First Call Magazine

Dissecting the undead craze
By Valeria Tsygankova

“I’m not scared of you.”

“You really shouldn’t have said that.”

I have to give it to the Twilight series — the movies look beautiful. There’s no better setting for a vampire story than the thick fogginess and rocky hugeness of the Pacific Northwest. Following in the footsteps of Joss Whedon’s Buffy, author Stephanie Meyer and the filmmakers breathe new life into the staunch old European legend by setting it in a politically and geologically young region of the United States. Sure, Twilight as story has its potential, which ultimately makes it more of a disappointment.

Unfortunately for moviegoers, the Twilight series is not all about forging a new vampire identity on the inhospitable shores of Washington State, which sounds like it could be a movie worth watching. Instead, it is a multimillion-dollar confirmation of sexual stereotypes for adolescent girls.

The romantic narrative seems simple at first: Edward the vampire falls for Bella the human girl but can’t take the relationship to a physical level because he’s afraid he will eat Bella in the process. In short, sex unleashes terrible things and ruins lives, which is not a very surprising notion for fiction of a certain bent. If pro-abstinence teenage girls were a lucrative sector of the market, this Twilight would be a movie for them.

And yet, there’s more undertone to the actual series than can be explained by just a pedagogical stance on premarital relations. There’s something there that’s more threatening, that extends back through the Western world”s fascination with vampires and other inhuman creatures. We can see it in Edward”s belief and in Bella”s acceptance that there are forces working within him that make it impossible for him to control his sexually violent side.

In essence, Twilight is no different from the rest of the vampire genre — not so far off from Dracula, the Victorian Gothic apex of vampire fiction. The bulk of that novel consists of a group of four protagonists in an English coastal town where Dracula steals nightly into a woman’s bedroom to drink her blood. The woman he claims is Lucy, the sexier and more vivacious choice among the group.

As Lucy wastes away to a mere shadow of herself, she becomes sickly and degenerate. In Stoker’s universe, it is the weight of sin from contact with Dracula more than the loss of blood that makes her finally crumble. As readers, we’re meant to fear the possibility of Lucy’s spiritual fall more than the physical danger that comes from Dracula alone. The stain on Lucy’s soul is the ultimate evil in the story, and the implication of wrongdoing comes to rest at least partially on her. (Later, Dracula will go after Mina, the quieter and less seductive choice. Her friends then brand her forehead with the eucharist and mark her as an outcast, rejected by God and society, until Dracula is finally defeated).

Besides being at fault for their attacks, the novel goes as far as implying that Lucy and Mina on some level want Dracula”s advances and are doubly at fault. After all, they do choose to be attractive women. The implication is that the woman who is truly innocent of desire would not entice it, or would easily escape by dint of her purity.

No matter how strongly emphasized the monstrous nature of the vampire seems to be, the fault descends on the woman in the end, as though it is her own responsibility to control the attraction that “emanates” from her. Only then can everyone else be expected to control their desire for consumption. Unfortunately, this line of thinking is not as foreign to the modern world as it should be, and survivors of sexual assault of all genders still experience disapproval from society.

Twilight, instead of departing from the mesmerizing predator/tainted girl dichotomy as other modern renditions have done, has amplified it by making the vampire more glamorous, more appealing and actually dazzling in the sun, without de-romanticizing the violence that comes with him.

After Bella and Edward are married (at 18 and immortal, respectively) their sexual experiences leave her covered in bruises. Some may say, “at least they waited,” but this seems like a cynical response that completely misses the mark. This story is not about two teenagers who kept their fabled purity, but about a relationship that objectifies a woman. Like in Dracula, the encounter also leaves Bella tainted, since she conceives a diabolic baby that begins to consume her from within. Eventually her human identity is killed completely when she almost dies giving birth and is turned into a vampire by her husband.

Why is the plot of this relationship idealized? Fans talk up the alleged romance: the mysterious stranger, the inexplicable, strong attraction, the girl rescued from incomprehensible danger. But why is it that in this type of “romance,” women tend to end up at the mercy of someone else? If vampires and werewolves are always saving Bella from other vampires and werewolves, she remains always in their debt and under their control. And the threat of the male characters going too far in their violence also remains, thanks to the essentially uncontrollable nature that Twilight creates for them. For example, how many times in a Twilight movie does a man (sort-of-man, living-dead-man, etc.) say something along the lines of I just can’t control myself around you? Why is that our idea of desirable romance?

I wonder how many adolescent girls out there are looking forward to having a scary vampire lover of their own someday because of the central relationship in the Twilight series. I also wonder whose fantasy this relationship really is. As long the vampire continues to be a trope in the media and in our cultural store of fantasies, gender relations will never be able to reflect true freedom for women. So why does this idea continue to appear in books, movies and television shows?

One way of looking at the origin is to ask who the fantasy benefits. On one level, the answer is whoever is making his fortune on the coattails of the Twilight saga. Beyond financial gain, however, encouraging women to imagine themselves as subordinates serves a society that is interested in keeping them there. There’s no better way to achieve that purpose than metaphorically, since overtly is no longer much of an option — at least in this country.

This entry was posted by firstcallmagazine on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 11:24 pm. It is filed under Articles, No. 4, Opinion, Valeria Tsygankova, Vol. 12. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.