Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

(26), which is to say that these girls find the answers to Who am I, and Who/what do I want to be mostly in the
culture through books, movies, magazines, and each other. Since adolescents become „avid cultural
readers,‟ looking for the appropriate ways to „be‟ women, it is interesting to note that there are very few
examples of women who have accomplished something outside of marriage and motherhood being
presented as role models to girls. The role models that are available seem removed from the everyday and
average life of an American teenager and love and sexuality do not exist in our society as something that can
be defined, much less modeled. As a result, adolescents are forced to seek outside sources for clues as to
what it means to be in love and be a sexual person in a romantic relationship. What they find are stories like
Twilight written and marketed just for them that reinforce the old notion that love is a force of nature that
nothing can deter, divert, or control. Essentially, these books are guidelines, roadmaps, with the landmarks
named and proliferated in different forms throughout our cultural subconscious. In other words, love and
sexuality are not choices, they just happen, and this is what they are supposed to look like. The problem is
that these landmarks must be interpreted and reinterpreted with each new „fact‟ gathered, story told, and
experience acquired with many of the pieces missing.
The Girl-venture
This necessity for self-teaching is where Romance novels come in as a kind of textbook about what
to generally expect from love and sexuality. Ann Bar Snitow studies mass market romances like Harlequins
that are usually marketed to married women with children (that is the stereotype, at least). She makes some
interesting points about these Romance novels and the role they play in women‟s lives that can be directly
connected with the Twilight series and the function it serves in adolescents‟ lives:
“The books…define a set of relations, feelings, and assumptions that do indeed permeate our
minds…They reflect…commonly experienced psychological and social elements in the daily lives of
women. That the books are unrealistic, distorted, and flat are all facts beside the point” (247).
It is generally accepted that Romance novels for girls are the equivalent of adventure books for
boys. This is to say that where the adventure books focus on identity formation through completing
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