Stephanie Meyer
Right then. My thoughts on these books.
I loved them, but I also hated them.
Spoilers will be included, so the post is after the jump, (sorry if you’re reading in a feed reader)
Firstly, the teenage girl in me loved them. I couldn’t put the books down once I’d started, even when I wanted to throw them across the room. There’s something about an attractive bloke being completely drawn to you and it being about love and not lust that just suckered me right in and I’m guessing is the cause of the immense popularity of these books among teenage girls.
Actually, it’s no good. I’m trying to explain what I loved about the books, and why I couldn’t put them down, but I can’t. I can only remember the things I didn’t like.
It was the third book that put me over the edge. The relationship between Edward and Bella is horrible. It’s practically sub-dom. In fact it is. She’s not allowed to do anything without his approval and supervision, to the point where he physically restrains her at times. That’s just messed up. It’s a model of a controlling abusive relationship and I wasn’t comfortable reading it at all.
Jacob is a much more sympathetic character, as he wants Bella to be herself, but she’s still all of a sudden this weak female who needs to be protected from everything. (I think a part of me also finds Jacob the more appealing character because I’m usually freezing so someone who’s always really warm is preferable to someone who’s always cold.)
Speaking of which, as the books progress I think the author ran out of adjectives. There’s only so many times I want to hear about Edward’s cool white skin like marble. I didn’t see what made him so attractive towards the end - there was no development of his character really.
Also, why is Bella’s father suddenly a bumbling fool who doesn’t know how to work his microwave and needs her to do his washing? He was managing fine without her before she moved to Forks.
The thing that made me nuts though was the sex stuff in the third book. Bella would like to take the relationship further, but Edward doesn’t want to until they’re married. It’s apparently ok to spend the night together and lie to Bella’s dad, but not to actually have sex. I don’t mind that, but there’s no mention of the possibility of anything in between a chaste kiss and full on shagging, either - it’s one or the other in Ms Meyer’s world.
Anyway, at first the message that Bella’s a wanton harlot trying to lead the wonderful Edward astray is a bit subtle. Her wanting to be made into a vampire is a pretty thin metaphor. By the end of the third book though, there’s no messing around. We’re told very clearly that sex before marriage is wrong, and that the strong pure male is the one to resist and the evil temptress female who needs protecting and to be told what to do should not be given in to. I have no problem whatsoever with books for teenagers not being full of sex. That’s fine. The third book is full of sex though - full of really unsubtle messages about it.
OK, I know I’m probably reading way too much into it, but, well, I found the third book very misogynistic and I didn’t like that at all.
The trouble is, despite my objections, I still didn’t actually throw the books across the room. I couldn’t put them down. I have no idea what it was but they grabbed me.
So, there you go: I loved them and I hated them too. Go figure.
In summary: Anne Rice light
Oh, goody, goody, goody, you’re DONE!!!!!!!!
I’ve been DYING to hear your POV.
You have them pegged: Love. Hate. So many times the overwhelming need to HURL — the doorstop tomes and the contents of my guts. I read the first novel with reasonable affection, but I a.) hated her name (Bella…Swan. Beautiful. Swan. Hookay.) and b.) I thought she was really kind of ridiculous for not figuring out that Edward wasn’t just a regular guy. And her name made me puke. No, really. A girl named Beautiful. Kill me now.
By the second book, I was irritated, because Jacob was so poorly characterized from the beginning, and now he was obviously being thrown in just as a metaphor for the choice Bella has to make between Undead and Alive — “Look! Family-oriented, warm, faultless hot (literally) Human Male!”– and then he turns out not to be fully human. And as sick as you were of “cool white marble skin,” I was just as sick of the exotification of the Quileutes and their “russet colored skin and coal black hair.” Jacob is six foot seven and gorgeous, and we’re to believe that he can see no one else but Bella? Aren’t there any girl puppies for him to play with? He’s on a RESERVATION. Doesn’t he get out to powwows and the like? There’s no mention of any kind of potential taboo between a native/non-native person… no, it’s were/non-werewolf drama, as if pack transcends tribe.
And then the final, uh, stake through the heart — utilizing the dominant black/white stereotype of “brown men will violate pale women.” Did she REALLY need to go there, with Jacob pinning Bella and forcing her? All that time, he had no one else to mess up with, and he has to almost violate the perfect virgin who belongs to the bloodless marble white guy?
…
And you thought *YOU* read too much into it.
…
21 Jul 2008 at 2:50 pm
Well done, Is. I agree with your points altogether. Love-it-can’t-put-it-down and hate-it-what-a-load-of-hooey all in one tome. Question is…will you read the fourth-yet-to-be-published book?
21 Jul 2008 at 3:12 pm
…furthermore
I didn’t throw any of these books across the room, but I’ll admit by the third ridiculously named phase of the dark (Twilight? Midnight? Moonrise? Something.), I was reading like an anthropologist tossed into the middle of a tribe of flesh-eating pygmies. I was poking every single sentence to see if I could prise out the foully twisted theology — and theology it is, I am afraid — beneath it. Meyers is a Mormon, and though that group is all for producing babies after the great seal of the State, don’t do so beforehand (unless there are other circumstances, which are more rumor than fact, but apparently it’s okay to bring someone into the fold that way. Feh.). So, it turns out that a whole series of books directed toward young women is about them needing to be restrained, by men, and men practicing resistance against Evil Temptresses, and apparently about marble saints, because somehow, a blood-sucking, death-dealing VAMPIRE gets to be the good guy and restrain a hot-blooded young hussy.
UGH. Could Meyer be any LESS positive toward her own gender? But romance — the idea of how it elevates the self, and through someone else’s eyes, we can be so… wonderful, so fragrant (!), so desirable, so amazingly lovely that they want to eat us up (!!) — it’s addictive. We all wish to see ourselves that way, and that’s why we don’t throw the books into the trash (that, and we have smaller trash cans around here, and the books wouldn’t fit.)
But I can tell you what. Breaking Dawn or Shattering Sunrise or Demolished Morning, or whatever the is? Will not be read. By me. I’m over it. Through. Done. Finito. I couldn’t care less if she becomes a vampire or not. What she really needs to do is move out of Forks, Podunk, U.S., and get a life away from the undead. Even Buffy eventually moved on away from the hellmouth, ya know?
21 Jul 2008 at 3:12 pm
“It’s practically sub-dom. In fact it is.”
See, the thing is that if it were revealed as sub-dome, then more people would be turned off by it, or at least able to address their feelings about it. But because it’s not all out-there, Anne Rice style, it kind of … slides on through, and the reader has this subtle message insinuated into their brain: sub-dom can be fun and make you pretty!
Bleh.
I already told you that I threw the second one across the room without reading it.
I just feel sorry for T, because I know that some idiot is going to recommend the 4th one for the Cybils award, and T will end up having to read it. Barf!
21 Jul 2008 at 3:19 pm
TadMack - yes! And I’d completely blocked out the bit where Jacob forced a kiss on her (and then later blackmailed her into another kiss which is a whole other sort of manipulation) - aside from the fact that it felt out of character for how he’d acted up to then, it’s just horrible - he assaulted her, and ok, she thumped him for it the first time, but it was still condoned, and was just a part of her realising that she loved him too. Because that’s a great message to send out to teenagers.
22 Jul 2008 at 10:27 am
Hmmm, this really unsettles me. All summer long many of the girls in my theatre company (aged 11 - 17) were devouring these books. While I don’t want any of them growing up to be the town whore, I also don’t like the fact that they’ve got a bit of Mormon/Christian Right propaganda in their hands.
Eww. This just makes me feel all confused inside. I wish they’d just go back and read Harry Potter again.
23 Jul 2008 at 1:53 am
I agree with everyone’s comments. I read the first one as I was intrigued at the hoopla surrounding it. I’m afraid I didn’t like it at all, I know I’m perhaps not the target audience, being a cantankerous 30 something and not a teenage girl, but man, that book has issues. The submissive female stuff is really creepy, all those long, looooong passages about how wonderfully marbly and bowel clenchingly gorgeous Edward is, but as Davimack says the more sinister, subtle message is contained in Edward’s infantilisation of Bella, his physical domination of her with his superhuman strength. She needs him to protect her because she is so helpless and well, a lady. Turned me right off it. All those restraint metaphors, being ‘caged’ by his stone-like, iron hard arms, lots of scenes where she describes being lifted or carried like a child.
But you know what really pissed me off about the goddamn Cullens in the end. There I was reading all about their beautiful Martha Stewart house in the woods with it’s perfect white, clean and antiseptic interior, with their perfect family, perfect home, expensive cars, cool clothes, perfect teeth, perfect hair and I thought, ‘wait a minute, these are bloody middle class vampires!’
In conclusion, a weak story and a weaker main character with enough sublimated weird stuff to keep a gaggle of psychiatrists happy. Come back Buffy, all is forgiven!
23 Jul 2008 at 10:34 am
Oh my! Now I want to read them more than ever… but I will have to wait til teen girl goes on holiday in case she reads them while I am out at work! I can tell I am going to swallow them whole and then spit them out - perfect summer reading!
23 Jul 2008 at 12:10 pm
But Buffy had her own issues, Donal … particularly in her blurring of the lines between love / hate / death / murder. So … she’s a bit sadistic, while Bella is a bit masochistic.
I’m with you, though - she’s the stronger role model.
23 Jul 2008 at 12:36 pm