Journal of Dracula Studies13 (2011)
[Lisa Lampert-Weissig is Professor of Literature at
UCSD, where she teaches a course on vampire narrative. Her publications include
Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (2004) and Medieval
Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2010). She is currently at work on a
new book: “Dracula’s Pulse: Vampires, Science and the Rise of Medievalism.”]
Among the many critiques of the Twilight saga is
the complaint that its vampires and their exploits are too sanitized: “Real
Vampires Don’t Sparkle” is a catchphrase across the web.[1] Stephenie
Meyer’s vampires, with their beautiful appearance, sweet smell, and
“vegetarian” tendencies are, indeed, a far cry from Stoker’s Count Dracula and
many other literary vampires.
To
find blood spilling freely in the Twilight saga, one must read Breaking
Dawn. In this fourth and final novel, Meyer provides birth scenes grisly
enough that their inclusion in the novel’s film adaptation has been subject to
much scrutiny and debate (Crowther).
This essay will turn to that moment in the Twilight
saga where the blood flows, examining the importance of birth and motherhood in
Breaking Dawn through the lens of Ellen Moers’ influential term, the
Female Gothic. A key source text for Moers is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Frankenstein, like Meyer’s Twilight saga, presents what Moers
calls a “birth myth.” Both Meyer and Shelley explore the relationship between
creating life and creating art, the moral implications of creating new life,
the horrors that can be found in this creation, and the potential monstrosity
of offspring.
But what in Shelley’s novel is a dark exploration of
these elements becomes in Meyer’s a portrayal of creation as redemption.
Shelley’s novel presents a world cruelly ungoverned, where a creator abandons
his creation, which then goes on to murder the innocent. Meyer’s imaginative
frame is in keeping with the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
Day Saints, which she has publically acknowledged as a major influence in her
life and thinking. We could call this Mormon Female Gothic.
In Ellen Moers’ original formulation of the term, the
Female Gothic can be “easily defined: the work that women writers have done in
the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the
Gothic” (90). Moers admits that the Gothic itself is difficult to define,
“except that it has to do with fear” (90). “Female Gothic” has been important
to literary examinations of the Gothic form since Moers first coined the term
in the late 1970s. It has also been extensively nuanced and critiqued, notably on
the grounds that it builds upon an essentialist model of the Female.[2]
What I want to focus on in this essay, however, is the
“birth myth” element so important to Moers’ formulation, an element that
arguably has fallen by the wayside in much of the critical afterlife of her
work. Childbirth and its consequences are at the heart of Moers’ analysis. In it she forcefully asks, “[w]hat in fact
has the experience of giving birth to do with women’s literature?” (92). The
epigraph to her chapter on the Female Gothic is a quote from the
then-influential dispenser of parenting advice, Dr. Spock. Spock describes how
a newborn is “usually disappointing to a parent who hasn’t seen one before,”
enumerating the many unattractive physical features that new babies often have,
including misshapen heads, bruises, jaundice and scaly or hairy skin. These are
babies with “monstrous” features. For Moers, Shelley’s work is distinguished as
Female Gothic because it treats the disappointment, resentment and depression that
can follow birth, aftereffects often, or even usually, obscured by the rhetoric
of the transcendent joys of motherhood. A focus on “the birth myth” in Meyer’s
novels is especially interesting in light of the strongly negative feminist
response to the Twilight saga.[3]
While it seems patently clear that the values of the Twilight saga are
deeply at odds with the feminist values that motivate a critic such as Moers,
Stephenie Meyer’s work is nevertheless part of a tradition of womens’ writing
that Moers helped to establish as an important part of literary history and a
legitimate and worthy object of critical study. Meyer’s creation of a “birth
myth” is an essential part of the saga. Evaluating the Twilight saga
within the Female Gothic tradition may help to explain some of the popularity
of these novels and more clearly to discern their literary origins and impact.
Furthermore, my attempt to categorize Meyer’s saga as Mormon Female Gothic does
not imply that the saga’s presentation of a “birth myth” is a monolithic
representation of motherhood as sacrificial and redemptive. There are moments
both in Meyer’s account of herself as a writer and in her depiction of the
beautiful but deadly “Immortal Children” in Breaking Dawn that point to
fears and frustrations that belie a uniformly positive view of sacrificial
motherhood.[4]
Writerly “Birth Myths”
For both Shelley and Meyer, motherhood and the life of
the writer are intertwined. We can see Shelley and Meyer as part of a Female
Gothic tradition not only through their fictions, but also in the “birth myths”
that each has created for their literary progeny. Both writers claim to be
inspired by visions. Meyer’s account of her vision highlights her motherhood.
Shelley barely mentions her experience as mother, but numerous critical
studies, notably those of Moers and of Gilbert and Gubar, have argued for the
importance of this experience to Frankenstein. As Moers observes,
“Frankenstein is a birth myth, and one that was lodged in the novelist’s
imagination, I am convinced, by the fact that she was herself a mother” (92).
Shelley’s journals indicate that at the time she wrote Frankenstein
the teenager was living through a period when she was “almost
continuously pregnant, ‘confined,’ or nursing” (Gilbert and Gubar 224). This
experience, combined with Shelley’s intensive reading and study, appear to have
profoundly shaped her novel. Moers connects Frankenstein to Shelley’s
experience of losing her first child, who died as an infant. Shelley’s journal
entry of March 19, 1815 records a dream that her dead daughter has come to life
again: “that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and
it lived.” (cited in Moers, 96). Even if the “official” creation dream
recounted in Shelley’s 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein is a
fabrication, this dream about her dead child is almost certainly actual, and
versions of it—of characters attempting to rub dead bodies back to life—appear
repeatedly in the novel. [5]
In her Introduction, Shelley recounts her more famous
dream as a response to a question “so frequently asked…How I, then a young
girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?"[6]
She tells her reading public that in her vision:
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling
beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man
stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of
life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be;
for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the
stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. (x)
Shelley’s vision embeds the act of creating new life within the
larger frame of Creation itself and separates out the creation of her “waking
dream” from that of God’s Creation (xii). In the course of the novel itself,
Frankenstein’s act of creation can lead only to disaster, as his obsession to
understand the inner workings of nature and to create life in unnatural ways
leads to disaster because of its hubris. As he is working on his
creation, Frankenstein believes that “A new species would bless me as its
creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to
me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should
deserve theirs” (40). He attempts to create life from death in order to become
the ultimate father, but then instead abandons his creation when he views its
horrible appearance.
Shelley ties her own act of creation as a writer to
Frankenstein’s creature by referring to the novel as her “hideous progeny”
(xii). Frankenstein’s dreams and creation scenes are so close to Shelley’s
“dream” that it is impossible to know if the dream was an actual influence,
something of which the novel is “only a transcript,” or a later fabrication
designed to complement the novel (O’Rourke 372). In her 1831 Introduction, however,
other details of important aspects of Shelley’s life are much less vividly
described than this dream. She briefly relates that she “scribbled” as a child
brought up in a literary household, but that when she became a woman that her
“life became busier, and reality stood in place of fiction…Travelling, and the
cares of a family, occupied my time; and study, in the way of reading or
improving my ideas in communication with his [her husband, the poet Percy
Shelley] far more cultivated mind was all the literary employment that engaged
my attention” (v-vii).
Mary Shelley had good cause to be reticent about her
domestic life, as Frankenstein was conceived when she was living with
Shelley out of wedlock while he was still married to another. Percy Shelley’s
influence and his solicitous care to help Mary be “worthy of” her “parentage”
are much remarked upon in her account, but the sadder and the more sordid
details of her domestic life remain unmentioned (vi).
In contrast, Meyer’s account of her creative dream
vision is firmly embedded in the vicissitudes of life as a stay-at-home mother.
On her official website, Meyer provides the “whole story” of how she came to
write Twilight:
I get a ton of questions about how I came up with the
story of Twilight and how I got it published. I woke up (on that June
2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense
conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your
average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a
vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A)
they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly
attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time
restraining himself from killing her immediately.[7]
Meyer remembers the date that she began Twilight with such
precision because it was the first day her children were to begin swimming
lessons. This detail not only adds a sense of veracity to her account, but also
emphasizes the dominance of maternal duties in her daily life. She woke that
morning and lay in bed entranced by her dream despite a busy day ahead: “Though
I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children,
dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that
no one ever puts away in the right place, etc.), I stayed in bed, thinking
about the dream.” As she later worked on Twilight she “mostly wrote at
night, after the kids were asleep so that I could concentrate for longer than
five minutes without being interrupted.” In this account, writing is the vocation
from which motherhood is a distraction. Motherhood had already put a very long
pause to Meyer’s creative endeavors; she recounts that she had written very
little before Twilight and “nothing at all since the birth of my first
son, six years earlier.” Shelley’s conception of Frankenstein took place
in the “Year Without a Summer.” Meyer, in contrast, endures a “typical Arizona
summer, hot, sunny, hot, and hot,” where she was often “stuck at swim lessons,”
thinking all the while of her fictional world in the rainy Northwest.
While Shelley’s
creation account steers away from detailing her daily life, Meyer’s creation
account emphasizes the burdens and responsibilities of family life and the
obstacles that it poses to creative work. In contrast to Shelley’s references
to her poet husband and his esteemed friend, Lord Byron, Meyer’s account omits
mention of her husband.[8]
It is Meyer’s characters, rather than her family, that bask in the glow of her
maternal and romantic affections:
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.
Meyer has fallen in love with her vampire hero and draws upon the
Gothic tradition for his name.
Her
heroine is named for the desired daughter Meyer realizes she will probably
never have.
In
an interview, Meyer describes the embrace of this fictional family as an escape
from her actual one: “I was really burned out. I really had gotten into that
zombie mom way of doing things where I wasn’t Stephenie anymore,” she says.
“[Writing Twilight] was a release. That was the dam bursting. I’d been
bottling up who I was for so long, I needed an expression.”[9]
Motherhood had reduced Meyer to a zombie, mindless and without
personality.
In this account,
the creation of children leads to a monstrous loss of self from which the
creation of literary progeny provides a powerful release.
The Horror of Creation
In Frankenstein, Moers notes, “Birth is a hideous
thing…even before there is a monster,” and death and birth are “hideously
intermixed in the life of Mary Shelley as in Frankenstein’s ‘workshop of filthy
creation’” (Moers 96). Frankenstein is creating life from death. He haunts “vaults and
charnel-houses” to learn the secret of creating life and to gather together the
parts needed for his creature. The final results horrify him:
It
was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my
toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the
instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the
lifeless thing that lay at my feet…I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature
open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How
can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch
whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs
were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!---Great
God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath;
his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness;
but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes,
that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they
were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
… now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream
vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. (43)
Frankenstein has devoted years of effort to create a living being,
but when his quest is completed the results fill him with loathing. For Moers,
it is the fact that Shelley focuses on this “trauma of the afterbirth” that
makes her work “distinctly a woman’s mythmaking” (93).
Moers argues that
Shelley draws on her experience as a mother, not to reveal the oft-touted
glories of motherhood, but to reveal the darker side of creating life. Of
course, the true horror of the novel arguably does not lie in this vision of
the created monster, but in the monstrous treatment of the creature that
follows. Unlike his own loving parents, Victor Frankenstein abandons his
“child” and it is this act, the leaving of the creature to his own devices in
the world, that eventually turns him into the bitter, heartless “fiend” who
destroys those dearest to Frankenstein (76).
In Breaking Dawn,
a similar “birth myth” scenario—the creation of a “monster”—is explored, but
the most horrifying scenes in Meyer’s version depict pregnancy and childbirth.
A nightmare version of pregnancy--having a deadly enemy trapped within one’s
own body--is hinted at in the Preface to Breaking Dawn:
I’d had more than my fair share of near-death
experiences; it wasn’t something you ever really got used to. It seemed oddly
inevitable, though, facing death again. Like I really was marked for disaster.
I’d escaped time and time again, but it kept coming back for me. Still, this
time was so different from the others. You could run from someone you feared,
you could try to fight someone you hated. All my reactions were geared toward
those kinds of killers—the monsters, the enemies.
When you
loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run,
how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life
was all you had to give your beloved, how could you not give it? If it was
someone you truly loved? (Breaking
Dawn, 1-2)
This Preface alludes to the Preface of Twilight,
the first book in the saga, in which it appears that Bella faces imminent
death. There she expresses a lack of regret for her decision to put herself in
a threatening situation both because she is making a “noble” sacrifice for love
and because she has been afforded a “dream beyond any…expectations” (Twilight
1). Twilight, as its epigraph, storyline and cover art imply, is about
temptation, especially, but not exclusively, erotic temptation. Bella chooses
Edward over her own safety and even over her existence as a human. She will
attempt to run or to fight in order to stay alive and she does not regret at
all that her love for Edward has put her in danger.
In contrast
to the Twilight Preface, the Preface to Breaking Dawn figures the
danger as coming not from outsiders, but from within Bella herself. Her own
unborn child threatens her life and she is now caught in a more profound set of
choices than ever before, as it seems she must trade her life to protect her
child. Pregnancy leaves Bella bruised, battered, and in
pain. Giving birth essentially kills her and she must be transformed into a
vampire in order to survive. Early in Breaking Dawn, Bella has married
Edward, something he has insisted upon as a “concession” in exchange for
allowing Bella’s transformation into a vampire, something he has vigorously
opposed. Bella wants to experience sex in her human form before transformation
and so Bella and Edward make love on their honeymoon. As a result of Edward’s
physical power, Bella is left severely bruised by the experience,
although she hungers to repeat it and eventually does.
Bella,
Edward, and most vampires had believed that it was impossible for Edward to
father a child, but this turns out not to be the case and Bella finds herself
pregnant with what is clearly not an average fetus. The baby is developing at
an extremely rapid rate and the pregnancy is physically devastating for Bella,
who experiences extreme and gruesome bruising and broken ribs from the fetus’s
movements, movements so strong that they also almost fracture her pelvis.
Because the pregnancy is so dangerous, Edward wants her to terminate it, but
Bella is steadfastly against this, despite the risks.
Jacob, the werewolf who also is in love
with Bella, narrates the section of the book describing Bella’s pregnancy and
labor, a departure from the usual first-person narration in Bella’s voice.
Bella has necessarily needed to keep her pregnancy secret and she has been
holed up in the Cullens’ home, under the care of Carlisle Cullen, the family
patriarch, who is also a physician. Jacob is visiting her there when she goes
into labor:
There was the strangest, muffled
ripping sound from the center of her body.
“Oh!” she gasped.
And then she went totally limp,
slumping toward the floor. …Bella screamed.
It was not
just a scream, it was a blood-curdling shriek of agony. The horrifying sound
cut off with a gurgle, and her eyes rolled back into her head. Her body
twitched, arched in Rosalie’s arms, and then Bella vomited a fountain of blood.
(346-7)
Now the
“disaster” that Bella has eluded for so long is ripping her apart from within,
transforming her into a grotesque spectacle of agony. Edward and Rosalie,
Bella’s sister-in-law, rush her upstairs into an improvised hospital room.
Jacob notes that the space:
looked like an emergency ward set up in the middle of a
library. The lights were brilliant and white. Bella was on a table under the
glare, skin ghostly in the spotlight.
Her
body flopped, a fish on the sand. Rosalie pinned Bella down, yanking and
ripping her clothes out of the way, while Edward stabbed a syringe in her arm. How many times had I imagined her naked? Now I
couldn’t look. I was afraid to have these memories in my head. (349)
Bella is now an object of horror instead of an object of
desire. She is “ghostly” and clearly in the last throes of struggling for her
life. Jacob watches Bella as under the glare of the lights her “skin seemed
more purple and black than it was white.
Deep red was seeping beneath the skin over the huge shuddering bulge of
her stomach” (349-50). Bella’s labor is
described as a violent aberration. Her legs are curled in an “unnatural
position” as her own husband first slices her apart and then breaks through to
the baby with his teeth (351-2). When Bella takes the newborn in her arms, “the
warm, bloody thing” bites her, adding yet another source of pain to her
suffering body. She is covered with blood: “the blood that had flowed from her
mouth, the blood smeared all over the creature, and fresh blood welling out of
a tiny double-crescent bite mark just over her left breast” (353).
Bella is cut
apart to make way for a “thing” that then bites her in a monstrous perversion
of nursing. Drenched in blood, her life is slipping away. She is saved and
transformed not only by Edward’s bites, but by an injection of his venom, given
through a shot to her heart administered by Edward with a syringe that is “all
silver, like it was made from steel” (354). Edward himself is in charge of the
process: “His voice was ice, was dead. Fierce and unthinking. Like he was a
machine.” (354). Childbirth as depicted here is gory, deadly, and clinical, a
description which one critic argues is a reflection of the
contemporary experience of many American women, whose childbirths are
characterized by painful, intensive medical intervention.[10]
Through his witness of Bella’s labor, Jacob continually refers to the baby as “it,” with the use
of his narrative voice allowing for a point of view that places all sympathy on
Bella and reacts in horror to her ordeal and views her child as a monster.
Earlier
Jacob’s fellow werewolves had deemed this child to be “Unnatural.
Monstrous.
An abomination”
(199). After witnessing the birth, Jacob feels compelled to agree, “The thing
was an aberration—its existence went against nature. A black, soulless demon.
Something that had no right to be. Something that had to be destroyed” (357).
Jacob, filled with hate, sounds a bit like Victor Frankenstein in his
determination to “cleanse the world of this abomination” (358).
When Bella’s
child is born, it appears that motherhood is a futile trap. Creation is
perverted and Bella and Edward’s union is a colossal mistake. But Meyer then
completely inverts this scenario, also directly through the eyes of Jacob. In a
remarkable turn-about, Jacob makes eye contact with the child and “imprints” on
it. Imprinting in the saga is an overwhelming mating-bond experienced by
werewolves. Jacob is now joined to the child, Renesmee, in an eternal
unbreakable love. Instead of being a monster, the child then becomes the
solution to the tension between Bella and Jacob and a link between the worlds
of werewolves and vampires.
Childbirth in
Breaking Dawn is depicted as a gruesome, horrific ordeal, the product of
which is redemptive. Bella’s choice to have her child and her subsequent turn
to a vampire state ends up saving her family. Childrearing is easy, as Renesmee
is a model child with parents ideally suited to raise her. The sexuality that
had been so physically dangerous for Bella is now part of life in a kind of
eternal Paradise, her “small but perfect piece of forever” that she will share
with husband, child and extended family (754). There has already been extensive
commentary on this way that Meyer’s vision of sexuality, marriage, and an
eternal family appears drawn from Meyer’s own beliefs as a member of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Within the LDS belief system, the
afterlife is conceived of as something shared with family, and, indeed, family
is not simply part of salvation, it is an essential prerequisite for it.[11]
Viewed within this frame, the horror that is childbirth becomes redemptive.
This
depiction of redemption through the creation of new life is a complete
inversion of Shelley’s depiction in Frankenstein. There the creation of
the creature and Frankenstein’s subsequent abandonment of him results in the
destruction of everyone Victor Frankenstein loves. In contrast to the cozy
eternity depicted at the end of Breaking Dawn, Frankenstein
concludes in a desolate expanse of icy sea as Frankenstein leaps out of the
cabin window of the ship where he has been relating his story and is “soon
borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance” (202).
Child as Monster
Within the
belief system of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, motherhood,
stemming back to the first motherhood of Eve, is a redemptive act and both
marriage and family are necessities in order to achieve immortality. If Frankenstein
is, in Moers’ words, “most original in its dramatization of dangerous
oppositions through the struggle of a creator with monstrous creation” and its
sources “were surely the anxieties of a woman who, as daughter, mistress, and
mother, was a bearer of death” then Meyer’s reworking of these “dangerous
oppositions” ultimately posits them as essential for life (Moers 98).
This message
can be seen as underscored by the story of the “Immortal Children,” which Bella
learns of just before she is married. This story of dangerous child-monsters,
however, also points to the potential disasters that children can bring.
Vampires are forbidden to turn children because those children, with their lack of impulse control, threaten to
breach the necessary secrecy of the vampire world: “Keeping the secret meant a
lot of things…And it meant not creating some things in the first place, because
some creations were uncontrollable” (33). Bella is told that centuries ago
children had been turned into vampires, something she finds so repulsive that
she has to swallow back “the bile that rose in my throat” (33). The child
vampires were “beautiful” and “enchanting.” Carlisle relates that “[y]ou had
but to be near them to love them; it was an automatic thing” (33). They were, however,
also extremely lethal: “Adorable two-year-olds with dimples and lisps that
could destroy half a village in one of their tantrums. If they hungered, they
fed, and no words of warning could restrain them. Humans saw them, stories
circulated, fear spread like fire in dry brush” (34). The Volturi, the cruel
ruling clan of Vampires, decided that these Immortal Children must be
destroyed, along with their maker. In Breaking Dawn, the final
confrontation between the Volturi and the Cullen clan comes because one of the
daughters of the condemned maker of the Immortal Children sees Bella and
Edward’s daughter, Renesmee, and believes she is an Immortal Child. The Cullens
are able to face up to the Volturi in large part due to Bella’s decision to
become a vampire and her special abilities.
After hearing
this story, Bella, on the night before her wedding, has a nightmare vision of
her friends and her parents dead, killed by an “adorable boy” with “bright,
bloodred eyes” (37). This vision and the epigraph for the book, the first three
lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 1937 poem, “Childhood is the kingdom where
nobody dies,” lead readers to believe until the novel’s conclusion that Bella,
like Frankenstein, will lose those close to her due to her own choices.[12]
Ultimately, however, Bella’s daughter is not at all a threat. Nevertheless, in the
Immortal Children we have a strong strain of the horrors potential in “the
afterbirth” that Moers locates in the Female Gothic. These Immortal Children
are not physically off-putting like Dr. Spock’s newborns. They are instead
gorgeous, but it is their very childishness, their lack of control, that makes
them deadly. They are willful creation run amuck, very much like what
Frankenstein fears his creature would create if given a mate: “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make
the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of
terror” (146). So even while Meyer glorifies
motherhood, her novel and her description of her work also engages “the motif
of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight
surrounding birth and its consequences” (93). These Immortal Children are
monster toddlers. Their superhuman physical strength shows the horror that
could be unleashed if toddlers had the physical strength to follow all of their
urges unchecked.
Overall then,
Meyer’s “birth myth” can be seen as an inversion of the paradigms found in
Shelley’s version of the Female Gothic in Frankenstein. Creation may be
horrifying in Meyer’s account, but birth and its results are redemptive, if not
holy. Nevertheless, the legend of the Immortal Children, and, perhaps more
tellingly, Meyer’s own account of her experiences of conflict between her roles
as mother and writer, point to some cracks in the smooth façade of sacrificial
motherhood. In these more subtle ways, Meyer’s writings also acknowledge the “trauma of the afterbirth,” even within the
saga’s vision of eternal familial bliss. Mormon Female Gothic may have more in
common with Moer’s original conception than first meets the eye.
Works Cited
Arnaudin, Edwin B. Mormon Vampires: The Twilight
Saga and Religious Literacy. “A Master’s Paper for the M.S. in L.S. degree.
April, 2008.” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, unpublished.
(http:/www.ils.unc.edu/NSpapers/3348.pdf.)
Becker,
Susanne. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester ; New York; New
York, NY, USA: Manchester University Press, 1999. Print.
Brabon,
Benjamin A., and Stéphanie Genz. Postfeminist Gothic : Critical
Interventions in Contemporary Culture. Basingstoke England ; New York,
N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
Clarke, Amy
M., and Marijane Osborn. The Twilight Mystique. Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2010. Print.
Clery, E. J.,
and British Council. Women's Gothic : From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley.
Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004. Print.
Click,
Melissa A. (ed. and introd.), et al. eds. Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture,
Media, and the Vampire Franchise. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. Print.
Crowther,
Jane. "Robert Pattinson Confirm Vamp Caesarean in Breaking Dawn."
Total Film (2011) Web. April 26, 2011.
“Facebook:
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<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Real-Vampires-Dont-Sparkle/122113248964>.
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Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley
& Sons, 2009. Print.
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[1]See for example:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Real-Vampires-Dont-Sparkle/122113248964
[2]An outstanding guide to the critical exploration of “Female Gothic”
can be found in the Introduction to Wallace and Smith, 2009. See also Becker,
Brabon and Genz (Introduction), Clery, Fleenor, Hoeveler, Horner and Zlosnik,
and Kahane.
[3]There is an extensive critique in print and on the web. See, for
example, Housel and Wisnewski, Platt, Summers and Wilson.
[4]On the Twilight saga and the Gothic, see McElroy and
McElroy.
[5]O’Rourke, 376. Frankenstein originally appeared in 1818.
Shelley’s 1831 Introduction has been carefully scrutinized by scholars, who
differ in opinion about whether or not this account of the novel’s creation and
the changes she made to the 1831 text represent a new conservatism and a
willingness to bow to make her work more “palatable” to a wider audience or if
it is actually a cleverly created assertion or even strengthening of earlier
beliefs and goals, sometimes characterized by irony. See O’Rourke.
[6]Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, 1831 edition.
Literature OnLine, Cambridge, Chadwyck-Healey, 1999, v. All subsequent citations
refer to this edition.
[7]http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/twilight.html.
All
subsequent references to Meyer’s “creation account” can be found here.
[8]“Though she'd been married for 15 years, Stephenie says she didn't
tell her husband at first about her new passion. ‘My husband thought I'd gone
crazy. I'd barely spoken to him because I had all these things going on in my
head, and I wasn't telling him about this weird vampire obsession because I
knew he'd freak out and think I'd lost my mind,’ she says.” “The Woman Behind Twilight” The Oprah Winfrey Show,
November 13, 2009. http://www.oprah.com/
entertainment/Twilight-Series-Author-Stephenie-Meyer_1/2
[9]“The Woman Behind
Twilight.” The Oprah Winfrey Show, November 13, 2009.
http://www.oprah.com/entertainment/Twilight-Series-Author-Stephenie-Meyer_1/2
[10] Granger 192. On the film adaptation of the labor scene, Stephenie
Meyer has this to say: "I'd love to have the birth scene be every bit as
awful [as in the book]— I know it freaked people out, but for those of us who
have been through childbirth a couple times, it is a scary, terrifying
experience," she said. "This is just taking that to an exponential
power, and I love going there."
Kara
Warner and Josh Horowitz, “Stephenie Meyer Wants ‘Breaking Dawn’ Birth Scene to
be ‘Awful’” Jun 30 2010 http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1642805/stephenie-meyer-wants-breaking-dawn-birth-scene-be-awful.jhtml
[11] On LDS beliefs in the Twilight saga see Arnaudin, Granger,
Lampert-Weissig, Riess and Toscano.
[12] “Childhood is not from birth to a certain
age and at a certain age/The child is grown, and puts away childish things. /
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.”
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