“I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars.” - Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
My entire life, I have been devout about one thing and one thing only: my hatred of Twilight. Given that my lord and saviour is Her Ladyship JK Rowling, there was really nothing else I could logically do: liking Harry Potter and liking Twilight were two mutually exclusive phenomena. Neither could live while the other survives, shall we say. Thus, for as long as I can remember, my life's work has been bashing Twilight with everything I've got. I’ve long considered it my passion, if not my profession.
It came to my attention a month ago that I had never actually read Twilight.
The following question was then posed: how can you hate something you’ve never read? Easily, I argued, but the table had already been set. Being the kind of person who likes to be informed when they absolutely demolish things, I begrudgingly decided it may be in my best interest to actually read Twilight, so with high skepticism, I proceeded to do the one thing I thought I never would: I read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.
If we're being completely honest, I did not hate Twilight. This, however, was due to the fact that my initial expectations were really, really low. The only reason I expected to enjoy this reading experience was because I am a stone cold bitch who wholeheartedly thrives on ripping shit into things, but there were, admittedly, some things that I didn’t outright hate: Edward’s family history was vaguely interesting, and I thought the ending was well-paced in consideration with the tone Meyer was aiming for. The rest, however, was terrible. To quote a friend of a friend (out of context, but it’s fine sshhhh), Twilight was a “piece of shit mess”. The monotonous plot -- a tawdry account of a mortal teenage girl and a 100-year-old vampire falling in love -- did nothing but meander until the last quarter. Before then, Bella just mooned and moaned about how much she loooooOOOOOoooooved Edward, even though she had known him for a grand total of 5 minutes. There were entire sections of the book I simply crossed out, so pointless did I feel they were to the overall progression of the story. Bella is petulant, miserable, irrational, unreasonable, and childish, while Edward’s mood and characterisation are about as consistent and reliable as that one friend you haven’t seen in 5 years because they always cancel on your catch-up plans at the last minute. The concept is ridiculous, the book takes itself far too seriously, I could not for the life of me give you a strong reason as to why Bella is so clumsy and why Edward finds it so damn charming -- all this and more gave me endless grief as I struggled through Twilight, and yet amazingly, I still have not mentioned the actual focus of this review: the infantilization of Bella.
It’s this, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I disliked most about this novel. (Okay, it was actually the time when Bella, in typical Bella fashion, let snow ruin her good day, but that doesn’t found the basis of a good essay.) When Stephenie Meyer released Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined in time for the 10-year anniversary of Twilight, she claimed to have reversed the genders of all the characters because Bella’s damsel-in-distress complex in the Twilight saga had “always bothered [Meyer] a bit”, but I feel like it goes beyond Bella being a damsel in distress; she’s actually characterised as an infant. Bella is handled, both literally and figuratively, as if she is a newborn baby. Edward repeatedly cradles her in his arms -- ‘cradle’ being the buzzword due to the unmistakeable connotation of a baby’s cradle. She also spends most of her spare time sitting in his lap. Meyer had Bella constantly pouting whenever things didn't go her way, and I also noticed Bella had a real habit of throwing tantrums and sulking at the mere prospect of Edward leaving her side. Just put her in a diaper and get it over with, Meyer! Of course, I’m me, so there’s a feminist angle to this. Gwen Sharp put it really well in her blog post, Infantilizing Women, Sexualising Girlishness:
On the one hand, women are portrayed as little girls, as coyly innocent, as lacking in power and [maturity]. On the other hand, child-likeness is sexy, and girls are portrayed as Lolitas whose innocence is questionable.
This could not be more true when it comes to Twilight. On the one hand, Bella is portrayed as a little girl, peevish, immature, and inexperienced (yet also deeply grave and averse to any kind of fun, a ludicrous dichotomy). Yet Bella is also incredibly sexy -- aggressively and uncontrollably lustful, a trait for which Edward often scolds her. What is he: her parent? Bizarrely, I think that's actually what Meyer was going for. Bella's innocence is ferociously alluring to Edward. He coddles her and cuddles her and speaks to her as if she is five years old, yet it's also blaringly obvious he desperately wants to jump her bones. Lisa Wade says it so well, I won’t even bother trying to paraphrase:
The sexualization of girls and the infantilization of adult women are two sides of the same coin. They both tell us that we should find youth, inexperience, and [naivety] sexy in women, but not in men. This reinforces a power and status difference between men and women, where vulnerability, weakness, and dependency and their opposites are gendered traits: desirable in one sex but not the other.
Bella’s naivety and babyishness are paradoxically equated with sex appeal. The fact that Edward totes her around like a child and yet still finds her incredibly sexually attractive creates a power imbalance, with an aggressive, powerful, dominant Edward towering over a submissive and innocent, but still promiscuous Bella (which, incidentally, is the premise of 50 Shades of Grey). The notion becomes that it’s okay for older men to associate innocence and youth with sex, that’s it okay for middle-aged pervs to be turned on by the innocence of teenage girls, that it’s okay for older men to prey on young girls. It's creepy, it's objectifying, it’s disempowering, and it's sexist as hell.
That's enough actual critical analysis for this review. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming: committing the gleeful murder of Twilight. If I were to sum this book up in a word, it would be the one I repeated endlessly whilst I was reading: garbage. Unfocused, self-indulgent, babbling, incoherent garbage. Even aside from its analytical flaws, Twilight is not a good book. I wasn’t sustained or entertained, I didn’t root for or care about anyone; I read to the end simply because I knew I’d be reviewing it. I would not recommend you do the same.
WORKS CITED
- “Piece of shit mess” - Sam Hogan on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, 24/03/16
- Sharp, Gwen, PhD. "Infantilizing Women, Sexualizing Girlishness - Sociological Images." The Society Pages. 15 May 2008. Web. 26 May 2016.
- Wade, Lisa, PhD. "Power, Mickey Mouse, and the Infantilization of Women - Sociological Images." The Society Pages. 8 Aug. 2013. Web. 23 May 2016.
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