Twilight: Incest and Cults

Readers, you find me today in a somewhat melancholic mood. You see, I've been following with great pleasure the incredible conversations in the comments of these posts, and I've been thrilled by all the wonderful information that has been brought to the table, from the explanation for why the opening Bible quote in Twilight was so King James Version-y to the delightful breakdown on why "masterpiece" and "swimsuit model" are not synonymous descriptions (more on that later).

What has saddened-and-delighted me the most, however, are all the absolutely wonderful characterization details and plot "alternatives" that have been brought up in the last few weeks. We've had several suggestions that the Cullens' situation would more adequately lend itself to college or homeschooling, where their home could be a veritable garden of learning. In this scenario, Bella could be drawn to Edward for his erudition and charm, having met him at their after-school job at the local burger joint (where Ed doesn't take lunch breaks because he's a vegetarian, natch). The draw of immortality in this case would be the offer of unlimited learning and self-improvement - a draw that I myself would feel acutely, having realized yesterday that if I never buy another book again, I still have enough unread material to last me for the next 7 years, minimum. (This realization simultaneously pleases and horrifies me - at least partly because a good chunk of my reading material is review requests that all need to be finished yesterday).

Other readers, on the other hand, have posited a darker story, where the Cullens' willingness to return to high school despite their obvious hatred of it is spurred by them being essentially time-locked at their physical ages (that is, the ages at which they were turned into vampires) and constantly drawn to others their own age in a desperate-but-futile attempt to recapture what was lost. In this case, the family members are simply serving time until they accomplish whatever goal is tenuously keeping them alive, or until their distaste for the other members of their "family" (here showcased by their obvious anti-social body language and refusal to converse with one another) drive them to complete isolation and potentially suicide.

What is interesting to me is that while I don't much care for the writing and plot in Twilight, I would totally read and enjoy all these nuanced spin-offs that are being suggested - it's really enough to make me quite sad for what could have been. Of course, some of this may be the simple matter of standing on the shoulders of a giant (or, at least, a highly published author), but if the view is good up there, who is going to complain?

In short, I summarily demand that all of you stop doing whatever it is you've been doing with your lives and instead start writing these incredible alternate Twilight-verse fan fics that keep being proposed, because they sound awesome. Just please don't make the vampires sparkly. *grins*

Now, on to the actual post:

Twilight Recap: Bella has caught her first glimpse of the Cullen family whose unearthly, preternatural beauty has absolutely captivated and astonished her. She seems further overwhelmed by their almost unattainable level of aloofness: not only are they not talking to any of the other students, they're not even talking to each other.

Twilight, Chapter 1: First Sight

I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel.

I really must give credit to Kit Whitfield for so clearly pointing out that while the concepts of "masterpiece" and "model" are both valid ways to describe a character, they are concepts that are not given to much overlap and don't work and play nicely as a combined description. Someone may be as lovely as an angel or as beautiful as a fashion model, but it's very difficult to imagine the person that could be equally well described as either - and seeing the two descriptions combined in this fast-and-furious manner almost comes off as a rather lazy attempt to just generically stamp the Cullens as "hawt" and then move on.

Raphael's St. Catherina + Elle Macpherson in Sports Illustrated
The similarities are eerie!

Once again, it's hard to know what to make of Bella's character as a result of this inner monologue. Is Bella is a modern girl whose notions of attractiveness are defined and formed by the fashion magazines aimed at her target demographic, or is she a studious girl who is deeply influenced by art history and ancient standards of desirability? Since we later see Bella reading "Pride and Prejudice" more often than "Cosmo Girl", I think we're meant to assume that she's the latter - an unworldly girl slightly out of phase from her more fashion-conscious peers - and yet if that's the case, her inner voice doesn't seem to ring very true at times.

“Who are they?” I asked the girl from my Spanish class, whose name I’d forgotten.

Bella, as we've noted before, doesn't remember the name of the girl she's been sitting with throughout lunch and the last two class periods. This wouldn't be especially noteworthy - I myself am notorious with names - except that she does remember "overly helpful" Eric's name, despite the fact that she's spent significantly less time with him than with this new girl. Whether this is just a natural quirk, or indicative of Bella being more interested in Eric than in this nameless curly-haired girl, we've yet to determine.

   As she looked up to see who I meant — though already knowing, probably, from my tone — suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at my neighbor for just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine.
   He looked away quickly, more quickly than I could, though in a flush of embarrassment I dropped my eyes at once. In that brief flash of a glance, his face held nothing of interest — it was as if she had called his name, and he’d looked up in involuntary response, already having decided not to answer.
   I glanced sideways at the beautiful boy, who was looking at his tray now, picking a bagel to pieces with long, pale fingers. His mouth was moving very quickly, his perfect lips barely opening. The other three still looked away, and yet I felt he was speaking quietly to them.

Later in the novel, we'll learn that Edward has the ability to read people's minds, and this scene is meant to be foreshadowing this fact. Apparently, Edward sits through lunch period in silence with his mental antenna up and any time anyone mentions the Cullens in their lunch conversation, he rapidly reports it to the others. This is supposedly meant to ensure the safety of the Cullen clan - if anyone gets suspicious enough to pull out the torches and pitchforks, they'll have advance warning to clear out of Dodge.

Why any of this is necessary considering that his 'sister' Alice has the ability to see the future is anyone's guess, but I find this terribly amusing because I like to imagine Edward reporting in all seriousness to his 'siblings' every time someone in the cafeteria points out in private conversation what tossers the Cullens are for buying food, ripping it to pieces with their hands, and throwing it away like there aren't people starving right now in China.

   My neighbor giggled in embarrassment, looking at the table like I did.
   “That’s Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The one who left was Alice Cullen; they all live together with Dr. Cullen and his wife.” She said this under her breath.
   Strange, unpopular names, I thought. The kinds of names grandparents had. But maybe that was in vogue here — small town names? I finally remembered that my neighbor was called Jessica, a perfectly common name. There were two girls named Jessica in my History class back home.

Twilight was written in 2005, and thanks to the wonder of the American government, we can and do have lists of the most popular American baby names that year. (Whether or not the website was available when this novel was written is another question.) The only one of the "unpopular" names listed above that didn't make the Top 1000 Names list for that year was "Rosalie", although the diminutive "Rosa" came in strong at #407. In fact, "Edward" (#134) was a more popular name that year than "Bella" (#208) - although to be fair "Isabella" was a whopping #6. The practical upshot of this, though, is that the Cullens' names actually weren't all that "strange" or "unpopular" when Twilight was published if they were still being dispensed regularly to new babies that year.

@ Social Security Administration

I think we're informed that the Cullens' names are old, unpopular names in order to drive home the point that they were all named several decades before our story is set. If you're going to do that in a novel, though, you have to actually use old, unpopular names rather than old names that have never stopped being popular - and the problem there is that no one really wants to moon over a modern literary hero named "Hyman" or "Fagin". J.K. Rowling may have brought back "Hermione" from the brink of obscurity, but that sort of success with a older name working in modern literature is probably the exception rather than the rule.

   “They are . . . very nice-looking.” I struggled with the conspicuous understatement.
   “Yes!” Jessica agreed with another giggle. “They’re all together though - Emmett and Rosalie, and Jasper and Alice, I mean. And they live together.” Her voice held all the shock and condemnation of the small town, I thought critically. But, if I was being honest, I had to admit that even in Phoenix, it would cause gossip.

This is my favorite scene in the Twilight movie, because Jessica says to Bella that she shouldn't bother getting interested in the un-paired Edward because "nobody here is good enough for him." To which Mike Nelson quips, "No, you're just not related enough for him!"

What I like best about this description, though, is that this is the first instance I've seen of Bella being mentally harsh to someone before immediately backing off and realizing that she's being unfair: she "critically" notes the "[small town] shock and condemnation" before being honest that, actually, the behavior of dating your foster-sibling would be considered odd pretty much anywhere in mainstream America.

What is debatable is whether or not the Cullen behavior would be considered odd pretty much everywhere. I've read somewhere (and I wish I could find this article again) that many anthropologists believe that cultural incest taboos are based somewhat less on the actual fact of being related to one another and more on the familiarity of growing up with someone in the same close-knit group. Supposedly, quite a few European monarchs had difficulty consummating relationships where the relatively unrelated couple had nevertheless been raised together in the same household from childhood and subsequently found the physical aspect of marriage to be psychologically distressing. On the flip side, there are apparently quite a few examples of monarchies where the couple were siblings or close cousins, but had been raised so separately that adult consummation of the marriage was apparently not overly difficult for the parties involved.

If the cultural taboo against incest is based on familiarity, therefore, instead of strict relativity, then the Cullens' behavior would be considered odd in most circles regardless of how "small town" the local attitudes are or aren't. Both the book and the movie, though, simply make the point that the Cullen Couples aren't technically related, and Bella is instantly okay with the foster-sibling dating and all that it implies. Of course, part of this immediate acceptance on the part of Bella (and the reader) is that we already know there's more to the Cullen family that meets the eye: the Cullens, in fact, not only aren't related but also haven't been raised together - they are functionally adult life-partners who choose to pretend otherwise as part of their masquerade.

However, having said that, when I was wracking my brain trying to think of a modern community where dating a foster-sibling or step-sibling would be considered acceptable, I couldn't help but think of some religious communities where keeping young people within the community faith is ranked at higher importance than, say, securing a spouse outside your immediate circle of childhood friends and family.

Last year, I read several books on modern polygamous cults, including "Escape", "Stolen Innocence", "When Men Become Gods", and "Under the Banner of Heaven". One thing that really struck me was when one FBI investigator said that interviews with escaped women usually resulted in "family tree diagrams" that were literally covered in lines - one woman was, if I recall correctly, married off to her mother's husband's father, so she had become through marriage her mother's step-mother... and her own step-grandmother! Several of these books also noted the climbing incidence of congenital birth defects resulting from inbreeding in these tightly controlled communities - a fact that I found particularly heart-breaking.

Now, while Stephenie Meyer is a member of the mainstream Mormon church, I am not suggesting that this description of the Cullen family is meant to be a proactive statement in favor of the fundamentalist Mormon polygamous groups. Instead, I think that S.Meyer's description here is another example of lightly fluffy writing that simply fails to examine the deeper implications of a family that - to all outward appearances - is defined by figurative incest. And the only reason I mentally linked the Cullen family to modern polygamous cults at all is because my brain pretty much hyperlinked there from "Is there any culture on earth where this behavior wouldn't be considered odd?" to "Oh, well, actually that wouldn't be so odd in some of the communities I read about last year..."

However, I do think it's interesting that once the connection has been made, the Cullens do seem a little like a religious cult if you don't know that they are actually vampires. They're quiet and isolated - living out in the woods, keeping to themselves, rarely socializing even amongst themselves. The kids keep erratic hours and are pulled out of school frequently for special instruction in the mountains. The parents encourage the children to date amongst themselves rather than seek relationships outside the family - behavior that would in almost any context be considered highly usual. And no one has ever seen the children eat the school fare - they buy their lunch, sit quietly in a corner of the room, and then throw everything away at the end of the period.

Really, the more we see of the Cullens, the more surprised I am that absolutely no one has staged an intervention for those poor kids.

31 comments:

zabiglione said...

I would wonder if the Cullens are supposed to be mentally/emotionally, as well as physically, trapped at 17? (It would explain Edward's towering angst). I think there needs to be some real explanation as to why they would choose to live through High School over and over. Realistically, in a big city, they could probably pass unnoticed for at least a 15 years or so as alleged 20-30 somethings, especially given their level of social engagement with humanity, and it is just as overcast in Seattle, Vancouver, or Portland. I know the odd particularly young looking 34 year old and I have never once thought "gee, they are probably immortal". Also, I am only 25, and had a fairly good time in high school, but I find the prospect of having to survive another four years of teen angst a horrifying nightmare proposition. I can't help but think someone who is supposed to be around a hundred would find high school to be at the very least tiresome and grim.

Mime Paradox said...

First time commenter heading over from Slacktivist. Loving the deconstruction here, which has been making me see the books (which I haven't read) in a new light: they may or may not be actually good, but they do sound more interesting than I'd initially given them credit for.

One thing, though, I'm not entirely sure sure I understand the usefulness of looking at baby name statistics from 2005 to verify if the names chosen for the book would have indeed been as unpopular as it claims. Wouldn't one need to check statistics from 1987-1990 instead, which is when the Cullens would have been named had they actually been teenagers? Or am I missing something here?

Also, looking at the pictures from the movies, it strikes me that "masterpiece + model" may have been an inadvertently apropos descriptions. While I can't see the people in rennaisance paintings having figures such as those of the actors, I can't see swimsuit models looking as pale or marble-y either.

Ana Mardoll said...

Wouldn't one need to check statistics from 1987-1990 instead, which is when the Cullens would have been named had they actually been teenagers?

Haha, I was hoping no one would notice that! You're right: that would have been better, but the site I linked to didn't go back that far, and the other "baby name popularity" sites I found, I wasn't sure how solid their data was and whether it was confined to the US or a combination of countries.

So I kind of lazied out of that one, but I'll now hand-wave it a bit by saying that if the names were popular enough to hand off to kids in the year 2005, then they still shouldn't be called "unpopular" names. :D

Also, looking at the pictures from the movies, it strikes me that "masterpiece + model" may have been an inadvertently apropos descriptions.

I do agree that the movie casting was spot on. They're still missing the bruises under the eyes, but they've got the tired, anemic thing going on with their body language. I'm not sure how pale swimsuit models are/aren't, but underwear models often are, so... hmm.

Actually, there's another interesting thought: if I was going to think of a "model", it would probably be an underwear model a la Victoria's Secret or Lane Bryant just because I pass their advertisements in the malls when I shop. I don't immediately think of Sports Illustrated because I don't have a subscription, so I pretty much go months or years at a time without thinking of SI.

So Bella's immediate leap to swimsuit modelling (in January, in the cold rainy winter) makes me think that either Charlie has a subscription that he leaves out on the coffee table, or S.Meyer just wasn't ready for the word "underwear" to appear in the novel....

Technocracygirl said...

Here's a link to a review paper on relationships in kibbutzes, where children of different families are raised together in a communal setting. The abstract says that they are likely to have an inhibited pattern of intimacy in alduthood unless they leave the kibbutz setting. So there's a modern-day, academic take on this.

Also, in high school, people get picked on and talked about for *anything* that's out of the norm. If you watch Rebecca Drysdale's fantastic "It Gets Better" music video, in the credits, she notes that it's not just QUILTBAG teens who get bullied, but anyone who's out of the norm, and it can get better for them, too. It looks like the Cullens have enough charisma (or maybe just enough I-don't-give-a-d*mn) to not be bullied for their oddness, but that's certainly not going to stop the gossip. Humans are social creatures, and gossip is one of those social activities.

Actually, gossip about how the Cullens are odd and scary might be a *good* thing, in the evolutionary sense. The Cullens, now matter how many vows of abstinence they take, are predators who kill human beings. We may like and admire the lions and jaguars, but humans have been working on killing the predators for a very, very long time. And there is now a lot of other things wrapped up in how we feel about them, but we still don't tend to want them wandering around our homes. The Cullens are just as dangerous as a lion, but they have a mind-whammy that makes people forget that. But the danger signals are still there, so the humans of the community will latch on to any reason to shun them, to keep the danger as far away from themselves as possible.

Also, the whole "old master painting the face of an angel" thing reminds me of Anne Rice. Armand was the one who got the decription the most, with comments about a face out of Caravaggio practically every time he showed up on the page, but all of the vampires got this in one way or the other. I think that in Queen of the Damned, when the "last" vampires are all sitting around together, Lestat or someone talks about how the Dark Gift has managed to transform all of them into works of art. As a teen who squeed over the Vampire Chronicles just as much as any Twilight fan squees over these books, SMeyer looks an awful lot like she's cribbing here.

Stuart Armstrong said...

There's a rationalist variant of Twilight (with a self-aware Bella) at http://luminous.elcenia.com/chapters/ch1.shtml

that essentially goes quite deeply into all the wonderful things that you could do and learn as a vampire: langauges, skills, the places you could visit (museums and acheological digs, for instance, where you could be an expert on everything there). I believe it also touched on how Bella could have fascinating email conversations with any expert in the world, once she'd got her vampire mind up to speed on the subject. It made it sound heavenly.

SkyknightXi said...

The kinds of unfinished business I was imagining for non-evil vampires included such things as reconciling two feuding clans (the vampire belonging to a third arbiter clan, and near-killed by a member of a fourth clan with a vested interest in the feud sticking around). In Edward's case, I imagined him with a very nastily difficult task: Bringing down a cult of malevolent shapeshifters, of a type known generally as "Skinwalkers" (the term comes from a particular sort of warlock in Pueblo lore, someone who gained the power to adopt the forms of other creatures after killing their kin or some other horrific crime). He was turned after he was fatally wounded protecting a colony of humans and selkies in Ireland from wolf skinwalkers, and since then he's been chasing and destroying skinwalker enclaves. The reason he's in a Pacific Northwest high school: The last skinwalker enclave on his hit list is based somewhere in Washington, and it looks like the top of THEIR hit list is one of the school's history teachers (one of his research projects has the potential to expose the enclave's presence). Edward enrolled to better keep a protective eye on him (not that the teacher in question knows this...). This also sets up the potential tension between him and Jacob over more than just Bella; Edward is constantly uncertain whether Jacob really is a natural werewolf, and not a skinwalker infiltrator (not to mention whether natural werewolves EXIST), and Jacob is nervous over whether Edward will go Knight Templar on him...

Anna K said...

I'd actually defend the angel-model comparison in this specific instance: paintings of angels and airbrushed models don't have much in common when it comes to their bodies, but she's specifically talking about faces - and both paintings and models have faces that are far more symmetrical and free of blemishes (in high school, clear skin is very rare) than the norm.

Of course, that comparison only works if your beautiful faces are indeed free of blemishes, rather than, say, having massive bruises under their eyes...

axilet said...

If you're looking for fairly long alt. Twilight fics, I'd suggest das-mervin's series which goes into/reinvents the backstories of the Cullens. They can be found on her Livejournal, on the first entry under the heading of 'Mrs Hyde's Twilight Revamp.' Alternately, here's the link: http://das-mervin.livejournal.com/66934.html#cutid6
(I'm not sure if links show up on your site =P) Das Mervin hates Twilight with burning passion and has a couple of chapters out on her planned rewrite for the whole series O_O Check 'em out and weep that she and Mrs. Hyde aren't the ones behind Twilight because I'd pay actual money for the stuff they are writing ^^

Chelsea said...

Yep, incest taboos tend to form around familiarity, rather than actual relation. In situations where the entire community/tribe/what have you is considered "family", marriage often takes place with members of other tribes, and marrying someone in your tribe would be considered incest even if you aren't biologically related. In modern day America, that's not much of a problem because we tend to think of family as being our biological, nuclear family.

Also, I gotta ask, having seen the miserable spectacle of the Cullens in social situations: is Dr. Cullen a total sadist? He knows how hard it is to be a vampire and try to keep some shreds of human morality. He knows how hard it is to abstain from human blood. But he just keeps making "children" anyway, even when some of them (Edward) are clearly miserable all the time.

octopod42 said...

It actually makes me think of the rampant sibling marriage within the ancient Egyptian royal families -- I think it comes down to a psychological effect, one of these weird human things, where for a sufficiently elevated family "marrying out" is equivalent to "marrying down" and thus unacceptable.

Gordon said...

Some spoilers ahead, if you care

Technically, Carlisle only made three of them himself: Edward, Rosalie and Esme. He made Edward because it seemed like Edward's dying mother begged him to save Edward, who was also dying. He made Esme when he came upon her battered body after she attempted suicide. Rosalie was made because 1) Maybe all Edward needed to cheer himself up was a ladyfriend. and 2) He took pity on her because she'd been raped, beaten almost to death, and left to die in the street. He made Emmet because Rosalie found him dying in the woods after being mauled by a bear and she basically said, "Make him a vampire. I know you can, and if you don't I will." and he caved because the alternative would have been worse for Emmet. Jasper and Alice each have their own unique, separate stories.

/end spoilers

Though, in the version of Twilight in my head, yes. Carlisle is insane with grief and completely unable to accept his fate, which is why he keeps making vampires. He's trying to recapture life as a living being and each time he makes a new one to join his family, he is content. For awhile. Then he grows bored, panics, and starts over. Though, the Twilight in my head is a very different novel. VERY.

Kit Whitfield said...

Supposedly, quite a few European monarchs had difficulty consummating relationships where the relatively unrelated couple had nevertheless been raised together in the same household from childhood and subsequently found the physical aspect of marriage to be psychologically distressing. On the flip side, there are apparently quite a few examples of monarchies where the couple were siblings or close cousins, but had been raised so separately that adult consummation of the marriage was apparently not overly difficult for the parties involved.

And indeed, there's the problem of Genetic Sexual Attraction, where closely-related people - siblings, or parent and child - meet as adults having been separated through childhood and find themselves distressingly attracted to each other.

Ana Mardoll said...

There's a rationalist variant of Twilight (with a self-aware Bella)...

Stuart, I would love to give you an internet for that. I only read a couple of pages so far, but I like her version of Bella WAY more than the one in canon. Axilet, I'll have to check out your link, too - sounds very interesting!

Though, in the version of Twilight in my head, yes. Carlisle is insane with grief and completely unable to accept his fate, which is why he keeps making vampires. He's trying to recapture life as a living being and each time he makes a new one to join his family, he is content. For awhile. Then he grows bored, panics, and starts over.

Grief-stricken serial-killer doll-collector Carlisle?! This is what I mean about you guys coming up with stuff that sounds so much cooler than the source material. Talk about grey-and-grey morality! (No wonder they're so accepting of Bella - fresh blood to sate Carlisle's pain a little longer. And no wonder Rosalie is so angsty about babies - not only does she want one, she doesn't dare express her emotions in front of Carlisle or it might set him off on a hunt for a cute little child..... For my money, BTW, Rosalie is the sanest person in Twilight so far, which is why it's such a shame that we're supposed to hate her.)

I'd expect sexual acting-out with their peers and inappropriate behaviour, and I'd want to work with their foster parents to give them consistent boundaries.

That would actually make sense, and it's a shame it wasn't incorporated into the novel as a hand-wave for why no one has intervened - there's a "reason" for the acting out and so everyone is satisfied with the logic and no one wants to be bothered to help fix it.

Unfortunately, Jasper and Rosalie (i.e., the two least sociable people in the group - Rosalie because she's EVUL and Jasper because he's a newborn and most likely to snap when the cheerleader squad syncs up and hits their periods on the same day, etc.) have supposedly been with the Cullens since they were eight, which is pretty young for foster children.

If I were writing it, I think there's an element of mystery you could add: have the Cullens address each other by different names from the ones they use to others. They could introduce themselves as Thomas, John, Anne and Mary Cullen, names so classic that the odds of them going out of fashion are low, and then Bella could overhear one of them calling another Fanny or Maria-pronounced-Ma-rai-ah, and wonder what was going on. Alternatively - which might fit better with the book's important theme of having a high-status boyfriend whose name everybody knows - you might have them use their real names in public, but address each other in private by old-fashioned nicknames.

Oooh, I'm really seeing that scene now and - again - wishing it had been used in the source material. It really does seem like the Cullens are doing everything they can to stand out as unusual - they make a big show of not eating, they drive ridiculously expensive cars way too fast (more on that later), and they're too proud to change their "old, unpopular" names to blend in.

Makes me think of the RiffTrax line where the guys' finish Jessica's introduction speech by saying, "Oh, also: they're vampires. I always forget to add that!!" :P

And indeed, there's the problem of Genetic Sexual Attraction,

I haven't actually heard of this one. OFF TO WIKIPEDIA! *whoosh*

Kit Whitfield said...


Unfortunately, Jasper and Rosalie (i.e., the two least sociable people in the group - Rosalie because she's EVUL and Jasper because he's a newborn and most likely to snap when the cheerleader squad syncs up and hits their periods on the same day, etc.) have supposedly been with the Cullens since they were eight, which is pretty young for foster children.


Trigger warning: child abuse

Though not too long to have suffered tragic and permanent damage from abuse, sadly, especially if they were severely abused or neglected in their first few years. This isn't particularly relevant to Twilight, but there's an interesting if harrowing book I'd recommend called The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog by Dr Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz, which is a series of case histories about the effects of trauma on children's brains, and one of the points he makes is that the younger a child is mistreated or neglected, the deeper the damage is. Apparently most of our brain development happens in our first three years, and trauma then can have horrendous effects.

Gordon said...

Grief-stricken serial-killer doll-collector Carlisle?! This is what I mean about you guys coming up with stuff that sounds so much cooler than the source material. Talk about grey-and-grey morality! (No wonder they're so accepting of Bella - fresh blood to sate Carlisle's pain a little longer. And no wonder Rosalie is so angsty about babies - not only does she want one, she doesn't dare express her emotions in front of Carlisle or it might set him off on a hunt for a cute little child..... For my money, BTW, Rosalie is the sanest person in Twilight so far, which is why it's such a shame that we're supposed to hate her.)

A friend came up with this idea that Edward was a...serial accidental murderer? I guess that's a good way to phrase it. He's was alive hudreds of years ago and was "courting" a girl when he was turned. After coming clean to her, she agrees to let him make her a vampire, but he accidentally kills her. Years go by. He is despondent. Then he meets a new girl, very similar to the first one. She makes him feel like he's alive...sort of. Only, he doesn't get the process exactly right, so she loses all memory of being alive permanently. She leaves to figure her unlife out for herself. Then he meets another girl, very much like the first(he's got a type), but gets the vampire thing wrong again. She turns into a bloodthirsty serial killer and they hate each other(She hates him for being a wimp. He hates her for being a monster.) Enter Bella...

I maintain that one of the biggest travesties of the Twilight Saga is that Smeyer has all these very interesting character backstories and plot elements that get literally no use. They get mentioned in passing and then dropped. I would love to read about Jasper's experiences after he was turned. Vampire wars in Mexico in the 1870's! Or the story of Alice in the mental institution! Tanya, Irina and Kate are the SOURCE for medieval succubi legends! The Volturi are a ruling class of vampires, how did they manage that? A Kill Bill-like novella about Rosalie? I AM IN!

But what did we wind up with? FACE TOUCHING, MURMURS(almost 100 in Eclipse alone) AND 150 SYNONYMS FOR PALE.

Gordon said...

Supposedly, quite a few European monarchs had difficulty consummating relationships where the relatively unrelated couple had nevertheless been raised together in the same household from childhood and subsequently found the physical aspect of marriage to be psychologically distressing.

That's called the Westermarck Effect. A.K.A. reverse sexual imprinting. It's why, for example, your father or brother, if you grew up with them, doesn't see you as a sexual object, and also why you have trouble thinking of them in that way.

Ana Mardoll said...

Kit, I hadn't thought about how formative those early years are - you're right. (I'll have to check out that book - sounds really fascinating and deeply sad.) Maybe there's some fridge logic there, then: the two Cullens that are the most antisocial were siblings traumatized as children... although it reads more like it was done this way because Alice, Emmett, and Edward have somewhat darker hair coloring. Plus it makes the couples come out "nicely" - brother-and-sister dating another brother-and-sister.

Gordon, I love the Edward backstory there - having had love interests go bad in the past would explain his reticence to turn Bella so much more than the weaksauce "I think vampires have no souls" stuff. I think after 100 years, you'd have come to grips with a theology you were comfortable with (unless, of course, your mind was perma-stuck at your year of turning....)

We are all going to have so much fun (and by "fun" I of course mean "horror") with this Westermarck Effect when we get to the imprinting. I can't wait. :)

Leely said...

The searchable SSA database was online at least as early as 2003. One of my first real community-type experiences was on a message board that started out discussing baby name trends (specifically, the ones we all despaired of!) and became a pregnancy/infertility support space.

I know of a pair of step-siblings who got married. Their parents didn't marry until the kids were teens and I have no idea when they (the kids) started dating. I remember the general consensus being that this was weird-unusual but not weird-icky.

Stuart Armstrong said...

>Stuart, I would love to give you an internet for that. I only read a couple of pages so far, but I like her version of Bella WAY more than the one in canon.

Thanks! Glad that you liked it. I think it has a lot of interesting gems, and actually takes the situation of being a vampire seriously (rather than just being about humans with superpowers).

SkyknightXi said...

Gordon: Must be a case of Meyer being in love, or rather obsessed, with the concept of love, or thereabouts. A worldbuilding done not for its own sake, or to explore precepts, but merely to, I guess, add further layers of grandeur to Edward? And that primarily to amplify the "perfection" of Bella and Edward's romance? {sigh} Powerful as romantic love is as a force upon humans, it doesn't exactly trump all else all the time...

Jenny Islander said...

You know, if the Cullens want to blend in, instead of sitting there being all look-how-silent-and-aloof-we-are and shredding cafeteria food in their hands, they could just eat and read at the same time. I did it all the time in high school. Nose in book, one hand absentmindedly picking at my food. Plate behind propped-up book, even, so that nobody can see whether I'm actually consuming anything or just pushing it around. (That was for the two or three times I actually bought the cafeteria pizza. Now I know what old tires are used for.)

Ana Mardoll said...

Ooh, that's a slick idea, Jenny! It would also justify the Cullens being so suspiciously "book smart" (on account of them having gone through high school 10 times) and zipping through all their classes so easily.

ack-47 said...

My favorite part about that theft is that Anne Rice's vampires were all spectacularly homoerotic, so a comparison to Caravaggio was wholly apt - he was both a strongly homoerotic painter and painted very specific figures that are very credible as vampires, and mostly suffused with an air of inner knowledge, secrecy, or self-concealment. (I'm not a big fan of Rice, but credit where credit was due.) Rice's comparison is just visually ambiguous enough but so tonally appropriate it tells us everything we need to know about Armand's appearance without sparing a single precious detail; Meyer is just using 'old master painting' without a specific referent, and I'm willing to accept she might actually know of one of the Old Masters, but which painting does she mean? Rubens's pissing toddler Ganymede? The dog in the Arnolfini Portrait? That one weird stretchy skull in The Ambassadors? Goya's Charles IV?

It is as Twain says: "Old Masters" is an abbreviation, a contraction.

storiteller said...

I'm watching through the seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer right now, and I love how they really grapple with the idea of Angel (Buffy's vampire lover, if you don't know anything about the show) truly being a cold-blooded killer and his struggle. These vampires just seem....unfulfilled in comparison.

Trigger warning: child abuse

My mom's a special ed teacher, and in the beginning of her career, she worked in a school for the severely emotionally disturbed. One of the saddest kids she had was a child whose parents kept him in a cage until he was taken from them when he was around 5. She said that he never learned how to interact with people, so he had become incapable of it. He acted just like an animal, and no amount of therapy could ever really heal what had been done to him.

sekushinonyanko said...

Oh dear. I just read the linked post and...that was creepy. From what I've heard, the Twilight books put forth an odd and old-fashioned template of chaste romance mixed with rather scary controlling behavior on the part of Edward. Well, unless your interpretation is very wrong, those books are downright freaky. Nightmares, forever.

The idea that she is seeking a relationship within a family context is interesting; the idea that she is doing so because incest is an intermediary between mature and immature sexuality is troubling. I got the impression that you didn't consider incest any more odd than bdsm, but while tastes vary, I think most people do.

Cathy Earnshaw (from Wuthering Heights) is such a loathsome creature to me, with all of the pain she causes all around her. And she doesn't have Bella's excuse of being a kid to justify doing it. Seeing Wuthering Heights as a romance as opposed to (how I saw it) as a psychological horror story is a thing that has surprised me consistently. I hadn't heard of the book before I was assigned to read it in high school, so when I started happening upon references to Heathcliff as a great romantic hero, or Heathcliff and Cathy's romance as a Great Epic Romance I was baffled. When I heard Twilight was like Wuthering Heights by instinctive reaction was to recoil and refuse to read it; I find relationship dynamics of that kind distressing.

Juniper said...

Like Mime Paradox, I adore the Social Security Administration Popular Baby Name database (http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/). I assumed (arbritrarily) that the novel takes place in 2003, meaning that many of Bella’s classmates would have been born in 1986. I assumed that the Cullens were all born in 1903 (which I’m sure is not true).

If by “old-fashioned”, you mean “more popular in 1903 than in 1986 or 2003”, then the Cullen names are all genuinely old-fashioned.

Alice (#12 in 1903; #339 in 1986; #431 in 2003)
Edward (#9 in 1903; #61 in 1986; #130 in 2003)
Rosalie (#277 in 1903; #988 in 1986; did not break the top 1,000 in 2003)
Emmett (#170 in 1903; #905 in 1986; #677 in 2003)
Jasper (#245 in 1903; #695 in 1986; #516 in 2003)

If by “old-fashioned” you mean “popular—say in the top 100 most common names—in 190, but not in the top 100 names in 1986 or 2003”, then they don’t fare so well. By comparison, the 10 most popular boy and girl names of 1903 that did not appear in the 100 top names of 1986 or 2003 are:

Henry, Walter, Harry, Arthur, Albert, Clarence, Fred, Harold, Roy, Carl

Helen, Ruth, Marie, Florence, Ethel, Mildred, Dorothy, Alice, Gladys, Edna

So, Alice is the only name that really fits that criterion. Interestingly, Henry is only the 11th most popular name of 1903 because #1-10 are still popular. Helen is #2. Girl names have higher turnover.

As Kit points out, though, you can kind of sympathize with S. Meyer for picking a historical romance novel name like “Rosalie” over a name that sounds appropriate after the title “Great Aunt.”

Stephanie Meyers, interestingly, does talk about how she named here characters
http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight.html
It took me a while to find names for my anonymous duo. For my vampire (who I was in love with from day one) I decided to use a name that had once been considered romantic, but had fallen out of popularity for decades. Charlotte Bronte's Mr. Rochester and Jane Austen's Mr. Ferrars were the characters that led me to the name Edward. I tried it on for size, and found that it fit well. My female lead was harder. Nothing I named her seemed just right. After spending so much time with her, I loved her like a daughter, and no name was good enough. Finally, inspired by that love, I gave her the name I was saving for my daughter, who had never shown up and was unlikely to put in an appearance at this point: Isabella. Huzzah! Edward and Bella were named. For the rest of the characters, I did a lot of searching in old census records, looking for popular names in the times that they'd been born. Some trivia: Rosalie was originally "Carol" and Jasper was first "Ronald." I like the new names much better, but every now and then I will slip up and type Carol or Ron by accident. It really confuses the people who read my rough drafts.

So to add in 2 more names:
Carol (#389 in 1903; #310 in 1986; #878 in 2003)
Ronald (#254 in 1903; #75 in 1986; #237 in 2003)

Yeah…good change.

chris the cynic said...

Names have actually been discussed elsewhere, I'm not sure if you're interested. My contribution, using both the SSA information and Google's Ngram viewer (which doesn't track the actual frequency of names but instead can be used to track the frequency with which they are used in English language writing over the past few hundred years) can be found here, for example.

hapax said...

Of course, if one is going to go Doylist instead of Watsonian, one could instead take a look at the name popularity in the community that Meyer would be most familiar with -- that is, the Mormon community.

Alas, I could not massage that information of the Social Security site, even using Utah as a proxy for "the Mormon Community".

:-(

Rkaiser said...

i've never heard of the Catherine/Heathcliff romance referred to as a "capital-E-capital-R" Epic Romance or anything, but the possibility that people do is quite scary, as it is, like you said, a psychological horror story, and i totally ended up hating everyone in that book. i read it this past summer and it is currently in my garage along with my other rejects, because i doubt i will ever have the urge to read such a disturbing book again.

Reader of Books said...

"What is interesting to me is that while I don't much care for the writing and plot in Twilight, I would totally read and enjoy all these nuanced spin-offs that are being suggested - it's really enough to make me quite sad for what could have been."

This this this! One of my major criticisms of the Harry Potter series is how thoroughly boring most of the characters are, and even the smart bookworm character is shuffled off into the background until she gets married to the sidekick. And yet, I thoroughly love good HP fanfic that twists premises around--like the link to HP and the Methods of Rationality that I found in the Narnia discussion's comments and went off to read, laughing and crying and shouting my way through it.

"[...]and seeing the two descriptions combined in this fast-and-furious manner almost comes off as a rather lazy attempt to just generically stamp the Cullens as "hawt" and then move on."

Or it's trying to give them some backhanded religious credibility. If the masters were divinely inspired to draw angels and the like and these vampires-cum-models still look like them, well! The only logical conclusion is that they're angels! ...hang on, I think my brain just twisted itself into a knot coming up with that.

"Why any of this is necessary"

Because psychic vampire + all-seeing vampire = super awesome clique that Mary Sue has to join!

"[...]the Cullens do seem a little like a religious cult[...]"

This is the kind of fanfic I'd chortle with sadistic glee to read. If it were well written.

Mime Paradox said...

Haha, I was hoping no one would notice that! You're right: that would have been better, but the site I linked to didn't go back that far, and the other "baby name popularity" sites I found, I wasn't sure how solid their data was and whether it was confined to the US or a combination of countries.

So I kind of lazied out of that one, but I'll now hand-wave it a bit by saying that if the names were popular enough to hand off to kids in the year 2005, then they still shouldn't be called "unpopular" names. :D

Heh. Fair enough. If you'd like, though, you can track name popularity throughout the ages in the SSA site you linked to. In the "Popularity of a name" field, you can track a name's popularity as far back as 200 years ago. It's actually super-interesting, if you're into that sort of thing. For example, I realized my name didn't start making the lists until 1935, but has been consistently in the top 100 since 1982. And that "Michael" had a 37-year streak (1961-1998) as the most popular name for boys, until it was dethroned by--HA!--"Jacob", which has reigned ever since. "Emma", on the other hand, has been incredibly cyclical in popularity, Ranking 3 in 1880, lowering to the 400's in the late 60's, and returning to top 3 prominence since 2003. Also, apparently "Diamond" is/was a relatively popular name for women, going from 958 in 1986 to 219 in 1992, which a rather staggering (almost "Madison"-like) increase and news to me (although granted, the age range means I wouldn't be likely to meet many of them).

Aaaaanyways, I tracked the names in the post, and taking into consideration that Bella doesn't quite need to be accurate about this--she's not, as far as I know, the type of person who would spend time tracking baby name popularity--I'm willing to give her/Meyer the benefit of the doubt regarding a few of those names. You've mentioned Rosalie already, but Jasper and Emmett, going by the list, are names which she would be more likely to hear on older people, having by 1990 dropped, respectively, from 197 to 615 and from 175 to 964. Edward and Alice, on the other hand? No dice. Edward himself is only 61 on the 1989 rankings, so there's little chance that Bella wouldn't have heard it among her peers. Jessica, by the by, was most popular girl's name from 1987 to 1990.

[/assorted name geekery]


I do agree that the movie casting was spot on. They're still missing the bruises under the eyes, but they've got the tired, anemic thing going on with their body language. I'm not sure how pale swimsuit models are/aren't, but underwear models often are, so... hmm.


Oops. Yup, you're totally right--I'd totally overlooked non-swimsuit models, which would indeed be paler. Now that you mention bruises, though, I'm imagining Edward as Deathnote's L, which...that would totally work.

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