Sometimes Progress Ain't What It Seems - A Review of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight"

I have, of late, found myself wondering what makes a good book for young adults.

Not long ago, I found myself trying to make some kind of headway in the young adult novel Twilight (Little, Brown, 2005). I’d been teaching, and I had seen a number of teenage students – often girls – reading the book, and when I’d bothered to ask them about its plot, they would generally say something vague about vampires or romance. Beyond that kind of hazy teenage generalization, the most I was ever able extract from a student was that the book was “pretty good.” This was high praise.

So, I tried reading it, and, while intrigued by parts of the story, I found myself rapidly coming to the conclusion that the book was simply not written with grown men in mind. It was a “girl’s” book.

This disturbed me. My last comment in the paragraph above could be seen as a foolishly sexist generalization that presupposes rigid, immutable gender boundaries and the existence of over-simplified gender spheres in the modern world (say what?) - the kind of generalization that presumes that girls read one type of book, and boys another. That kind that presumes that girls stick to Nancy Drew, and that boys stick toThe Hardy Boys. That girls read romance, boys Westerns. That only girls read Austen, and that boys necessarily laugh at it. Of course, in the twenty-first century, such simplistic notions of gender are, in theory, ridiculous. Right?

Well…

What bothered me about Twilight, aside from the rather clunky prose style of author Stephenie Meyer, was that it seemed to play off of the worst notions of gender.

Let me digress for a moment and briefly mention romance novels. It seems to me that romance novels, while perhaps serving the real word purpose of giving voice to unspoken fantasy, nonetheless belong to a rather cynical genre – a genre that is marketed largely toward women, and that is designed to play on their insecurities, and on enforced notions of women as passive, starry-eyed housewives dreaming of nothing but being rescued by men with perfect physiques. It is a genre that seems to present women as helpless victims incapable of saving themselves.

Twilight, which focuses on teenager Bella Swan’s love affair with Edward, a do-gooding vampire, strikes me as a romance novel in the guise of teenage lit aimed at young women. Bella, though supposedly smart, is also infuriatingly passive when dealing with Edward, and spends much of her time fawning over his looks and his perfect physique. It's a fantasy - one in which the theoretically strong female protagonist goes weak in the knees (and in the head) for a mysteriously beautiful stranger.

This is progress?

Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with a little fantasy or wish fulfillment. But I begin to see a problem when that fantasy is decidedly anti-feminist and then slapped in a glossy package and marketed to teens. I see a problem when the novel's dithering female protagonist is held up as a model for young women. It's a bit disheartening to realize that the book has been enormously popular (and thus aggressively marketed) among teens - especially girls.

For Twilight is, quite simply, not a very good book.