cry as a middle schooler when he left Bella. What does that guy have? He’s tall, strong, a protector. He’s conventionally attractive and desired by everyone, which makes Bella feel important as the object of his affection. Though I suppose some of his more salient characteristics that make him magnetic relate to the role he fills in his codependent relationship with Bella, and by proxy, his relationship with the reader.
The word codependent is thrown around a lot so I’d like to take a moment to define it. It doesn’t just mean that someone in a relationship is dependent on someone else because there’s a give and take to be expected in any relationship. I’d love to pull a healthy example from the Twilight Saga but I don’t think it exists. Maybe Emmett and Rosalie, simply because they both have distinct lives that don’t completely rely on one another as far as we know. Codependency exists when one person plans their entire life around meeting the needs of the other person. It’s a lot like an addiction. There’s a person whose entire self worth comes from sacrificing for the other and the other person is a little too willing to receive those sacrifices. The codependent person has no identity or interests outside of their codependent relationship. In the Twilight Saga, Bella is completely codependent all the way through. Sometimes Edward enables her codependence, like when he doesn’t think twice about monopolizing her time and drawing her away from her friends. Other times he’s codependent himself and doesn’t really care what happens to his family if he starts affiliating with a human girl. Neither of them find any happiness outside of each other and when they’re together, there’s all this tension because Edward could snap at any moment and suck all of Bella’s blood.
This is the age old story of the vampire in love: he wants the thing he cannot have and his animalistic impulses put the object of his affection at risk. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Literally damned. In any and all teen vampire sagas of the past 30 years, a girl is prone to falling in love with a vampire because doesn’t come on too fast (obviously if he did, there would be blood), he’s sober unlike all those human guys. He’s helpful but he’s also a fixer upper and while it seems like he’s helpful enough to make his quirky murder streaks worth it, it’s still always about him. This isn’t just Twilight: this is Buffy, Vampire Diaries, maybe Blood Ties.
A vampire never gets rejected. They choose who they want and use experience and supernatural gifts to woo the person they’re interested in. Edward is always there. Bella, more than anything, would like a stable person who is reliably there for her. Like I’ve pointed out before, he watches Bella sleep, hides in treetops, etc and his love for her is characterized as an addiction. Even in those moments where he gone from Bella’s day-to-day, he’s pretty obsessed with her and reliant on her. If more books come out from his perspective, we might get to see how true that really is but we know for certain from Midnight Sun that once he meets Bella, all of his thoughts are framed by his budding relationship. It’s not the same kind of obsession Bella has for him where she’s having lowkey panic attacks when he’s not at school. He’s completely satisfied with the idea of Bella. It makes me think he actually doesn’t care what she has to say or how she’s feeling. (Looking at her books and listening in on conversations) He sure is lucky he doesn’t require an invitation to get inside.
There’s a scene in Twilight where Edward and Emmett go on a weekend trip to hunt because it’s going to be sunny in Forks so they have to get out of town. Side note: I love how vampire lore has changed thanks to Stephenie Meyer. My first real introduction to vampires was through Twilight and I actually didn’t know what happened to other vampires in the past when they went in the sun. I knew they were nocturnal and they died in the sun or something but I learned from Buffy that they turn to ash! The idea of burning up in the sun started at Nosferatu and there are plenty of vampires, including Dracula, who aren’t harmed by the sunlight at all. The feral vampires in Van Helsing just crawl around whenever they want. The Vampire Diaries vampires can protect from the sun but without protection, they burn. The idea of a sparkling vampire came entirely from Stephenie Meyer and I love it. There’s this Nickelodeon made-for-TV-movie called Liar, Liar, Vampire (2015) where a high school kid tries to get popular by convincing people he’s a vampire. There’s a scene where he gets covered in craft glitter on accident and that helps convince his peers. I have to laugh that regardless of whether or not someone saw Twilight, they’re familiar with sparkling vampires.
So anyway. In Twilight, Edward and Emmett go on a trip out of town to suck some animal blood. We know from Midnight Sun that Edward felt “almost agonized at the thought of saying even a temporary goodbye” because he knew Bella was “so soft and so vulnerable” and he tells her to be safe. He goes through this “oh god is it safer if I’m here to protect her or is she safer if I get away from her and dont eat her.” There’s a whole lot to unpack in the trip with Emmett. Emmett and Rosalie have weird drama and Emmett fights a bear and it’s a whole thing. Edward is having a really hard time viewing himself as a protector, even though that’s pretty much the only way Bella views him and he has a bunch of protective instincts when it comes to Bella.
When Edward gets back from this trip, it’s still sunny so Edward and all the other sparkle vamps stay away from the school to avoid being outed as vampires. Bella is freaking out because she lives and breathes Edward and doesn’t know if he’s ever coming back. It seems like an overreaction but Edward really was on the brink of fleeing for the entire first book, even though he loves to gaslight Bella and tell her that she’s making up the sense that he might leave. After the boys get back from hunting, there are those couple days where Edward is in town watching Bella while she goes about her life wondering where he is. He’s eavesdropping on her conversations about prom and listening to her sleep talk, all while she thinks he may never come back. It comes up in the car when they finally reunite in Port Angeles. He mentions the three day trip and Bella tries to clarify—if it was only three days why hadn’t she seen him? He mentions the no-vampires-in-the-daylight thing. Then we get this passage from Midnight Sun:
I doubted I could come up with an analogy to explain this one. So I just told her “I’ll show you sometime,” and then immediately wondered if this was a promise I would end up breaking—I’d said the words so casually, but I could not imagine actually following through.
It wasn’t something to worry about now. I didn’t know if I would be allowed to see her again after tonight. Did I love her enough yet to be able to bear leaving her?
“You might have called me,” she said.
What an odd conclusion. “But I knew you were safe.”
“But I didn’t know you were. I—“ She came to an abrupt stop, and looked at her hands.
“What?”
“I didn’t like it,” she said shyly, the skin over her cheekbones warming. “Not seeing you. It makes me anxious, too.”
And this is the first confirmation Edward gets that Bella actually likes him. They really have some awful communication going on if he doesn’t know that but she’s already at the point of total infatuation. It also says something about Edward that she’s whispering “Edward” in her sleep but he doesn’t think it’s about him. He’s incredibly insecure.
In Twilight, this passage is nearly identical except from Bella’s perspective, Edward comes off angry and Bella is embarrassed for asking. A line from Twilight is “I tried very hard not to look like a sulky child.” For the record, this is textbook self-objectification like we talked about in the first episode. She doesn’t exactly say how she feels but instead is worried about how she’s coming off and compares herself to a child.
In Life and Death, Edythe is the one described as anxious. Instead of coming off as angry, she comes off like someone is hurting her. Anxiety is not a gendered issue. Anyone can get anxiety and it honestly does a disservice to men to act like men are immune from being anxious. At the same time, if you’re talking about clinical anxiety, women are much more often diagnosed with anxiety and phobias because they are more likely to see a doctor who would diagnose such things, because they are disproportionately victims of violence by an intimate partner, and if we’re gonna go this far, are historically subjugated to being dependent on men to have their needs met. This is one of the classic double edged swords of feminism: on the one hand, there’s no given discrepancy for being anxiety prone in men versus women but on the other hand, clearly the way our society is built has made women more prone to anxiety and therefore, it is sometimes appropriate to address anxiety as a women’s issue. But when we’re talking teenage vampire codependency, I think both sides are equally anxious and it’s kind of rude to everyone involved to only describe the women as anxious. Beau says he gets freaked-out, instead of anxious. He also confidently tells Edythe that he just had to see her again, while when Bella was in the same situation she was shy about expressing the same thing. I do not care if the excuse here is that we’re trying to have a realistic teenage boy or teenage girl. This is a vampire book. With a lot of influence. In a vampire universe, it is completely acceptable to describe a boy as shy and it wouldn’t even be groundbreaking. Bilbo Baggins was a timid dude but he still managed to make history. Bella Swan is one of the shyest characters of all time—that doesn’t just go anyway when you write a Y chromosome into her storyline. Stephenie Meyer is, by every fault of her own, writing guidelines for acceptable behavior but her guidelines suck. If I could give advice to my 6th grade self, I would say “question Stephenie Meyer. Question everything. This is not your Bible.”
The Bible is The Body Keeps the Score. It’s by Bessel Van Der Kolk and it is all about healing from trauma, something Edward has in spades. I can and do apply this book to every character I read or watch but it’s surprisingly difficult to apply trauma-theory (I guess?) to Edward Cullen because his body is dead. He’s a dead body. So when you consider someone getting a racing heartbeat or night terrors or even a nervous system breakdown, it can’t be directly applied because Edward’s internal functioning is fuzzy. He’s hot and mysterious from the outside but he’s a biological mystery. In a regular human being, the psychological and the physical are closely tied but in the case of a Twilight vampire, the physical body is a totally separate being from the mental person. This could be a dead end to the conversation but that’s not fun and Edward does have emotions and reactions that I’m not about to discount just because biology can’t be forced onto a science fiction creature.
Edward hates himself. To Bella, he seems confident but when you read Midnight Sun the veil is lifted. Becoming a vampire is invasive and long-lasting and it’s a lot to deal with. I hope at some point our world can reach a point where mental health care is immediately offered to vampires when they turn to help them cope and develop a re-entry program or something so they do better in the real world, if they’re going to re-enter the real world the way the Cullens do. According to The Body Keeps the Score, people define themselves as worthless when they’re mistreated or abandoned. The message was sent to a young Edward Cullen loud and clear that he was completely alone on this planet. He was surrounded by people dying of the Spanish flu in 1918 when Carlisle turned him and this “saving grace” of Carlisle’s also marked Edward as one of history’s villains. Like everyone in the Twilight universe, he cares what other people think and there’s this right and wrong way of being that he’s stuck between. Someone who feels fundamentally despicable reacts strongly to slight frustrations and is therefore challenging to be around. It’s not really his fault that he thinks he’s a monster. He came by that honestly. But that also doesn’t take away the fact that his internal struggle taints his relationships and makes connection harder.
In humans, people who feel unlovable survive by ignoring or denying their reality and numbing physical sensations. Edward can’t use drugs or get drunk but his physical sensations are already sort of numbed and he’s in a permanent state of dissociation. Like I said earlier, Edward is trying very hard to figure out if he’s the protector or the threat and he never gets his answer. His identity is lost behind almost 100 years of trauma. We know from Body Keeps the Score that in order to have an identity, Edward has to trust himself to know what is real and label those events in his mind, and to be able to trust his memory and tell it apart from his imagination. Again, Stephenie Meyer, would it be too much to ask for an Alice Cullen book? I would very much like to know ElectroShock impacts the self esteem of a vampire. But we didn’t get an Alice Cullen book. We got Twilight from Edward’s perspective so we got to see that Edward gaslights himself as much as he gaslights other people.
Find example of Edward gaslighting himself
“Gaslighting” is another one of those buzzwords that a lot of people pretend to know, me including, but have never actually looked up. Fun fact: when you look up the word “gaslight” in the dictionary, there’s a picture of Edward Cullen. However, the word originally comes from the 1938 play called Gas Light, where a husband tries to convince his wife that she’s crazy as part of a plot to steal her family jewels. Part of how he drives her to madness is by messing with all the lights in the house to make them flicker and then telling her that she’s imagining the flickering.
Edward Cullen gaslights in a bunch of ways but his signature move involves spending a lot of time telling Bella he will always be there for her with absolutely no intention of following through. From the Bella side of the story, this comes off like a man all in on commitment and there must be something wrong with Bella for thinking he will leave her. The plot of the saga from Bella’s perspective is that “will she or won’t she become a vampire” but the plot from Edward’s perspective is “will he or won’t he give in to his desire for Bella’s blood.” Strangely, his desire for her blood and her desire to become a vampire completely mesh but Edward has a side plot that revolves around him denying Bella all bodily autonomy and planning his escape from Bella even though he can’t escape from himself. He sees Bella as an extension of himself and his lust so he tries to escape her. She wants him and he wants her but he thinks that she shouldn’t want to be with him because he hates himself so much. This is why he’s always watching but he’s not always there.
I have alluded to Edward being an incel a couple of times which isn’t actually quite accurate. Incel is short for involuntarily celibate and in 2021 it refers to aggressive online subculture of men who feel entitled to commit violence against women so that they may have sex. I do think Edward is involuntarily celibate but he’s not a domestic terrorist outside of the fact that he’s a vampire. His reaction to his first kiss with Bella in Midnight Sun is one part sweet and one part unnerving. The passage is this:
Though I’d thought I was prepared, I was not entirely ready for the combustion. What strange alchemy was this, that the touch of lips should be so much more than the touch of fingers? It made no logical sense that simple contact between this specific area of skin should be so much more powerful than anything I’d yet experienced. It felt as if a new sun was bursting into being where our mouths met, and my whole body was filled to a shatter point with this brilliant light of it.
I only had a fraction of a second to grapple with the potency of this kiss before the alchemy impacted Bella.
Alright, even if Edward has been kissed, it’s been a while. And it’s certainly been a while since he kissed a human. Bella is the first human he’s been physically close to who he wasn’t murdering with his teeth. I would say she was the first person he wasn’t stealing energy from but.. I do think in many ways he was taking her life so he only gets partial credit.
I found this kind of flowery language informative to Stephenie Meyer’s entire process. At the beginning of Life and Death when she explains the changes she made, she says that Beau doesn’t use flowery language the way Bella does. I thought this was kinda sus and it’s easy to read into it. Say Beau is more logically brained and Bella is more creative brained and the only difference between them is their gender. That has some implications, right? Like maybe one of them is more logical and one is more poetically (impulsive) minded? This Edward thing throws a wrench in that sexist wheel because his language is flowery as hell. Maybe it’s just because he’s old.
There’s that most famous Twilight quote that’s on the back cover of the book.
About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him—and I didn’t know how potent that part might be—that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.
In Life and Death, Beau’s version is
There were a few things I knew for sure. For one, Edythe was an actual vampire. For another, there was a part of her that saw me as food. But in the end, none of that mattered. All that mattered was that I loved her, more than I’d ever imagined it was possible to love anything. She was everything I wanted, the only thing I would ever want.
I don’t intend to hold it against Beau that he doesn’t have as many ten dollar words in the bank. But why doesn’t he? He reads just as much as Bella and he is Bella, just as a boy. But if Edward speaks eloquently about the alchemy of a kiss, is it not a boy/girl thing?
There is a complicated intersection here where we are looking at the difference between men and women, between vampire and human, and between time frames 100 years apart. I don’t think Edward speaks like that because he is a vampire. In these books, being a vampire is almost never the most salient aspect of an identity, proven by the way Edythe is first and foremost treated like a fragile woman and not a dangerous vampire. I’m not exactly surprised Edward talks like this considering he came of age around the same time pencils got popular. He’s got totally cherry picked traits of new and old. He and his family drive new cars, wear sophisticated clothing, and they all experience 2005 human pop culture because they go to school and work with humans. They mostly keep their old hobbies. As far as I know, none of them play video games or even really watch TV. Rosalie probably practices calligraphy or something. I can only imagine trying a new spiced chai recipe from a tattered cookbook. They are all a mix of new and old.
Presumably the Edward deck is stacked to make him as attractive as possible to Bella. And presumably, anybody who is Team Edward would also be interested in this kind of man: the kind of man who was okay with adapting to new models of motor coach but doesn’t worry himself too much with the advancement of moving pictures and evidently holds no opinions on civil rights. It’s a red flag that he spends so much time contemplating the human condition but really only his own human condition. And again! I want to make it clear that Stephenie Meyer doesn’t owe us a woke vampire or any sort of unflawed character or anything at all. It’s more that this story and these characters went across so many desks of wealthy executives who decided these old timey yet modern hot vampires were profitable and then they were released to a public who either agreed or was so captivated by the tragedy of filmmaking that they kept returning to the theater.
In New Moon, he finally gets the noble courage to completely abandon her without explanation because he has decided, without consulting her, that he knows what is best for her. His departure wouldn’t have been nearly as painful if he didn’t spend the whole first book gaslighting her. The lights were flickering every time suddenly disappeared but he kept telling Bella, nah, we’re steady.
The scene in New Moon where Edward leaves is the emotional peak of the entire series and every emotional point past that is simply trying to recreate it. It is both a literary masterpiece and a cinematic masterpiece. It captures raw depression and solitude like nothing I’ve ever seen. In the book, Edward leaves pretty abruptly. Bella’s life is all about him and he’s told Bella so many times that he’ll be there to protect her. When he finally goes out for the proverbial pack of cigarettes, you turn the page and the new page is mostly blank with the word “OCTOBER” in all capital letters. But the book is basically about Edward so he must be coming right back. When you turn the next page, it is similarly blank with the word “NOVEMBER” in the middle. The next page is “DECEMBER.” As the reader, you’re still coming to terms with Edward leaving and next thing you know, months have passed and you’re still in anguish. It is mad clever. The New Moon movie captures the same feeling cinematically and it still hurts. The camera slow pans in a circle around Bella sitting in a chair. The month pops up after each full rotation. We see the seasons changing outside, the quality of light dimming and coming back, and this song plays. It’s called Possibility by Lykke Li. It’s a soft indie pop song and it embodies broken innocence, like the audio embodiment of knives going through silk. This is exemplary film making. This is everything I love about Twilight. Watching Twilight is basically creative self harm.
The things that make this scene work are more or less the same things that make Edward a bad dude. He keeps secrets. All vampires keep secrets, that’s part of their whole thing. There’s a huge difference between keeping secrets and having privacy. But at the end of the day, if the person you are hiding information from would be hurt by you hiding the information, that’s not great for building trust. Hiding that you’re a vampire is difficult and only possible for so long. We’ve seen it in Buffy, in Vampire Diaries, and in Twilight. Once the vampire thing comes out, there is heavy suggestion of past murders, supernatural manipulation, and whatever amount of soul searching allowed the vampire to fall in love with a human.
Keeping secrets
Says one thing but means another
“I’m not a good friend for you.”
Edward’s romantic past
What happens when you cross a vampire and a snowman? Frostbite.