[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.]
Twilight, Chapter 21: Phone Call
We're really racing towards the end here, because I think this may be the shortest chapter in the book. It certainly feels short; you can whip through it pretty quickly so we're going to do just that.
I COULD FEEL IT WAS TOO EARLY AGAIN WHEN I WOKE, and I knew I was getting the schedule of my days and nights slowly reversed. I lay in my bed and listened to the quiet voices of Alice and Jasper in the other room. That they were loud enough for me to hear at all was strange.
One of my biggest regrets about the Twilight series--aside from the way-too-common-in-literature abusive relationships and the fact that I dreamed last night that Bella was vampire'd mid-Twilight and everything was so much better--is all the missed opportunities to explore out the nuance between Bella's human life that she doesn't have much left to savor versus Bella's vampire life and what she can expect when that happens.
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Twilight: Waiting for Edward |
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Twilight: The Cullens are Terrible at Everything |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.]
Twilight, Chapter 20: Impatience
So Chapter 20 is titled "impatience" and it's like the author is trolling us at this point, because we spent seventeen or eighteen chapters with absolutely nothing happening and then plot finally started to occur--it wasn't good plot, but it was plot and there was danger and excitement and car chases and things--and then BOOM everything has to slow down so that we can chill in a motel room for a day. It's so boring and tiresome, and I'll be skipping over 80% of it, but there are a couple of juicy pieces to bite into. But here's a chapter summary in advance so that I don't have to quote the whole chapter:
In Chapter 20, Bella wakes up in one of the Cullens' cars to find that Alice and Jasper have made it to Arizona in one night...somehow. (Ostensibly by the power of not observing traffic laws.) They pass the airport, but decide to head to a motel instead and hang out. They then proceed to hang out in a motel room for an interminably boring period of time while nothing happens and no one calls and Bella worries about Edward's safety. Bella and Alice talk about the vampire-making process. Then Alice has a new vision that Bella utterly fails to interpret correctly despite being amazingly obvious, then Edward calls to say they lost track of the tracker, then Bella leaves a message for her mother telling her how to contact her.
Okay, now we're all on the same page. Let's do this thing.
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Twilight: Asking Permission |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.]
Twilight, Chapter 19: Goodbyes
There's a lot of Chapter 19 left, but it all conveniently follows the same theme of Bella's consent being entirely disregarded by the Cullens, so I think we can whip through it all very quickly. When we last left Bella, she was flouncing out on Charlie while pretending an intent to drive to Arizona, which is a 24 hours drive under the best of conditions (i.e., not stopping to eat or sleep or buy gasoline).
“I’ll call you tomorrow!” I yelled, wishing more than anything that I could explain everything to him right then, knowing I would never be able to. I gunned the engine and peeled out.
I'm pretty sure that Bella (a) never fulfills this promise and (b) doesn't even intend to. Which, I mean, to a certain extent? Fine. My personal morality is perfectly comfortable with lying about a phone call if necessary to save someone's life or something. But, as several of us have already noted, Bella driving out of town and then instantly disappearing off the grid--no phone calls, no witnesses, no credit card trail of gas stations tracking her to Arizona, not a single person who has seen or heard of her--will naturally lead her father (and the other local authorities) to assume very bad things have happened to Bella.
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Twilight: Watching Her Leave |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.]
Twilight, Chapter 19: Goodbyes
I'm not going to lie; I've been dreading this chapter for the last couple of weeks. Every time I sit down to try to write about it, all these conflicting feelings come up, and I'm going to try to work through those here.
When I started this series, I wanted to deconstruct Twilight as an admitted non-fan who didn't like or agree with the books but didn't "hate" them. I'd seen plenty of "omg how awful is this" stuff online, and as much as I found a lot of it very funny and amusing to read, I didn't want to necessarily go in that direction. I wanted to sit down and talk about things that worried me in these books, ideologically-speaking, and what I thought it said about our larger society that these tropes weren't simply acceptable in a mainstream novel but arguably necessary for a novel to become as wildly successful as Twilight did.
For example: Edward Cullen is an abusive boyfriend by any objective metric I know to apply to him. But his popularity as a cultural icon in spite of (or because of) that fact doesn't lead me to believe that all girls want abusive boyfriends. It does, however, lead me to some very unpleasant observations about how we as a culture view female gaze and desire, female sexuality, acceptable male-on-female forms of attention, and so forth. In short, I wanted to Do Feminism, but using Twilight as a sounding board (or, as I privately prefer for reasons of amusement, a flannelgraph) to demonstrate that these things are real things that actually exists all around us.
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Twilight: Two Too-Permanent Solutions |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.]
[Extra Content Note: Kidnapping, Physical Abuse]
Twilight, Chapter 18: The Hunt
When we last left our lovers, Carlisle had perfectly maneuvered Bella to be considered a threat to the regular / non-vegetarian / murdering vampires that had come into town for a visit, and had then ordered her out of sight (though not, obviously, out of mind) lest prolonged contact with the murderer-vampires cause them to personify her into someone they might not want to eat. Thanks, Carlisle!
This whole time I’d been rooted in place, terrified into absolute immobility. Edward had to grip my elbow and pull sharply to break my trance. Alice and Emmett were close behind us, hiding me. I stumbled alongside Edward, still stunned with fear. I couldn’t hear if the main group had left yet.
Far be it from me to impugn the strategies of the Cullens, and I also realize that this would be totes immoral and also there are those maybe-exist / maybe-don't Volturi to think about, but there's a point in all this where I'm genuinely trying to work out why they don't just kill the three visiting vampires. (We need a term for them. I assert we shall call them the Traveling Trio.)
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Twilight: How to Win Friends and Influence People |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.]
Twilight, Chapter 18: The Hunt
Things are happening now! It's all very exciting! Maybe? When we last left our star-crossed couple, it was kinda confusing because non-vegetarian vampires were about to visit the Cullens in their baseball clearing and they were arriving at a rate that made it impossible for Edward to just carry Bella off to a safe distance, but not at a rate that made it impossible for the Cullens to go back to playing their game after talking for a bit.
It was especially weird and frustrating because we all recognize that vampires might not be okay with taking the Cullens' word on the human being okay with all this and not informing the other humans and/or the very vengeful Volturi who might not have existed at this point in the series, but the actual Cullens themselves seem incapable of figuring out that might be a possible response to introducing a human to the non-vegetarian vampires.
And, I mean, this pisses me off. Because even if they legitimately couldn't hide Bella, they could have strolled out to the visitors and said, "Hey, wait, here's the thing. We wanna meet you, but we have a human with us. She's safe, we have her enthralled, and there will be turning later, but we have to wait for the right timing because of our established-in-society cover story. So if you don't want to meet her because you don't want her to see your faces, or don't want to get in trouble with the V-men, that's cool. We'll just take you to our house from here."
You know, this might not have worked. But it would probably have worked better than what is actually about to happen. (And I really cannot parse out how Carlisle thought his actual plan could have worked at all since it hinged on the vampires not noticing that Bella is human, i.e., not noticing the one thing Edward said they couldn't fail to notice. So.) But whatever, I think we've all agreed this is just a plot device to make vampires scary again. Fine.
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Twilight: They Just Don't Care |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.]
Twilight, Chapter 17: The Game
OK! We're past all the billion sudden plot points (and mess of terrible) that got dumped on us when we arrived at Chapter 17, and now it's time for vampire baseball. Except I probably shouldn't have been hyping it up all this time, because literally nothing I could say about it would be amusing at this point. But let's dive in!
He smiled wistfully and released all of me but one hand. He led me a few feet through the tall, wet ferns and draping moss, around a massive hemlock tree, and we were there, on the edge of an enormous open field in the lap of the Olympic peaks. It was twice the size of any baseball stadium.
I could see the others all there; Esme, Emmett, and Rosalie, sitting on a bare outcropping of rock, were the closest to us, maybe a hundred yards away. Much farther out I could see Jasper and Alice, at least a quarter of a mile apart, appearing to throw something back and forth, but I never saw any ball. It looked like Carlisle was marking bases, but could they really be that far apart?
This chapter continues more of the same Bigger and Better themes of the book: vampire baseball isn't really about a tighter focus on nuance or skill, but is rather really more about super-sizing the existing game. The bases are farther apart. Every not-hit is a strike. Every hit is a home run. Every home run has the outfielders running to Canada and back (or wherever).
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Twilight: No Excuses Needed |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Discussions of rape, abuse, and kink.]
Twilight, Chapter 17: The Game
Chapter 17 remains the longest chapter ever written, and I despair of getting to the actual baseball. But we are going to eventually, I promise! But first we have to wade through a lot of abstinence porn (which is great if that's your thing but is probably not great if that's not your thing) and a lot of Edward being genuinely awful at Bella. So let's put on our Wellingtons and slog through.
First we have to get Bella into an "off-roading harness" because the jeep is going to drive partway to wherever they play baseball which, apparently, is not reachable by your human roads (and only partly reachable by your human off-roading vehicles).
“What’s all this?” I asked when he opened the door.
“It’s an off-roading harness.”
“Uh-oh.”
I tried to find the right places for all the buckles to fit, but it wasn’t going too quickly. He sighed again and reached over to help me. I was glad that the rain was too heavy to see Charlie clearly on the porch. That meant he couldn’t see how Edward’s hands lingered at my neck, brushed along my collarbones. I gave up trying to help him and focused on not hyperventilating.
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Twilight: Rules For Dating My Daughter |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Misogyny, Conservative Christian Fathers (CCF), Sex-Shaming]
Twilight, Chapter 17: The Game
OK! It's still the baseball chapter! We're gonna baseball the crap outta this chapter. I mean it this time. I have been looking forward to this chapter for something like forever. Wheee!
When we last left our heroine, she was being uncharacteristically snippy at Billy and Billy was framing his perfectly reasonable objections to dating a supernatural mass-murderer as though he once heard a rumor that Edward smoked a cinnamon cigarello behind the school gym once. (There are also rumors that he might own a leather jacket. You don't wanna go steady with a boy like that, do you Bella? You're one of the Good Girls!)
Which is to say: Billy is being weirdly puritanical rather than genuinely concerned and his response is not to offer Bella shelter on the reservation (where vampires are forbidden to go) like you would to, you know, a woman facing the threat of abuse from an obsessive and powerful boyfriend, but rather his response is to instead semi-threaten to tattle to Charlie, before being the first to blink in the wimpiest game of chicken ever.
I can perfectly believe that everything about this scene fits a conversation that S. Meyer may have experienced or have heard about from her friends; what everyone involved in the making of this novel seemed to forget (possibly intentionally? for the cozy?) is that this dialogue makes no goddamn sense in the context of serial killing vampires. But whatever, let's plow through.
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Twilight: Innocent Until Victim-Blaming |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Misogyny, Rape, Victim-Blaming]
Twilight, Chapter 17: The Game
IT'S THE BASEBALL CHAPTER IT'S THE BASEBALL CHAPTER IT'S BEEN FOUR YEARS AND WE'RE AT THE BASEBALL CHAPTER. *confetti and colorful streamers explode from the ceiling*
Did I mention Vampire Baseball chapter?? Very infamous chapter, and I know a lot of you have been looking forward to it. I've already covered this elsewhere, so I won't belabor the point, but: I'm disappointed that we're playing baseball instead of a uniquely vampire sport. Or, rather, I don't so much mind that the vampires are playing baseball (because I don't expect vampires to be completely divorced from human pastimes), so much as I mind that they don't seem to have any unique vampire games born out of their vampire abilities and (non-existent) vampire culture.
Anyway. Before we can get to the baseball, we're going to cram several chapters' worth of drama into a single chapter who edited this book I mean really. Ack. So we may not get to the baseball this week after all. We'll see. First we have to be territorial about Bella and I think someone may pee on her leg at some point.
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Twilight: They Don't Need To Breathe |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Rape, Self-Harm]
Twilight, Chapter 16: Carlisle
OH MY GOD, IT'S CHAPTER 16, YOU GUYS. DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN CHAPTER 16?
Pretty much nothing at all. Yeah.
Who was it who pointed out last time (or was it two times ago?) that we've gone through 15 chapters and it feels like hardly anything has happened? We're on Chapter 16 in a book that has 24 chapters, and it still feels like we're sitting on our hands. And this week is more Carlisle backstory and I've already said I couldn't care less about Carlisle's backstory even if you paid me to care less about it, so today may suck a little. Maybe once we get into it, there will be something good.
HE LED ME BACK TO THE ROOM THAT HE’D POINTED OUT as Carlisle’s office. He paused outside the door for an instant.
“Come in,” Carlisle’s voice invited.
Edward opened the door to a high-ceilinged room with tall, west-facing windows. The walls were paneled again, in a darker wood — where they were visible. Most of the wall space was taken up by towering bookshelves that reached high above my head and held more books than I’d ever seen outside a library.
Carlisle sat behind a huge mahogany desk in a leather chair. He was just placing a bookmark in the pages of the thick volume he held. The room was how I’d always imagined a college dean’s would look — only Carlisle looked too young to fit the part.
“What can I do for you?” he asked us pleasantly, rising from his seat.
“I wanted to show Bella some of our history,” Edward said. “Well, your history, actually.”
“We didn’t mean to disturb you,” I apologized.
I... what the hell kind of family is this?
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Twilight: Sharing Peoples' Stories |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Ableism in text, Misogyny, Jealous Woman Stereotypes]
Twilight, Chapter 15: The Cullens
When we last left our heroine, she was lounging on the piano bench with her prodigy boyfriend while the Cullen family she had come specifically to meet had skedaddled in order to give them some privacy to moon at each other. Bella's happiness at being accepted by Edward's vampire family is marred by her worries over being acceptable.
Or something.
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Twilight: Snow White and the Seven Kyriarchal Expectations |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Invisibling of asexual people, Heteronormativity, Fat Hatred, Rape, Self-Harm]
Twilight, Chapter 15: The Cullens
So we're standing in the White House (not the one in the United States capitol; the one in Forks, Washington) and are about to meet the White People who live amongst this vast expanse of white carpet. We'll start with mom and dad:
I’d seen Dr. Cullen before, of course, yet I couldn’t help but be struck again by his youth, his outrageous perfection.
Just so we all recall, Bella has seen Dr. Cullen because he was the physician who attended to her after the Van Incident, and his interaction with her was predominantly an attempt to gaslight her into believing that Edward didn't use super vampire powers to save her and also that these aren't the droids she is looking for.
In that context, I kinda feel like I would be struck by more than just his good (and unnatural) looks. Even if Bella doesn't remember that day with any accompanying trauma, I think it would be realistic to note the difference between that Dr. Cullen and this one. Seeing him relaxed and comfortable where before he was nervously lying would introduce both continuity and the recent change that Edward has undergone now that he doesn't have to hide his nature from Bella. But wev.
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Twilight: White Carpets for White Cullens |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Parental / Patriarchal Abuse, Bullshit Gender Roles, Rape Culture, Unconsciousness, Ableism.]
Twilight, Chapter 15: The Cullens
Edward has decided to take Bella to meet his family, and all that Bella really knows about them (apart from name, rank, and superpower) is that a fair lot of them bet on Edward killing her, which would indicate that her well-being is nothing more than a joke to them and certainly not something that they are seriously concerned about. (Since, if they were seriously concerned, they'd be taking measures to protect her instead of placing bets on the outcome.)
She also doesn't really know what Alice sees in her future, since the whole "why anyone would bet against Alice" thing was ambiguously stated. Maybe Alice has her getting mauled by Edward five minutes from the house; whatever she's seen in Bella's future, Edward is stubbornly not sharing.
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Twilight: Love Is Fearful, Love Is Glowering |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Parental / Patriarchal Abuse.]
Twilight, Chapter 15: The Cullens
If I recall correctly -- and I may well not be, so I leave it to ya'll to correct me on this -- this Weekend At Bella's was initially supposed to be a road-trip weekend with Edward taking Bella to a Big City (Seattle, I think? Port Angeles again?) so that she could find some nice books and do some shopping and just generally get out of Forks.
As I vaguely recall, this came about because the School Dance was this weekend, and Bella didn't want to go, so she made fake plans to leave town, but then decided they might as well be real plans to leave town because why not, and then Edward asked to drive her because he wanted to be with her he didn't trust her truck to make the trip, and then they canceled the fake trip so that she could see him sparkle, and also she's spent the weekend telling Charlie et. al. that she's going to be Home Alone instead of Gone Hunting so that if the worst happens and she disappears, no one will blame Edward. I hope I got all that right.
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Twilight: Breakfast Time |
[Twilight Content Note: Murder, Abusive Relationships, Winning At Patriarchy.
Extra Content Note: Relationship Abuse.]
Twilight, Chapter 15: The Cullens
I think I mentioned some eleventy times that I liked Chapter 14 a lot; for all that it was still problematic, it seemed problematic in realistic, common, not-totally-abusive-unsalvageable ways. Like how Bella wanted Edward to spend the night and NEVER LEAVE because TRUE LOVE and okay, that's probably not the best way to start a first relationship but I've been there and I get it.
Chapter 15, on the other hand, is basically full of Bella being awesome, to which Edward is either an asshole or an angst-bucket, and then Bella backs down from awesome because WE CAN'T HAVE THAT, etc. Also: This is that chapter I kept alluding to when I talked about Charlie sabotaging Bella's car and how Edward is basically a ramped up version of that. Yikes. So let's dive in.
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Twilight: Baby Seals and Killer Whales |
[Content Note: Reference to Species Changes, and Related Dietary Issues]
Twilight, Chapter 14: Mind Over Matter
The thought occurs that the Narnia chapters move more swiftly than the Twilight ones in part because there is so much prose and so little dialogue. It's easier, somehow, to boil down 800 words into "an then they found a boat", but much harder to slice through 18 back-and-forth dialogue lines with a pithy summary.
But, at any rate, when we last left Edward and Bella, he was planning to spend the night in Bella's bedroom.
“You seem more . . . optimistic than usual,” I observed. “I haven’t seen you like this before.”
“Isn’t it supposed to be like this?” He smiled. “The glory of first love, and all that. It’s incredible, isn’t it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?”
This exchange strikes me as interesting, because I would have thought that Edward -- who reads minds, when the narrative doesn't forget that he can do so -- would have more references for True Love than reading and movies. (Bonus points, though, for calling movies "the pictures". Nice anachronism, if that was intended.) And in addition to reading minds, Edward lives with three couples who are shining examples of True Love, to the point where Emmett and Rosalie have to go off alone for a few years every couple of decades when their True Love reaches critical mass.
But I also find the exchange interesting because I'm a bit of a Tudor obsessive (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I'm an Alison Weir obsessive, since I tend to stick to her books alone), and if there's one thing Henry VIII is famous for, in addition to the whole Six Wives thing, is that he was extremely in love with Love, but (as it turns out) less so with the actual people he claimed to love. There's a fine line between enjoying the rush of new love versus enjoying the rush more than the actual person supposedly causing it.
“For example” — his words flowed swiftly now, I had to concentrate to catch it all — “the emotion of jealousy. I’ve read about it a hundred thousand times, seen actors portray it in a thousand different plays and movies. I believed I understood that one pretty clearly. But it shocked me. . . .”
And then there's this. Again, it's a really... odd choice that Edward's point of reference here is not his mind-reading. It's especially odd given that hunting Men Who Hurt Women was kind of his thing, and I should think that Jealousy would be something he would have been on the prowl for, along with Hatred, Resentment, and Anger. (Apparently Twilight continues to insist that women are only hurt by men because of rampaging Lust, in which case: NO.)
Anyway, Edward then talks about the day Mike asked him to the dance and how thoroughly outraged he was by that, and how angry he was that he couldn't tell why Bella turned Mike down ("Was it simply for your friend’s sake? Was there someone else?"), and how tense he was as he waited for Bella to turn down the other men in "line". (UGH THAT FRAMING.)
I am sure there is some bizarro-universe where it makes sense why Edward would force Bella to listen to three more invitations to the dance when he didn't want her to go with anyone at all, all the while laughing at her discomfort (as opposed to stewing in impotent rage at the fear that she might not like boys at all or whatever would cause Edward to hit the Misogyny Bell for the day the hardest), but I honestly don't care. Suffice to chalk this up to one more example of Edward trying to assert ownership over Bella before they even had a relationship at all.
“That was the first night I came here. I wrestled all night, while watching you sleep, with the chasm between what I knew was right, moral, ethical, and what I wanted. I knew that if I continued to ignore you as I should, or if I left for a few years, till you were gone, that someday you would say yes to Mike, or someone like him. It made me angry.
ARGH OH MY GOD THIS IS NOT SEXY TALK.
There is so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start. I don't know how thoroughly to convey how gross it is for Edward to talk about Bella choosing someone other than him as a sort of settling, with his dismissive "someone like him" framing. Even if we don't take that as connotatively bad and just read it as "someone other than me", there's the gross overlay of the fact that Edward is still not being honest about his feelings. "It made me angry that I might not have you", while horrifying, is at least honest; "it made me angry that you might settle for Mike or someone like him" is, once again, justifying Edward's really problematic actions and impulses under the guise of protecting Bella.
And then there's all this added baggage of assuming that Bella is sexual and heterosexual. Edward has no reason to assume this; Bella could be entirely uninterested in romance and/or sex or she could be entirely uninterested in those things with men. I think this is probably an author-fail instead of an Edward-fail, but it works out to the same thing: this book entirely invisibles asexual people and gay people. That really infuriates me so very much, and it's especially problematic when all the Cullen couples are being held up as a Platonic Ideal of True Love.
“And then,” he whispered, “as you were sleeping, you said my name. You spoke so clearly, at first I thought you’d woken. But you rolled over restlessly and mumbled my name once more, and sighed. The feeling that coursed through me then was unnerving, staggering. And I knew I couldn’t ignore you any longer.” He was silent for a moment, probably listening to the suddenly uneven pounding of my heart.
So just to be really clear: Edward was attracted to Bella because she smelled good to him and he couldn't read her mind. Then he became infuriated at the idea of Bella accepting Mike as a love interest. He broke into her home and watched her sleep while trying to think of an excuse to exert ownership over her, and had just about settled on the "for her own good because Mike is grody" excuse when Bella said his name and that became the new excuse for ownership. Sure.
Anyway, Bella points out that the existence of Rosalie hurts her self-esteem and Edward reassures her that Bella is way hotter, ("...she could never have one tenth, no, one hundredth of the attraction you hold for me."), which is always a nice thing to say about a close friend who is "like a sister to me". But it doesn't really matter because Rosalie is blond and attractive, so she deserve what she gets, amiright. Moving on, Bella says that she hasn't had to wait as long as Edward has for True Love (because Edward is old-balls), and he points out that he's not the one in mortal danger here.
“You only have to risk your life every second you spend with me, that’s surely not much. You only have to turn your back on nature, on humanity . . . what’s that worth?”
“Very little — I don’t feel deprived of anything.”
“Not yet.” And his voice was abruptly full of ancient grief.
I think that's kinda nice, if a bit overdone. But everything in this novel is overdone with ANCIENT GRIEF and TRUEST LOVE and ANGSTYEST ANGST, and while this is, yet again, an example of Edward usurping Bella's pain for himself, at least it maybe-sorta-kinda fits here a touch. Edward doesn't like being a vampire, so it's very difficult for him to imagine that Bella might like being a vampire, and while it would be nice if he trusted her judgment more, there's also the fact that being a vampire isn't exactly something you can test drive.
And I would like Twilight a little more if it really explored a lot of the things Bella would be giving up as a vampire (and maybe didn't hand us a Magic Baby) and how those things might not seem important now, but how she may miss them later. For instance: Carlisle notwithstanding, Bella can never really have a career, or at least her options for careers are very limited. Find me a career that Bella can do without ever being in the sunlight, or without any of the other vampire 'tells' being given away, and which can survive her having to pack up and change identities every decade or so. And job satisfaction is just one thing she'll have to give up; there's also stuff like food and family and sunlight and apple martinis. Bella hasn't experienced much of these things, so it's hard for her to miss them now, but Edward knows there's a chance she could miss them later. I'd like to explore that more, but Twilight never really does.
Anyway, Charlie pops in to check on Bella and Edward tells her she sucks at acting, because he read about negging girls in that pick-up artist book he memorized a few years back.
I could feel his cool breath on my neck, feel his nose sliding along my jaw, inhaling.“I thought you were desensitized.”
“Just because I’m resisting the wine doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the bouquet,” he whispered. “You have a very floral smell, like lavender . . . or freesia,” he noted. “It’s mouthwatering.”
“Yeah, it’s an off day when I don’t get somebody telling me how edible I smell.”
LOL! I actually laughed at this. Bella has a sense of humor. Who knew?
“I’ve decided what I want to do,” I told him. “I want to hear more about you.”
“Ask me anything.”
And I kind of admire this, too. This whole book has been one long slog of Bella trying to find the right time to ask Edward questions, so I kind of like that when she has him in her bed and he's determined to pretend to be her captured slave, chivalric love conceit, etc. then she figures she might as well ask a few of her precious questions. I think that shows a lot of initiative, and it's nice to see an active (rather than reactive) Bella.
I sifted through my questions for the most vital. “Why do you do it?” I said. “I still don’t understand how you can work so hard to resist what you . . . are. Please don’t misunderstand, of course I’m glad that you do. I just don’t see why you would bother in the first place.”
He hesitated before answering. “That’s a good question, and you are not the first one to ask it. The others — the majority of our kind who are quite content with our lot — they, too, wonder at how we live. But you see, just because we’ve been . . . dealt a certain hand . . . it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to rise above — to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted. To try to retain whatever essential humanity we can.”
And that's not a bad answer, but it's not really the one I would have given, either. There's this weird presumption through all this that the vampire mythos existed first and then people (like the Cullens) actually became vampires after that mythos began and were faced with the decision of what kind of vampires they wanted to be.
Surely if vampires really did just evolve on their own, or were the product of a disease, or basically were "natural" creatures instead of demonic and supernatural, there would be quite a few of them who just didn't want to kill humans because they were very recently humans themselves and didn't want to be a murderer. I mean... imagine if a cow were somehow turned into a human tomorrow; it'd probably be awhile before the cow-turned-human decided to have a burger. Indeed, it seems very strange to me that "hey, we can eat animals too!" is apparently a really deep insight that every 'good' vampire takes years and/or the guidance of a mentor to discover -- it seems to me that eating humans would be the thing that would take time for most vampires to become desensitized to.
And then there's the fact that Twilight vampires cannot feed without killing or creating another vampire; every feeding is fatal. (Unless, I guess, they drain the body without fluid exchange, i.e., the saliva venom. So I guess they could open a vein with a nail or something.) In a world where the masquerade is paramount, I would think that the occasional animal feeding would be necessary in order to maintain secrecy. We're given to believe that vampires need to feed at least once a week, and I don't think a small town could handle 52 unsolved killings a year. Granted, a lot of the Twilight vampires prefer to be nomadic, but there's still going to be a lot of dead bodies piling up by this math. It seems like Carlisle could make just as many vampires understand by invoking the "we're trying to maintain the masquerade, you assholes" defense.
At least the Cirque du Freak books, for all their problems, recognized that killing a human at every feeding was the extremist position, and not the one likely to be mainstream in vampire society.
Moving on: Bella asks about vampire powers and we get the series-handwave:
“We don’t really know. Carlisle has a theory . . . he believes that we all bring something of our strongest human traits with us into the next life, where they are intensified — like our minds, and our senses. He thinks that I must have already been very sensitive to the thoughts of those around me. And that Alice had some precognition, wherever she was.” “What did he bring into the next life, and the others?”
“Carlisle brought his compassion. Esme brought her ability to love passionately. Emmett brought his strength, Rosalie her . . . tenacity. Or you could call it pigheadedness,” he chuckled. “Jasper is very interesting. He was quite charismatic in his first life, able to influence those around him to see things his way. Now he is able to manipulate the emotions of those around him — calm down a room of angry people, for example, or excite a lethargic crowd, conversely. It’s a very subtle gift.”
Wouldn't it just suck to have your vampire power being "loving things passionately", while everyone else gets like, Super Zapper Powers and Mind Control? Yeah. Then Edward says "something something something evolution predator-and-prey creation delicate angelfish with the shark, the baby seal and the killer whale". Um.
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| OH THE HORROR. |
Edward assures Bella that she has an eternity to ask questions -- which would be reassuring if it were actually true, but probably isn't because we all know how moody Edward is -- and she asks for one more question about Teh Sex:
“You said that Rosalie and Emmett will get married soon. . . . Is that . . . marriage . . . the same as it is for humans?”
He laughed in earnest now, understanding. “Is that what you’re getting at?” [...] “Was there a purpose behind your curiosity?”
“Well, I did wonder . . . about you and me . . . someday . . .” [...]
“I don’t think that . . . that . . . would be possible for us.”
“Because it would be too hard for you, if I were that . . . close?”
“That’s certainly a problem. But that’s not what I was thinking of. It’s just that you are so soft, so fragile. I have to mind my actions every moment that we’re together so that I don’t hurt you. I could kill you quite easily, Bella, simply by accident.” His voice had become just a soft murmur. He moved his icy palm to rest it against my cheek. “If I was too hasty . . . if for one second I wasn’t paying enough attention, I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don’t realize how incredibly breakable you are. I can never, never afford to lose any kind of control when I’m with you.”
WHAT. I mean, I knew this was coming. But still: WHAT.
This makes NO SENSE. None. For this to be true, the Cullens are basically Disney's Hercules, which also didn't make any goddamn sense, because basically nothing on earth is engineered to stand up to use by Hercules because everything on earth is engineered by humans to stand up to human use. If merely brushing Bella's face could cause her head to cave in, then Edward should be leaving behind a constant trail of broken desks, smashed CDs, crushed cell phones, and mangled car doors. His reckless driving is even more scary and reckless because he wouldn't press the brakes properly at a crucial moment -- his foot would instead dive through the floor of the car. Shifting gears in the car would tear off the gear stick. Etc.
None of this is true. None of this can be true. The vampires cannot be impossibly graceful in every thought, word, and deed and in constant danger of clumsily leveling the block because they sneezed too hard. You can have one or the other, but you can't have both. And if Edward has perfect control every moment of every day except when fucking Bella -- How does he suppose this? Does this mean Emmett and Rosalie destroy houses, nay whole cities, when they romp? -- then that's a suspiciously specific weakness. I mean, he even has more self-control when he feeds! That's supposed to be the vampire thing, feeding.
My cynical side wonders if this isn't Edward holding out on sex in order to get the lifetime marriage commitment that he wants from an unwilling, anti-marriage Bella. Certainly, it seems to be used that way as a plot device and combination purity shield from the parental critics. But while (again!) it's okay for Edward to not have sex with Bella if he doesn't want that, he needs to be honest about that and not continue to do things under the guise of "protecting her" from whatever bullshit threat he makes up.
And it feels a little awkward to have Edward segue from "we can't have sex until you're committed to this thing" to "have you ever had sex with anyone else", especially right after talking about his white-hot jealous rage at the thought of Bella with Mike or 'someone like him':
“Have you ever . . . ?” He trailed off suggestively.
“Of course not.” I flushed. “I told you I’ve never felt like this about anyone before, not even close.”
“I know. It’s just that I know other people’s thoughts. I know love and lust don’t always keep the same company.”
“They do for me. Now, anyway, that they exist for me at all,” I sighed.
“That’s nice. We have that one thing in common, at least.” He sounded satisfied.
He's satisfied that they're so similar or satisfied because Bella is a virgin? Because, I gotta say, everything about this conversation is leading me to the latter interpretation, and that's not a nice interpretation.
In fact, it's actually kind of a creepy interpretation if Edward really does think they'll never have sex (because he's thinking he'll never turn Bella into a vampire), because it would seem to suggest that he expects her to forgo sex (and presumably children) for her entire life as the price of being with him. For someone previously lamenting that Being A Vampire has so many drawbacks, he doesn't seem too keen on making Being With A Vampire any easier, even though it conceivably could be. Which suggests that Edward is less interested in easing Bella's pain and more interested in co-opting her pain to angst about his own, which is a very selfish thing for Edward to be doing.
“Your human instincts . . . ,” I began. He waited. “Well, do you find me attractive, in that way, at all?”
He laughed and lightly rumpled my nearly dry hair.
“I may not be a human, but I am a man,” he assured me.
*groan* But I guess I can't expect any better from Edward "cis-heterosexual-normative" Cullen, who previously assured Bella that every man at school wants to bone her because god knows that's reassuring to a nervous teenager trying to fit in and not attract attention.
And that's Chapter 14! We actually finished it! Woo-hoo!
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Twilight: Dancing Through Life |
[Content Note: Twilight references to murder and rape; Narnia references to genocide]
[[Title Drop: Reference to song from Wicked. Lyrics here. Note that the song is sung by a privileged fop who then spends the rest of the musical realizing that there actually are important things in life that are Serious Business. This isn't intended as a needle against people who are genuinely fun and carefree, but rather as a commentary on privileged people who wield their privilege as a shield in order to avoid noticing that Caspian I The Wizard of Oz is gathering up all the Talking Animals for a combination genocide and barbeque.]]
Twilight, Chapter 14: Mind Over Matter
Before we continue chapter 14 today, we need to talk about what some of you wonderful readers brought up in the comments last time, which is that apparently it's canon that Edward can't read Charlie's mind too well and that presumably this is where Bella got her shielding ability from.
I can't decide if this feels like a retcon (i.e., something added in later which just happens to loosely fit with Bella's rhetorical "as if Edward can't read Charlie better than me, lulz" comment in this chapter) or if it was something intended all along with this being some subtle foreshadowing, but either way this detail makes me want to tear my hair out because (a) it makes no damn sense and (b) here is yet another opportunity for Edward to be interesting which was torn out with pruning shears to make room for more abstinence porn.
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Twilight: Bring On The Shackles |
[Content Note: Purity Culture, Rape]
Twilight, Chapter 14: Mind Over Matter
If I recall correctly, we last left Twilight with Bella coming back from the shower and her "human time" and Edward sizing her up in her nightclothes and pretending that he hasn't seen her in precisely those clothes night after night for, I believe, weeks. (Nothing to see here, move along.) Oh, and Bella has run up and down the stairs to breathlessly inform Charlie that, no really, she's super-tired and going to bed now.
“What was all that for?”
“Charlie thinks I’m sneaking out.”
“Oh.” He contemplated that. “Why?” As if he couldn’t know Charlie’s mind much more clearly than I could guess.
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Twilight: Human Time and Victoria's Secret |
[Content Note: Boundary Trespass of Unconscious People]
Twilight, Chapter 14: Mind Over Matter
I cannot apologize enough for neglecting Twilight for so long, and I cannot praise highly enough Dawn M and Silver Adept for their wonderful guest posts which got us through the dry stretch while my brain was otherwise occupied. Here's hoping I haven't gotten rusty and lost my Twilight Touch.
“Why don’t you sit with me,” he suggested, putting a cold hand on mine. “How’s the heart?”
“You tell me — I’m sure you hear it better than I do.”
I felt his quiet laughter shake the bed.
We sat there for a moment in silence, both listening to my heartbeat slow. I thought about having Edward in my room, with my father in the house.
“Can I have a minute to be human?” I asked.
“Certainly.” He gestured with one hand that I should proceed.
“Stay,” I said, trying to look severe.
“Yes, ma’am.” And he made a show of becoming a statue on the edge of my bed.
I hopped up, grabbing my pajamas from off the floor, my bag of toiletries off the desk. I left the light off and slipped out, closing the door.
I could hear the sound from the TV rising up the stairs. I banged the bathroom door loudly, so Charlie wouldn’t come up to bother me.
I think I've mentioned that I deliberately haven't read the Twilight books after Twilight itself, though I have seen the movies. I find myself, therefore, wondering if this concept of "human time" ever comes up again or if this is the only time we see it. I'm fairly certain this is the only time we see it in Twilight itself.