Hi! As someone whoās literary opinion I really trust, I was surprised that youāre a twilight fan? I know almost nothing except commen knowledge things about that series, and I always assumed it was actually bad/un-feminist. What is it that you like so much that others seem to miss? Iām just genuinely curious about your take on the hate it always seems to get vs. itās actual quality. Iām not gonna judge bc animorphs is also one of those books where you see it and assume itās bad.
In over 14 years of loving this series, Iām not sure anyone has ever asked me why I enjoy it instead of simply trying to convince me that Iām wrong to do so.Ā So thank you for that.
First and foremost, I love the Twilight saga because of the vivid detail in Stephenie Meyerās writing style.Ā The descriptions are lush and dense with sensory information that you can practically bite down on them as you read.Ā Bella and Jacob arenāt just sitting on the beach; theyāre sitting on a gnarled log of driftwood, worn smooth at the top from where so many Quileute teens have sat upon it during bonfires but still uneven enough to rock on its branches when Bella suddenly stands to rage at her own mortality.Ā Meyer describes that log in Twilight, so tangibly and with such economy of detail, that we recognize it immediately when Bella and Jacob return to that spot in Eclipse.Ā Iāve always disliked the movies, because Iāve always felt that the best part of Meyerās writing simply did not translate well to the screen.
Secondly, I love the feminism.
Okay, letās take a quick pause to let everyone gasp and clutch their pearls over me calling Twilight a feminist work.Ā I will address the criticisms later.Ā For now, please just hear me out.
TwilightĀ strikes me as a premier example of whatĀ HĆ©lĆØne Cixous means when she calls forĀ āwomenās writing,ā or writing for women, about women, by women, with a strong focus on the concerns and strengths and desires of womanhood.Ā This is a series about building and maintaining close relationships, both romantic and platonic.Ā It celebrates beauty, and love, and care.Ā Bella moves to Forks because she recognizes that her dad is lonely while her mom is quite the opposite, torn between family priorities.Ā She doesnāt simply subsume her interests to those of other people, but instead actively chooses how and when and where to express her love for her birth family and her found families.Ā Most of the other major decisions throughout the story ā AliceĀ āadoptingā Bella, Carlisle moving the family to Alaska, Jacob becoming werewolf beta, the Cullens going up against the Volturi, etc. ā are motivated by care and devotion for oneās family and friends.Ā Even the selfish or morally ambiguous character choices are shown to be motivated by love.Ā Rosalie tells Edward that Bella died because she genuinely thinks itāll help him move on.Ā Victoria creates an army that nearly destroys Forks because sheās avenging James.Ā Alice abandons Bella and the others before the final battle because if she canāt save her entire family, sheāll settle for saving her lover before letting him die in vain.
Not only is there a striking concern with love and care, but thereās also a strong commitment to avoiding violence.Ā Bellaās eventual vamp-superpower proves to be preventing violence and protecting others, an awesome character decision that Iād argue gets set up as early as the first book.Ā She lives in a violent world ā this is a YA SF story, after all ā but she has the power to suppress violence and create peace, both in herself and others.Ā I was already sick ofĀ āpower = ability to inflict damageā in YA stories well before I knew the wordĀ āpatriarchy.āĀ Ā Twilight was one of the first books to convey to me that power could be refusing to do harm in spite of hunger or anger, that power could be shielding onesā family, that power could be about building enough friendships and alliances to have an army at oneās back when facing an enemy too strong to take on alone.
Closely connected to all of that love and care, I love how much Twilight is about navigating teenage girlhood.Ā Is it perfect, empowering, intersectional, all-inclusive?Ā Hell no.Ā Does it still dare to suggest that a completely ordinary teenage girl could still have valid concerns about the world?Ā Yep.Ā The main conflict of the story, as Stephen King so derisively explained, is about the romantic entanglements of a teenage girl, and the book therefore has no literary merit.Ā (To quote my dadās response:Ā āBold words from the guy who inflicted FirestarterĀ on the world.ā)
There is, indeed, a lot of romance in Twilight.Ā There are a lot of clothes.Ā Alice and Rosalie especially spend a lot of time on makeup, and hair, and choosing the prettiest cars and houses.Ā Twilight embraces all the stereotypicallyĀ āgirlyā concerns of adolescence, and makes no effort to apologize for or condemn them.Ā Bella isnāt particularly good at performing them ā she likes but doesnāt excel at shopping, fiercely defends her ugly car as ugly, hobbles through prom on crutches ā but she can still enjoy the feeling of being pretty in a sparkly dress while dancing with her sparkly boyfriend.Ā And Twilight, like Animorphs with Cassie, takes the daring step of treating that feeling as valid.
Speaking of sparkles, I love the commitment to the fantasy concept in Twilight, including the myriad mundanities that Meyer brings with that commitment.Ā If you have super-speed, why not use it to play extreme baseball?Ā If youāre a mindreader with a clairvoyant sister, why wouldnāt you two play mental chess games?Ā I couldnāt tell you, after seven seasons of Buffy or eight of Vampire Diaries, what Spike or Damien or Angel or Stefan does all day when not brooding or lurking in the bushes to creep on human women.Ā I can tell you what the Cullens get up to.Ā Emmett and Rosalie work on their cars, usually by holding them overhead one-handed.Ā Carlisle and Alice read plays, and sometimes talk the whole family into home Shakespeare productions.Ā Edward and Carlisle debate theology, Emmett and Jasper have dumb athletic competitions, Edward and Esme play music, Alice manipulates stock markets, the twins go shopping online, etcetera.Ā The Cullens feel real, feel like the vampires next door, in a way that Louis and Lestat simply do not.
To get to the elephant in the room ā I just described TwilightĀ as a feminist text! ā letās talk about the other thing the Cullens do for fun: they have sex.Ā Weird sex.Ā Kinky furniture-breaking sex.Ā Sex that Emmett (who would know) compares to bear-wrestling.Ā These books suck with regards to queer representation, but they are sex-positive.Ā They feature an old-school Anglican protagonist offering his daughter-in-law a medical abortion.Ā They treat Edwardās desire for sex only within marriage and Aliceās desire for sex outside of marriage as both being valid.Ā Like I said, not groundbreaking, even by the standards of 2005, but still more than most teen novels do even today.
Thereās a passage from Breaking DawnĀ that people love to pull out of context asĀ āeverything wrong with Twilight in two paragraphsā because it describes Bella waking up the morning after sex with bruises on her arms.Ā That moment is shocking out of context, to be sure ā but in context, itās the end result of an in-depth consent negotiation that lasts four books.Ā Bella says that sheād like to become a vampire.Ā Edward says okay, but only if she spends a few more years living as a human and considering that choice.Ā Bella says okay, but only if Edward, not Carlisle, becomes the one to turn her.Ā Edward says they can use his venom, but that Carlisle, whoās an MD, really needs to supervise the process.Ā Bella doesnāt love the idea of Edwardās stepdad cockblocking whatās supposed to be an intimate moment, and so agrees only on the grounds that she gets to have sex with Edward as a human first.Ā Edwardās hella Catholic, so he requests that they get married first.Ā Bellaās super horny, so she demands that the wedding happen within six months.Ā Edward says that he might hurt her during sex, and Bella says that she wants a little hurt during sex.Ā They marry.Ā They bang.Ā During the banging, Edward makes every effort to be controlled and courteous and gentile, while Bella goes wild and crazy.Ā The next morning, she has bruises and he does not.Ā Edward apologizes, but Bellaās actually really into it.Ā She spends a while admiring her sexy vamp-marked self in the mirror, touches the bruises many times, and reminds us yet again that Bella Swanās whole M.O. is being a monsterfucker.Ā Her kink is not my kink, and thatās okay.
To be clear, I think there are other aspects of the romance that get criticized for good reason.Ā Edward does not negotiate with Bella before sneaking into her room to watch her sleep, and he does make unacceptable use of their power differences when he thinks sheās in danger of being mauled by werewolves.Ā The text condemns JacobāsĀ ādonāt wanna die a virginā ploy to manipulate a kiss out of Bella, but not the wider conceit of all the male characters as possessing uncontrollable urges.Ā Bellaās struggles to adjust to a new town feel very feminine and realistic; her amused tolerance of Jacobās and Mikeās sexual harassment as the price for their friendship does not.Ā Werewolf imprinting might be mostly platonic, but that doesnāt make it okay for Meyer to depict it as a form of soulmate bonding that happens with child characters. Those are good points, all around.Ā I just wish that most of them didnāt come up in the context of post-hoc rationalizations for loathing the femininity of a feminine text.
Iām not calling Twilight an unproblematic series.Ā Iām saying that it gets (rightly!) criticized for appropriatingĀ Quileute culture, while Buffyās total absence of main characters of color and blatant anti-Romani racism are (wrongly!) not remarked upon, and that Iāve been told Iām a misogynist for liking Twilight but not for likingĀ James Bond.Ā Iām saying that thereās a reason people tend to goĀ āoh, that makes so much sense!ā when I let them in on the fact that reactive hatred forĀ āTwitardsā started and spread on 4Chan, later home of Gamergate and incel culture.Ā Iām saying that Twilight depicts problematic relationship dynamics as sexy ā but then so do Vampire Academy, Blue Bloods, Supernatural, Vladimir Tod,Ā and Vampire Diaries.Ā All of which take the time to stop and thumb their noses at Twilight, smug in the superiority of having vampires that fly rather than vampires that sparkle, and for thoroughly condemning teenage girls for being girly while continuing to show men inflicting violence on them.
After all, as Erin May Kelly puts it:Ā āwe live in a world taught to hate everything to do with little girls.Ā We hate the books they read and the bands they like.Ā Is there anything the world makes fun of more than One Direction and Twilight?āĀ No one has ever called me a misogynist for liking the MCU, in spite of less than a third of its movies even managing to clear the low-low bar of the Bechdel test.Ā Because people are still allowed to like Harry Potter in spite of its racism, or Lord of the Rings despite its imperialism.Ā Because hatred for TwilightĀ was never about its very real misogyny, or the genuinely silly sparkle-vampires, until it had to justify itself as something other than hate for everything that teenage girls have ever dared openly love.
I enjoy the novels, and I enjoy the fan fiction that tries to fix some of the problems with the novels.Ā I appreciate the extent to which Meyer has elevated fan culture, and made an effort to acknowledge her own past mistakes.Ā I would love to be able to talk about my love for the series as flawed but beautiful works of literature, but for now Iāll settle for asking that the world just let me enjoy it in peace.
