When I came across the Twilight series, something went horribly wrong after step 3. Or... step 3 and step 2 got horribly mixed up and I had what I like to call a "Pop Culture Conflict."
Literary works become popular for many reasons. The characters are relate-able, the conflicts are timeless, the ending leads to some internal moral insight.... but this is not the case for Twilight.
At first I considered that maybe it's because the books were targeted to girls between the ages of eleven and sixteen. Until I started to see young women my age, reading this garbage.
My words are cruel, I understand. But when a book is entirely centered around a self-hating, whiney, unremarkable teenage girl who develops her self-esteem by dating guys who want to kill her out of blood lust.... we women of a post-feminist era need to take a step back and ask ourselves what the hell went wrong.
Margot Adler wrote this extensive article on the surge of vampires in our literature and media, noting the fact that our contemporary portrayal of vampires involves moral conflict. Blood-sucking, light-evading, hellish creatures grappling with the fact that they are not human, but desperately trying to act human.
I don't like it. I want my vampires to be evil, because the archetype of the vampire gives us a glimpse of our own maliciously animal nature - and in contrast, reminds us of our true goodness and humanity. And this is why people find vampires to be oh-so-sexy. The fantasy is completely taboo because we so desire to link sex with blood, and darkness, and decay, and desecration. But to white-wash this charismatic and brutal personage is to take away its power in the psyche.
There's my Jungian psychology for the day.
When I was in high school, I fell in love with Anne Rice. Her early stuff was hypnotic. The characters were average until they became vampires (except Lestat; he was awesome before he turned over... and being a vampire just amplified it). But then you begin to realize just how depraved these characters really were. You began to see the irony in how they lived, because no matter how hard they tried to blend into polite society, to live fashionably, they were fundamentally apart from the people they feasted on. And to watch the character's slow realization of this was heart-wrenching. You'd finish the book with a greater sense of your own humanity, because the characters you just fell in love with (or grew to despise) were so very nihilistic.
Why aren't girls still reading those, huh? Why not encourage teenage girls to explore their own psychology through something as sexually tensioned as a vampire novel? I feel this is far better than having them relate to a "heroine" as pathetic as Bella. That series has started a deplorable trend: all the girls want a vampire for a boyfriend. Don't bother, they just want to suck your blood (pop your cherry) and leave you for dead (move onto their next naive target). And most vampires are stuck on themselves anyway.
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| Notice, ladies, how you're not getting any of his attention. |
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