If one were to analyze the Twilight series, it would conveniently sum up to a story of a mortal and an immortal being in love and emotional trauma that results out of the fact that they cannot get close to each other.
Stephen Meyer’s four-book series had fans celebrating the anomalous relationship between Edward and Bella and sold over 70 million copies.
Weak female lead
Bella’s readiness to surrender herself to her lover’s adorable dark side has not gone down well with the critics ever since the first book of the Twilight series was released in 2004.
Jamieson Ridenhour, a scholar of gothic fiction and chairman of the Division of Humanities at the University of Mary in Bismarck, said he thought Bella was projected as a weak role model. “I know the abstinence theme is why people like it, but I think they should look deeper. The stuff I don’t like about Twilight, I don’t think was intentional on Stephenie Meyer’s part, but I think it’s there.
“Bella frequently needs needing to be rescued yet pursuing the bad boy against his wishes and insisting his murderous nature will subside for her,” Ridenhour explained.
“I think she’s a very weak heroine. She gains strength through the series, but particularly in the first book, she erases a lot of strides women have made in the genre,” he added.
Kathy Smith, program services coordinator at the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center in Fargo, said she liked Bella because she is a girl-next-door and projects what a real teenager is like.
However, Smith doesn’t quite agree with the dependant nature of the heroine. “It kind of played up that being weaker than your partner is a good thing. A romanticized view that women need someone to look out for them, someone to rescue them, someone who is stronger than they are both emotionally and intellectually and physically,” Smith said.
Sarah Hassell, a feminist, also shares a similar view, “It’s written to appeal to teenage girls, but I don’t think it sends that great a message. Meyer tried to make Bella seem strong and make her seem like she knew what she wanted and went after it, but to me, it was pretty obvious this was a woman who was way too dependent on someone else for her happiness … That you can’t be happy until you find ‘the one’ and he’s going to do all these traditional, chivalrous things for you and you just sit back and be worshipped.”
An anti-feminist heroine?
Asked whether Bella is more of an anti-feminist heroine, the author Stephenie Meyer doesn’t agree. “I never meant for her fictional choices to be a model for anyone else’s real life choices.
“She is a character in a story, nothing more or less. But do her choices make her a negative example of empowerment? For myself personally, I don’t think so,” she answered. However, critics perceive Bella as a damsel-in-distress waiting to be rescued!
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