Menswear - The Founder

14 The Founder | Wednesday 23 February 2011
E X T R A
Arts
Screwing up your daughters, the
Twilight way
Julia Armfield
The other day, I read an article so
asinine that it made me spill coffee
down my dress (although saying
that, I don’t generally need an
asinine article to spill coffee down
my dress. All I need is coffee.). I
happened to be trawling the Empire
movie website, as you do, when I
came across an article by movie
blogger Helen O’Hara, entitled
The Case for Twilight’s Bella Swan,
Feminist. When I regained consciousness,
some forty-five minutes
and an exorcism later, I found that
I had not, alas, hallucinated and
that there was, in fact, someone out
there willing to make a case for the
heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s phenomenally
popular Twilight books’
right to stand alongside Mary Wollstonecraft
and Hermione Granger
and give us the womanly word.
The gist of O’Hara’s argument,
from what I could make out
through bleeding eye sockets, was
that: “Bella’s relationship with Edward,
while starting from a place of
(unhealthy) obsession, evolves into
something that’s still obsessed (on
both sides) but actually rather balanced
between give-and-take. He
may try to control her life, but she
simply doesn’t let him.” Well step
back, Mrs Pankhurst, there’s new
money in town.
Let me just hark back a bit here.
The Twilight novels, for those of
you who have been living on Mars
(in a cave, with your eyes shut) tell
the story of a girl, Bella, who falls
in love with a vampire, Edward,
whose only defining characteristics
appear to be bouffant hair and
an incurable thirst for her blood.
Over the course of the series, the
two argue interminably over Bella’s
desire to be changed into a vampire
so they can be together forever and
make mixtapes of My Chemical
Romance songs or whatever, whilst
peppering their bickering with
intermittent battles for their lives
and scenes in which they compare
themselves to Heathcliff and Cathy
without, I’m fairly certain, even
the most basic knowledge of what
Wuthering Heights is about, who
wrote it or where England is. Also,
there are werewolves and everyone
talks about their cars. All pretty
clear so far. As far as Teen Fiction
goes, Twilight exploded in a style
unheard of since Harry Potter. The
books have sold over 100 million
copies worldwide and three movies
have already been made, with the
final instalment set to be released
in two parts. Twilight fans, or
“Twi-hards”, are certainly not agespecific,
ranging from preteens to
the faintly disturbing “Twi-Moms”,
who make me yearn for the days
when nobody’s parents could even
pronounce “Dumbledore”. Age
discrepancies aside, however, there
are still two incontrovertible facts
to be gleaned about Twilight, the
first being that its fan demographic
is almost exclusively female and
the second being that, whoever
happens to have latched onto it, its
target readership has always been
teenaged girls.
Teen fiction, as a genre, is endlessly
problematic. The fact that
the word “teen” can encompass
anything from Upper Fourth to the
end of university creates untold
problems in terms of appropriacy
and relatability and the highly
gendered lines along which youth
fiction is divided are certainly no
help. Fiction aimed at those aged
thirteen to nineteen is, as a general
rule, aimed either at girls or at boys.
The Alex Rider books and anything
to do with sports or underpants are
aimed at boys. Twilight is aimed at
girls.
Now, let’s wander back to that
Empire article for a second. O’Hara
claims that Bella Swan makes “wise
decisions” and “follows her own
path”, surely the founding tenets
of feminism. This is, I should
point out, the girl who obsesses
so continually over her undead bf
that she contemplates suicide when
he leaves her; who is so near-mute
in his presence that almost all her
dialogue is followed by the words
“I mumbled”; who allows him not
infrequently to carry her around;
who loses all interest in family and
friends when in love; who tries to
forgo college in the name of said
love; who marries at age nineteen
(oh yeah, spoilers); who has some
seriously questionable violent sex
afterwards; who gets pregnant
with what I can only assume, from
six-hundred pages of vomituous
description, to be some kind of
human incarnation of a Saw movie;
who willingly has the thing; who
loves it because she’s a lady and
who waltzes off into the sunset with
Saw baby and her Abusive Vampire
Hottie like that’s all just how she
rolls. Neat.
O’Hara argues that “Feminists
don’t - or shouldn’t - demand that
every woman on screen live up
to some feminist ideal when the
population as a whole doesn’t”.
Well, this I absolutely must contest
when it comes to Teen fiction. A
while ago, I wrote an article on
how children’s books help fashion
whoever we turn out to be and I
would argue now that books aimed
at teenagers carry just such a social
responsibility. Admittedly, readers
of thirteen up have a more rounded
view of the world and a more fullydeveloped
ability to interpret what
they read, but the fact remains that
at fourteen/fifteen, you’re a gibbering
mess. Hormones, peer pressure
and stress combine to create the
Perfect Storm that is adolescence,
and it is at this point more than
ever that you start looking around
for anything to latch onto that
gives you a tangible identity. That’s
why people become Goths (that’s
why I joined Greek Myth Club).
Literature, during adolescence, is a
touchstone and Teen Literature is
a means of searching for identity
through relatable characters and
issues. The importance of Twilight
purveying a positive, empowering
message for teenaged girls,
however “idealised” O’Hara might
think that, should consequently
be pretty apparent. Teenaged girls
are a vulnerable lot and frankly,
the last thing they need is the most
popular book in the world dangling
a dream-scenario of perfect,
vampire love over their heads as the
way to opt out of a dreary life. Bella
is made infinitely happier, prettier
and more appealing by and marrying
Edward, and if you have any
problems with your sad teen life,
then you should just get yourself
a boyfriend too. One who carries
you up stairs and fills in your
Dartmouth applications, because
it’s always best if you let the man
take charge of the really important
things, like college applications and
motor skills (though obviously you
don’t really want to go to college).
Don’t worry if he slaps you around
a bit, either, or randomly takes the
engine out of your car – it’s only
because he loves you. For all its
inherent pull upon the sparkling
escape fantasies of teenaged girls,
Twilight is so woefully backward in
its approach to essential teen issues
that it is difficult to see how it could
be more damaging. Opportunities
to approach domestic violence, selfimage
and suicide as anything but
the trials of young love are sorely
wasted, whilst abortion, as an issue,
is as good as outright lambasted.
An abusive boyfriend is presented
as the absolute ideal (he sparkles,
kids) and female characters are defined
almost solely by the men who
surround them.
Bella Swan, for want of a better
closing statement, is not a feminist.
She’s a teenaged girl in dire need of
a book to show her the way. And
that book is most definitely not
Twilight.