Final Thoughts on Stephenie Meyer

I’m nearing the end of Breaking Dawn, the final book in the Twilight series and I have a series of completely random thoughts on the subject.

Even though I’ve not quite finished the book, this will be spoilerific—if you haven’t read the books and want to, don’t keep reading.

I’ve also numbered my points to keep them straight, but there’s no underlying organising principle.

1. I’d never noticed before, even though this is the fourth book of hers I’ve read, that they’re all structured in exactly the same way: several hundred pages of emotional angst and trauma followed by a hundred pages of action.

That worked well—for me, anyway—in Twilight, but I’ve been a little bored with it in this book. Frankly, I was a little bored with it in New Moon, but I think that was largely to do with the fact that the emotional trauma was centred around Jacob; Jacob is just as objectionable as Edward, really, but once the author has made it clear that I’m supposed to see Edward as Bella’s true love, I get frustrated with the addition of a love triangle. It seems like a fairly cheap way of jerking the reader’s emotions around.

Actually, love triangles just irritate me, full stop. The only one I had any patience with was the one between Aeryn Sun and the clones of the original John Crichton, in Farscape—and even that wasn’t dragged out for too long.

2. I’m uncertain about the werewolf “imprinting”. As far as I can tell, it’s a “love at first sight” thing, but specific to werewolves: intenser, perhaps? Or tied to their pack nature? To be honest, I’m not quite certain, except that I am certain that the woman the werewolf imprints on (and the almost exclusively masculine natures of werewolves is another issue) is his future mate.

It’s the future part that bothers me, because one of the werewolves imprints on a two-year-old girl and one on a newborn baby.

Now, clearly Meyer isn’t suggesting that the attraction is sexual at this stage: she goes to some length to have her characters explain that, in fact, and the relationships between these werewolves and their future mates isn’t suggestive or disturbing.

Not sexually.

But the idea of these hyper-masculine creatures (did I mention that the packs are almost exclusively male?) closely overseeing the rearing, education, and development of their future wives . . . there’s something a little creepy in that. Especially combined with the fact that the gender politics of these books do tend to construct men as controlling (and that control as a good thing) and women as fragile.

3. The hyper-masculinity of werewolves in the novels has also come to irritate me, but only in this book. There’s one female werewolf, and in this book she explains something of how the change came about for her. For the male werewolves, the change (triggered by an ancient protective spirit and by the presence of the vampires) effectively stalls development: once they change the first time, they age and grow rapidly for a period—so that the adolescent boys who change become, physically, enormous men—but the natural aging process is stalled. (This is convenient for the two who “imprint” on much younger women.)

But for the female werewolf, Leah, it doesn’t work this way. Leah makes it clear that the woman’s role in the werewolf myth is simply to pass the gene on: to give birth to future generations of werewolves. But, she argues, she can’t do that: clearly, she doesn’t possess the correct gene (or whatever it is that triggers the change), despite her descent from one of the original three werewolves. If she did, she believes, the Alpha werewolf—her ex-boyfriend—would have imprinted on her and not her cousin.

So her change into the first female werewolf in the history of the pack is, she thinks, a corrupted act: a way of her body coping with her lineage in the absence of its appropriate, feminine, fertile response.

And the change triggers menopause. She’s a twenty-year-old woman, but—while the male members of the pack are trapped in permanent adolescence—she ceases to menstruate, describing herself as a “genetic dead-end.”

And the same is true for female vampires. When Bella becomes pregnant on her honeymoon, while she’s still human, she concludes that female vampires can’t become pregnant, because the vampiric change essentially freezes their body, rendering the necessary change of pregnancy impossible. But male vampires can impregnate human women, apparently because the former’s bodies don’t change.

And while I’m happy to acknowledge that men remain fertile much later into life than women, this seems oddly absurd to me. If their bodies don’t change, how does a century-old vampire still have the means to impregnate women?

It seems to me that it would be very easy to construct an argument that suggests Meyer is presenting powerful women as unwomanly: while men can change into werewolves and vampires without giving up their essential nature, women who shift into these powerful modes do so by giving up their fertility. In a novel whose world view presents—as I argued above—men as controlling and women as fragile, women are hyper-feminine, although that femininity might not take the form of an obsession with shoes. Their change makes them unwomanly.

In case it seems as though I’m over-reaching here, look at the three women whose origin stories we know. Esme is changed after she loses her infant son, goes mad, and tries to kill herself. The entire Carlisle coven grows up around her desire to recreate her thwarted maternal instincts. Rosalie is changed after she is almost killed in a vicious sexual assault—horribly disturbing, even if it isn’t described in detail—and is almost crippled by her desire for a normal human life, centred on a desire for children. And Bella—who has no trouble with the change, at all, despite the emphasis on how difficult it is to stop newborn vampires from killing people—has already borne a child, in a magically accelerated pregnancy. In fact, her early hours as a vampire, the hours in which she demonstrates unusual self control, are centred on her child, who keeps her sane.

Suddenly, the “powerful women are prevented from achieving the one thing that all women really want; power is merely a second-best option” reading doesn’t look quite so unlikely.

4. On a lesser note, the typography is driving me completely insane. There’s something odd about the formatting of the letters: the apostrophe is too highly set, or takes up too little space, or something that I can’t put my finger on. Either way, I keep reading “I’m” as “Im” and “I’ve” as “Ive,” which forces me to go back and re-read the sentence.

The book is also artificially bloated. If you have a copy of this and either Twilight or The Host, put them next to one another. The 750 pages of this book aren’t all densely packed story: the font is enormous and the lines widely spaced, to make the book look longer than it is.

That’s just annoying, frankly: had it been formatted along ordinary lines, it would be easier to hold and read.

The cover is pretty, though—as always.

5. Finally, Renesmee? Really? No, I’m not talking about the impossibility of a half-human, half-vampire child. I’m talking about the daft name. If you want to honour your mother and your mother-in-law, Bella, why not call the child Renee Esme? Or Esme Renee?

After all, when you thought the child was a boy, you planned on calling him Edward Jacob. Not Edcob. Or Jacward. Both of which are just as silly names as Renesmee. Really, you can’t complain when people nickname her Nessie. I know you do complain. Endlessly. But, really, you have no grounds for complaint. Moxie Crimefighter would have been a more sensible name.

Really, I have enjoyed these books, on a certain level. I don’t mean I’ve enjoyed them in a “these are trash reading, but I’ll save my real enjoyment for books with Penguins on the spine” sense, because I don’t think like that—as those of you who’ve seen the contents of my bookshelves will probably agree.

I mean I’ve enjoyed them as page-turners; I’ve been dragged along with the narrative, especially in the action-packed final pages of each volume.

But once I started noticing the gender imbalances in the books—which took me long enough—I couldn’t stop noticing them.

And I think that’s what I’m going to take away from these books: a vaguely disquieting sense that, ultimately, these books suggests that, except in the unique case of Bella, women can only achieve power at the cost of what the world of Twilight thinks should be their natural, feminine, maternal purpose.