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