I first heard of Twilight two or three years ago when a couple of
my friends began gushing about how much they loved the series.
Gradually, I noticed that more and more of my friends had read it, and
with the release of the movie last year, anything connected with Twilight
flew off the shelves of the kiosk where I was working. I heard
comparisons to Harry Potter and followed along with discussions about
its literary and spiritual merits. Finally, I decided that I needed to
check it out for myself.
Twilight is the first book in
the series. It’s narrated by Bella Swan, the nondescript daughter of
divorced parents who has just left her emotionally immature mother in
Arizona for her preoccupied father in dreary Forks, Washington. Bella is
a bit of an oddball who doesn’t mingle naturally with others. She
manages to make a few friends at her new school but is fairly bored by
their interactions. The only thing that makes her new life bearable is
her fascination with one particular group of students, a cluster of
gorgeous, aloof siblings, one of whom sits next to her in science class.
His name is Edward, and it doesn’t take long for him to turn into an
all-encompassing obsession.
Bella has a few distinct traits.
She’s described as having brown hair and pale features. She’s absurdly
klutzy, constantly inflicting injury on herself. On the other hand,
she’s industrious, a good student and a capable housekeeper who
cheerfully takes care of all the household tasks, especially cooking.
She’s also kind-hearted, despite being rather wrapped up in herself. On
the whole, however, she’s not an especially well-defined character, and I
get the impression that author Stephenie Meyer mostly intended for her
readers to insert themselves into Bella’s shoes, to become her for the
duration of the series. Because nobody, it seems, reads the books for
Bella. They read it for Edward.
Edward Cullen is a 17-year-old
with hard, alabaster skin, bronze hair and angelic features. He’s
seductive, chivalrous and wholly devoted to the frail, plain Bella, who
can’t understand why anyone as perfect as him would single out someone
as average as her. To some extent, one could say that it was love at
first sniff. No one in the world smells as beautiful to Edward as Bella
does. Unfortunately, that makes their relationship Bella’s most
dangerous circumstance yet, because Edward is a vampire. A vampire who
has no intention whatsoever of giving into his thirst for Bella, but who
suspects the best way to avoid that possibility is to stay away from
her altogether. But Edward is just as deeply in love as Bella is, so
abandonment isn’t that easy.
It’s easy to see the attraction of
Edward, as well as the objections. On the plus side, here is a man who
is never going to age physically. He’ll always be young and gorgeous.
What’s more, he’s incredibly romantic and protective. And, at least at
this point, his courtship with Bella is quite chaste. On the other hand,
he’s about a century old, which makes his dalliance with Bella a tad
creepy, especially when one considers the fact that he sneaks into her
house at night, sometimes when even she isn’t aware of it. He’s also
very condescending, and he doesn’t really offer Bella the chance to make
decisions for herself. Additionally, though he is always worried about
Bella hurting herself, he drives like a maniac while she is in the car
with him, laughing as he lets the spedometer creep up to twice the speed
limit.
Though the Harry Potter comparisons are what I most
often hear, the similarities there are limited. Of course, Robert
Pattinson plays Cedric in one film series and Edward in the other. Both
series have stirred up considerable controversy. Both concern a
supernatural population kept hidden from the greater public. Moreover,
Bella’s attraction to Edward’s “family,” who in fact are not related to
one another at all, feels similar to the delight Harry takes in the
Weasley family. But Bella has parents of her own, and though they are
separated, each clearly cares about her a great deal, so she’s hardly an
orphan. Additionally, while J. K. Rowling’s world is full of color and
inventive elements, Meyer’s is drab and shadowy, and melodramatic Twilight
could sorely use a dose of Rowling’s humor. One might argue that both
series are ultimately about one thing: love. But Harry Potter delves
most deeply into the idea of sacrificial love, while Twilight is
all about romance. A romance for which Bella may indeed sacrifice her
life as she knows it, but the benefit, it seems, would be to her and
Edward alone. This is a lot less like Harry Potter than it is like Romeo and Juliet. Bella and Edward are all wrong for each other, but they’re determined to have a go at it anyway.
While
I understand why Edward is so appealing, Meyer lays the adulation on a
little thick. Scarcely a page goes by in which Bella fails to mention
some element of his perfection, and she quickly runs out of new ways to
say it, so the novel starts to sound pretty repetitive. To be honest, I
found myself much more interested in some of the side characters,
particularly Edward’s bubbly, compassionate “sister” Alice, who is able
to catch glimpses of the possible future, and warm, heroic Cullen
patriarch Carlisle, who is the oldest of the bunch and has become so
disciplined after centuries of practice that he is able to work as a
surgeon without being tempted by the smell of human blood. He and the
others in his family feast only on animal blood, making them less of a
threat than just about any other vampires in the world. Nonetheless, not
all members of the family have Carlisle’s self-control, so they still
aren’t exactly safe, at least as long as Bella is human.
Going back to Harry Potter, that series is quite preoccupied with death, and so is Twilight.
All of super-villain Voldemort’s actions are motivated by his desire to
conquer death, and we see other characters toy with that prospect.
Ultimately, the series seems to confirm headmaster Albus Dumbledore’s
comment that there are things far worse than death, and at the moment,
this is how Edward feels. But Bella desperately wants to bypass the
natural order of things in order to become an equal to Edward, no longer
a liability, no longer doomed to grow old while her true love remains
young and vital. Bella is determined to be transformed into a vampire,
despite Edward’s fear that becoming a vampire destroys one’s soul. This
conflict finds no resolution in the first book, but the two points of
view could create some interesting fodder for discussion.
I’m
only halfway through the series myself. I’ll probably finish it, but I’m
not committed to doing so. These are not characters who have seeped
into my soul, and after two more books, I doubt they will be any more
real to me than Lemony Snicket’s Baudelaire orphans - and at least those
books were hilarious. Nonetheless, as I was reading, I couldn’t stop
turning the pages. I was engrossed enough that I had to know what would
happen next and impressed with the many positive qualities various
members of the Cullen clan display. I wouldn’t recommend the series to
children younger than high school, and I do think that parents would do
well to read the books themselves so they can talk about some of their
more unsettling elements; some worthwhile conversations could result. As
for me, I’ll still take Cedric Diggory over Edward Cullen – and Neville
Longbottom over Cedric Diggory – but I see no need to toss Edward on
the bonfire.
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