Rethinking Stephenie Meyer's Novels

I mentioned in my post on the first of this saga that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would—and I did.

I even lent it to my sister-in-law, because I thought it was very much her cup of tea. I don’t know yet if she enjoyed it.

But I also mentioned that I needed to read the others before I could legitimately judge what I thought. I’ve now read two and three, New Moon and Eclipse—the fourth, called I believe Breaking Dawn, hasn’t been published yet—and I now find I’m more ambivalent than before.

These books have been going through my first-year students—the female ones, anyway—like a dose of salts.

(On that note, giving a lecture on cliches last week seems to have had an adverse effect on my writing: “cup of tea” and “does of salts” in one post? Let’s see how many more tired metaphors and battered similes I can use in this post.)

But my students are reading and loving these books; in fact, when I said that halfway through the third book I started thinking to myself, “You know, this vampire is psychotic!” they were up in arms.

(And there’s another cliche for you.)

But that’s where my thoughts starting shifting; and it retrospectively changed my understanding of the previous books.

It wasn’t so much that at one level Edward thirsted to drink human blood; that’s not actually that psychotic, for a vampire. (It reminds me of a news broadcast that talked about the damage caused in the U. S. by a “rogue cyclone”; really, a cyclone causing massive property damage is a fairly well-adjusted cyclone.) No, I started thinking he was psychotic when he removed the distributor cap from his girlfriend’s car to prevent her visiting her Native American werewolf buddies.

Of course, I didn’t like her werewolf best friend, either—he was just as possessive, in a different way.

But Edward’s behaviour bothered me, more than the idea that he might one day be unable to resist the impulse to have Bella for lunch.

When I was reading Twilight, I said to Nick that there were shades of a domestic violence debate coming through the novel for me; I couldn’t judge whether it was deliberate on the author’s part or something that I was reading in for myself, but it came through the emphasis on the dangers of consorting with vampires. Somewhere in there was the sense that we all, on one level, take that risk; we all, when we enter into a relationship, determine—usually on a subconscious level—that this person will never pose a threat or a danger to us and, horror stories aside, we’re mostly right.

The idea of layering that through a romance with a vampire, inherently more threatening than any human partner, fascinated me; it seemed to give weight and substance to the discussion of a relationship that otherwise seemed to accelerate too quickly, even for a romance between teenagers.

Until he removed the distributor cap.

So now I’m not sure how I feel about these. I know as the books progressed, I became more and more annoyed at the idea that the romance would end in marriage—or, analogous to marriage, being turned into a vampire or both—for an eighteen-year-old protagonist, which is not something with which I find myself in sympathy. We haven’t got to that point, yet, but I suspect we will.

On the other hand, I did read all 1200 pages of the second and third novels and, while I’m not generally someone who puts books down unfinished, that does say something about Meyer’s ability to write page-turners. And she is capturing a broad readership among late teens, arguably a harder task than grabbing the early teen market, given the greater time pressures on 17-20 year olds.

But that’s not, I suspect, enough to make me ignore my growing feeling that this vampire is psychotic and that this might be less a great romance than a damagingly co-dependent, potentially abusive relationship.