Touched by a Vampire (7 page)

1. Do you have someone you can talk with honestly about the way “waiting” for sex does or doesn’t
   happen for you and your friends? How can we find ways to wait that don’t increase temptation?
   

2. Describe God’s faithful love. How is sexual purity a witness to God’s faithfulness?
   

3. Reflect on Bella’s feelings about the connections between vulnerable intimacy and lifelong commitment. How can intimacy without commitment cause pain?
   

4. Do you agree that faithfulness is rare in our culture? Who has been an example of faithfulness in your life?
   

5. What are your expectations, whether you’re married or not, for sex within marriage? Do you expect perfection? Do you see sex as fearful or shameful? What are the good things about married life that look different from the picture of endless and intense sex we get from movies or married vampires?
   

6. What messages about sexuality have you gotten from church, family, friends, and society? Is sex seen as something good? as something shameful?
   

The Superhero and the
Girl Next Door

T
HE
T
WILIGHT
S
AGA CONTAINS
interesting assumptions about what it means to be masculine and feminine. It’s full of characters who represent ideal and not-so-ideal males and females, and it challenges some of our assumptions about what is masculine and what is feminine. It also reinforces some stereotypes about those same assumptions.

The questions we’ve already discussed—questions about romance, love, and sexuality—are intimately tied to our ideas about what it means to be male and female. Many of the problems that come from certain beliefs about romance, love, and sexuality are connected to ideas about what it means to be male and female that are themselves troublesome. Both male and
female readers may see themselves in the characters of the saga, and it’s all too easy to measure ourselves or other people by the standards portrayed in the novels.

Bella is a girl-next-door heroine. She’s competent but also full of self-doubt. Edward is Bella’s indestructible protector. What do their characters have to say about what it means to be created male or female?

Readers identify with Bella because she’s an everygirl. “I’m absolutely ordinary,” Bella insists, “well, except for bad things like all the near-death experiences and being so clumsy that I’m almost disabled.”
¹
Many of us can relate to Bella’s feelings. She is ordinary, normal, nothing outside the box. At the same time, she regrets her deficiencies. She’s incredibly awkward and gets into accident after accident.

There are two sides to Bella—she is both strong and weak. On one hand, she’s unusually competent. She can run a household better than most adults I know, and she’s extraordinarily self-reliant. At the same time, her clumsiness and poor judgment come together to create conditions in which she often needs to be rescued. In general, Bella is much more aware of her weakness than she is of her strength. The most
obvious feature of her character is that she puts herself down at every turn.

Her self-consciousness about her clumsiness means she won’t dance—she’s horrified at the thought of the prom. As a rule, she doesn’t want special attention of any kind, fearing that such attention will only highlight her weaknesses. While her strong attachment to Edward is the main reason she is so determined to become a vampire, she is also drawn to vampire life because it promises her the opposite of all her human weaknesses. In
New Moon
, she explains that “more than anything, I wanted to be fierce and deadly, someone no one would dare mess with.”
²

Though Edward’s feelings for Bella are undeniably strong, though he loves her deeply, he also tends to focus on her weakness. In part, this is less about Bella herself and more about the fact that he has fallen in love with a human being, and to him, to be human is to be weak. Edward thus emphasizes Bella’s fragility, the ways that she is constantly in danger just because she is human. It is not only being human that makes Bella vulnerable though. Edward agrees with Bella’s own estimation of herself—she is particularly prone to danger. Edward, then, acts as her protector because, he says, Bella is “one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet.”
³
Edward also believes
that Bella is vulnerable because she is so desirable. Her very attractiveness makes her a target for trouble. Edward tries to challenge Bella’s more negative views of herself, but it’s also probable that the overprotectiveness and concern for her weakness that dominate his interactions with her add to her sense that she isn’t very strong. As readers, we believe that Bella is an everygirl because she tells us it’s true. We also believe it because this is the main thing we know about her; in other ways, her character is left largely undrawn. Like Bella, we all have strength and weakness, and we’re likely to be familiar with her worries about her weakness.

Edward’s beautiful sisters, Rosalie and Alice, represent, to Bella, a contrast to her own ordinariness. Alice and Rosalie are poised, gorgeous, gifted, and powerful. Bella sees herself as clumsy, ordinary, average, and weak. These vampire sisters possess female beauty that goes beyond anything a supermodel on a magazine cover could ever boast.

In their differences from Bella, the characters of Alice and Rosalie embody different aspects of what it means to be female. If Bella is the self-deprecating girl-next-door, Alice and Rosalie are ideals of different ways of being a girl, ideals that Bella can’t imagine ever achieving.

Bella has two very different relationships with Alice and with Rosalie. Almost from the beginning, she and Alice recognize each other as sisters and form a close friendship. In contrast, the relationship between Rosalie and Bella is filled with tension.

Alice is small, dark haired, and fiery. Unlike most members of the Cullen family, Carlisle didn’t transform her from human to vampire. Alice remembers very little of her human life. Her sad and unclear past includes being committed to an asylum because she had premonitions—the human talent that would become her vampire gift. She was transformed by an asylum keeper but left to make her own way as a vampire. Wanting something different than the violent vampire life, she found her partner, Jasper, and together they joined the Cullen family.

For many vampires in the Twilight Saga, some talent from their human lives is brought forward into their vampire lives and strengthened into a unique gift. Alice’s gift is an ability to see the future. It’s not a fail-safe ability, because the future changes when people’s decisions change, but it is of great benefit to her family.

Alice has fun with typically girlie activities—shopping, fashion, and party planning—and she’s determined to enjoy these things in her friendship with Bella even though they aren’t Bella’s preferred forms of fun. Alice plans fancy parties and an elaborate wedding for Bella. After Edward and Bella marry, she stocks Bella’s closet with a dream wardrobe.

She is very much a sympathetic sister to Bella. She’s there for her for fun and as a confidante, and she’s also incredibly powerful. Alice is vital to Bella’s last-minute rescue of Edward from his attempt at self-destruction in
New Moon
. She also uses her gifts and strengths to play an important role in saving Edward and Bella’s daughter and the Cullen family from the Volturi threat at the end of
Breaking Dawn
.

Rosalie was an astonishingly beautiful human being, and her beauty has been carried forward and heightened in her vampire life, making her unimaginably stunning. She is hostile to Bella from the very start and often expresses her disapproval over Bella’s relationship with her brother. She is responsible in
New Moon
for misinforming Edward about Bella’s death and sending him on his death quest to Italy.

Rosalie’s sad human story is one in which she lived a shallow life, spoiled and petted for her beauty. While she was drawn to the real, loving relationships she saw in the life of a friend with a husband and baby, she was engaged to a man who prized her only for her beauty. One night, her cruel fiancé and his friends raped and beat her. Carlisle found her on the brink of death and transformed her into a vampire. The beautiful vampire Rosalie took her revenge on her attackers. She killed them, but she did not drink their blood.

Until we learn her story, Rosalie is an unsympathetic character in the saga—a cold and heartless beauty. The revealing of her past, though, also reveals something of her current
motivations. She wishes, above all else, to protect her family, and she sees Bella as a threat to their security.

Later, when confronted with Bella’s determination to become a vampire, Rosalie is angered by her choice. “You already have everything,” Rosalie tells Bella. “You have a whole life ahead of you—everything I want. And you’re going to just throw it all away. Can’t you see that I’d trade everything I have to be you? You have the choice that I didn’t have, and you’re choosing wrong!”
⁴
Rosalie regrets the shallowness and tragedy of her human life. She wishes for the human experiences of a true, loving relationship and, most of all, for motherhood.

Alice embodies the feminine ideals of spunk, energy, and girliness. She’s the perfect girlfriend and sister, and she’s also incredibly powerful and isn’t afraid to use her power. Rosalie embodies other aspects of what it means to be an ideal women. Her femininity is shown in her commitment to her family and in her desire to be a mother. For Bella, both are impossible ideals, images of the kind of perfect girl she thinks she can never be. As pictures of what being a woman is all about, Bella, Alice, and Rosalie represent different facets of the ideals of our culture. The three characters reinforce some stereotypes while bringing others into question.

While Bella is an “ordinary” heroine, she does defy a lot of stereotypes about what it means to act feminine. It is Alice who loves clothes and parties and Rosalie whose dreams center on marriage and babies. Bella is a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl who has been taught that it’s dangerous to focus all her dreams on marrying Prince Charming.

Yet in one very worrisome way, Bella falls right into stereotypes about what it means to be female: she’s willing to erase herself for the sake of Edward. Her life is completely subsumed by his, and she has no interests or hobbies outside of him. Going to college is her plan B; it’s a distant second to what she really wants—a future that’s all about Edward.

In some ways, this works in the books to allow lots of readers to identify with Bella. If the main thing we know about her character is that she cares about love, almost all of us can imagine ourselves in her shoes. If she were a more defined character in other ways, if she spent tons of energy on soccer or indie music or giggling with friends, it would certainly change the story in ways that would make it harder for so many readers to identify with her. Not everyone cares about soccer, after all, but most people care about love.

But Bella’s self-erasure is terrifying. Erasing the self is a real problem for girls and women in our society. While little girls
tend to have many interests, to speak up confidently in class, and to feel comfortable putting themselves forward, older girls often get the message that they ought to step back, take themselves out of the limelight, and make some more room for the boys. Older girls and women, then, often feel that they’ve lost their voices in the world. It gets difficult to speak up, and sometimes it gets difficult even to know who we are. It’s not uncommon for women to feel that somewhere along the way they’ve lost themselves.

Lots of girls and women have mixed feelings about our cultural ideas of what it means to be feminine. Bella’s story picks up on those mixed feelings. On one hand, she’s not a typical girlie-girl. She doesn’t have much interest in the perfect prom dress, for instance, and in this she defies easy stereotypes about what it means to be female. On the other hand, Bella’s character lets readers embrace the common feeling that love is incredibly important and that, just maybe, total self-reliance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Bella’s a powerful girl in many ways, but there’s something compelling—and disturbing—about her need for Edward.