The Twilight Series – a feminist’s nightmare

These books are great for a light read, and very absorbing, but they’re not the literary masterpiece that every other teenage girl is making them out to be.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed reading them - sometimes it’s good to just kick back with something that’s just fun rather than challenging, as this blogger says:

“…isn’t shallow and predictable the very reason we read books like this? Attempting to write these books any other way would have robbed them of their easy appeal as tasty escape fiction…. why read a whole set of books like that if you knew from the start that you wanted realism and quality?”

However, I had a problem with a lot of the characterisation.

To give a quick summary of the plot, Bella Swan moves in with her Dad in the dreary town of Forks, Washington, and hates it until she meets a boy at school who she falls in love with, who (it transpires) is a vampire. Very original. Hi-jinks ensue. The novels are (for the large part) written in the first person of Bella herself who, as far as I can tell, is a fictional personification of the author (a ‘Mary-Sue,’ for fandomers). She’s a fairly average girl with little self-confidence and some annoying pride issues who, as it turns out, is the best and prettiest at everything. It’s mildly annoying, but bearable.

The thing that really irritates me about this character, though, is her subordinate attitude towards the vampire in question, Edward Cullen. She’s totally smitten by him.

I understand that she HAS to be smitten, otherwise it wouldn’t be a romance, but she worships him to the point of being sycophantic – a large portion of the prose is just her fawning over how ‘breathtaking’ and ‘beautiful’ he is, and it’s all done with no tone of dignity or even shame. Edward himself is a fairly undeveloped character – true, he has no bad points (unless you count prejudice, over-bearing protectiveness and stubborness to the point of being ridiculous as bad), but he doesn’t really have any good points either. Apart from being startingly attractive, he doesn’t really have any prominent character traits aside from pride and a misplaced sense of nobility – both of which, over the course of the four novels in the series, cause Bella much grief and distress.

Despite this, she moons over him quite pathetically nearly every time he enters a dialogue, and numerous references are made to her feelings of inferior self-worth in comparison to him.

I just don’t think such a protagonist is a good role model for the intended audience, which is largely teenage girls. While I did enjoy reading the series, I had the urge throughout to just grab her by her fictional shoulders, give her a shake and say, ‘Get a grip, woman – have some self-respect!’