Twilighting: My Exploration of the Twiligh Phenomenon

Twilighting: My Exploration of the Twilight Phenomenon

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Harris, Dead Until Dark, ; Sookie discovers further supernatural traits as the series progresses as she is not only telepathic but also part fairy. Hamilton, Obsidian Butterfly New York: Hamilton, Skin Trade, Meyer quoted in Radish. Accessed November 4, Accessed February 12, Meyer quoted in Kirschling. Accessed December 23, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight London: Print , 35; 38; Meyer, Twilight, ; Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn London: Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: Liverpool University Press, The Silver Ring Thing is a para-church youth ministry that promotes the message of abstinence until marriage.

The movement is directed at teenagers and has gained a growing following in the US. Meyer quoted in Kirschling, 1. There are distinct similarities between the treatments of teenage sexuality in the Twilight saga and Buffy. For Buffy, sex leads to nothing but trouble. She cannot engage in sexual activity without self-disgust or regret. Her list of lovers includes the notably named vampires Angel and Spike, the mortal demon fighter Riley, and the college student Parker, with whom she experiences a humiliating one-night stand.

Rhonda Wilcox, Why Buffy Matters: In Fire with Fire, Naomi Wolf distinguishes two different feminist traditions: See, Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: Hamilton, Flirt, ; Hamilton, Blood Noir, Indiana University Press, Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller London: Hamilton, Blood Noir, ; For discussions of pornography and porno chic, see McNair, and McNair, ; on pornification, see Paul, Blending ars erotica and romance, romantica combines a romance-driven plot with plentiful and graphic sexual scenes, sexually explicit language, and erotic constellations that may go beyond coupledom.

Both publishing houses describe their venture in semifeminist terms. McFarland, forthcoming ; P. Pornography and the Postmodern Culture London: Sex, Media and the Democratisation of Desire London: McNair, Striptease Culture, 11; Harris, Dead Until Dark, 1. Harris, Dead Until Dark, 52; ; ; The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Glennis Byron provides telling examples of the adoring reader comments in discussion forums on the Twilight phenomenon: Lol he is my love..

If we expand the term to its very broadest definition, translation is also the act of interpreting anything. However, studying a translation side-by-side with the original can teach bilingual readers a great deal, not only about how a translator has interpreted and adapted the novel for a new audience, but also about the spaces between the languages and cultures and how translation attempts to bridge that gap.

Translation obviously allows for the expansion of an audience of a text, but it also expands the text itself, giving the text a type of afterlife. Translation also results in subtle but significant changes to suit the tastes and expectations of the target audience. Translation can reveal a great deal, not only about the text itself but also about the culture for which it has been adapted. Uncovering differences such as these can lead to a greater understanding of French culture on the part of US readers. Before moving into the specifics of the French translation, we shall first look at some of the other foreign language translations of Twilight that have been published.

Some translations, French for example, use the cover from the original, but others develop a cover illustration that would appeal more to their target culture audience. The Japanese cover features a manga-like design, while the German cover features a photo of a young woman presumably Bella with a long, pale neck. The Dutch version of the novel uses the US cover, but with a twist—there is a heart-shaped bite taken out of the apple. Japan has released two versions of their translation, one which stays close to the original novel, and a three-volume graphic novel. As for English-toEnglish translations, Twilight was adapted for a British-English edition, and the first installment of the English-language graphic novel version with illustrations by Young Kim was published in March It would be appropriate at this point to note that Luc Rigoureau has been awarded the Prix Chronos for translation work, and spent years working in publishing before becoming a translator.

In addition to the Twilight saga, he has also translated over eighty other titles, mainly in the young adult category. Bilingual readers and readers who know just enough of a foreign language to proclaim themselves semifluent are the ones who enjoy the type of carping and fussing over word choice, which is not necessarily productive or revelatory about the process of translation. To the uninformed, translation might seem like a simple linguistic puzzle to be solved or a mathematical equation in which a word in one language precisely equals one in another.

But it is obviously much more than that. Translation requires not only a native fluency in the language into which one translates the target language and as near-native fluency as possible in the language from which one translates the source language , but also a very sensitive understanding of both the source and target culture. From there, a series of difficult decisions must be made: How do I adapt this work to make it acceptable and appropriate for the target audience? What will a reader expect from a novel of this type? Should I leave all the foreign elements in place and add footnotes so that my target readers will understand those elements?

Or, do I localize some elements and leave others? What is the best approach to translating this text? Clearly, this is not only a linguistic exercise, but a complex task that requires a great deal of cultural understanding and insight. Now that we have a better sense of how we will be using translation to discuss the novel, we can move into the specifics of the French version, looking at the instances where there is a marked difference between the source and the target. The space between the two versions offers the reader an opportunity to think critically about both the process of translation including the elements of language and culture that allow or prevent translation as well as the novel itself and how we interpret it.

As mentioned above, Twilight was translated into French by Luc Rigoureau and was published at the same time as the English counterpart. The most striking difference at first sight between the English and the French is the title. Certainly the word has multiple layers of meaning in the novel. Other differences in the French translation are more subtle, but are also the result of careful planning and difficult decision-making on the part of the translator. Some of the features of the English Twilight are difficult to maintain in the French.

The nickname is a term of great endearment for him.

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It would have worked in a similar way as the English, revealing the softer side of Charlie and highlighting the special nature of this father—daughter relationship. Rigoureau does not change any of the character names to make them francophone, however. As a translator Rigoureau does not localize the text in any way, meaning the distinguishing features of the setting remain the same, from the now-famous small town of Forks, Washington, to the specifics of the US high school system and overall cultural aspects.

For those elements that would be unexpected or foreign to his French audience, such as metal detectors in schools, people under eighteen driving, and the American holiday Thanksgiving, Rigoureau provides explanations in brief footnotes. Another striking difference between the English source text and the French target text has to do with linguistic register.

While most contemporary French teenagers would immediately use the informal tu form the second person singular , Edward, having been born in , would very likely have a different sense of propriety, especially when he first meets Bella, who notices that his mode of expression sounds a bit old-fashioned. In French, Edward says: Whatever the reason, the tone does not match—Edward is formal and courteous in English, but informal and relaxed in French. Indeed, not all the characters in Fascination use the informal tu instead of the polite, formal vous. Carlisle Cullen, when he meets Bella in the hospital, uses the vous form in addressing her, and Edward uses vous when speaking with Mr.

Cope, the school receptionist. He is trying to get his class schedule changed when Bella enters the room. Naming the gods specifically as Rigoureau does adds little to the text, but it does change Bella slightly, making her perhaps more bookish in French than her English-speaking counterpart. Edward in the French translation seems slightly more brooding and more dangerous, and Bella seems more aware of the risky situation in which she has placed herself.

In the scene where Edward and Bella are having their first lunch together in the cafeteria, he shares with her that he has given up trying to avoid her. His intentionally vague explanation for this unexpected turn of events confuses Bella, who asks: But there is another element of the translation that warrants examination.

Rigoureau translates this phrase: That scene, however, is not the first one in which Rigoureau puts the French reader on alert by hinting at vampirism. When he and Bella are driving home from Port Angeles and she reveals that she knows the truth about him, she goes on to share that it does not matter to her what he is. Edward is more intimidating in French not only with Bella, but also with his sister Alice. Edward, however, is not the only character who experiences a shift in personality when translated into French.

Bella also changes slightly, as stated earlier, becoming more confident and self-assured in French than she is in English. She is still as clumsy as ever, but when speaking with Edward, she has an edge that is not anywhere near as pronounced in the original.

When she is telling Jessica about her impromptu date with Edward in Port Angeles, she knows he will be listening, and purposely makes comments for his benefit. Charlie invites Edward to have a seat and Bella grimaces at the impending conversation. Some other areas where the translation differs from the English text provide some insight into the interpretation and approach of the translator and offer the foreign language reader a slightly different understanding of the novel.

Twilight is difficult to categorize: It seems clear that although many see the novels as romance, the French translator made a clear attempt to highlight the horror aspect as well, as discussed above in regards to the emphasis of the vampiric element. Returning to the scene in which Edward and Bella first speak with each other, she asks him how he knew her name. One final example in which the French expands upon the English and reinforces the theme of danger is in the first-kiss scene. Certainly there are additions and places in which things seem slightly askew, but nothing has been lost in the process.

A good translation is a sort of echo of the original: By this definition, Fascination is a good translation, providing the novel with a new audience of readers, and a second life for our protagonists. Stephenie Meyer has a link to some of these covers on her website, www. Twilight, ; Fascination, Twilight, 88; Fascination, Twilight, 93; Fascination, Twilight, 22; Fascination, Fascination, ; Twilight, Twilight, 44; Fascination, Stanford University Press, Fan fiction, or fanfic, is one expression of contemporary fan involvement with previous texts; the term today describes mainly Internet-published stories.

The Twilight saga has resulted in an unusually large number of fan fictions; on the largest collective site, FanFiction. The varied fan-created products fan fiction, fan films, and fan art and the different approaches to the canon suggest that readers are both active and critical. The selection is by no means comprehensive, and the results of my investigation cannot be used to assess the fandom, nor the 6,plus texts on this particular site.

The close ties between a fanfic and its canon s entail both repetition and reinterpretation, yet fan fiction is seldom included in contemporary theoretical discussions about adaptations and other forms of highly intertextual narratives. Considering, however, the transformations that always take place in an adaptation, and the sometimes minute alterations between canon and fanfic, I would argue that fan fiction can and should be considered in more general adaptation discussions.

Theories concerning remediation the study of how texts move from one medium to another without necessarily losing their original characteristics similarly profit from incorporating the fanfic form, and analyses bring valuable insight into how contemporary readers position themselves in relation to canons of different kinds. Therefore, while all texts examined here offer deviations from the Twilight canon, some contain elements that, simultaneously, are infinitely repeated. I argue, therefore, that fan fictions need to be read with an eye to both what they subvert or vary and what they endlessly recycle.

Narrative Gaps, Logical Gaps, and Dirty Dancing To read, write, and analyze fan fiction necessitates a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the canon and the elements in it. Sheenagh Pugh argues that [f ]anfic happens in the gaps between canon, the unexplored or insufficiently explored territory. For that to happen, the gaps must be left, and the territory must exist—i. The choice to cross two vampire worlds might seem obvious, but also results in logical gaps the author textually works to close. Some of the logical gaps produced by this collision of worlds cause 5by5creations greater problems than others.

Why, for example, have the Cullens, like other vampires and demons, not been drawn to the Hellmouth? Whereas the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary vampire often represented the Other and the frightening consequences of lost willpower and control over both life and sexuality , the trope today also signifies attractive alternatives to human existence. This is a humanized terrain, which is more ambiguous in its depiction of good and evil. However, Edward is unusually powerful: As the evil, soulless Angelus, he does not have to assume responsibility for the sins he has committed, whereas in his ensouled state he struggles with remorse following his monstrous actions.

You could choose to have a conscience or to ignore it. His crumbling beliefs in the absence of his own soul also make him question his need to protect Bella from a vampire existence. By crossing these textual universes, the fanfic authors accomplish two things. That is, their rewrite makes the sexual tension of the last film scene find its outlet.

The absence of a detailed love scene in the Twilight saga is in this way amended and Love Man, like countless other fan fictions, adds its own particular version of it to the archive. Both canons initially depict an unequal relationship between the central characters. Furthermore, both male characters are portrayed as having abilities the female characters lack: These imbalances result in a sense of disbelief, in both Baby and Bella, when Johnny and Edward profess to being attracted to them. Some critics have applauded the depiction of young adult love and the deferred sexual union in the canon.

To be the object of desire, in abstinence porn is not really so far from being the object of desire in actual porn. At the end of the fanfic, after detailed descriptions of the mutual seduction, the characters profess that nothing compares to what they have just experienced. Other fanfic authors employ different strategies, but with the same end result: Many stories put great emphasis on the kind of equality that is foregrounded in Love Man, where both characters initiate sex. The Death of Bella The deviation from the canon that the death of a main character represents has consequences for other characters, not only in terms of events, but in terms of personality development and actions.

A number of fan fictions in this category are based around the idea that Bella dies, which, in turn, frees other characters from their canon behavior.

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He is self-reflexive and sarcastic, and a sense of humor is added to his musings. God is indeed hot, especially today, with my navy polo, collar popped. Edward here is a creature to be feared and unabashedly uses his superhuman powers and feeds on human blood. Significantly, however, his victims are described as either deserving of this fate, or in need of it with Bella as an exception. In this, Edward resembles other contemporary variations on the vampire trope.

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The story ends with a graphic sexual scene in which Edward seduces the budding novelist. The superhuman speed that Edward uses in the canon to traverse forests is here used in cunnilingus, and, naturally, reveals to the female protagonist that he is something not altogether human. This realization gives her the hero she needs and Dear God ends with the author busily working away at her computer.

In early criticism, slash was often touted as subversive32; however, more recent studies, following on the more varied output of popular culture texts, suggest that this is not necessarily the case. The characters are further linked by the promise made by Jacob to kill Edward if anything happens to Bella. However, Jacob finds himself incapable of fulfilling his promise because if Bella loved Edward, so must he. Jacob also takes on roles and responsibilities Bella has previously had, since he is capable of human emotion: The physical strength both the vampire and the shape shifter possess puts them on equal terms, which can be juxtaposed with the constant worries Edward in the canon harbors for hurting Bella.

In a discussion about slash and romance, Anne Kustritz argues that: In the fanfic, the lovemaking is literally protected by this difference. All the loss, all the sorrow and pain ebbs away in the cleansing fog, and all they see and feel is each other. Despite the alternative pairing and the different events leading up to lovemaking, there are strong affinities between The Strange Design and the previously discussed Love Man. Equality between characters is in both stories reached through an acknowledgment of their true selves and the validity of their desires.

Both fanfics thus evidence how readers question the power imbalance in the canon, adding more evenly matched couples to the archive. The texts analyzed in this chapter demonstrate that despite the numerous alterations made in fanfic, the central love story from the canon is an element endlessly repeated in ways that do not necessarily add to the archive. The other four stories all explore and provide resolution to physical and romantic desire.

Love Man stages a love scene between the central characters and emphasizes their closeness by the parallel to another popular culture couple, and The Strange Design portrays intense homoerotic emotions that enable the characters to meet as equals. The main characters define themselves in relation to the love they harbor for each other, and the changes they go through, the choices they make, are all motivated by their love. The prevalence of narratives—both classical and contemporary—focused on incommensurable, unstoppable, and eternal love teach readers and viewers that everlasting togetherness is to be strived for, and that tales about this quest deserve to be told.

This may be one reason for the endlessly repeated story line. Another reason, particularly tied to fan products such as fan fiction, is the imitative act itself as a tribute to the text world of which the author is a fan. When publishing a fanfic, the writer offers up the imitative act for scrutiny and feedback. While many readers may applaud both subtle and profound differences between canon and fanfic, a certain amount of fidelity to the central theme of love is encouraged and lauded.

In the conventional romance format, success hinges on eventual closure; the lovers will get each other, and in the case of Twilight, not just for a few decades, but for all eternity. The deferment of this closure, however, might be seen as a final reason for the masses of romantic fan fiction connected to the Twilight saga. The lack of resolution in popular culture texts can be of different kinds, but seems to be a prerequisite for fandom activity.

Esther Saxey discusses how the extended story arches in the Buffy television series blur the boundaries between action and closure. While the action-packed middle segment of the episodes may further threats, most shows end with temporary closure: At the same time, however, viewers know that the process and structure will be repeated in the next episode. The Twilight saga is not an extended series in the same sense as Buffy, but it similarly resists closure, and specifically romantic closure, in the first three texts.

Fanfic authors thus seize on and expand the endlessly deferred closure to a new romantic core story: Fan fiction further illustrates that boundaries between authors and readers are becoming increasingly blurred in a media landscape characterized by participation, and that texts are increasingly seen as communal pools of inspiration.

Her novel draft Midnight Sun corresponds to the many fan fictions that alter the narrative perspective of the canon: In the book section on the same site, the number of Twilight fanfics is surpassed only by texts connected to Harry Potter, of which there are, to date, over , The fan fiction Dear God was retrievable from the site in November and December of , but has subsequently been removed from Twilighted. Karin Hellekson and Kristina Busse Jefferson: A common way to signal overt ties to the canon is by prefacing the fanfic with a disclaimer. The Strange Design of Comfort, for example, opens with the following statement: No copyright infringement intended.

Add to this adaptations in different media, prequels, sequels, and the thousands of fan fictions in existence. Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context Bridgend: However, in contemporary fanfic, the use of pseudonyms is established convention. Accessed December 5, Fan fictions are categorized in different ways on different sites to indicate what type of text they are. The category AU Alternative Universe , for example, indicates what relationship the story has to the canon, whereas slash denotes a homosexual pairing. Crossovers means stories that feature characters from two or more fictional universes.

Fanfics can also be categorized according to the genre they belong to; angst, for example, denoting a story where characters wrestle with existential or other doubts, or according to story length or rating. Structurally, these aspects bring the fanfics closer to the TV series the author remediates than to the Twilight canon. Characters in Buffy and Angel are used to new forms and genealogies of vampires, and developing strategies for how to slay them is an integral part of the narrative structure of episodes in both series.

Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: To create an image of a human-sembling family, Emmett, Edward, and Alice Cullen pose as adopted, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale as foster children. The pairings of Emmett and Rosalie, and of Alice and Jasper do not, therefore, represent biological incest. And they live together. Little, Brown book, Stephenie Meyer, New Moon ; London: Print , 12 and Breaking Dawn, ; London: Accessed January 10, , np. Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced: Stephenie Meyer homepage, n.

Accessed Januart 10, Sexuality and Fantastic Literature. Donald Palumbo New York: Print , —55, and Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Stephenie Meyer, Midnight Sun, Web. Accessed January 10, Suddenly everything was on fire. Instead, suspense is ultimately provided by and resolved through a courtroom drama, Perry Mason—style with a surprise witness Alice! Moreover, the central conflict of the novels—whether or not Bella will become a vampire—is decided not by love or choice but by various species of juridical wrangling: What drives the conflicts is the vampire secrecy law from which any and all other laws stem and which, like any good foundational taboo, seems to be defined by nothing more than constant violation.

So there is something romance-y here, in the genre sense. The series centers around a relationship rebelled against, challenged, and ultimately reconciled, with both parties changed—a change of jurisprudence rather than sensibility, or perhaps more accurately, a change of jurisprudential sensibility. The business of Twilight is still, obviously and unabashedly, desire a skim of the back-covers is sufficient to make this point.

The difference is in the object choice: This is a chapter about that romance, about what is between law and literature.

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For the late jurist Robert Cover, the relationship, like Bella believes of her vampire love, is one of inextricable entanglement. The inseparability is, at its most abstract and perhaps most obvious level, ontological: For every constitution there is an epic. Each part of a written constitution or statute has no meaning outside the narratives used to explain it, outside of the interpretations of the epics used to support a given hermeneutic i.

For this reason, he focuses on conscious commitments made from communities who actively produce oppositional legal meaning, for example, abolitionists, religious sectarians, civil disobedients. His ethical thrust is this: What follows is not precisely a critique but an expansion: All narratives—and thus, all cultural media engaged in producing such narratives—have the potential for jurisgenesis, but a commitment must be made to this nominally extralegal text the epic as well as to a sanctioned legal text the constitution , and the simplest and most direct index of such a commitment would be the popularity of the work, the quantity and quality of consumption.

The romance under investigation here is not precisely the intratextual one of literature with law, but the intertextual romance of law with literature. The legalistic themes and genre trouble of Twilight matter here not as evidence of why Twilight is a jurisgenerative text it could be one without explicit legal tropes as Manderson demonstrates of Where the Wild Things Are, more on which later , but as evidence of a nomos saturated by juridical language, which tells us less about a relationship to a particular jurisprudence and more about the production of a specific subject.

Though Twilight is often grouped with the YA genre of horror or fantasy, it might be usefully understood as part of a subgenre or category that I will call the teen monster story. From a jurisprudential point of view, the logical precursor for the teen monster story is the magical journey narrative. The magical journey traditionally begins with a disorderly or disobedient act: After the disorderly act, the child enters a fantasy land of different rules, populated by monsters and wonders.

The door to the magic land generally only swings one way, meaning only the child is eligible to become a subject, to enter the new legal order through a rejection of the Wild and a choice to follow law by subjugating desire. The benefit of this practice of restraint—that is, the reward for not just following but loving law—is readily apparent at the conclusions of these narratives: In the magical land narratives, the child might start out displaying monstrous tendencies toward disobedience, but he makes duly rewarded choices to accept the legal order, to put away wildish things.

In the transition to an older audience, monsters come out of the closet, as it were: Or rather, the narrative shift from fantasy land to teen monster story highlights how the discursive representation of adolescence is monstrous. Contributing to this conflation, the favored monsters are also humanoid or halfhuman—vampires, werewolves, faeries, angels—torn between two sets of normative commitments and belonging to neither.

They inhabit a liminal state between two legal orders. I want to make a distinction between this claim to liminality and a more general description of the vampire as liminal, as for example undead neither alive nor dead.

Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on a Pop Culture Phenomenon

The choice shares more with vegetarianism than Meyer might have intended as it is not a revolutionary position, but, to borrow a phrase from the s, an alternative lifestyle, meant not to disrupt or challenge the system but to negotiate an alternative normative space within it. Edward explains his vegetarianism to Bella in terms of personal desire: In the magical land narrative, the child accepts authority as if she had the power of a choice between discrete entities: Bella, on the other hand, lives in a world in which her choices are seldom if ever respected and where she frequently is unsure whether she has the possibility of selection: The child is empowered to make a choice regarding authority and to come to understand its purposes.

But notice the passive nature of empowered—by whom? But Bella has neither the power to make herself a vampire nor that which would prevent her from being killed by the Volturi for knowing their secrets. In contrast, following Cover, the legal adolescent subjectivity produced in Twilight is one that challenges the relationship between benevolence and authority and acknowledges the consequences of this relationship on the possibility of choice.

The possibility of having your legal meaning elected depends not on your will, but on that of the judicial power. Courts, including vampire ones, do not adjudicate truth, but a quantum of interpretation, a selection between competing narratives under a rubric that asks not which is more truthful but which is more convincing.

The menacing Volturi, in fact, makes clear what the decorum and civility of the courtroom are meant to obscure: The consequence of this weighing—that some interpretations, and thus some legal meanings, are more equal than others—tends to overwhelm the other consequence—that our cultural narratives generate these meanings—with the result of reinforcing the fetishization of law, that is, reproducing the mythologies that order and naturalize inequitably structured relations of power by fixing hegemonic meaning and animating the law as subject e.

Roland Barthes describes the function of myth as emptying reality: Consider, for example, the following propositions from Twilight law: The prior law—all immortal children are illegal—sits alongside the amendment—except those born—creating a fissure, which in turn, shows the idea of legality as a known, uncontested concept to be mythic.

The meaning chosen turns out to depend on those who, most visibly in the context of a climax of gathering vampire armies, have the power to define it. But Bella does make choices, and what Bella is able to choose, what she desires, is just as revealing jurisprudentially as what she is not.

To love the good monster in such a way that he stays good means Bella must desire his restraint, his abstinence, and thus her own subjectivity is defined not by abstaining but by waiting. In a switch from the teen romance formula of dramatizing temptation and waiting for desire the someday-my-prince-will-come model , the teen monster story dispenses with the pretense of fighting temptation and eroticizes the state of waiting. In the context of consumerism, Honeyman tracks a similar shift in Hansel and Gretel retellings: Consumers are increasingly depicted as willing victims of a manipulation wherein deeper structure is concealed, agency being reimagined as externally located impossibly in ephemeral confections.

Like monsterhood, then, adolescence is characterized by its own moral ontological impossibility—that is, the good teenager, like the good vampire, is one who is not a teenager at all. She is, at best, a reluctant consumer, indifferent to shopping, clothes, cars, and nonvampire-related gossip. Her ennui is continually set in contrast to the bubbling normalcy of the other human girls that she can barely bring herself to make friends with, interacting with normal teenagers with about as much gusto as the Cullens bring to their five hundredth repetition of high school. Here, the pattern should be more recognizable as part of a familiar genealogy, that of the anti-teenage teen girl: The jurisprudential value of the make-over narrative is in how the transition to the new subject inevitably requires a transition of sensibility i.

Her relationship to the laws is one of production within a field of constraint, and her desire is for new law. The human girl in vampire romances rarely if ever wants to be a vampire, and even in the adult monster romances, her resistance to becoming undead usually provides much of the drama. Being a vampire is, in colloquial terms, her un life-goal. If children are like lawyers, as Manderson suggests, in their search for proper read: The level of advocacy required for lawyers is an ethical responsibility, here, from the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility: Edward is a rule hound, worrying constantly about the law of monsters, of humans, and of the divine no sex before marriage, no turning Bella into an undead beast who might feast on the faces of her family, blah, blah, blah.

You want to worry about the human ones too? Aro is the judge; Caius, the prosecution; Edward, the defense. The legal issue before the court: The issue of Renesmee—immortal child or dhampir—again points to the contrast between the social organization of law as power and as interpretation: This jurisprudence goes beyond hermeneutics to look at power, which Aro betrays when he switches the issue before the court: That is a separate issue. This court scene betrays another myth, one of temporal ordering, to which Edward is susceptible and the Volturi are strategic: As this law to come will in return legitimate, retrospectively, the violence that may offend the sense of justice, its future anterior already justifies it.

If we understand law to be acts of textual interpretation, then the problem of retroactively justified violence exists in every moment of law. Law is made out of its perceived violation; wherein, judgment is a retroactive application of meaning, an exercise of choice whose justness is promised by a future perfect and can therefore only be determined by its confirmation thereafter.

The temporal ordering myth, understood in conjunction with law as an interpretative commitment, should not be read as dystopic. Consent-related resistance, then, should be understood not as civil disobedience but as uncivil obedience—obedience to something not fully included nor fully excluded by the civil. By obeying her own fully formed interpretation of vampires as different but not evil, Bella resists, to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, not good sense but common sense.

However, the sophistication of this jurisprudential methodology is undercut by its substantive goals. Although the Volturi are questioned as kings, the Cullens do not revolt, wishing only to be left alone to pursue their lifestyle, more Amish than evangelical in their juridical approach. But who is her client? Even Harriet was a spy. Their favorite pastime is baseball. They have a car for all seasons. They eat a lot of red meat and enjoy hunting. But they are also the idle aristocracy of Gossip Girl, wealthy parasites with endless leisure time whose only real drama seems to be whom they might sleep with, what they will have for dinner, and whether those things will be the same.

This framing reproduces the sexism it seeks to critique by assuming that this aspect of the story is the one which is fantasy. Far more disturbing than the idea of abuse as a secret desire that must be squelched by a vigilant feminist critique is a reality of abuse that we misdiagnose as desire. Meyer gives us a transition without loss, transforming the traditionally sentimentalized end of childhood into a gift, into that which, through persistent advocacy, makes a boring, clumsy teen into an unusually strong, exceptional vampire, who, significantly, becomes more powerful than those who previously threatened her safety, including the two legal authorities of the new order: Edward and the Volturi.

Taking seriously the ways in which adolescents might enjoy The Twilight Saga as a fantasy that they relate to means understanding how what seems most problematic about the series might in fact be what is most normative and not necessarily what is most appealing. If becoming an adult necessitates a linguistic and metaphoric death of the child, we can look at a work like the Twilight series as grappling quite literally with the anxiety that motivates being a teenager, the space we have set aside to deal with the question at the heart of this violent transition: And, less metaphorically, and more jurisprudentially: Accessed September 8, Little, Brown and Company, Pride and Prejudice is useful here both as a text marked as an originary point for contemporary genre romance form and as one cited by Meyer specifically as an inspiration for her work, in particular for the first book.

From a interview: With Twilight, it was Pride and Prejudice. Meyer, New Moon, —

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