151 pages in...
Oh boy.
There were moments in the previous chapter that I kind of enjoyed. This one...um...this was more challenging.
I assume this takes place directly after Bella returns from La Push. She goes up to her room and listens to a CD (Meyer cites on her website that the music described is Linkin Park, though she didn't include the name because she wasn't sure how long Linkin Park would be popular and was worried it would be embarrassing if it took ten years to get the book published. Interesting logic from someone who claims to have written Twilight solely for own personal enjoyment. Btw, it's still embarrassing, and it never would not have been embarrassing). So in listening to her angsty teen crapfest CD, Bella falls asleep and has a dream in which Jacob turns into a wolf and attacks Edward, who has fangs. Subtle, Meyer. Subtle.
This dream disturbs Bella to the point where she gets up and looks up "vampire" on the interwebs, finding a variety of myths and trying to reconcile them with what Jacob has told her and what she has observed about the Cullens. She goes out into the woods to think things over and considers the idea that Edward "maybe" is a vampire and makes the decision (which isn't really a decision; we'll get to this) to do nothing and allow Edward to pursue her.
The next day, it's sunny. Edward and fam aren't at school. Depressed Bella is depressed. She reads Jane Austen for fun. Jessica and Angela convince her to go on a shopping trip with them to Port Angeles city. End chapter.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: I really do hate being alone with Bella. Her life is boring, for one. For two, she rarely has any moments of genuine insight. For three, the story continues asking me to care about her problems, and I continue to not.
I have to wonder what Twilight fans think when they get to this chapter, in which nothing of consequence actually happens and Edward, the glittering star of this novel, is completely absent. Do they skim it in frustration, desperate to get back to Edward? Or do they absorb every second of Bella's convoluted thought process, spinning around "in answerless circles," (Bella's own words, 139)? Do they share Meyer's obvious opinion that every trivial moment of Bella's life is of tantamount importance?
I will say, there's one moment that struck me as a genuinely interesting one. Bella goes out into the woods to think about what she's learned from her internet search and acknowledges that the change in environment makes it "easier to believe the absurdities that embarrassed" her in her "clear-cut" bedroom (137). "Nothing had changed in this forest for thousands of years," she muses, "and all the myths and legends of a hundred different lands seemed much more likely in this green haze." It's nice to see Meyer use Washington's rich environment to affect her character's perceptions of the world. It's a fleeting moment, but it shows me that Meyer is capable of such writerly insight, but isn't interested in exploring it.
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: This chapter is 23 pages. It's 23 pages. Nine of those pages are devoted to Bella looking shit up on the internet and then contemplating whether or not Edward is a vampire. I mean, I really don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that nothing happens in this chapter, nothing that couldn't have been said in a paragraph anyway. And I really do think that fans must skim this part of the book, clenching their teeth in search of the next page featuring Edward.
Also, a note to young writers: avoid prophetic dream sequences like the plague. It's a lazy, overused device and a transparent ploy to make your otherwise-average character that much more of a special snowflake. This device got on my nerves even in Harry Potter, despite the fact that there was a logical reason for it in the context of the series.
LANGUAGE: "dust moats" (142).
This makes me want to cry. Stephanie Meyer is a published novelist, and she does not know the difference between the little things that float around in the air and the water-filled trenches used to protect castles. And neither does her editor, apparently.
Also, any literary merit Meyer gained in Ch. 6 language-wise has been ABSOLUTELY DECIMATED here, as this chapter features some of the dullest prose I've ever read in a published work. Meyer is painfully obsessed with Bella's daily activities, and sentences read with a relentlessly repetitive structure: "I verb direct object. Then I verb direct object. Maybe I would verb direct object." I mean, the only way to really understand the drabness of it is to show you. So read this passage where Bella gets online. Just...read it:
"I hated using the Internet here. My modem was sadly outdated, my free service substandard; just dialing up took so long that I decided to get myself a bowl of cereal while I waited.
I ate slowly, chewing each bite with care. When I was done, I washed the bowl and spoon, dried them, and put them away. My feet dragged as I climbed the stairs. I went to my CD player first, picking it up off the floor and placing it precisely in the center of the table. I pulled out the headphones, and put them away in the desk drawer. Then I turned the same CD on, turning it down to the point where it was background noise. With another sigh, I turned to my computer. Naturally, the screen was covered in pop-up ads. I sat in my hard folding chair and began closing all the little windows. Eventually I made it to my favorite search engine. I shot down a few more pop-ups and then typed in one word."
I just...I can't even...it's just...WHY!?? Why the fuck do we need to know any of this!? It is really necessary for us to know the precise manner in which Bella eats her cereal, or the fact that she visits her favorite search engine, as opposed to her second favorite? (Which would be what, Lycos? ::scoff:: Is it 1998 still?) What would we be missing if she simply told us, "That weekend, I looked for information about vampires online. Here's what I found"? I could maybe buy that this authorial foot-dragging is supposed to build suspense, but there's no tension in it at all! It's not remotely interesting! And the reader already knows that Edward is a vampire anyway!! IT SAYS SO IN THE GODDAMN BLURB!!! I'm sorry. I'm about to go into an exclamation point coma.
SUBTEXT: Caitlin Flanagan (who I've mention before; she wrote this article, What Girls Want, a glowing review of Twilight) cites how "interesting" it is "how deeply fascinated young girls, some of them extremely bright and ambitious, are by the questions the book [Twilight] poses, and by the solutions their heroine [Bella] chooses." Right.
I've talked before about how annoyed I am that Bella hasn't made very many active choices so far. Bella claims to make a choice in this chapter; she repeatedly calls it a choice, and she does some reflecting on her decision-making process in general, which is interesting:
"Making decisions was the painful part for me, the part I agonized over. But once the decision was made, I simply followed through -- usually with relief that the choice was made." (140)
So Bella actively dislikes making decisions, and she prefers to feel relief whenever she makes a decision because it is better than "wrestling with the alternatives" (140), i.e., reflecting on whether or not the decision she's just made is a good one. I'm sure that this manner of thinking reaches many young women, especially those who would rather not make decisions, who would prefer to have decisions made for them.
But lets take a closer look at the "decision" Bella makes in this chapter, which takes place when she considers what to do if Edward happens to be a vampire. She brings up two options, one that requires action, and one that doesn't. The first, "to avoid [Edward] as much as possible. To cancel our plans...To tell him to leave me alone" (138), is almost unthinkable. It "grip[s]" her in "a sudden agony of despair." "My mind rejected the pain," she says, "quickly skipping on to the next option" (139). The next option is that she should "do nothing different," which is what she chooses to do, not surprisingly the decision that requires the least amount action on her part, and the one that most leaves the outcome of the situation up to Edward.
Setting aside the fact that there is no reason for Bella to feel "agony" at the idea of not talking to Edward since they've had maybe four complete conversations and she didn't seem to enjoy herself during any of them, this is not a genuine decision. This is Meyer reaching down and punching Bella in the head for considering, even for a second, that being with Edward is maybe not a good idea. Bella even REALIZES this: "I didn't know if there ever was a choice, really. I was already in too deep...when I thought of him, of his voice, his hypnotic eyes, the magnetic force of his personality, I wanted nothing more than to be with him right now" (139). Read what the text says, Caitlin Flanagan, please. Bella is powerless; she doesn't make choices. Meyer wants us to understand that her pitiful human protagonist wouldn't be able to refuse Edward's advances even if he openly confessed to being a serial murderer.
In this chapter, there's also this unintentionally hilarious moment where Mike and Bella are discussing their English papers on MacBeth and Bella quips that hers is about "Whether Shakespeare's treatment of the female characters is misogynistic" (143), funny in its irony and also in the fact that the story tries to make it seem as though Bella is the only person in Forks who knows what misogynistic means. Readers have cited this as a moment where Meyer is trying to make Bella a feminist character, though in the context of what I've read so far, Bella's exploration into this subject is supposed to be seen as one of her "negative" qualities, as any time she expresses an independent thought or tries to exist without a male crutch, the Twilight Universe shocks her with a lightning bolt and tells her to get back in the kitchen.
WHAT'S WORKING: This is a toughie. Not gonna lie. I wish I could discern better what Meyer's doing right here, but I'm having a hard time understanding why any young female reader would want to subject herself to such dullness. Are fans so enamored already that they don't mind the lag in the plot? Do they interpret it as suspense? Do they identify with Bella's dull musings because their own lives are similarly dull?
I suppose the meat of this chapter is the "decision" that Bella makes to let Edward pursue her, which, as I read it, isn't a decision. But what I perceive to be literary problems (Bella's passivity and relentless dullness) in fact seem to reinforce the idea that this protagonist has no control over the situation she's in, which may be an actual comfort to readers who would prefer a relationship that doesn't require them to make decisions, and which sustains itself by magic. Many young women seem to believe that this is how ideal relationships are supposed to be, and they see their desires reinforced by this hyper-contrived romance.
I should mention also that Bella expresses a range of emotions here. That is, we get Happy Bella, qualifying her upbeat mood with the temporarily sunny weather. If there's one thing you learn about Bella, it's that outside factors are always strongly influencing her state of mind, to the point where she is pitched violently into despair (I don't remember the exact phrasing and I don't have the book with me right now, so I can't quote it) when she gets to the cafeteria at school on Monday and finds Edward and his fam absent. Bella lets things affect her to a ridiculous degree (granted, I struggle with this too sometimes), and she sometimes even seems to prefer wallowing in her emotions as opposed to making an effort to moderate or analyze them. (Oh my god. Is this anybody you know?) It's the highest form of encouragement for any reader that is equally emotional or histrionic. "Everything that you feel is appropriate and good. So feel. Just feel, feel, feel. Don't think."
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I had heard about this chapter before I read it, the one in which Meyer describes, in detail, her protagonist using the internet. I've survived it, and when I recover from my brainwounds, I think I'll be ready for Chapter 8 next week.
Wish me luck,
Jenchilla
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Chapter 6: Scary Stories
128 pages in...
Bella's friends have been talking about this "trip to the La Push beach" since Chapter 2, only the weather has been rainy for...I'm going to assume months. (The passage of time is completely irrelevant in this book; I don't even know what month it's supposed to be.) So Bella goes with Mike, Jessica, Eric, Tyler and pretty much any other non-Cullen student whose name has been mentioned in previous chapters, then Meyer takes great pains to describe the scenery and Bella & Co. look at tide pools. They also encounter some boys visiting from the Quileute reservation, and one of them is Jacob Black, the son of the guy who sold Bella's truck to Charlie. Jacob remembers Bella from the fishing trips she used to take with her father.
The subject of the Cullens comes up, as everybody in this novel is always thinking about the Cullens all the time, and one of the Quileute boys mentions that the Cullens aren't allowed to come to La Push. Desperate to know more, Bella takes Jacob aside, overtly flirting in order to wheedle information from him. ...How shy she is. Her scheming works, and he tells her about old Quileute legends that say his people are the descendants of wolves, and that the Cullens are "the cold ones," who have promised to keep off of Quileute land. "Your people call them vampires," Jacob says (126). Yeah, Edward Cullen is a vampire. It says so in the goddamn blurb.
Bella seems to like Jacob and feels guilty "knowing that [she] used him" (her words!), and she leaves him with a thankful wink and a promise that she will see him again. So ends the beach trip.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Edward makes no appearance in this chapter, so the focus returns to Bella, wandering around in full Passive-Aggressive-Twat mode. Much of the time she's at La Push she's thinking about Edward and wishing he was there, though I'm not sure why, really. She never seems to have that good a time whenever he's around and is always uncomfortable or having an anxiety attack about how beautiful he is or getting annoyed with his condescending attitude.
Whatever. I guess having a good time is for chumps. Bella continues to consider it a chore to have to be around her Forks friends. Mike and Jessica are depicted just short of prattling, drooling idiots, there's a girl named Angela that Bella likes only because she doesn't have a single line of dialogue to show for herself and never forces Bella to hold a conversation, and there's another girl named Lauren, who is the first person to reflect genuine negativity toward Bella (out of jealousy, of course). These characters are all as flat as surfboards. CARE NOT ABOUT THESE PEONS. BELLA AND EDWARD ARE THE ONLY SOULS WHO MATTER.
To Bella's credit, she is pleased to see that the weather is sunny. She even stands at her window for an extended period of time to enjoy it, and, on the trip to La Push, she launches into LONG-ASS descriptions, enamored with the breathtaking beauty of the Olympic Peninsula, which, it seems, she has not noticed until now.
I've figured something out. The level of attention Meyer pays to a character's beauty is in direct correlation to how important they're supposed to be in the story. When Bella meets Jacob, she likes him immediately and fawns over his "beautiful, silky and russet-colored skin" and "the high planes of his cheekbones" (119) for a good-sized paragraph. The same thing happened when she first saw the Edward and his fam in the cafeteria, and Dr. Cullen at the hospital. As soon as we see a good-looking character, we are supposed to understand that they're pretty cool.
The thing with Jacob though...he's downright likable. I mean, he's not very well fleshed out in the few pages we spend with him, but he talks like an actual teenager, says "cool" a lot, and he manages to carry across some personality in the folklore he tells and a few jokes to boot. It kind of makes it that much more atrocious when his first function in the story is having Bella seduce him to learn more about Edward. Gag. That a supposedly plain, shy girl would even consider such a overtly manipulative tactic says a lot about how plain and shy she actually is, and all the seeds have been planted for Jacob to be that sad sack resigned to the Friend Zone in later installments. (Btw, we are on Suitor #5 now! Can we get someone else to melt into a lovesick pool at Bella's feet? Because we need more of that.)
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: This story has such a claustrophobic feeling that I was glad to see Bella leave the town of Forks and venture out with friends. I appreciate Meyer's instinct to have Bella leave for a while, indulge in the scenery, and to admire and appreciate things outside of herself.
I also enjoyed the Quileute folktales that Jacob tells, to the point where I can almost (almost) forgive Meyer for inventing mythology for an actual tribe in the Pacific Northwest, rather than doing genuine research on them (Meyer has been known to brag a little bit about how little research she does; go figure). It is good to see that the story has a lens that is slightly wider than Bella, that there are people in the story with histories that extend beyond her.
This does piss me off a little, though. Seriously.
And this is fun. Meyer seems to think that driftwood fires burn blue (p 116). Really? Meyer, you are a college graduate. You could have at least used Google to verify that shit before embarrassing yourself with your science fail.
LANGUAGE:There are moments in this chapter where, I'll admit, Meyer shows competence with prose. The descriptions of La Push are, granted, messy and unrestrained (passive voice and adverbs abound, she uses particular words to excess, and some details feel inaccurate, though I can't say for certain because I've never been to Washington state), but this is the first time I sense that Meyer actually cares about language, and is interested rendering her setting with respect. I'll pick and choose lines that I enjoyed.
"The beach had only a thin border of actual sand at the water's edge, after which it grew into millions of large, smooth stones that looked uniformly gray from a distance, but close up were every shade a stone could be: terra-cotta, sea green, lavender, blue gray, dull gold." (115)
"There was a brisk wind coming off the waves, cool and briny. Pelicans floated on the swells while seagulls and a long eagle wheeled above them." (115)
"Eventually, I broke through the emerald confines of the forest and found the rocky shore again. It was low tide, and a tidal river flowed past us on its way out to sea. Along its pebbled banks, shallow pools that never drained completely were teeming with life." (117)
It's not necessarily brilliant prose, but its colorful enough to inspire a fourteen-year-old amateur writer to mimic it when they start describing scenery in their own stories about vampires. And while nothing of consequence actually happens on Bella's hike to the tide pools (Writing 101 rules specify that every moment you include in a story should serve SOME purpose), there's a moment where our protagonist lags behind away from her friends, and the descriptions of the environment do a better job of accurately portraying her isolation than 100+ pages of adolescent whining.
SUBTEXT: Meyer describes herself as anti-human. I mentioned this in a previous post. The proper term for this is misanthropy, and this novel IS, when it boils down to it, misanthropic. A writer who doesn't hold these values would have used the trip to La Push to develop Mike and Jessica and Bella's relationship with them. But of course, Bella's thinking about Edward the whole time, and Meyer's not interested in developing Bella's human relationships at all. In fact, Meyer is actively trying to depict them as insufficient and shallow, so that Edward seems that much more incredible in comparison. (Granted, Jacob does present himself as a decent candidate for a good-old-fashioned, non-supernatural foil for Edward, but anyone who saw the SciFi-channel-TV-movie-event special effects in the New Moon trailer knows that he's a werewolf. So he doesn't count.)
Where Edward is concerned, Meyer demonstrates his superiority over the vulgar human rabble at every turn, often to the point of contradiction. Bella has little problem with this man, whom she barely knows, dragging her across the parking lot and forcing her to get into his car, but she is quick to judge Mike, who doesn't seem to have any faults aside from being a touch nerdy, as "territorial" (112) because he defends Bella from one of Lauren's jibes. The Twilight universe is quick to forgive Edward Cullen for any action, and condemn anyone who isn't Superman for...not being Superman, I guess.
WHAT'S WORKING: If you're a teenager, the idea of being antisocial, on some level, appeals. I mean, Hot Topic has pretty much built its entire franchise around it. Selfishness, pessimism and an obsession with supernatural beauty. That's the very foundation of the character of Bella Swan, and the foundation of this novel.
I don't think that Meyer started writing Twilight with the intention of condemning all humanity and outshining the commonfolk with her own Edward Perfect McManmeat, even if it can be read that way. I think I need to reiterate that everything I write is an opinion, though I'm trying to limit my interpretation to what's on the page, which often provides me with insufficient or contradicting information.
I also want to reiterate the power of a reader, particularly a young female reader, to impose her own interpretation onto things when insufficient information is provided (see the WHAT'S WORKING section in my previous post). The brilliance of Bella Swan may not be the qualities that she actually DISPLAYS, but the holes and contradictions present in the way she is characterized. Girls see either themselves, or what they want to be, the world they would prefer to live in. And I worry I find myself doing this as well, though with adverse effects; because there is so little of Bella that is actually fleshed out, I think I might be imposing onto her people I've known that remind me of her, people who I can only hope will one day realize that you do no have to be openly confrontational or aggressive to be a mean, selfish human being.
The universe of Twilight and particularly the character of Bella Swan are pretty divisive, either loved with abandon or relentlessly despised. I honestly think now that PART of the reason for this is the way things can be imposed in this story.
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This chapter was bearable. That's all I can really say. I want to make clear that I'm trying to cite ANY SINGLE MOMENT that I enjoy in these books. This means that I'm leaving out a LOT of potential riffing material. To cover every problem in this novel would take far more time and energy than I would be willing to put into this blog. Whatever. Chapter 7 for next week.
Wish me luck
Jenchilla
Bella's friends have been talking about this "trip to the La Push beach" since Chapter 2, only the weather has been rainy for...I'm going to assume months. (The passage of time is completely irrelevant in this book; I don't even know what month it's supposed to be.) So Bella goes with Mike, Jessica, Eric, Tyler and pretty much any other non-Cullen student whose name has been mentioned in previous chapters, then Meyer takes great pains to describe the scenery and Bella & Co. look at tide pools. They also encounter some boys visiting from the Quileute reservation, and one of them is Jacob Black, the son of the guy who sold Bella's truck to Charlie. Jacob remembers Bella from the fishing trips she used to take with her father.
The subject of the Cullens comes up, as everybody in this novel is always thinking about the Cullens all the time, and one of the Quileute boys mentions that the Cullens aren't allowed to come to La Push. Desperate to know more, Bella takes Jacob aside, overtly flirting in order to wheedle information from him. ...How shy she is. Her scheming works, and he tells her about old Quileute legends that say his people are the descendants of wolves, and that the Cullens are "the cold ones," who have promised to keep off of Quileute land. "Your people call them vampires," Jacob says (126). Yeah, Edward Cullen is a vampire. It says so in the goddamn blurb.
Bella seems to like Jacob and feels guilty "knowing that [she] used him" (her words!), and she leaves him with a thankful wink and a promise that she will see him again. So ends the beach trip.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Edward makes no appearance in this chapter, so the focus returns to Bella, wandering around in full Passive-Aggressive-Twat mode. Much of the time she's at La Push she's thinking about Edward and wishing he was there, though I'm not sure why, really. She never seems to have that good a time whenever he's around and is always uncomfortable or having an anxiety attack about how beautiful he is or getting annoyed with his condescending attitude.
Whatever. I guess having a good time is for chumps. Bella continues to consider it a chore to have to be around her Forks friends. Mike and Jessica are depicted just short of prattling, drooling idiots, there's a girl named Angela that Bella likes only because she doesn't have a single line of dialogue to show for herself and never forces Bella to hold a conversation, and there's another girl named Lauren, who is the first person to reflect genuine negativity toward Bella (out of jealousy, of course). These characters are all as flat as surfboards. CARE NOT ABOUT THESE PEONS. BELLA AND EDWARD ARE THE ONLY SOULS WHO MATTER.
To Bella's credit, she is pleased to see that the weather is sunny. She even stands at her window for an extended period of time to enjoy it, and, on the trip to La Push, she launches into LONG-ASS descriptions, enamored with the breathtaking beauty of the Olympic Peninsula, which, it seems, she has not noticed until now.
I've figured something out. The level of attention Meyer pays to a character's beauty is in direct correlation to how important they're supposed to be in the story. When Bella meets Jacob, she likes him immediately and fawns over his "beautiful, silky and russet-colored skin" and "the high planes of his cheekbones" (119) for a good-sized paragraph. The same thing happened when she first saw the Edward and his fam in the cafeteria, and Dr. Cullen at the hospital. As soon as we see a good-looking character, we are supposed to understand that they're pretty cool.
The thing with Jacob though...he's downright likable. I mean, he's not very well fleshed out in the few pages we spend with him, but he talks like an actual teenager, says "cool" a lot, and he manages to carry across some personality in the folklore he tells and a few jokes to boot. It kind of makes it that much more atrocious when his first function in the story is having Bella seduce him to learn more about Edward. Gag. That a supposedly plain, shy girl would even consider such a overtly manipulative tactic says a lot about how plain and shy she actually is, and all the seeds have been planted for Jacob to be that sad sack resigned to the Friend Zone in later installments. (Btw, we are on Suitor #5 now! Can we get someone else to melt into a lovesick pool at Bella's feet? Because we need more of that.)
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: This story has such a claustrophobic feeling that I was glad to see Bella leave the town of Forks and venture out with friends. I appreciate Meyer's instinct to have Bella leave for a while, indulge in the scenery, and to admire and appreciate things outside of herself.
I also enjoyed the Quileute folktales that Jacob tells, to the point where I can almost (almost) forgive Meyer for inventing mythology for an actual tribe in the Pacific Northwest, rather than doing genuine research on them (Meyer has been known to brag a little bit about how little research she does; go figure). It is good to see that the story has a lens that is slightly wider than Bella, that there are people in the story with histories that extend beyond her.
This does piss me off a little, though. Seriously.
And this is fun. Meyer seems to think that driftwood fires burn blue (p 116). Really? Meyer, you are a college graduate. You could have at least used Google to verify that shit before embarrassing yourself with your science fail.
LANGUAGE:There are moments in this chapter where, I'll admit, Meyer shows competence with prose. The descriptions of La Push are, granted, messy and unrestrained (passive voice and adverbs abound, she uses particular words to excess, and some details feel inaccurate, though I can't say for certain because I've never been to Washington state), but this is the first time I sense that Meyer actually cares about language, and is interested rendering her setting with respect. I'll pick and choose lines that I enjoyed.
"The beach had only a thin border of actual sand at the water's edge, after which it grew into millions of large, smooth stones that looked uniformly gray from a distance, but close up were every shade a stone could be: terra-cotta, sea green, lavender, blue gray, dull gold." (115)
"There was a brisk wind coming off the waves, cool and briny. Pelicans floated on the swells while seagulls and a long eagle wheeled above them." (115)
"Eventually, I broke through the emerald confines of the forest and found the rocky shore again. It was low tide, and a tidal river flowed past us on its way out to sea. Along its pebbled banks, shallow pools that never drained completely were teeming with life." (117)
It's not necessarily brilliant prose, but its colorful enough to inspire a fourteen-year-old amateur writer to mimic it when they start describing scenery in their own stories about vampires. And while nothing of consequence actually happens on Bella's hike to the tide pools (Writing 101 rules specify that every moment you include in a story should serve SOME purpose), there's a moment where our protagonist lags behind away from her friends, and the descriptions of the environment do a better job of accurately portraying her isolation than 100+ pages of adolescent whining.
SUBTEXT: Meyer describes herself as anti-human. I mentioned this in a previous post. The proper term for this is misanthropy, and this novel IS, when it boils down to it, misanthropic. A writer who doesn't hold these values would have used the trip to La Push to develop Mike and Jessica and Bella's relationship with them. But of course, Bella's thinking about Edward the whole time, and Meyer's not interested in developing Bella's human relationships at all. In fact, Meyer is actively trying to depict them as insufficient and shallow, so that Edward seems that much more incredible in comparison. (Granted, Jacob does present himself as a decent candidate for a good-old-fashioned, non-supernatural foil for Edward, but anyone who saw the SciFi-channel-TV-movie-event special effects in the New Moon trailer knows that he's a werewolf. So he doesn't count.)
Where Edward is concerned, Meyer demonstrates his superiority over the vulgar human rabble at every turn, often to the point of contradiction. Bella has little problem with this man, whom she barely knows, dragging her across the parking lot and forcing her to get into his car, but she is quick to judge Mike, who doesn't seem to have any faults aside from being a touch nerdy, as "territorial" (112) because he defends Bella from one of Lauren's jibes. The Twilight universe is quick to forgive Edward Cullen for any action, and condemn anyone who isn't Superman for...not being Superman, I guess.
WHAT'S WORKING: If you're a teenager, the idea of being antisocial, on some level, appeals. I mean, Hot Topic has pretty much built its entire franchise around it. Selfishness, pessimism and an obsession with supernatural beauty. That's the very foundation of the character of Bella Swan, and the foundation of this novel.
I don't think that Meyer started writing Twilight with the intention of condemning all humanity and outshining the commonfolk with her own Edward Perfect McManmeat, even if it can be read that way. I think I need to reiterate that everything I write is an opinion, though I'm trying to limit my interpretation to what's on the page, which often provides me with insufficient or contradicting information.
I also want to reiterate the power of a reader, particularly a young female reader, to impose her own interpretation onto things when insufficient information is provided (see the WHAT'S WORKING section in my previous post). The brilliance of Bella Swan may not be the qualities that she actually DISPLAYS, but the holes and contradictions present in the way she is characterized. Girls see either themselves, or what they want to be, the world they would prefer to live in. And I worry I find myself doing this as well, though with adverse effects; because there is so little of Bella that is actually fleshed out, I think I might be imposing onto her people I've known that remind me of her, people who I can only hope will one day realize that you do no have to be openly confrontational or aggressive to be a mean, selfish human being.
The universe of Twilight and particularly the character of Bella Swan are pretty divisive, either loved with abandon or relentlessly despised. I honestly think now that PART of the reason for this is the way things can be imposed in this story.
-
-
-
This chapter was bearable. That's all I can really say. I want to make clear that I'm trying to cite ANY SINGLE MOMENT that I enjoy in these books. This means that I'm leaving out a LOT of potential riffing material. To cover every problem in this novel would take far more time and energy than I would be willing to put into this blog. Whatever. Chapter 7 for next week.
Wish me luck
Jenchilla
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Chapter 5: Blood Type
109 pages in...
Announcements: the Eclipse trailer has successfully infected the internets, and I wanted to take this special moment to share it with everyone:
Hahaha. Ha. Haaa. Don't judge me. I need the snark to help alleviate the nausea.
SO. Onward.
It's later on, that same day Edward hypnotizes Bella into going with him to Seattle. At lunch in the cafeteria, he's sitting apart from his family and beckons her to come sit with him. They participate in a 7 pg Q&A over Bella's theories about what kind of supernatural being Edward is, and the consensus that Bella arrives at is that Edward is trying to tell her he is dangerous, and this is why he doesn't want them to be friends. However, Bella's also set on the idea that he is "not bad," because he of course hasn't done or said anything remotely creepy lately. (We'll get to this. Oh we will.)
After lunch, Bella goes on to Biology while Edward ditches class, but, lo and behold, they are testing blood types, and the sight of all the students pricking their fingers sends Bella into a swoon. Lovesick Mike helps her to the nurse's office but Edward reappears, intercepting Bella, literally carrying her the rest of the way. When Bella recovers from her faint, Edward eye humps the elderly nurse into letting her go home early (gross...), so he walks with her out to the parking lot. When she starts to head off to her car he GRABS HER JACKET AND DRAGS HER ACROSS THE PARKING LOT TO HIS VOLVO, FORCING HER TO GET IN.
Stranger danger! STRANGER DANGER!!!
Of course, the pretense is that Bella shouldn't drive in "her condition," and Bella, noting that it's not in her power to defy Edward, complies. On the way home, they have a conversation spurred by Edward playing Debussey, and the subject comes up about their home lives and about the upcoming trip to the La Push beach that Mike is planning. Edward won't go. He has a "camping trip" planned with his brother Emmett. Edward ends their conversation with this little gem, just before he drops Bella off at Charlie's: "Don't be offended [ladies, prepare to be offended], but you seem to be one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet. So...try not to fall into the ocean or get run over or anything, all right?" (109).
...You asshat. Bella's mad at him and slams the door when she gets out of the car.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: While Bella continues to be her insipid self, the real star of this chapter is Edward, who demonstrates himself to be, in multiple instances, the kind of love interest who likes to have the upper hand in conversation, who manipulates people's emotions unabashedly, and who prefers to keep Bella confused and guessing. And he is all kinds of creepy. He summons Bella from across the cafeteria, beckoning her with his index finger and winking (87) -- when is it ever not repulsive for a guy to do that! -- and Bella comes to sit by him as if pulled by some inescapable magnetism. When she mentions the change in his behavior, he responds with a series of unsettling comments:
"I decided as long as I was going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly." (87)
Yes, those first four women I raped and murdered, I think they sealed the deal, so one more won't make much of a difference.
"I think your friends are angry with me for stealing you." [And he says this next line with a "wicked glint in his eyes"] "I may not give you back, though." (87-88)
You see, I'm gonna take you down this dirt rode where a good friend of mine lives. They call him the Misfit.
"[I'm] giving up trying to be good. I'm just going to do what I want now, and let the chips fall where they may" (88)
Aaaand that's my moral compass, SIGNING OUT.
I'm not going to cite every single creepy thing Edward says, because pretty much everything comes off with this psuedo-civil Hannibal Lector flair. It's also important to note that none of this triggers any noticeable alarms in Bella, though his cryptic statements do frustrate her, and she is aware, at least, that his default mode is I'm-good-looking-enough-to-be-perpetually-condescending-to-women. He's always chuckling, smirking, snickering, or stifling a laugh or a smile any time Bella gets irritated, embarrassed, or tries to demonstrate that she is in any way self-sufficient. To her credit, she does deliver a couple of eerily well-spoken monologues to him on pg 90 about how his behavior pisses her off.
But no matter Bella's frustration with Edward, she always finds herself completely transfixed by his good looks, and therefore unable to actively defy him. It is the ONLY thing she seems to notice about him. When she says, "I don't believe you're bad," she never rationalizes with the logic typical of one making a statement like this, e.g., You saved my life, therefore you must be good. That NEVER comes up. It seems as if she only has to look at his beautiful face to make her judgments, which, unsurprisingly, seems to be the way the story would like for us to read all of its characters.
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: Five chapters in. Twice now Edward has played savior to Bella. Not only is Bella's swooning spell repetitious and unnecessary, it also perpetuates the idea that Bella has no agency. Both incidents, the car accident and the blood lab, are circumstantial, authorial interference sending our narrator once again into Edward's arms. The events of Bella's life are not based on her decisions or character, and Meyer tries to explain this by having Edward say that Bella is a "magnet" for trouble...just...by some kind of glittery Mary Sue magic apparently.
I have never read a romance as inorganic and contrived as this one. Bella is being manhandled into this relationship; she can't resist Edward, mentally or physically.She WILL be in love with Edward, plot be damned, and Edward, though he seems to have marginally more agency than Bella, is basically saying, "I'm having some major problems with this INEXPLICABLE DESIRE, so I'm just going to give up and pursue this girl who I'm obsessed with for no reason."
This is not a plot. It's is a game with a couple of one-dimensional chess pieces.
LANGUAGE: The conversations Bella and Edward have are long. Like, really long. They take up maybe 70% of this chapter. To imagine them, picture the conversations between Hannibal Lector and Clarice Starling, mesh them together with the quick-witted bickering of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, throw in some 80s teen movie, then remove all of the nuance, psycho intellectualism, and social commentary. That's about what we have here. Bella spouts sentences like, "I think you've made your opinion of the subject of my intellect clear" (89) and "I just wondered...if you could warn me beforehand the next time you decide to ignore me for my own good. Just so I'm prepared." You can almost hear where she's supposed to lapse into a British accent, desperately trying to evoke Pride and Prejudice for any 14-year-old who may have seen the Kiera Nightly rendition. A page or so later, Bella is back to saying things like "Holy crow" (who the fuck says "holy crow"?), and "Dang" (92). (Btw, nobody swears in this book...unless they mutter "low oaths.")
We also have Meyer's typical disrespect for Writing 101 standards. '"No,' I disagreed quickly" (90) may be the most atrocious thing I've ever seen I've ever seen in print, and, young writers, never use the word "infinitesimally" (103) unless you're writing a scientific paper.
SUBTEXT: Edward is a puzzle to me. Do fans love him a) in ignorance of his qualities or b) in response to them? If it's a, they're not reading closely and probably aren't interested in reading closely, but if it's b, then maybe I'm overlooking something.
I guess I've been into the bad boy. I mean, when I first saw Silence of the Lambs and watched the scene where you see that Hannibal Lector has drawn a picture of Clarice Starling with a lamb, my initial response was, "Aw, he really respects and cares for her!" Subsequently, Hannibal then ripped a guy's face off and wore it. So, if you have a character that is charismatic and interesting enough, you will still root for him, regardless of his behavior. But in this case, Edward isn't particularly charismatic or interesting, and Bella is CERTAINLY no Clarice Starling, which just makes the power play between these characters all the more unsettling to me when it's acceptable, even admirable, to fans of the series.
So far, the story is telling me that Bella, who is embarrassed at the idea of being weak and who shows some desire to be a self-sufficient young woman (the one quality in her that I actually LIKE), really needs to be taken down a peg and shown that she does need someone to take care of her, because she is fragile and vulnerable. And I could maybe understand this theme (even if I don't agree with it) if Bella was portrayed as the kind of person who actively takes risks, who maybe decides, "I'm going throw myself in the middle of a dangerous highway accident because people might need my help" or "I'm going to try to donate blood today even though I didn't eat lunch," and these choices could result in Edward having to save her and set her straight.
But Bella DOESN'T take risks. She doesn't DO anything. She's just trying to go about her normal boring day and attracts trouble through some magical magnetic forcefield. The universe of Twilight is constantly saying to Bella, "Oh? You think you can survive today without someone around to rescue you? Well guess what. YOU'RE A HEMOPHILIAC NOW!"
And in all of this, Edward is right. He's always right. He's right in ways he has no right to be right. When Bella finds herself on her back in the nurse's office, she remembers that Edward decided to play hooky instead of going to biology, and that he justified this decision to her.
'"You were right,' I moaned letting my eyes close.
'I usually am -- but about what in particular this time?'
'Ditching is healthy.'" (98)
Yeah! Even though Bella being a hemophiliac and Edward skipping class have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER, ditching is fucking healthy! Remember that kids. Edward wants you to make the right decision...
WHAT'S WORKING? I'll put it in bullet points:
Here's an interesting thing. This cool lady brings this up in her video review of the My Little Pony movie, where she talks about how boys' cartoons have considerably more conflict than girls' cartoons, which is acceptable because girls are more interested in the stories they can elaborate upon, rather than the story that is ACTUALLY there. I understand what she's saying because I remember the cartoons I watched as a kid/young teen, how the characters were bland and one-dimensional, and yet the imaginary games I played and the stories I thought up involving those characters were much more nuanced and complicated. I took what I saw and imagined greater things.
Hmm...this might explain a) why there are so many female fanfiction writers, and b) why so many women are attracted to fixer-upper boyfriends. Whoops.
Maybe that's part of what's going on with Twilight. Girls fill in the blanks. They have decided from the start what they want Edward and Bella to be, and they imagine accordingly. Even if Edward has a creepy undertone, they know in their heart of hearts that he is good, just as Bella does, because the narratives they have already established in their heads say so.
And Meyer's not doing absolutely everything wrong. There are some interesting albeit forced moments going on when Bella and Edward talk about their families. It's the first time Bella shows an interest in Edward's personal life and the first time the two of them actually share things in common, which is what teenagers do when they like each other. This was, however, about 3% of the chapter, and by the time it occurred I had already witnessed Edward pulling Bella across the parking lot by her jacket, so any respect this asshole had for this girl seemed moot.
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You guys, this...this is hard. I'm trying to set aside all of my feminist and literary sensibilities but...after reading this far into the book, I feel like I've just polished off an entire box of ho-hos. I mean, I feel physically ill. Here's to hoping I can get through Chapter 6.
Wish me luck
Jenchilla
Announcements: the Eclipse trailer has successfully infected the internets, and I wanted to take this special moment to share it with everyone:
Hahaha. Ha. Haaa. Don't judge me. I need the snark to help alleviate the nausea.
SO. Onward.
It's later on, that same day Edward hypnotizes Bella into going with him to Seattle. At lunch in the cafeteria, he's sitting apart from his family and beckons her to come sit with him. They participate in a 7 pg Q&A over Bella's theories about what kind of supernatural being Edward is, and the consensus that Bella arrives at is that Edward is trying to tell her he is dangerous, and this is why he doesn't want them to be friends. However, Bella's also set on the idea that he is "not bad," because he of course hasn't done or said anything remotely creepy lately. (We'll get to this. Oh we will.)
After lunch, Bella goes on to Biology while Edward ditches class, but, lo and behold, they are testing blood types, and the sight of all the students pricking their fingers sends Bella into a swoon. Lovesick Mike helps her to the nurse's office but Edward reappears, intercepting Bella, literally carrying her the rest of the way. When Bella recovers from her faint, Edward eye humps the elderly nurse into letting her go home early (gross...), so he walks with her out to the parking lot. When she starts to head off to her car he GRABS HER JACKET AND DRAGS HER ACROSS THE PARKING LOT TO HIS VOLVO, FORCING HER TO GET IN.
Stranger danger! STRANGER DANGER!!!
Of course, the pretense is that Bella shouldn't drive in "her condition," and Bella, noting that it's not in her power to defy Edward, complies. On the way home, they have a conversation spurred by Edward playing Debussey, and the subject comes up about their home lives and about the upcoming trip to the La Push beach that Mike is planning. Edward won't go. He has a "camping trip" planned with his brother Emmett. Edward ends their conversation with this little gem, just before he drops Bella off at Charlie's: "Don't be offended [ladies, prepare to be offended], but you seem to be one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet. So...try not to fall into the ocean or get run over or anything, all right?" (109).
...You asshat. Bella's mad at him and slams the door when she gets out of the car.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: While Bella continues to be her insipid self, the real star of this chapter is Edward, who demonstrates himself to be, in multiple instances, the kind of love interest who likes to have the upper hand in conversation, who manipulates people's emotions unabashedly, and who prefers to keep Bella confused and guessing. And he is all kinds of creepy. He summons Bella from across the cafeteria, beckoning her with his index finger and winking (87) -- when is it ever not repulsive for a guy to do that! -- and Bella comes to sit by him as if pulled by some inescapable magnetism. When she mentions the change in his behavior, he responds with a series of unsettling comments:
"I decided as long as I was going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly." (87)
Yes, those first four women I raped and murdered, I think they sealed the deal, so one more won't make much of a difference.
"I think your friends are angry with me for stealing you." [And he says this next line with a "wicked glint in his eyes"] "I may not give you back, though." (87-88)
You see, I'm gonna take you down this dirt rode where a good friend of mine lives. They call him the Misfit.
"[I'm] giving up trying to be good. I'm just going to do what I want now, and let the chips fall where they may" (88)
Aaaand that's my moral compass, SIGNING OUT.
I'm not going to cite every single creepy thing Edward says, because pretty much everything comes off with this psuedo-civil Hannibal Lector flair. It's also important to note that none of this triggers any noticeable alarms in Bella, though his cryptic statements do frustrate her, and she is aware, at least, that his default mode is I'm-good-looking-enough-to-be-perpetually-condescending-to-women. He's always chuckling, smirking, snickering, or stifling a laugh or a smile any time Bella gets irritated, embarrassed, or tries to demonstrate that she is in any way self-sufficient. To her credit, she does deliver a couple of eerily well-spoken monologues to him on pg 90 about how his behavior pisses her off.
But no matter Bella's frustration with Edward, she always finds herself completely transfixed by his good looks, and therefore unable to actively defy him. It is the ONLY thing she seems to notice about him. When she says, "I don't believe you're bad," she never rationalizes with the logic typical of one making a statement like this, e.g., You saved my life, therefore you must be good. That NEVER comes up. It seems as if she only has to look at his beautiful face to make her judgments, which, unsurprisingly, seems to be the way the story would like for us to read all of its characters.
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: Five chapters in. Twice now Edward has played savior to Bella. Not only is Bella's swooning spell repetitious and unnecessary, it also perpetuates the idea that Bella has no agency. Both incidents, the car accident and the blood lab, are circumstantial, authorial interference sending our narrator once again into Edward's arms. The events of Bella's life are not based on her decisions or character, and Meyer tries to explain this by having Edward say that Bella is a "magnet" for trouble...just...by some kind of glittery Mary Sue magic apparently.
I have never read a romance as inorganic and contrived as this one. Bella is being manhandled into this relationship; she can't resist Edward, mentally or physically.She WILL be in love with Edward, plot be damned, and Edward, though he seems to have marginally more agency than Bella, is basically saying, "I'm having some major problems with this INEXPLICABLE DESIRE, so I'm just going to give up and pursue this girl who I'm obsessed with for no reason."
This is not a plot. It's is a game with a couple of one-dimensional chess pieces.
LANGUAGE: The conversations Bella and Edward have are long. Like, really long. They take up maybe 70% of this chapter. To imagine them, picture the conversations between Hannibal Lector and Clarice Starling, mesh them together with the quick-witted bickering of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, throw in some 80s teen movie, then remove all of the nuance, psycho intellectualism, and social commentary. That's about what we have here. Bella spouts sentences like, "I think you've made your opinion of the subject of my intellect clear" (89) and "I just wondered...if you could warn me beforehand the next time you decide to ignore me for my own good. Just so I'm prepared." You can almost hear where she's supposed to lapse into a British accent, desperately trying to evoke Pride and Prejudice for any 14-year-old who may have seen the Kiera Nightly rendition. A page or so later, Bella is back to saying things like "Holy crow" (who the fuck says "holy crow"?), and "Dang" (92). (Btw, nobody swears in this book...unless they mutter "low oaths.")
We also have Meyer's typical disrespect for Writing 101 standards. '"No,' I disagreed quickly" (90) may be the most atrocious thing I've ever seen I've ever seen in print, and, young writers, never use the word "infinitesimally" (103) unless you're writing a scientific paper.
SUBTEXT: Edward is a puzzle to me. Do fans love him a) in ignorance of his qualities or b) in response to them? If it's a, they're not reading closely and probably aren't interested in reading closely, but if it's b, then maybe I'm overlooking something.
I guess I've been into the bad boy. I mean, when I first saw Silence of the Lambs and watched the scene where you see that Hannibal Lector has drawn a picture of Clarice Starling with a lamb, my initial response was, "Aw, he really respects and cares for her!" Subsequently, Hannibal then ripped a guy's face off and wore it. So, if you have a character that is charismatic and interesting enough, you will still root for him, regardless of his behavior. But in this case, Edward isn't particularly charismatic or interesting, and Bella is CERTAINLY no Clarice Starling, which just makes the power play between these characters all the more unsettling to me when it's acceptable, even admirable, to fans of the series.
So far, the story is telling me that Bella, who is embarrassed at the idea of being weak and who shows some desire to be a self-sufficient young woman (the one quality in her that I actually LIKE), really needs to be taken down a peg and shown that she does need someone to take care of her, because she is fragile and vulnerable. And I could maybe understand this theme (even if I don't agree with it) if Bella was portrayed as the kind of person who actively takes risks, who maybe decides, "I'm going throw myself in the middle of a dangerous highway accident because people might need my help" or "I'm going to try to donate blood today even though I didn't eat lunch," and these choices could result in Edward having to save her and set her straight.
But Bella DOESN'T take risks. She doesn't DO anything. She's just trying to go about her normal boring day and attracts trouble through some magical magnetic forcefield. The universe of Twilight is constantly saying to Bella, "Oh? You think you can survive today without someone around to rescue you? Well guess what. YOU'RE A HEMOPHILIAC NOW!"
And in all of this, Edward is right. He's always right. He's right in ways he has no right to be right. When Bella finds herself on her back in the nurse's office, she remembers that Edward decided to play hooky instead of going to biology, and that he justified this decision to her.
'"You were right,' I moaned letting my eyes close.
'I usually am -- but about what in particular this time?'
'Ditching is healthy.'" (98)
Yeah! Even though Bella being a hemophiliac and Edward skipping class have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER, ditching is fucking healthy! Remember that kids. Edward wants you to make the right decision...
WHAT'S WORKING? I'll put it in bullet points:
- This courtship takes all the pressure off of the female participant
- Edward is enough of a blank slate to insert whoever you like into his character
- If Meyer's already convinced you that YOU ARE BELLA, it's easy to insert yourself too
Here's an interesting thing. This cool lady brings this up in her video review of the My Little Pony movie, where she talks about how boys' cartoons have considerably more conflict than girls' cartoons, which is acceptable because girls are more interested in the stories they can elaborate upon, rather than the story that is ACTUALLY there. I understand what she's saying because I remember the cartoons I watched as a kid/young teen, how the characters were bland and one-dimensional, and yet the imaginary games I played and the stories I thought up involving those characters were much more nuanced and complicated. I took what I saw and imagined greater things.
Hmm...this might explain a) why there are so many female fanfiction writers, and b) why so many women are attracted to fixer-upper boyfriends. Whoops.
Maybe that's part of what's going on with Twilight. Girls fill in the blanks. They have decided from the start what they want Edward and Bella to be, and they imagine accordingly. Even if Edward has a creepy undertone, they know in their heart of hearts that he is good, just as Bella does, because the narratives they have already established in their heads say so.
And Meyer's not doing absolutely everything wrong. There are some interesting albeit forced moments going on when Bella and Edward talk about their families. It's the first time Bella shows an interest in Edward's personal life and the first time the two of them actually share things in common, which is what teenagers do when they like each other. This was, however, about 3% of the chapter, and by the time it occurred I had already witnessed Edward pulling Bella across the parking lot by her jacket, so any respect this asshole had for this girl seemed moot.
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You guys, this...this is hard. I'm trying to set aside all of my feminist and literary sensibilities but...after reading this far into the book, I feel like I've just polished off an entire box of ho-hos. I mean, I feel physically ill. Here's to hoping I can get through Chapter 6.
Wish me luck
Jenchilla
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Chapter 4: Invitations
84 pages in...
We start off with that dream Bella was talking about in Ch. 3, which features Edward "radiating" light from his skin (Foreshadowing!?!?). After having this dream, Bella's obsession with Edward reaches a critical level, though in the month following the accident, he is aloof toward her. Her natural conclusion is that he, um, regrets saving her from the van? So she tries to ignore him until he starts talking to her again and, uh --
Jesus. You know what? This chapter is 17 pages long and here's what happens in it:
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: It wouldn't be so hard to handle Bella if other characters treated her like the outsider she thinks she is, but everyone loves her without reason, the tally of boys who are obsessed with her has reached four now, and she continues to view the people of Forks with enough disdain to curl wallpaper. Surely someone at the school realizes how much Bella hates everything. The girl hasn't experienced one iota of genuine joy the entire time I've been trapped inside her head.
I think what fans of the series don't seem to realize is that Bella's pessimistic, self absorbed qualities are not the central obstacle for readers like myself. I can deal with pessimistic, self absorbed characters, as most any teenager would at times display these qualities. What I CAN'T deal a character who is endlessly admired and never gets treated in the way she would actually be treated. What's worse, none of Bella's admirers have any real bearing on the plot. It would in fact make MORE sense if people hated or ignored Bella when she first arrived in Forks. It would give her an actual motive to seek a connection with the Cullens, the other outsiders at school, and it would make her more sympathetic. But it's as though Meyer couldn't imagine a world in which Bella was not the center of attention.
For readers that are capable of seeing Bella as themselves, it might make enjoying the book that much easier. Instead of having to deal with all the typical obstacles of making friends, fitting in and being liked, the self-inserted girl has all of those problems steamrolled out of the way by the author. Since everything in the world outside of Edward is portrayed as dopey, dull and insufficient, there is no reason for us to worry about any of it.
But I digress. On to more important things, like Bella and Edward's steamy, erm, "relationship." Edward is all over the map, only consistent in the way his moods shift dramatically during his conversations with Bella, from amused to angry and back again; he's a series of extremes and contradictions. He insists "You really should stay away from me" (84), just seconds after asking Bella if she'll go to Seattle with him. And I'm pleased to see Bella acknowledge and be angered by his assholish capriciousness. "Do you have a multiple personality disorder?" she asks on p 82. For once, she and I are on the same wavelength.
Edward does little to explain his behavior. He's prone to vaguely creepy, cryptic remarks, the weirdest of which is, "...I'm tired of trying to stay away from you, Bella" (84), which you could certainly picture someone whispering as they catch up to you at night in the Walmart parking lot, just seconds before the chloroform kicks in. Creep. Tastic.
But what makes this even stranger is Bella's response to Edward. She kind of hates him, which is fun to observe, but when she looks at his face, his beauty is so overpowering that it causes a debilitating physical and mental reaction.
"I couldn't believe the rush of emotion pulsing through me -- just because he'd happened to look at me for the first time in a half-dozen weeks. I couldn't allow him to have this level of influence over me. It was pathetic. More than pathetic, it was unhealthy." (74)
Oh. OH. So Bella knows that her reaction to Edward is unhealthy. And yet, she can't seem to do anything about it. So what does she feel exactly when she looks at Edward's face? Adoration? Joy? Love?
"His eyes were light again today, a deep, golden honey color. Then I had to look down, to reassemble my now-tangled thoughts." (81)
"His eyes were gloriously intense as he uttered that last sentence [the "I'm tired of trying to stay away..." sentence]. I couldn't remember how to breathe." (84)
"[after Edward asks Bella to go to Seattle] I couldn't speak yet, so I just nodded." (84)
Hm. If Bella feels anything remotely pleasant when she looks at Edward, she doesn't talk about it. In fact, Bella even closes her eyes at one point so that she doesn't have to look at Edward's face and can think straight. In short, Edward makes Bella go stupid any time he looks at her, and Bella seems to be really uncomfortable with this. She knows that Edward could ask her anything and she would be unable to refuse him. Really, it's more akin to being glamoured than having a crush on someone.
(Hahaha...man do I love True Blood.)
I'm also really annoyed by how the secondary characters are treated in this book, but it's consistent with the fantasy Meyer has created. Meyer goes out of her way to show that none of these characters have inner lives aside from Bella and Edward, or if they do, their inner lives aren't important. Bella's friend Jessica, who has a crush on Mike, is consistently shown being nothing but jubilant around Bella, and yet she's categorized as liking Bella only for her "inexplicable popularity" (71), an unfair assessment that we're supposed to read as god-given truth, just because Bella thinks it. Charlie, who showed potential in the first chapter, has been resigned to sitting in the background and eating Bella's cooking. Bella's mother is a hysterical parental figure meant to be consistently lied to.
In all of this, Bella stands alone as the one whose life is worthy of a 500p novel. Replace the name "Bella" with the name "XY or Z," rinse and repeat.
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: I'm still perplexed over details involving the car accident. We discover that Bella's truck has suffered "minimal damage" (76) in the collision, while "Tyler's parents had to sell their van for parts." What...did it explode? Setting aside the retard logistics of Bella's truck only needing a new taillight, how fast was this idiot Tyler going? Was he drag racing in the parking lot -- STOP! Stop. Thou shalt not apply logic to Twilight, for ye shall be sorely disappointed.
Really. REALLY. Logistics do not matter. I have a feeling that if you've reached this point in the novel and are asking questions (Minor ones like the one above or even broader ones: Why do all of these people like Bella? Why is she putting up with Edward's behavior? Why aren't we supposed to care about anybody but these two people?) then this is NOT the book for you.
LANGUAGE: Language problems persist, particularly in the dialogue tags, which continue to be annoying. Meyer shows some talent for dialogue itself when the secondary characters are talking; they sound like actual teenagers. Bella's language tends to be stiffer than her friends', less so in dialogue but ridiculously so when she's addressing the reader. "To my dismay, I found myself the center of attention for the rest of the week" (68) (What teenager says, "To my dismay"?) This is done to depict Bella in a class above her peers. Oh, and Edward also talks like he's got something up his butt, however...he's a vampire so...I'll deal with it.
SUBTEXT: Meyer has gone on record as claiming that she is not anti-feminist (she's "anti-human," which is...better...for some reason?). Her opinion is that the foundation of feminism is "being able to choose." Well...that's an interpretation that a lot of women seem to be adopting, but it's not what I adhere to. For instance, a woman can "choose" not to vote because she believes that men have a better head for politics, which was in fact the stance of many women during the suffrage movement. I see feminism as being about equality, assuming equal weight in society, taking responsibility for your actions and recognizing the impact your choices have.
But no matter. Let's apply Meyer's definition of feminism to Bella Swan so far. How much of what has happened to Bella happened because of the choices she's made? Well, she made the initial choice to come to Forks, I'll grant her that. But did she choose to have Edward talk to her? Did she choose to be obsessed with him? Did she choose to have him rescue her? Um. She did not. She didn't even choose to go to Seattle with him. The story makes very clear that she was so tongue tied and stupefied by Edward's beauty that she physically could not say no to him.
So far, Meyer's whole universe is set up so that Bella can be carried from plot point A to plot point B. (She's a Port-a-Bella!) Choice is irrelevant. Do I think Meyer sat down at her computer saying, "I'm going to write an anti-feminist novel now"? No. I think Meyer's fantasy of Edward took the front seat, and it never occurred to her to make her female protagonist an autonomous individual whose decisions have actual weight. This kind of setup has obviously appealed to a lot of people.
WHAT'S WORKING? Do girls want this? They really want a guy who stupefies them into submission? A multitude of women share Meyer's fantasy. If I take a step back, I sort of get it.
If someone falls in love with you through no action of your own, think about the pressure that takes off of you. You wouldn't need to actually be interesting (In fact, On p 79, Bella takes a paragraph to think about how uninteresting she is, how it is impossible that Edward likes her, and I'm inclined to agree; none of her thoughts or emotions have been particularly insightful so far and she doesn't have any hobbies to speak of). And you wouldn't need to say or do the right thing or go out of your way to impress anyone; your guy would be in love with you regardless, and he would rescue you any time you found yourself in some perilous situation, which would occur often through no fault of your own. Not-doing-anything is part of the fantasy.
It's understandable. Teenagers find themselves in a weird half-state, girls particularly, struggling to hang onto their childhoods while facing budding sexuality at the same time, feeling the pressure that comes with turning into responsible adults. Flanagan discusses this in her article about Twilight, in which she claims that girls have a tougher time with sexuality than boys because they are "far more rooted in the domestic routines and traditions of their families, which constitute the vital link between the sweet cocooning of childhood and their impending departure from it." Hm. That's a huge generalization but...okay. Whether or not you think that's true, Twilight provides certain tropes (and these aren't old tropes, folks; they've been around for thousands of years) for its female readers to fall back on: in the Twilight universe, Bella has an extremely handsome love interest to take care of her; she's essentially carted around like a child, and much of what happens to her is not her own responsibility.
THIS. IS. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.
In the meantime however, Furious Bella is a bit more tolerable than Mopey Bella. There's a moment in this chapter when she contemplates rear-ending Edward's Volvo with her megatruck, and another moment when she refers to him as a "stupid, shiny Volvo owner" (83) both of which tingled my enjoyment neurons. That last bit is also funny because the comma usage is incorrect; the sentence doesn't read that Edward is stupid and owns a shiny Volvo. It actually reads that Edward is stupid, shiny and a Volvo owner, which is amusing to anyone who knows what happens to Meyer's vampires in sunlight. (Shaolin Grammar PUNCH!!! YAAAAH!!)
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Chapter 5 for next week. Edward reveals to Bella that he was booted off the set of True Blood and now cannot legally come within five hundred feet of Anna Paquin.
Wish me luck,
Jenchilla
We start off with that dream Bella was talking about in Ch. 3, which features Edward "radiating" light from his skin (Foreshadowing!?!?). After having this dream, Bella's obsession with Edward reaches a critical level, though in the month following the accident, he is aloof toward her. Her natural conclusion is that he, um, regrets saving her from the van? So she tries to ignore him until he starts talking to her again and, uh --
Jesus. You know what? This chapter is 17 pages long and here's what happens in it:
- Mike asks Bella to the upcoming spring dance.
- Eric asks Bella to the upcoming spring dance.
- Tyler, the van guy, asks Bella to the upcoming spring dance.
- Bella refuses each guy by suddenly deciding to have a trip to Seattle that weekend.
- Edward is aloof toward Bella, then disdainful toward her, then amused by her, then he tells her they shouldn't be friends, then he finds her hilarious, then he condescends her some more, then he tells her they shouldn't be friends, then he invites her to go with him to Seattle, then he tells her she should stay away from him.
- Bella fumes.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: It wouldn't be so hard to handle Bella if other characters treated her like the outsider she thinks she is, but everyone loves her without reason, the tally of boys who are obsessed with her has reached four now, and she continues to view the people of Forks with enough disdain to curl wallpaper. Surely someone at the school realizes how much Bella hates everything. The girl hasn't experienced one iota of genuine joy the entire time I've been trapped inside her head.
I think what fans of the series don't seem to realize is that Bella's pessimistic, self absorbed qualities are not the central obstacle for readers like myself. I can deal with pessimistic, self absorbed characters, as most any teenager would at times display these qualities. What I CAN'T deal a character who is endlessly admired and never gets treated in the way she would actually be treated. What's worse, none of Bella's admirers have any real bearing on the plot. It would in fact make MORE sense if people hated or ignored Bella when she first arrived in Forks. It would give her an actual motive to seek a connection with the Cullens, the other outsiders at school, and it would make her more sympathetic. But it's as though Meyer couldn't imagine a world in which Bella was not the center of attention.
For readers that are capable of seeing Bella as themselves, it might make enjoying the book that much easier. Instead of having to deal with all the typical obstacles of making friends, fitting in and being liked, the self-inserted girl has all of those problems steamrolled out of the way by the author. Since everything in the world outside of Edward is portrayed as dopey, dull and insufficient, there is no reason for us to worry about any of it.
But I digress. On to more important things, like Bella and Edward's steamy, erm, "relationship." Edward is all over the map, only consistent in the way his moods shift dramatically during his conversations with Bella, from amused to angry and back again; he's a series of extremes and contradictions. He insists "You really should stay away from me" (84), just seconds after asking Bella if she'll go to Seattle with him. And I'm pleased to see Bella acknowledge and be angered by his assholish capriciousness. "Do you have a multiple personality disorder?" she asks on p 82. For once, she and I are on the same wavelength.
Edward does little to explain his behavior. He's prone to vaguely creepy, cryptic remarks, the weirdest of which is, "...I'm tired of trying to stay away from you, Bella" (84), which you could certainly picture someone whispering as they catch up to you at night in the Walmart parking lot, just seconds before the chloroform kicks in. Creep. Tastic.
But what makes this even stranger is Bella's response to Edward. She kind of hates him, which is fun to observe, but when she looks at his face, his beauty is so overpowering that it causes a debilitating physical and mental reaction.
"I couldn't believe the rush of emotion pulsing through me -- just because he'd happened to look at me for the first time in a half-dozen weeks. I couldn't allow him to have this level of influence over me. It was pathetic. More than pathetic, it was unhealthy." (74)
Oh. OH. So Bella knows that her reaction to Edward is unhealthy. And yet, she can't seem to do anything about it. So what does she feel exactly when she looks at Edward's face? Adoration? Joy? Love?
"His eyes were light again today, a deep, golden honey color. Then I had to look down, to reassemble my now-tangled thoughts." (81)
"His eyes were gloriously intense as he uttered that last sentence [the "I'm tired of trying to stay away..." sentence]. I couldn't remember how to breathe." (84)
"[after Edward asks Bella to go to Seattle] I couldn't speak yet, so I just nodded." (84)
Hm. If Bella feels anything remotely pleasant when she looks at Edward, she doesn't talk about it. In fact, Bella even closes her eyes at one point so that she doesn't have to look at Edward's face and can think straight. In short, Edward makes Bella go stupid any time he looks at her, and Bella seems to be really uncomfortable with this. She knows that Edward could ask her anything and she would be unable to refuse him. Really, it's more akin to being glamoured than having a crush on someone.
(Hahaha...man do I love True Blood.)
I'm also really annoyed by how the secondary characters are treated in this book, but it's consistent with the fantasy Meyer has created. Meyer goes out of her way to show that none of these characters have inner lives aside from Bella and Edward, or if they do, their inner lives aren't important. Bella's friend Jessica, who has a crush on Mike, is consistently shown being nothing but jubilant around Bella, and yet she's categorized as liking Bella only for her "inexplicable popularity" (71), an unfair assessment that we're supposed to read as god-given truth, just because Bella thinks it. Charlie, who showed potential in the first chapter, has been resigned to sitting in the background and eating Bella's cooking. Bella's mother is a hysterical parental figure meant to be consistently lied to.
In all of this, Bella stands alone as the one whose life is worthy of a 500p novel. Replace the name "Bella" with the name "XY or Z," rinse and repeat.
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: I'm still perplexed over details involving the car accident. We discover that Bella's truck has suffered "minimal damage" (76) in the collision, while "Tyler's parents had to sell their van for parts." What...did it explode? Setting aside the retard logistics of Bella's truck only needing a new taillight, how fast was this idiot Tyler going? Was he drag racing in the parking lot -- STOP! Stop. Thou shalt not apply logic to Twilight, for ye shall be sorely disappointed.
Really. REALLY. Logistics do not matter. I have a feeling that if you've reached this point in the novel and are asking questions (Minor ones like the one above or even broader ones: Why do all of these people like Bella? Why is she putting up with Edward's behavior? Why aren't we supposed to care about anybody but these two people?) then this is NOT the book for you.
LANGUAGE: Language problems persist, particularly in the dialogue tags, which continue to be annoying. Meyer shows some talent for dialogue itself when the secondary characters are talking; they sound like actual teenagers. Bella's language tends to be stiffer than her friends', less so in dialogue but ridiculously so when she's addressing the reader. "To my dismay, I found myself the center of attention for the rest of the week" (68) (What teenager says, "To my dismay"?) This is done to depict Bella in a class above her peers. Oh, and Edward also talks like he's got something up his butt, however...he's a vampire so...I'll deal with it.
SUBTEXT: Meyer has gone on record as claiming that she is not anti-feminist (she's "anti-human," which is...better...for some reason?). Her opinion is that the foundation of feminism is "being able to choose." Well...that's an interpretation that a lot of women seem to be adopting, but it's not what I adhere to. For instance, a woman can "choose" not to vote because she believes that men have a better head for politics, which was in fact the stance of many women during the suffrage movement. I see feminism as being about equality, assuming equal weight in society, taking responsibility for your actions and recognizing the impact your choices have.
But no matter. Let's apply Meyer's definition of feminism to Bella Swan so far. How much of what has happened to Bella happened because of the choices she's made? Well, she made the initial choice to come to Forks, I'll grant her that. But did she choose to have Edward talk to her? Did she choose to be obsessed with him? Did she choose to have him rescue her? Um. She did not. She didn't even choose to go to Seattle with him. The story makes very clear that she was so tongue tied and stupefied by Edward's beauty that she physically could not say no to him.
So far, Meyer's whole universe is set up so that Bella can be carried from plot point A to plot point B. (She's a Port-a-Bella!) Choice is irrelevant. Do I think Meyer sat down at her computer saying, "I'm going to write an anti-feminist novel now"? No. I think Meyer's fantasy of Edward took the front seat, and it never occurred to her to make her female protagonist an autonomous individual whose decisions have actual weight. This kind of setup has obviously appealed to a lot of people.
WHAT'S WORKING? Do girls want this? They really want a guy who stupefies them into submission? A multitude of women share Meyer's fantasy. If I take a step back, I sort of get it.
If someone falls in love with you through no action of your own, think about the pressure that takes off of you. You wouldn't need to actually be interesting (In fact, On p 79, Bella takes a paragraph to think about how uninteresting she is, how it is impossible that Edward likes her, and I'm inclined to agree; none of her thoughts or emotions have been particularly insightful so far and she doesn't have any hobbies to speak of). And you wouldn't need to say or do the right thing or go out of your way to impress anyone; your guy would be in love with you regardless, and he would rescue you any time you found yourself in some perilous situation, which would occur often through no fault of your own. Not-doing-anything is part of the fantasy.
It's understandable. Teenagers find themselves in a weird half-state, girls particularly, struggling to hang onto their childhoods while facing budding sexuality at the same time, feeling the pressure that comes with turning into responsible adults. Flanagan discusses this in her article about Twilight, in which she claims that girls have a tougher time with sexuality than boys because they are "far more rooted in the domestic routines and traditions of their families, which constitute the vital link between the sweet cocooning of childhood and their impending departure from it." Hm. That's a huge generalization but...okay. Whether or not you think that's true, Twilight provides certain tropes (and these aren't old tropes, folks; they've been around for thousands of years) for its female readers to fall back on: in the Twilight universe, Bella has an extremely handsome love interest to take care of her; she's essentially carted around like a child, and much of what happens to her is not her own responsibility.
THIS. IS. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.
In the meantime however, Furious Bella is a bit more tolerable than Mopey Bella. There's a moment in this chapter when she contemplates rear-ending Edward's Volvo with her megatruck, and another moment when she refers to him as a "stupid, shiny Volvo owner" (83) both of which tingled my enjoyment neurons. That last bit is also funny because the comma usage is incorrect; the sentence doesn't read that Edward is stupid and owns a shiny Volvo. It actually reads that Edward is stupid, shiny and a Volvo owner, which is amusing to anyone who knows what happens to Meyer's vampires in sunlight. (Shaolin Grammar PUNCH!!! YAAAAH!!)
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Chapter 5 for next week. Edward reveals to Bella that he was booted off the set of True Blood and now cannot legally come within five hundred feet of Anna Paquin.
Wish me luck,
Jenchilla
Monday, March 1, 2010
Chapter 3: Phenomenon
67 pages in...
Announcements: I have received my first comment concerning the fact that I'm...ahaha...not doing a very good job identifying why Twilight works. Mostly, I've been riffing on it. And that is true. But. I will admit. I enjoy fantasy. I enjoy escapist literature at times. And this is not working for me. Not even on a superficial level. It's important to me that I catalog my initial reading experience, and then I can go back and try to understand what it is I'm missing that's prohibiting me from enjoying what I find in these pages. Why do I not connect with Bella Swan? Well, she's insufferable. Why do other people connect with Bella Swan? Maybe I'll understand that as I go on, but I'm having trouble seeing it. I'm not a sociologist or an expert in cultural phenomena. I'm just a reader, trying to figure something out. And I want to give people an accurate depiction of what it is I'm reading.
I also want to provide special thanks to my friend Neela, who linked me to this article, "What Girls Want" by Caitlin Flanagan. It's a very insightful review, singing Twilight's praises, and while I don't agree with a lot of it (it clearly didn't stem from a close reading of the novel, and some of it actually makes me downright nauseous), it's a very eloquent analysis of the phenomenon. I may address it later as my journey continues.
So. Let's continue.
Bella goes on to have the worst case of SADs in history when she sees that it has snowed outside and "groan[s] in horror." "I had enough trouble not falling down when the ground was dry," she laments. (Did I mention that Bella is clumsy? Bella mentions it. A lot. It's supposed to be one of those self-effacing ploys that makes you feel more sympathetic for her, but to many antifans, this is proof that Bella is a VARY SPESHUL kind of character.)
Anyway. Bella drives to school in the snow without incident and comes to discover, when she gets out at the school parking lot, that Charlie has graciously gotten up early to put snow chains on her tires. As Bella experiences a moment of sincere gratitude, she looks up and sees an out-of-control van skidding in her direction. In a very convoluted action sequence, Edward, whom Bella sees over on the other end of the parking lot, suddenly appears at her side to save her by blocking the van and/or lifting it up over her legs. In the midst of this, Bella knocks her head on the pavement and, subsequently, Edward manhandles her into an ambulance. Edward rides in front LIKE THE MAN HE IS. Tyler, the kid who was driving the van, gets sent to the hospital too with a head injury. (Guess who it is everybody is most concerned about. Just guess.)
Bella meets Dr. Cullen, Edward's father, who is also beautiful and who does doctor things, but Bella is most concerned about how Edward managed to save her. She confronts him directly and he condescends her, natch; she is convinced that she saw Edward lift the van, and he is apparently convinced not to explain it to her, pulling all the usual, "Well, you're a hysterical woman with a head injury, so no one will believe you," stops. Actually, his responses are pretty amusing; I was very much pleased to see him piss Bella off.
Charlie comes to pick up a still-fuming Bella, and she sees, on the way out, the entire school sitting worriedly in the waiting room. (Did they cancel class for this event?) She has to call her mother, who is "in hysterics," hearing about the accident from Charlie. Bella resists her mother's pleas to come home because she is "consumed by the mystery Edward presented," and when she goes to sleep that night, she has her first dream about him.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Let's play a quiz game. It's called, "Bella Rationalizes Her Way Out of a Wet Paper Bag." Pretend that you are Bella, and answer the following questions:
You move to a new town where the local boys are remarkably friendly toward you. Two of them (We'll call them Mike and Eric) have already started a rivalry for your affections.
a) You consider that you are a "novelty" (p 55) that the people in the bumfuck town where you've moved have never seen a marginally attractive person before, and that's why they're going apeshit.
b) You consider that your "crippling clumsiness" (p 55) must been seen as "endearing," and that most boys would like to date a girl who must always wear a giant, bubble wrap coat.
c) Despite complaining about never fitting in with people your age 40-some pages ago, you are disconcerted by the fact that boys like you, and you would prefer to be ignored.
d) All of the above.
The answer: D. Bella takes pgs 54-55 to theorize about why the boys in Forks seem to like her so much, and her conclusion is that she wishes they didn't like her at all. Readers may interpret this as Bella being vulnerable and shy, but she doesn't cite shyness as the reason why she doesn't want this attention. Really, it just annoys her, and she doesn't seem to respect Mike or Eric for their feelings at all.
I think this is because we are not supposed to see Mike and Eric as important to the story. Meyer hasn't taken the time to explain WHY Bella is so turned off by boys liking her. There may very well be a reason. Maybe Bella is terrified of embarrassing herself. Maybe she's nervous about sex, or making commitments, or the idea of having to impress a boy, things that would make her genuinely shy or vulnerable. But none of that is discussed. We're left with a bitchy girl, thoughtlessly dismissing romantic suitors.
OMG Bella I love you so much I want to be you tell me your secrets
Here's question 2.
True or False. You are a sixteen-year-old high school student who knows more about head injuries than people with medical degrees.
If you answered false you are WRONG, and I passive aggressively grimace at you. Bella is embarrassed and frustrated about being taken to the hospital, which is understandable, even admirable in her hatred of being coddled. But she is also an irritating, indignant little snot about it, sorely convinced that there is nothing wrong with her and that everyone is just inconveniencing her. When they put her in a neck brace, she takes if off when no one is looking and throws it under the hospital bed because it's "stupid-looking" (p 60), and when they X-ray her head she tells the reader, "I told them there was nothing wrong, and I was right. Not even a concussion" (p 61). That's right. Doctors are stupid, and the tests they run to make sure that people aren't bleeding internally are stupid, and the devices they put on people's necks to ensure that they don't have permanent spinal injury are STUPID.
To be honest, there is something to be said here about Bella wanting control over her own body, or even knowing her own body more than trained professionals. Her anger at being overpowered reached me on some level, as I understand what it's like to not feel like you are in control. It's a genuine teenage girl fear that I can somewhat relate to. But really, Meyer? Did you have to try to make her smarter than the doctors?
Last question.
You think it's "stupid, stupid, stupid" (pg 67) to be so suddenly obsessed with Edward because:
a) Obsessions are bad
b) He has been openly hostile toward you
c) You saw him demonstrate immense physical strength by lifting a van, and then he lied to you about it, which makes you nervous around him
d) Being obsessed with Edward makes you NOT want to get the hell out of your small town
The answer? D! "I wasn't eager to escape Forks as I should be, as any normal, sane person would be" (pg 67). Not only is this the ultimate insult to the people of Forks, it overlooks a lot of the more frightening possibilities that NORMAL, SANE PEOPLE would recognize. But then, those aren't things that the story wants us to pay attention to. Edward Cullen: he makes shitty small town life bearable.
And it's true that Edward isn't completely unlikable so far, particularly when he bickers with Bella about what happened at the accident. Here are some little moments that pleased me:
"I saved your life -- I don't owe you anything." (p 64)
"Bella, you hit your head, you don't know what you're talking about." (p 64)
"You think I lifted a van off of you?"..."Nobody will believe that, you know." (p 65)
"Can't you just thank me and get over it?" (p 65)
Yeah Bella, you little twerp. Can't you? I'm sure I should be disconcerted by the way he treats her, but I actually kind of enjoy it. Bella's mindset is so childish that to see someone treat her like a child is rewarding. Eventually, Edward (sort of) wins their argument by staring Bella down, and his beauty makes it difficult for her to stay focused. "It was like trying to stare down a destroying angel" (p 65). A what? A destroying what? The same hair-gel model who just snapped, "Can't you just thank me and get over it?" like a haughty adolescent is what? Haha, Bella Swan, your metaphors are funny.
There is one little thing that concerns me about Edward. On pg 65, they argue about his rescuing Bella and she asks him, "Why did you even bother?" which is kind of a dumb question to ask when you've just gotten rescued by someone. Edward, however, replies, "I don't know." What...you don't know why you saved a person's life? Is he implying that if Tyler's van were to careen toward anybody but Bella, he would have watched them get crushed, even though he had the power to save them? It doesn't speak well for Edward's morality if he only ever feels an impulse to ease human suffering when the suffering human happens to be one fragile, good-smelling girl. This problem, I have a feeling, gets overlooked by casual readers, who most likely assume that Edward saved Bella because he is in love with her, not because he actually values human life.
In the land beyond Edward-Bella World, secondary characters MATTER NOT. Poor Tyler! Bella hears a whole crowd of people shouting her name over the parking lot when the accident happens, but nobody shouts Tyler's name, and he spends most of his time in the hospital in the bed next to Bella, desperately apologizing for nearly crushing her. Bella is frustrated since she has already told him she's fine and he won't let the subject go. She eventually "close[s] [her] eyes to ignore him," oblivious that Tyler's anxiety about almost killing a person might, I don't know, HAVE TO DO WITH SOMETHING A LITTLE BIGGER THAN JUST BELLA SWAN!
But, as I've come to find out, nothing in the Twilight universe is bigger than Bella Swan.
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: This is the first time an event has taken place in Twilight, and again, the car accident is circumstantial, totally outside of Bella's control, and therefore irrelevant to her character or her decisions, and lacking causality. I mean, it's more exciting than smirks and grimaces over a biology lab, so I'll bite. But I think I kind of understand why Meyer might want to keep action sequences out of the equation as often as possible. There are...PROBLEMS, mostly inconsistencies and a lack of clarity in the language, so...
LANGUAGE:...I'll deal with it in this section. This marks the first chapter where Meyer's language hindered my ability to understand literally what was happening. Maybe someone else can have a go at it. Here's the paragraph where the van almost hits Bella.
"Just before I heard the shattering crunch of the van folding around the truck bed, something hit me, hard, but not from the direction I was expecting. My head cracked against the icy blacktop, and I felt something solid and cold pinning me to the ground. I was lying on the pavement behind the tan car I'd parked next to. But I didn't have a chance to notice anything else, because the van was still coming. It had curled gratingly around the end of truck and, still spinning and sliding, was about to collide with me again." (p 56)
...What? Setting aside the image of a van "folding around" the truck (like a taco?) it curls around the end of the truck a second time, spins and slides some more (how does it do this if it's up against the truck?) at comes at Bella a second time, as though it's making another attempt. Oh, van. I admire your attempt, I surely do. It is a brave and honest endeavor but...it's impossible to picture what's happening in this paragraph.
When Edward rushes onto the scene, a "low oath" makes Bella aware of him. (You get it? Edward is swearing.) There also some confusion as to what Edward does to the van, whether he stops it with his hand, catches it in the air (?) to keep it from "landing" on Bella's legs, or lifts it up off of her (if this last one were the case, wouldn't she have been crushed anyway?). The consensus on p 64 seems to be that he both stops the van with his hands AND lifts it to keep it from crushing her, but if it's already stopped before it crushes Bella, why would he need to lift it...? These are language problems typical of amateur writers, who have little experience choreographing scenes, and who orchestrate action in a really confusing way. Meyer wants us to know every tiny movement that happens when the van comes at Bella, but we're bogged down with so many details that its hard to decipher them. A more mature writer would have focused more on the sensory elements of almost getting hit by a car: sounds, the smell of burning rubber maybe, the sight of a car door swinging toward your face. Instead, we get Bella attempting to give us a blow-by-blow account of the literal events.
But It doesn't really matter. The only thing you're supposed to take away from this scene is EDWARD MAN SAVE BELLA WOO-MAN!!!. The logistics are irrelevant.
SUBTEXT: Meyer's forbidden fruit and outsider subtexts have been set aside in lieu of the plot; what's at the forefront in the chapter is Bella's life-in-peril moment, and her curiosity/frustration with Edward. I have a feeling it's going to become a pervasive idea that Bella is frail and in need of protection, and that Edward, the strong, silent guardian, will protect her without question, and without explanation. However, even though I don't like Bella at all, I do appreciate her stubbornness, her dogged quest for answers, and her distaste for being coddled (even if her frustrations are petty, misplaced and annoying). These are qualities that, one hopes, will evolve into something more interesting as the story progresses.
WHAT'S WORKING? Plausibility aside, convoluted language aside, Bella's incessant snottiness aside...there is one question to be asked. Who doesn't want to get rescued from an out-of-control van by the hottest guy in school?
The event is escapist fantasy to the extreme. What makes it even more radically fantastic is that Edward implies that Bella is the ONLY person he would have done such a thing for. All Bella has to do is exist, and she magically becomes the center of people's universes. By now, if Meyer has successfully convinced readers that Bella is selfless, mature, intelligent, and misunderstood by the rest of the world, she's probably also convinced them that they share Bella's qualities. "Of course Bella is deserving of Edward's special attention, and I am too, because Bella is me!"
The only way this could ever work is if the reader hasn't thought deeply about any of the things Bella has said, and if the reader is able to ignore, or doesn't recognize, a lot of the other problems with the prose, which range from distracting to infuriating.
With that said, I can still understand the teenage attraction to Edward so far, with all his smirking and arrogance, and his predominant quality being that he is really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking. I will be paying attention to him in the next chapter, if not just to see him be an asshole to Bella some more.
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Geeeez. Someone tell me Bella takes some Prozac in Chapter 4. Or at least downs a giant handle of vodka.
Wish me luck,
Jenchilla
Announcements: I have received my first comment concerning the fact that I'm...ahaha...not doing a very good job identifying why Twilight works. Mostly, I've been riffing on it. And that is true. But. I will admit. I enjoy fantasy. I enjoy escapist literature at times. And this is not working for me. Not even on a superficial level. It's important to me that I catalog my initial reading experience, and then I can go back and try to understand what it is I'm missing that's prohibiting me from enjoying what I find in these pages. Why do I not connect with Bella Swan? Well, she's insufferable. Why do other people connect with Bella Swan? Maybe I'll understand that as I go on, but I'm having trouble seeing it. I'm not a sociologist or an expert in cultural phenomena. I'm just a reader, trying to figure something out. And I want to give people an accurate depiction of what it is I'm reading.
I also want to provide special thanks to my friend Neela, who linked me to this article, "What Girls Want" by Caitlin Flanagan. It's a very insightful review, singing Twilight's praises, and while I don't agree with a lot of it (it clearly didn't stem from a close reading of the novel, and some of it actually makes me downright nauseous), it's a very eloquent analysis of the phenomenon. I may address it later as my journey continues.
So. Let's continue.
Bella goes on to have the worst case of SADs in history when she sees that it has snowed outside and "groan[s] in horror." "I had enough trouble not falling down when the ground was dry," she laments. (Did I mention that Bella is clumsy? Bella mentions it. A lot. It's supposed to be one of those self-effacing ploys that makes you feel more sympathetic for her, but to many antifans, this is proof that Bella is a VARY SPESHUL kind of character.)
Anyway. Bella drives to school in the snow without incident and comes to discover, when she gets out at the school parking lot, that Charlie has graciously gotten up early to put snow chains on her tires. As Bella experiences a moment of sincere gratitude, she looks up and sees an out-of-control van skidding in her direction. In a very convoluted action sequence, Edward, whom Bella sees over on the other end of the parking lot, suddenly appears at her side to save her by blocking the van and/or lifting it up over her legs. In the midst of this, Bella knocks her head on the pavement and, subsequently, Edward manhandles her into an ambulance. Edward rides in front LIKE THE MAN HE IS. Tyler, the kid who was driving the van, gets sent to the hospital too with a head injury. (Guess who it is everybody is most concerned about. Just guess.)
Bella meets Dr. Cullen, Edward's father, who is also beautiful and who does doctor things, but Bella is most concerned about how Edward managed to save her. She confronts him directly and he condescends her, natch; she is convinced that she saw Edward lift the van, and he is apparently convinced not to explain it to her, pulling all the usual, "Well, you're a hysterical woman with a head injury, so no one will believe you," stops. Actually, his responses are pretty amusing; I was very much pleased to see him piss Bella off.
Charlie comes to pick up a still-fuming Bella, and she sees, on the way out, the entire school sitting worriedly in the waiting room. (Did they cancel class for this event?) She has to call her mother, who is "in hysterics," hearing about the accident from Charlie. Bella resists her mother's pleas to come home because she is "consumed by the mystery Edward presented," and when she goes to sleep that night, she has her first dream about him.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Let's play a quiz game. It's called, "Bella Rationalizes Her Way Out of a Wet Paper Bag." Pretend that you are Bella, and answer the following questions:
You move to a new town where the local boys are remarkably friendly toward you. Two of them (We'll call them Mike and Eric) have already started a rivalry for your affections.
a) You consider that you are a "novelty" (p 55) that the people in the bumfuck town where you've moved have never seen a marginally attractive person before, and that's why they're going apeshit.
b) You consider that your "crippling clumsiness" (p 55) must been seen as "endearing," and that most boys would like to date a girl who must always wear a giant, bubble wrap coat.
c) Despite complaining about never fitting in with people your age 40-some pages ago, you are disconcerted by the fact that boys like you, and you would prefer to be ignored.
d) All of the above.
The answer: D. Bella takes pgs 54-55 to theorize about why the boys in Forks seem to like her so much, and her conclusion is that she wishes they didn't like her at all. Readers may interpret this as Bella being vulnerable and shy, but she doesn't cite shyness as the reason why she doesn't want this attention. Really, it just annoys her, and she doesn't seem to respect Mike or Eric for their feelings at all.
I think this is because we are not supposed to see Mike and Eric as important to the story. Meyer hasn't taken the time to explain WHY Bella is so turned off by boys liking her. There may very well be a reason. Maybe Bella is terrified of embarrassing herself. Maybe she's nervous about sex, or making commitments, or the idea of having to impress a boy, things that would make her genuinely shy or vulnerable. But none of that is discussed. We're left with a bitchy girl, thoughtlessly dismissing romantic suitors.
OMG Bella I love you so much I want to be you tell me your secretsHere's question 2.
True or False. You are a sixteen-year-old high school student who knows more about head injuries than people with medical degrees.
If you answered false you are WRONG, and I passive aggressively grimace at you. Bella is embarrassed and frustrated about being taken to the hospital, which is understandable, even admirable in her hatred of being coddled. But she is also an irritating, indignant little snot about it, sorely convinced that there is nothing wrong with her and that everyone is just inconveniencing her. When they put her in a neck brace, she takes if off when no one is looking and throws it under the hospital bed because it's "stupid-looking" (p 60), and when they X-ray her head she tells the reader, "I told them there was nothing wrong, and I was right. Not even a concussion" (p 61). That's right. Doctors are stupid, and the tests they run to make sure that people aren't bleeding internally are stupid, and the devices they put on people's necks to ensure that they don't have permanent spinal injury are STUPID.
To be honest, there is something to be said here about Bella wanting control over her own body, or even knowing her own body more than trained professionals. Her anger at being overpowered reached me on some level, as I understand what it's like to not feel like you are in control. It's a genuine teenage girl fear that I can somewhat relate to. But really, Meyer? Did you have to try to make her smarter than the doctors?
Last question.
You think it's "stupid, stupid, stupid" (pg 67) to be so suddenly obsessed with Edward because:
a) Obsessions are bad
b) He has been openly hostile toward you
c) You saw him demonstrate immense physical strength by lifting a van, and then he lied to you about it, which makes you nervous around him
d) Being obsessed with Edward makes you NOT want to get the hell out of your small town
The answer? D! "I wasn't eager to escape Forks as I should be, as any normal, sane person would be" (pg 67). Not only is this the ultimate insult to the people of Forks, it overlooks a lot of the more frightening possibilities that NORMAL, SANE PEOPLE would recognize. But then, those aren't things that the story wants us to pay attention to. Edward Cullen: he makes shitty small town life bearable.
And it's true that Edward isn't completely unlikable so far, particularly when he bickers with Bella about what happened at the accident. Here are some little moments that pleased me:
"I saved your life -- I don't owe you anything." (p 64)
"Bella, you hit your head, you don't know what you're talking about." (p 64)
"You think I lifted a van off of you?"..."Nobody will believe that, you know." (p 65)
"Can't you just thank me and get over it?" (p 65)
Yeah Bella, you little twerp. Can't you? I'm sure I should be disconcerted by the way he treats her, but I actually kind of enjoy it. Bella's mindset is so childish that to see someone treat her like a child is rewarding. Eventually, Edward (sort of) wins their argument by staring Bella down, and his beauty makes it difficult for her to stay focused. "It was like trying to stare down a destroying angel" (p 65). A what? A destroying what? The same hair-gel model who just snapped, "Can't you just thank me and get over it?" like a haughty adolescent is what? Haha, Bella Swan, your metaphors are funny.
There is one little thing that concerns me about Edward. On pg 65, they argue about his rescuing Bella and she asks him, "Why did you even bother?" which is kind of a dumb question to ask when you've just gotten rescued by someone. Edward, however, replies, "I don't know." What...you don't know why you saved a person's life? Is he implying that if Tyler's van were to careen toward anybody but Bella, he would have watched them get crushed, even though he had the power to save them? It doesn't speak well for Edward's morality if he only ever feels an impulse to ease human suffering when the suffering human happens to be one fragile, good-smelling girl. This problem, I have a feeling, gets overlooked by casual readers, who most likely assume that Edward saved Bella because he is in love with her, not because he actually values human life.
In the land beyond Edward-Bella World, secondary characters MATTER NOT. Poor Tyler! Bella hears a whole crowd of people shouting her name over the parking lot when the accident happens, but nobody shouts Tyler's name, and he spends most of his time in the hospital in the bed next to Bella, desperately apologizing for nearly crushing her. Bella is frustrated since she has already told him she's fine and he won't let the subject go. She eventually "close[s] [her] eyes to ignore him," oblivious that Tyler's anxiety about almost killing a person might, I don't know, HAVE TO DO WITH SOMETHING A LITTLE BIGGER THAN JUST BELLA SWAN!
But, as I've come to find out, nothing in the Twilight universe is bigger than Bella Swan.
PLOT DEVELOPMENT: This is the first time an event has taken place in Twilight, and again, the car accident is circumstantial, totally outside of Bella's control, and therefore irrelevant to her character or her decisions, and lacking causality. I mean, it's more exciting than smirks and grimaces over a biology lab, so I'll bite. But I think I kind of understand why Meyer might want to keep action sequences out of the equation as often as possible. There are...PROBLEMS, mostly inconsistencies and a lack of clarity in the language, so...
LANGUAGE:...I'll deal with it in this section. This marks the first chapter where Meyer's language hindered my ability to understand literally what was happening. Maybe someone else can have a go at it. Here's the paragraph where the van almost hits Bella.
"Just before I heard the shattering crunch of the van folding around the truck bed, something hit me, hard, but not from the direction I was expecting. My head cracked against the icy blacktop, and I felt something solid and cold pinning me to the ground. I was lying on the pavement behind the tan car I'd parked next to. But I didn't have a chance to notice anything else, because the van was still coming. It had curled gratingly around the end of truck and, still spinning and sliding, was about to collide with me again." (p 56)
...What? Setting aside the image of a van "folding around" the truck (like a taco?) it curls around the end of the truck a second time, spins and slides some more (how does it do this if it's up against the truck?) at comes at Bella a second time, as though it's making another attempt. Oh, van. I admire your attempt, I surely do. It is a brave and honest endeavor but...it's impossible to picture what's happening in this paragraph.
When Edward rushes onto the scene, a "low oath" makes Bella aware of him. (You get it? Edward is swearing.) There also some confusion as to what Edward does to the van, whether he stops it with his hand, catches it in the air (?) to keep it from "landing" on Bella's legs, or lifts it up off of her (if this last one were the case, wouldn't she have been crushed anyway?). The consensus on p 64 seems to be that he both stops the van with his hands AND lifts it to keep it from crushing her, but if it's already stopped before it crushes Bella, why would he need to lift it...? These are language problems typical of amateur writers, who have little experience choreographing scenes, and who orchestrate action in a really confusing way. Meyer wants us to know every tiny movement that happens when the van comes at Bella, but we're bogged down with so many details that its hard to decipher them. A more mature writer would have focused more on the sensory elements of almost getting hit by a car: sounds, the smell of burning rubber maybe, the sight of a car door swinging toward your face. Instead, we get Bella attempting to give us a blow-by-blow account of the literal events.
But It doesn't really matter. The only thing you're supposed to take away from this scene is EDWARD MAN SAVE BELLA WOO-MAN!!!. The logistics are irrelevant.
SUBTEXT: Meyer's forbidden fruit and outsider subtexts have been set aside in lieu of the plot; what's at the forefront in the chapter is Bella's life-in-peril moment, and her curiosity/frustration with Edward. I have a feeling it's going to become a pervasive idea that Bella is frail and in need of protection, and that Edward, the strong, silent guardian, will protect her without question, and without explanation. However, even though I don't like Bella at all, I do appreciate her stubbornness, her dogged quest for answers, and her distaste for being coddled (even if her frustrations are petty, misplaced and annoying). These are qualities that, one hopes, will evolve into something more interesting as the story progresses.
WHAT'S WORKING? Plausibility aside, convoluted language aside, Bella's incessant snottiness aside...there is one question to be asked. Who doesn't want to get rescued from an out-of-control van by the hottest guy in school?
The event is escapist fantasy to the extreme. What makes it even more radically fantastic is that Edward implies that Bella is the ONLY person he would have done such a thing for. All Bella has to do is exist, and she magically becomes the center of people's universes. By now, if Meyer has successfully convinced readers that Bella is selfless, mature, intelligent, and misunderstood by the rest of the world, she's probably also convinced them that they share Bella's qualities. "Of course Bella is deserving of Edward's special attention, and I am too, because Bella is me!"
The only way this could ever work is if the reader hasn't thought deeply about any of the things Bella has said, and if the reader is able to ignore, or doesn't recognize, a lot of the other problems with the prose, which range from distracting to infuriating.
With that said, I can still understand the teenage attraction to Edward so far, with all his smirking and arrogance, and his predominant quality being that he is really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking. I will be paying attention to him in the next chapter, if not just to see him be an asshole to Bella some more.
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Geeeez. Someone tell me Bella takes some Prozac in Chapter 4. Or at least downs a giant handle of vodka.
Wish me luck,
Jenchilla
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