Twenty years ago, Mormon housewife Stephenie Meyer published Twilight and split the lowbrow literary world: into diehard fans and critics who found it creepy; into girls who got it and boys who didn’t; into vampires and werewolves and people who preferred Harry Potter; and into, of course, Team Edward and Team Jacob.
No young adult book or film since has matched the Twilight phenomenon. Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn collectively sold more than 160 million copies. The five films grossed over $3 billion. Stephenie Meyer tapped into a particular type of teenage lust in a way that no other modern author has managed.
Meyer’s writing is flat and repetitive, and her heroine, Bella Swan is about as supine and featureless as a main character can be. She’s far more passive than the feisty protagonists of the girl-power fiction that followed, such as The Hunger Games or Divergent – neither of which quite matched Twilight’s success.
Bella is essentially a cypher. We learn a few things about her – she’s pale, a virgin, an introvert, and falls over a lot. Everything else is sketched out vaguely enough for any 13-year-old girl to put herself in Bella’s place. She can’t remember her own tastes, if she has any. “I tried to remember if I liked scary movies, but I wasn’t sure,” she says. “Since when do you listen to rap?” a friend asks. Bella has no idea.
Yet the battle for Bella’s heart – and the blood that pumps through it – propels 1,600 pages. The 104-year-old undead Edward Cullen is transfixed by Bella for two reasons: first, her blood is particularly alluring to him, and second, he has a supernatural ability to hear everyone’s thoughts except hers. (Truly, he’s not missing out.) This was the appeal of Twilight to angsty young women. What a dream: no need for charm or beauty or even an inner life; you can captivate someone simply because your plasma smells nice. The teenager who didn’t like much about herself was promised a life with Robert Pattinson. “Which is tempting you more, my blood or my body?” Bella asks Edward, like that is all she’s worth. “It’s a tie,” he replies. Hot!
Bella doesn’t fight, and doesn’t flirt. Her most striking choice is to totally self-destruct when Edward leaves her in the middle of New Moon. Four blank chapters are headed “October”, “November”, “December”, “January” as time passes without her. When the narrative returns, she’s still wandering about in a fugue state. “I was surprised when I found myself in my room, not clearly remembering the drive home from school or even opening the front door. But that didn’t matter. Losing track of time was the most I asked from life.” She is willing to risk death, jumping from cliffs to feel Edward’s presence.
Bella and Edward’s dynamic provoked a certain amount of adult alarm. His persistent stalking was declared to constitute an abusive relationship; the Parents Television Council accused the books of glamourising domestic violence; the Young Adult Library Services Association admitted a hesitancy to stock them. A viral quote, misattributed to Stephen King, negatively compared the series to Harry Potter: “Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity… Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.”
A little harsh. Bella’s self-abasing devotion is hardly new. “You can have my soul. I don’t want it without you – it’s yours already,” she tells Edward, like an overwritten Cathy talking to Heathcliff. The titles New Moon and Eclipse describe Bella’s total darkness with Edward gone. It’s not far from Jane Eyre on that monster Rochester: “He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun.”
The bravest thing Bella will do is die for Edward. “Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even.” It’s a rather Victorian sentiment. Letitia Landon, the popular poet of middlebrow melodrama, described woman’s love as “self-denying, devoted, and making an almost religion of its truth.” Her work has largely been forgotten, but 19th-century readers salivated at the concept of a woman willing “To yield thus to another’s reign / To live but in another’s breath.”
The two biggest female literary phenomena since Twilight have also sidestepped the fourth-wave feminist push for strong female characters. Fifty Shades of Grey, the hit Twilight-inspired porn series, brings to the fore the sexual undercurrent of Bella’s self-abasement, with Edward Cullen-adjacent Christian Grey whipping and chaining and beating his beloved. And in Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Marianne tells Connell why she’ll try BDSM with other people, not him: “With you that really was the dynamic, I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to… Who wouldn’t want to beat me up?”
Is any of this deliberate disempowerment good for teenage girls? Probably not. But look: they love it. Fictional girlbosses are all well and good, but Meyer understood the seductiveness of self-sacrifice, the thrilling power of lying down and hoping that today, the monster won’t kill you.
[Further reading: The man who sold the world: Spotify’s founder steps down]
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