In this chapter, James calls the hotel room. Bella hears her mother's voice on the other end of the line, and so James, saying that he has her mother and will hurt her, convinces her to escape Alice and Jasper and come to meet him so that he can eat her. His very polite about it, in the way that creepy, Eurotrash villains always are. Bella makes a really speedy decision to go through with it, despite more sensible options. She writes a letter to Edward apologizing for her need to be a heroic asshole, asking him not to come after her, and then Meyer (or possibly Meyer's lame-ass editor) literally uses curly-cue text to depict Bella's handwriting.
Bella ends the chapter on the winning line. "And then I carefully sealed away my heart" (432). Because get it, she's writing a letter to Edward and her heart's in it and she's sealing it up in an envelope? You don't get it? YOU ARE A HEARTLESS CYNIC AND YOU SHOULD GO AWAY AND DIE!!!1!!1!1oneIs there any point in my dissecting the stupidity of this situation? Firstly, it's clear that Alice already senses that something's going on (don't vampires have super hearing, and wouldn't Alice be able to hear James on the other end of the line if she was in the same room as Bella?), the story desperately wants us to believe that that Bella's an awful liar (actually, it's kind of inconsistent about this; there are several moments in the story, like this one, in which Bella manages to lie very effectively), and while she does hear her mother's voice over the phone, she never once considers that James might be tricking her, which he very obviously is.
There are other questions I have about this chapter (like, "If James is so super obsessed with the challenge of hunting Bella down like a the magical doe she is, why does he utilize such an easy, lame-ass method to get her?" and "Why is Bella so worried about her new vampire friends getting hurt when they are all very clearly invincible?") but searching for answers to these questions would be pointless. The event in this chapter serves one purpose and one purpose only:
TIE BELLA SWAN TO THE FUCKING TRAIN TRACK.
And what better way to do that than to make the girl an idiotic martyr? In fact, Meyer is so quick to switch Bella into martyr mode that she throttles logic with a piano wire in the process.
WHAT'S WORKING: This will mostly be about Bella Swan.
Bella has not grown on me. In fact, the more I read from her point of view, the less I like her and the less human she seems. I've heard that she only gets worse in later books and eventually undergoes a completely undeserved, unrealistic transformation at the end of Breaking Dawn, which I will never read, ever, not even out of morbid curiosity. I mean, FANS thought it was bad. FANS.
I hate this character for a number of reasons, and I can't help but wonder if Twilight would be a more enjoyable book for me if the character of Bella were more reasonable, if she responded to Edward glittering in the sunlight with, "Wow. That is lame," as most world-weary teens would. Or if she was more appreciative of the fact that everything seems to magically go well for her or if she wasn't, um, FLATTERED to have her own personal stalker.
The problem though, contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, isn't that Bella is an atrocious person. She's not a person, first of all. She's a character. And a bad one at that. What it seems to come down to is that Meyer just sucks big time at character development, as Bella's main problems seem to be, not just that she is unlikable, but that she is inconsistent.
I made a chart for this occasion. No really, I did.
In this chapter particularly, we are supposed to read Bella's decision as a reckless and heroic one. Bella exhibits other brief moments of compassion for other people, though they are few and far between and tend to come across as pretty outrageous and nonsensical. One, which always bothered me, was back in the glittery meadow scene, when Edward describes a moment at school when Bella came into the office behind him, and he almost killed her AND another person who happened to be in the room."I shivered in the warm sun, seeing my memories anew through his eyes, only now grasping hte danger. Poor Ms. Cope; I shivered again at how close I'd come to being inadvertently responsible for her death." (270)
You see? ACTUALLY, she is quite selfless. She blames herself for the faults of others and she doesn't value herself as much as she values other people. This is how Twilight fans argue that Bella is a strong character worthy of Edward's love, even when others point out that the MAJORITY of the time, we see a very negative side to her. It's interesting to me that whenever Bella complains and mopes and behaves in a completely shallow manner, her fans jump the gun to give excuses for her. And yet they see these brief moments of self-sacrifice and compassion as proof that she's a saint, rather than what they really are: jarring character inconsistencies meant to cloy sympathy from reader and (in the case of Bella's decision to meet James' demand) plot contrivances.
So why are some susceptible to this ploy and others (namely, the people who don't like Twilight) not? Well, I think it depends on a couple of factors:
- The level at which a reader identifies with Bella
- The level of insight a reader has about people in general
Secondly, I think that readers with some level of insight can see through the fantasy fog that Bella's character creates. For one, most people with insight know that hating on yourself all the time and blaming yourself for other people's faults IS NOT THE SAME THING AS HUMILITY. In fact, it's really just another form of self-absorption to think that everything has to do with you. (A lot of teenagers don't realize this until they become adults, and some never realize it.)
Insightful people would also be able to recognize that someone as self-absorbed as Bella is probably not going to be running off to sacrifice herself anytime soon, for anybody. That's not to say that people can't be sometimes self-absorbed and also be selfless; in fact, the best characters in literature are well-rounded. But the problem with Bella is that she doesn't evolve into her selflessness. She doesn't mull over the decisions she has to make. She never applies what she learns. She doesn't grow or change. The story just kind of hands her to us and tell us she's perfect as is, which is bullshit. The character as a whole is bullshit.
I don't know if people who identify with Bella think that they also would be selfless in her situation. I seriously doubt that most readers ever would, but they can fantasize that they would through Bella. After all, what other position allows for complete respect and adoration more than martyrdom?
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Read ahead a little in the next chapter. I have 66 pages left in this novel. It is officially of the devil.
Wish me luck,
Jenchilla
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