When our teacher asked us, a class of adolescent girls, how many of us would like to marry Heathcliff, all the hands in the class shot up. I imagine if she'd asked us about Mr Rochester we would have done the same thing. This, I imagine, did not augur well for our futures, our lives as women and wives or our careers. Certainly, my own first marriage was to a stormy, handsome Russian who strode around on long legs and pulled at his hair, to confess of his love for other women to whom he had reluctantly succumbed, with much breast beating and agonizing, saying always that he really loved me. "I just have to go and say good-bye to X this weekend," he would say and rush off in his Porsche, scattering pebbles. Yet I remained at his side through many years of this, and I ask myself what was the source of my patience ( he took to calling me Saint Sheila!) or perhaps more honestly my desire for what we might call, today, these "blood-sucking men" .
For this desire, which is probably part of today's "Twilight" phenomenon, mild and accommodating though these vampires may be, seems to be an intrinsic part of our make up. What is the origin of our desire for these Byronic heroes, these "bad boys," these men that we know can only disturb our dreams at night and cause us nothing but grief in our days.
What drove all three Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, whose lives I have recently explored in "Becoming Jane Eyre" to create very similar male characters, characters like Heathcliff who hangs poor Isabella's pet dog up on a tree, or Mr Rochester who storms around Thornfield, provoking Jane's jealousy and whom Jane calls "My master," or Huntingdon and his pack of dissolute friends. All three girls had read and admired Byron's work, including Don Juan; and they had watched their brother, Branwell, fall desperately in love with the mother of the boy he was tutoring at Thorp Green. He expected her to marry him when her husband died and when she didn't, turned to opium and drink, causing chaos in the poor parsonage, narrowly risking burning the place down as he lay unconscious in his bed. Charlotte, too, had fallen in love with her charismatic and temperamental professor in Belgium, her black swan as she called him.
But does this explain our fascination with the modern day phenomenon of vampires? Surely, much of this, the violence between the sexes, comes from our guilt, our female ( or male for that matter -- think of the great adulterous heroines like Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary) guilt at our sexual desires, our need to camouflage our desire for the other sex, causing them to become the ones who prey on us, the ones who drag us reluctantly to their beds; the ones who humiliate us and remain ultimately out of reach, adulterous or drugged and drunken, or simply resisting the urge to drink our blood.
We can only hope that with age comes the wisdom to renounce this sort of folly, to turn from these savage characters or like Charlotte Bronte, with Mr Rochester, to curb their violence, to control them, to turn the tables on them, to take the upper hand and enter into a real and useful partnership.
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I cherished every page of the predictable series, enjoying the reversion back to teenage fantasies for a couple weeks. The romance is not a good example for young girls, but there aren't many good examples of love from books or movies. Like dreams, books are usually far more potent than real life. Still, most of us understand that real life is not meant to be lived like a book, movie, or dream. Many of us wish it as teenage girls and for some of us it continues on through adulthood. We can't wish away anything that isn't a good example - life would be quite boring without a little fantasy every once and a while. Everything in moderation - after finishing Breaking Dawn, I moved on to Marriage, A History by Stephanie Coontz. Maybe the best thing we can do is seek to set good examples of positive self views and healthy relationships in real life.
(not a fan of me)
I do suppose, in addition, that this is one of the troublesome and yet exhilarating things about all literature, good or inept - the sheer mutability of interpretation by each individual... Thanks again!
The fear of hurting her is the main reason for putting off sex, but there is also the issue that Edward is very old-fashioned. He was born in 1901,after all. So it's really the farthest thing from a standard teen relationship that can serve as a metaphor for a modern-day "abstinence only" message.
I will admit, every preconceived notion you have about the Twilight series, I also had at one time. That's not to say you would necessarily interpret the books the same way I did, but it's something to consider. It's a lot more ambiguous than many people have made it out to be, it's not in-your-face paternalism or moralizing about sex.
All that said, the best thing about the books is the characters themselves, which is why I enjoy the fanfiction more than the actual books. It makes up for the lack of sex in the series by making these characters behave in a manner dirty enough to make a Penthouse Forum reader blush. :)