Wife, Mother, Vampire: The Female Role in the Twilight Series

Introduction In Stephenie Meyer's wildly popular Twilight series (2005-2008), Bella Swan and Edward Cullen are in love. The problem is that Bella is a human and Edward is a vampire who thirsts for her blood. Rather than giving into this hunger, Edward controls himself so that he and Bella can be together; in doing so, he represents a domesticated, or self-controlled, vampire. Domesticity does not only apply to vampires in the Twilight series; instead, Meyer confines females, particularly Bella, to traditional female roles. In doing so, the series represents an overwhelming backlash against the struggle of feminism. The change in vampire bodies throughout vampire texts marks a change in attitudes towards women's bodies, from the sexually repressed female of the Victorian era seen in Dracula and Carmilla to empowered, contemporary females shown in modern works such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet in Twilight, the female is not shown as empowered, but rather a regressive figure akin to the Victorian ideal of womanhood as well as highlighting repressive beauty ideals and gender norms, creating a backlash against the empowered feminist ideal. Bella Swan, the main character of the Twilight series, symbolizes that backlash. Unlike Buffy whose heroine is a strong, empowered female, the heroine in Twilight is weak and dependent on men to give her value. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy demonstrates female autonomy in a male-dominated society, empowering not only herself but others. In Twilight, however, Bella illustrates female submission in a male dominated world; disempowering herself and symbolically disempowering women. The series does so by having Bella view herself in a negative light as well as through the largely domesticated nature of the vampires. Whereas previous vampire works depicted vampires as threats and outsiders to society, Twilight depicts vampire characters as accepted in society, integrating their lives into mainstream society; as such, they highlight modern society's fascination with physical appearance and the ideal of female beauty. Bella has been at the center of an argument about the role of feminism in today's society given her submissive nature. As Bonnie Mann states in her essay, "Vampire Love: The Second Sex Negotiates the Twenty-first Century," (2009) "When Bella falls in love, then, a girl in love is all she is. By page 139 she has concluded that her mundane life is a small price to pay for the gift of being with Edward, and by the second book she's willing to trade her soul for that privilege" (133). Bella sacrifices herself, "her mundane life" to be with Edward; in doing so, her actions embody Victorian values of female sacrifice for men. By being more focused on being with Edward, Bella is unable to focus on developing herself. Mann comments: Other than her penchant for self-sacrifice and the capacity to attract the attention of boys, Bella isn't really anyone special. She has no identifiable interests or talents; she is incompetent in the face of almost every challenge. She is the locus of exaggerated stereotypically feminine incapacities and self-loathing. She has no sense of direction or balance. She is prone to get bruises and scrapes just in the process of moving from one place to another and doesn't even trust herself to explore a tide pool without falling in. When she needs something done, especially mechanical, she finds a boy to do it and watches him. (133) Typically, men watch women, objectifying the female in viewing them as a solely sexual object. Laura Mulvey explores this concept in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975): Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly ... women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual impact and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. …