Bella Swan … [is an] honest (though cringe-inducing) representation of adolescence. She doesn’t know who she is or what she wants. She’s clumsy, obtuse, and aggravating in her helplessness. She is also entirely internal, almost alienatingly so …
This is an uncomfortable place for feminists, because this heroine is not particularly good at actualizing herself. Bella waits, she wallows, she thinks, and feels, and worries, and wonders. She does not actualize in the sense we have come to expect from our heroines, an expectation that, I might point out, is quite often based on a masculinist understanding of what being effective in the world looks like. Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of the popular The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series, is emotionally stunted but, damn it, she actualizes herself! She punishes the people who hurt her, she sleeps with whomever she wishes, she zips around on a motorcycle, and she’s a master computer hacker. In other words, our actualized female heroine might as well be a tiny man.
This is amazing and I think she could be right. MAN my mind is a little bit blown. Is Stephanie Meyer the new Alanis? Is she an ironic genius or is she just a colossally boring idiot?
The problem, as I see it, regardless of the answer to that question, is that there are just too many stupid people in the world who just wouldn’t ever think to deconstruct the text as a snapshot of gender constructions and relations in society, as Sarah Blackwood’s done here (just as there are too many people in the world who listened to “Ironic” all those times and now totally misunderstand the meaning of the word “ironic” forever, whether Alanis honestly wrote it as a brilliant example of irony or not, which makes me want to die a little inside when I think about it). The problem is there are young girls who read this book and get lost in its fantasy and actually DO see Bella Swan - passive, weak, human Bella Swan - as a “heroine”, someone to look up to, to aspire to be like. Here’s a girl who literally gives up life to be with a dude, who does so because she doesn’t see any value in her own life, let alone herself, unless she’s with or in relation to him. And this is all good because she gets an impossibly hot boyfriend forever in the end, so whatever, right?
I know I’m being reductive but, well, this is the glaring stuff to me about these books. This is what’s on the surface to my eye. This is the story and the message that comes across if you’re not Sarah Blackwood.
This problem, as always, can only begin and end with us. Question everything so we can be better smarter faster stronger. Go deeper. Yes, even into “Twilight.” (I can’t believe I just advised going deeper into “Twilight”.) It’s like Facebook. It ain’t going away anytime soon so we might as well understand what we’re really up against, right?
