Mrs. Meyer’s Anti-Cult, Feminist Story-Message

PodCast on Eclipse and Bree Tanner

Mrs. Meyer says Twilight is Meaningless?

PodCast with Mrs. Meyer’s Favorite BYU Professor, Steve Walker

‘Alchemists Everywhere!’ A Hog’s Head PubCast

Thank you in advance for joining the discussion at HogwartsProfessor!

EW: Some people read Breaking Dawn as very pro-life and Mormon because Bella decides to have her baby even though it’s endangering her life. Did any of that bother you when you read the book?

STEWART: No, because it made sense. Not wanting to give up the baby is about her holding onto that last thing that she would have to give up if she was not human anymore. Right after she and Edward sleep with each other for the first time, she says, “Oh, f***, I might want to be human for a little bit longer.” The baby is just an even more intense version of that.
PATTINSON: I think people make up all these Mormon references just so they can publish Twilight articles in respectable publications like the New York Times. Even Stephenie [Meyer, author of the Twilight novels] said it doesn’t mean any of that. It is based on a dream.

After some notable screw-ups, both Ms. Stewart and Mr. Pattinson are clearly reading from Twilight franchise talking point scripts. I find their answers to the Mormon question interesting, then, for at least three reasons:

(1) It suggests that the franchise — Mrs. Meyer or the book-film marketing mavens or both — want the Mormon discussion squashed;

(2) It turns out to have had just the opposite effect. Mr. Pattinson’s comments inspired a small avalanche of articles about the LDS content of the books; and

(3) None of these articles mentioned more than the echoes of Mormon doctrine in Mrs. Meyer’s stories, which, frankly, is the least interesting aspect of Mormon elements in Twilight.

Let’s look at these three points one at a time to arrive at a more meaningful, perhaps embarrassing reason Mrs. Meyer may want the discussion repressed.

Putting the Lid on Discussion of Twilight’s Mormon Meaning

Any publicity is good publicity, right? The Christian Controversy about magic in Harry Potter, for example, what academics are now calling “The Potter Panic, 2000-2005,” was a god-send for keeping the Hogwarts Saga in popular media and the public mind — and, knowing the Passion narrative of Deathly Hallows’ ending as she did, I hope Ms. Rowling assuaged her frustration with Christian critics by laughing all the way to the bank.

Mrs. Meyer, as we have discussed here more than once, seems committed to discouraging discussion of the meaning to her stories. I think her reason for this is a combination of modesty, prudence, and a little fear. As she said in her interview with Amazon.com for The Host, “the heart of it all” is that “[I'm] writing to entertain myself.” In the introduction to Bree Tanner she tells us that “it was easy” to slide into the minds and voices of Bree, Freddy, and Diego and it is this kind of character, the ones that “take on strong lives of their own,” whose stories she finishes.

As I wrote here in June, it may be this very personal quality of her writing that makes discussion of its meaning uncomfortable for her because it means exposure of her subconscious and conscious thinking that she’d just as soon not discuss outside of her story-projection and transparencies. Remember this from TwilightMoms.com:

TM:  Stephenie, if you could hold a live Q&A session with any of your favorite authors, who would it be?? What are your burning questions?

Steph:  I’d love to talk to J.K. Rowling about secrecy and crazy antagonistic fans and her writing process and what her everyday life is like. I’d love to listen to Orson Scott Card talk about anything, but I wouldn’t be able to formulate questions, as I have learned from experience. I’d like to ask Jane Austen how much of herself is in her stories.

Mrs. Meyer is a thoughtful woman capable of interpreting her own work and seeing “how much of herself is in her stories.” And the not-very-hard-to-see critiques of her faith in these stories and the community in which she lives may be something she is serious about not wanting to discuss with anyone but a fellow female romance writer who is long dead (and unlikely, being dead, to talk publicly about it).

Hence, potentially, Mrs. Meyer’s eagerness to repress discussion of Mormon content in her work. There is meaning in her stories that would not reflect well on her within the LDS community. This needs a lot of expansion, I know, so we’ll be coming back to this.

Why, though, would the book and film franchise back her up on this sufficiently to make it a Stewart-Pattinson talking point?

If the push to repress is coming from Mrs. Meyer (or her husband and family), the franchise is motivated to do this to keep the goose laying the golden eggs happy. If it’s not coming from her, the film folk have their own concerns, most notably, protecting those golden eggs from sudden depreciation and their own standing in the Hollywood creative community. Association in the media and public mind between their cash-cow film franchise and Salt Lake City Mormonism is the last thing they want. As I joke even with Mormon friends, most Americans know next to nothing about the Latter-day Saints — and wish they knew less. I’m afraid the only thing everyone in the film community thinks of when they hear the word ‘Mormon’ is “Proposition 8,” and, given the political leanings of that tribe, this isn’t a positive association.

I suspect, given that Mrs. Meyer has pulled down the “I’m a Mormon” paragraphs on her web site, that this is a mutually agreeable meme for her and the money-holders in the Twilight franchise. Both author and publishers-film-makers have substantial reasons for wanting to discourage a Mormon or even a religious association with the Forks Saga.

Whatever their intention, however, Mr. Pattinson’s remarks to Entertainment Weekly inspired quite a few stories on just this subject.

Recent Articles on Religion and Twilight

My favorites, with a hat-tip to Perelandra, Arabella, and James for sending me these urls:

• Twilight: The ‘Eclipse of God’ National Catholic Reporter, Jamie L Manson, July 01, 2010: Catholic, positive.

Manson argues the “Eliade thesis” that I introduced in 2002 from an aside in The Sacred and the Profane to explain the popularity of the Potter novels:

In many ways, Edward fits the archetype of the Christ far better than that of the vampire. Edward comes from a family of more enlightened vampires that sublimate their desire for human blood by settling for
animal blood. Rather than life-sucking, Edward’s love for Bella is chaste, constant and immortal. With his superhuman ability to know when Bella is in danger, Edward always arrives just in time to use his
superhuman powers to protect her. Fearing that his innate thirst might lead him to hurt Bella, Edward at one point even sacrifices his desire for her to ensure her safety.

Mircea Eliade, one of the most influential scholars of the relationship between the sacred and the profane, wrote that popular art forms such as film and literature served a critical religious purpose in secular culture. In a world where human spiritual sensibilities are under-stimulated, people will reach out to drama and entertainment to satisfy their intrinsic spiritual yearnings.

Manson believes that  Twilight’s success, then, is “a sign of a new generation’s intense hunger for something both beyond the secular and beyond the institutional.”

On the surface, “The Twilight Saga” seems little more than another tale of adolescent love and angst. But the fact that this romance involves a human girl and an immortal vampire escalates the story to a
metaphysical level. The films are based on a series of novels by Stephanie Meyer, a devout Mormon. Meyer’s faith is interlaced through the story, making for themes that even a pope might approve.

• Twilight Breakdown: ‘Girl Porn’ and the Books of Mormon LifeSiteNews.com, Kathleen Gilbert, July 16, 2010: Catholic, an echo of the Potter Panic

As you’d expect from the web site of the Star Chamber Catholics in Ontario that gave us ‘Pope Condemns Harry Potter,” Ms. Gilbert’s piece is a response to and rebuke of the position advanced in the National Catholic Register’s Manson article. “Themes even a pope might approve”? Hardly. These themes are all LDS heretical nonsense and kiddie porn!

• Mormon influence, imagery run deep through ‘Twilight,’ Religious News Service (multiple outlets, to include newspapers, Huffington Post, etc.), Angela Aleiss, 24 June 2010: academic, doctrinal.

This article, written by an adjunct professor of “film and religion” at UCLA, was a direct response to Mr. Pattinson’s comments in Entertainment Weekly, and, if the intent of his remarks was to smother the Mormon-Twilight association, Ms. Aleiss’ notes did just the opposite:

Ever since Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” began haunting the imagination in 1897, popular culture has identified Christian symbols—crucifixes, holy water, Communion wafers—as weapons to ward off a blood-thirsty vampire. The “Twilight” novels and film franchise have religious associations, too—but most of them come from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). As the film’s “Twi-hard” fans get ready for the third “Twilight” installment, “Eclipse,” to open in theaters on June 30, few are likely to recognize the religious references in the film based on the novels by Stephenie Meyer, herself a Mormon.

“I think people make up all these Mormon references just so they can publish `Twilight’ articles in respectable publications like The New York Times,” actor Robert Pattinson (Edward, the film’s central vampire character), told Entertainment Weekly. “Even Stephenie said it doesn’t mean any of that.”

It’s possible that Meyer never set out to weave Mormon imagery into the `Twilight’ background. Yet intentional or otherwise, it’s hard to ignore:

She proceeds to list eight similarities between Twilight and LDS beliefs, which similarities readers of this weBlog, my Touchstone article ‘Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden,’ or Spotlight: An Up Close Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga are already familiar with: Word of wisdom observation, Celestial marriage, Lamanite parallels, etc.

I wrote to Ms. Aleiss to ask her if she would like a copy of Spotlight because it covers in depth the subjects she mentioned in her article as well as more challenging LDS links. She didn’t need a copy, she wrote back, because she already had one. “Thanks for your emaill (sic).  Yes, I am familiar with your book and took a look at it several months ago.  Very interesting.”

Very interesting, indeed. Moving right along…

• Twilight Weaves Mormon Ideas into Supernatural Love Saga, USA Today, Cathy Lynn Grossman, 7 July 2010: Survey of articles on LDS content in Twilight.

If Team Twilight blanched at the Aleiss post appearing in The Huffington Post, the news aggregation website of the political left, they probably wept at the article that appeared in USA Today, America’s newspaper, the first week in July. There they read:

With the latest Twilight movie packing theaters, a raft of experts are busy spotting religious threads in the girl-vampire-werewolf love triangle tales. While groups root for Team Edward or Team Jacob, rivals for Bella’s love, experts are saying the spiritual winner is Team Mormon.

If that weren’t bad enough, Ms. Grossman then gives the wow LDS-Twilight highlights from articles in The Mormon Times, on BeliefNet, and, worse, on a USC Media weBlog with still another survey of the many articles making the Mormon Vampire association.

There’s more, of course. This one, ‘Twilight Stars: What Mormon context?,’ from iVillage is cute and this article from God Spam, ‘Edward Cullen: Vampire or Perfect Mormon Boy,’ has some very funny pictures that make the Forks-is-SLC-North point in a smash-face kind of way.

It seems only Psychology Today was not interested in making that connection for their readers, post Pattinson denials. Go figure. As we’ll see, they should be the ones most interested in the Meyer-Mormon material.

What We Didn’t See in Any of These Articles

The funny thing is that, even in the articles that set out to directly rebuke Edward-the-actor’s assertion that there is no Mormon content in Twilight (and anyone who thinks so is making it up to fill newspaper column space), Mr. Pattinson’s main point is the one that prevails. His argument, you’ll recall, is that there is no LDS meaning to Twilight because (a) “Stephenie said it doesn’t mean any of that” and (b) “[the story] is based on a dream.” Both points are in reference to Mrs. Meyer’s assertion that she didn’t consciously insert Mormon doctrine in the text; its origin in subconscious dream material absolves her of intentional proselytizing through story.

The assertion that “Stephenie said it didn’t mean any of that” is problematic, if not just flat wrong. In Meridian Magazine, ‘The Place Where Latter-day Saints Gather,’ Ms. Meyer said “her [Mormon] faith informs her work and [she] hopes that the message comes through. She was looking to put a lot more light than darkness in the books.”

What she has denied is explicit religious meaning in her books (see her conversation with RTE Entertainment), but only in the sense of not having written a proselytizing tract with Mormons or other believers in the narrative line:

“I really don’t write about religion and my characters aren’t specifically religious in any way. I suppose it does influence me because I think about things like, ‘What comes next? Why am I here? What am I doing here? What is the purpose?’ And my characters think about those things. I think it’s important in a book that is about immortality to think about these things.” Here shape-changer laden vampire story isn’t horror or romance; “It’s all just the story about people being human.”

The queer thing here is that, though Pattinson is wrong on this point and, consequently, on his larger point about Mormon content, the media chorus who correct him do not disagree with his “Stephenie said so” statement or his “dream origin” point. They agree that the Mormon content is subconscious, therefore unintentional, and, though undeniable and ubiquitous in the Twilight saga, there’s no reason to dump the books on this count. Mrs. Meyer isn’t smuggling the Salt Lake City Gospel as a novelist-cum-evangelist, so who cares?

Jana Riess’ patronizing note on BeliefNet to an actor just speaking his studio written lines is typical on this point:

OK, Robert Pattinson, here’s a reality check: Yes, the Twilight books were conceived in a dream that Stephenie Meyer had about a vampire named Edward (that’s you!) and an ordinary girl talking in a meadow. But so much else about the series is decidedly Mormon that to claim that people “make up” Mormon references is just silly. What’s buried deep inside any good novelist is going to “out” whether the writer intends it to or not. That has clearly happened here.

Get it? The Mormon content has just oozed out of ‘Mormon Molly’ Meyer — she couldn’t prevent it or shape it any more, say, than a volcano chooses the direction of its irrepressible lava flow. This fits with the pervasive media meme that Mrs. Meyer isn’t that bright, that she isn’t capable of conscious artistry consequent to inspiration. Hence one writer’s conviction that in my Touchstone article the assertion that Meyer is writing critiques of Mormonism as well as a work suffused with LDS content is “giving Meyer too much credit.”

But this is Sarah Palin Syndrome, i.e., misogyny that is okay because it is media approved and confirmed in each news cycle. The allegorical and anagogical content of the Twilight books, not to mention the history of every written work being some combination of both inspiration and artistry, makes the “it comes from a dream” argument just that much sophistry. As I argue in Spotlight, there are three LDS aspects to Mrs. Meyer’s story — Meyer as Mormon Artist, Apologist, and Apostate — and probably the least important and interesting one of these three is the superficial doctrinal links that bleed into every part the story.

The more interesting parts of the Forks Saga’s Mormon content is in her apologetic work through story, e.g., for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the inspiration of the Meadow dream, for the South American genetics dead-end that seems to make the Book of Mormon a fiction and Prophet Smith a fraud, and for old men marrying child brides. More challenging but perhaps most important than those hidden arguments are her critiques of Mormon community and history, specifically, its cultish aspects and the inevitably schizophrenic qualities of life as a Latter-day Saint in America.

In the Twilight novels, this is most evident in Eclipse, as I discuss at length in Spotlight. Not only do we get the Emma Hale story retold as nightmare via Rosalie’s origin story in Rochester, but we have a serious rival to Edward Cullen, Mormon vampire, in Lamanite Jacob Black. Bella, of course, has to decide for Edward for the Human heart-Divine mind allegory to work in Breaking Dawn, but in Eclipse, Bella sees the underside of life with the vampires and how inhuman they are.

What is curious in all the articles on Mormon content in Twilight is their turning a blind eye to a problematic part of assuming the novels are vehicles for Mormon doctrine, consciously or unconsciously delivered. The principal characters standing in for the Latter-day Saints are vampires, whose ‘vegetarianism’ makes them different from nomadic and Volturi vamps, yes, but they are still, as Edward rightly insists, very dangerous anthropivores. They may be honorable, even sacrificial, in many ways, but they’re also near pathological liars and indifferent to other vampires killing and eating human beings.

Looking at the sequence of composition in Mrs. Meyer’s oeuvre, too, there is a trend and growing emphasis on the dehumanizing aspect of living in a group that is separated from a larger community, a body of believers that doesn’t respect individuality.  Mrs. Meyer is arguing with increasing urgency about the difficulties and dangers, especially for women, that are inevitable inside a cult.

The sequence of composition we know about the books is first Twilight, then Forever Dawn, the original Breaking Dawn. Dawn was outlined as two books to satisfy the Little, Brown three book contract. They refused the Renesmee and Showdown with the Volturi books, however, and insisted on two more Forks High School adventures, which brought on New Moon and Eclipse. She wrote The Host before or while she revised Forever Dawn into Breaking Dawn. Last, we have The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, a novella about a newborn vampire.

Anti-Cult Dramas: The Host and Bree Tanner

The last three books Mrs. Meyer has written, then, are Eclipse, The Host, and Bree Tanner. I’ve already touched on the step-away-from-Edward qualities of Eclipse and the plea from Rosalie Hale not to choose the life of a vampire at the cost of her humanity, and, more specifically, of her life as a woman. Leah’s extinction as a woman because of the demands of her heritage and community mirror Rosalie’s message to Bella. In The Host and Bree Tanner, this don’t-sacrifice-your-life-as-a-woman all but explodes into an anti-cult message that is hard not to read almost as a cry of anguish or for help.

In The Host, the narrator is a Soul, an outer-space alien whose fellow creatures have invaded and taken over planet earth. They’re called ‘Souls’ because they live as the animating intelligence on the human “host” bodies they are inserted into. Usually the person inside that body disappears or surrenders to the parasitic Soul so the Soul has full control of the body; the Souls took over the planet by quietly and quickly inserting themselves into oblivious human hosts. Once inserted, each Soul used the still active memories of the previous occupant to find and subdue everyone that person knew.

Nota bene: the Souls are all non-violent, kind, loving ‘people.’ Once the violent, selfish humans have been displaced, war, disease, poverty, hunger, and all human problems end in short order.

The Soul in Meyer’s story is named the Wanderer. She is inserted into a hold-out human’s body in the hope that she would be able to track down this host’s hold-out community of unsubmissive humans. But there’s a problem. The human person, the real soul of this host, Melanie Stryder, refuses to disappear or co-operate. Without giving away too much of the story if you haven’t read it, Wanderer winds up being transformed by the memories, love, and desires of Melanie and living in a cave-dwelling secret society of surviving humans sans alien Souls. Most of the book takes place in this group’s caves.

If you don’t want to know how The Host ends or what it means before you’ve read it, stop reading here and scroll down five paragraphs.

As you might guess from the initials and syllable count, Melanie Stryder is Stephenie Meyer in mirror reflection. The Souls are Latter-day Saints and their perfect civilization consequent to vanquishing humanity the much-anticipated Mormon Zion, the paradise that is gentile-free. The conflict between Melanie and Wanderer is the one experienced in every Mormon woman between her LDS identity with community, call it her “conscience,” and her repressed individual desires, needs, and abilities.

The world of The Host is an inversion of America as it is today, in which the Latter-day Saints live on islands in an alien-occupied, hostile world. In Wanderer’s utopia (dystopia?), the Soul/Saints are in charge and the gentiles are on the run. In a fascinating twist, though, Wanderer-controlled-Melanie winds up in a gentile/human community living in a cave, in which cavern cult she is treated as a pariah and prisoner for having imprisoned Melanie, her repressed human host. Wanderer eventually frees Melanie in an act of loving self-sacrifice (what else?).

The Mormon Soul yields to the human woman displaced and suppressed by the inhuman righteousness of a Conscience that is a parasite. The story ends with the hope that Souls and the few human beings left can learn to live in peace with one another — meaning Soul-Mormons learn to respect for human-gentiles as more than body-hosts for Mormon-Souls to take over.

In brief, lest this already too long post become a Host exposition, Mrs. Meyer was inspired to write The Host on a plane trip to Salt Lake City, the capitol of Mormonism and in a state she has sworn she “would never live” I presume because of its remarkable LDS orthodoxy. It is the story of Melanie Stryder/Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon woman’s life as a prisoner to the Soul of her community and how she escapes from her narrow identity as a possessed person to be a human woman again.

The Twilight Saga can be read as an apotheosis drama (which it is) and, on a more mundane plain, the wish-fulfillment fantasy of a woman who wants more than anything else to open her mind to her husband and savior. The Host, too, is a profound allegory — whenever you’re in a story cave, think Plato, right? — but it also, alas, is another impossible wish-fulfillment fantasy. Here Mrs. Meyer is writing the story of her escape from Zion to regain her life as a woman, a life in which she can express her gifts and talents without restriction or repression.

Second Life of Bree Tanner is more of the same, only the transparency is more dramatic. Bree and Diego learn on their own (in escaping from another cave into the light!) that the cult they are living in is a community based on lies and violence. Tragically, Bree trusts Diego, who rather than escape from the basement nightmare existence of newborn vampires, has to check in with the cult’s leader to share his enlightenment. Diego, of course, is destroyed by the cult leader, who uses Bree’s love for Diego to manipulate her to do what he wants, ultimately to her destruction.

Again, there are edifying, universally applicable elements of allegory in this novella, with the basement as “the World,” Freaky Freddy as the light shining in the darkness (Christ is everywhere as sanctuary and escape, the story says, for those who can see and follow Him), and the cult’s violence and lies as story stand-ins for the life without Love and Light.

But the cult allegory all but overwhelms this universal tale. Written as it is by a Mormon woman whose husband has a Spanish side-kick nickname (Pancho :: Cisco Kid as Diego :: Riley), it is not hard to see that, as with Bella, Leah, and Melanie/Wanda, Mrs. Meyer has once again written herself into the story as Bree.

Only this story has a very unhappy ending. Mrs. Meyer writes in the introduction to Bree that “the closer I got to the inevitable end, the more I wished I’d concluded Eclipse just slightly differently.” Bree/Stephenie gets her moment with Edward, but, in this non-wish-fulfillment drama that may be closer to painful reality, Bree’s love results in her being sacrificed by the Mormon vampires to the demands of their larger community, the Volturi. The woman is ripped to pieces and destroyed. Bree dies wishing that she had found the strength to have followed Christ/Freddy and given up on Pancho/Diego rather than hoped for the help or mercy of Prophet/Edward.

Conclusion: Why the Push to Repress the Mormon Discussion

The franchise move to smother media speculation about Mormonism has largely done its work, if only because of American misconceptions about Mormons and especially Mormon women. No one in the main stream media is talking about Mrs. Meyer’s feminism (which I’m betting is all right with her). The many LDS-Twilight articles we read in the paper and online all are written from the perspective that Latter-day Saints, especially the women, are one-dimensional ditto-heads that are brain-washed by the First Presidency to do whatever they want. This reflects a rather profound ignorance of Mormon reality. LDS women as a rule are neither stupid or push-overs.

Mrs. Meyer’s work, qua Mormon, inevitably reflects her faith which is an all-consuming thing. There is no reason to believe, though, that her work is either missionary in intent or, more important, lacking in conscious and unconscious criticism of the community in which she lives. Her last three stories have been about three women divided within themselves between their longing for life in Zion, the perfect community, and their lives as women of individual understanding, talents and desires that their community restricts or destroys. I think it may be best to think of her as the Mormon Kate Chopin.

That these three stories have become darker, the restrictions more dramatic, and the endings more problematic, I think points to a reason she may not want to discuss what her stories mean, a reason unsuspected by the reporters who ‘get’ only the surface LDS elements in Twilight. Because that discussion would eventually and inevitably mean the revelation that, like many believers, male and female, in demanding faiths, Mrs. Meyer is tremendously conflicted about her life as a faithful Mormon woman.

What strikes me as bizarre here is the continuing parallel with Ms. Rowling’s life as a writer. Her biggest critics were Christians — and it turns out her books were stuffed with Christian themes, symbolism, and meaning. Mrs. Meyer’s critics are literary know-betters and, as often, feminists  — and it looks like Twilight and The Host are largely works about a woman’s struggle for identity and personal integrity in a patriarchal community. The feminist Meyer bashers like the Christian Harry Haters have missed the boat on a writer doing some very heavy lifting for their cause via story.

As always, I covet your comments and correction.

I flew into Phoenix last Thursday and enjoyed a wonderful afternoon at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College. Prof. Joel Hunter, faculty adviser to ASU’s Harry Potter Society, talked with me on a tour of campus and took me to dinner with said Society before my talk that night on ‘The Eyes of Deathly Hallows.’ Considering it was the night before Spring Break at America’s largest university, we had quite the crowd — and these folks have a command of canon detail that, frankly, really surprised me (how many readers know how many stair cases there are at Hogwarts off the top of their head?). They also were all over the Coleridgean ideas and anagogical artistry in Deathly Hallows, which was a treat for me to discuss with them.

The next day I taught a class at Glendale Preparatory Academy, one of Arizona’s Great Hearts charter schools, and I confess to being both surprised and delighted by my experience there. Headmaster David Williams has created a challenging, nurturing and wonderfully engaging school of moral and intellectual virtue north of Phoenix in just a few years. My evidence? The experience I had Friday morning at ‘GP’ leading a discussion of George Herbert’s poem, Vertue (1633), in a classroom of seventh graders; the conversation never flagged, the participation of the 20 boys and girls was doggone close to 100% — and everyone’s comments were always attentive and respectful of their classmates’ contributions.

This isn’t an elite private school but a free public school whose students were chosen by lottery from the pool of local children interested in the Great Hearts ‘Great Book’ program. These polite, wonderfully challenging, and curious 12 and 13 year olds had been part of Glendale Prep’s community for a year at the most — and yet they all dove into Herbert’s meditation on life and death and his wonderful conceits with real enthusiasm and no little insight. I’m confident I was much more impressed with them than they were with me. I sat back and directed conversational traffic for the most part — while marveling at their excitement and courtesy.

I drove to Tucson that night after a sushi lunch with the Glendale Prep architects and an afternoon meeting with the ASU Potter Society. Incredibly, to me at least, these die-hards met to discuss chapters 16-18 of Deathly Hallows though the campus was all but empty (and given the Godric’s Hollow and pre-Silver Doe material of those chapters, it was a full 90 minutes!). I arrived in Tucson and, after a wonderful conversation with my hostess for the festival, I was asleep in a minute when I finally turned in.

Saturday was a ‘wow.’ Lisa Bunker, goddess of Harry Potter fandom and to all Potter Pundits because of her AccioQuotes.org resource (and a person to whom I will always be personally and profoundly indebted because of certain sensational discoveries she posted there), gave me the royal tour of beautiful Tucson with none other than ‘Lexicon Steve’ Vander Ark, also in town for the Book Festival! The first eye-popper was at the Tucson Museum of Art where Ms. Bunker introduced us to El Nacimiento, a Nativity scene several decades in the making and something I won’t ever forget (I wish we had had the day or two of attention this one room display and three dimensional icon deserved).

Before heading over to the University for the Festival of Books and my Twilight talk, Steve and I were treated to a trip out of town to the ‘Rez,’ and a Roman Catholic mission church, the Mission San Xavier de Bac, founded there in the 17th Century and still active as a Native American parish run by Franciscans today.

The weather was clear, bright, and cool. The desert was in bloom and the book lovers were on hand to listen to and meet their favorite authors. I was flattered that so many people came to hear my thoughts on Mrs. Meyer’s Twilight — and that they found my arguments about these books (which they loved or despised, it seemed to me, with little middle ground) largely convincing. Ms. Bunker sent me these Twitter notes from the University of Arizona Arts group, Wild Cat Arts:

• HPW: Twilight seems to be the theme of the festival. Is that really all people are reading anymore? 2:47 PM Mar 13th via txt
• BS: Speaking of Twilight, John Granger just gave a surprisingly convincing lecture on why Twilight is good literature. 2:50 PM Mar 13th via Seesmic
• BS: Would you believe that Edward Cullen represents God, Joseph Smith Jr. and divine consciousness? 2:50 PM Mar 13th via Seesmic
• BS: BTW, Granger is known as “The Hogwarts Professor”. At least his last name fits the theme. 2:52 PM Mar 13th via Seesmic
• SK: Ugh, Twilight. 2:59 PM Mar 13th via Twitterrific

The folks in attendance bought copies of Spotlight (and a few picked up Deathly Hallows Lectures, too, hurrah) and we spoke in the Signing Tent for about an hour afterward while I did the Gilderoy number, talked Twilight, and enjoyed the roasted corn. Ms. Bunker then gathered a clan of librarians, Potter mavens, and good friends — several of whom qualified on all three counts — for a night of live mariachi music and delicious Mexican food at a delightful restaurant.

I drove back to Phoenix before dawn on Sunday for an early morning flight and I was fully expecting to sleep my way through fly-over country. As providence would have it, instead I wound up between a pilot on his way to Kuwait and a serious reader and history professor at a notable Washington, DC, university. We talked without a break from Arizona to Washington-Dulles — and to where the baggage claim and flights to Allentown paths split. What a treat to discuss life as a mercenary in the 21st century and the comparative merits of Gladstone and Disraeli as writers and literary wonders at 36,000 feet…

And even nicer to be at home! Just in time to get ready for April’s talks at the C. S. Lewis Conference in Oklahoma City, two venues in Missouri, and then Augustana College… But more on those dates and topics in the next few weeks.

A very warm thank you to Joel Hunter and the Harry Potter Society at ASU, David Williams and Company at Glendale Prep (especially Mrs. Junker’s 7th Grade Literature class!), SVA, Lisa, the Bunk-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, and Gertrud in Tucson for their delightful hospitality, my friends from the talk at the Festival of Books, and my conversation companions from United Flight 952, Phoenix to Washington. It was a trip I hope to repeat for next year’s Festival, if not sooner!

(Photos all by L.Bunker)

Your comments and corrections, of course, are coveted.

4 March, 6:30 pm, on the sixth floor, ‘Spotlight on Twilight.’ Be There!

Update: Arrrghhh. It’s not 4 March; it was 4 February! My apologies to those of you who wanted to come but missed this because of my posting the date incorrectly…

Can the Opera and Forks Reality Show be far behind? (H/T to Perelandra)

Here are a few links to interesting posts and collections of posts in the hope you will join our discussions!

* The New Moon Posts: What is the Second Book Really About?
* Twilight and the Future of the Novel: Thoughts on a WSJ Editorial
* The Spectrum of Christian Opinion on Twilight
*A Twilight-focused editorial in the Washington Post and damning the series with faint praise,
* The Meaning of Mrs. Meyer’s denial of profound meaning in her books in August, 2008, and …
* A series of posts comparing the critical receptions Ms. Rowling’s and Mrs. Meyer’s popular series received.

And don’t neglect the Anne of Green Gables discussion just below this one for more on Coleridge, critical nominalism, and Bella as the ‘Heart’ Incarnate! Thanks again for joining us — and please share the site with friends you know who love literary discussions, whether they love or loathe Mrs. Meyer’s work. See you tomorrow!

Today I want to start the discussion of the Anne of Green Gables (hereafter Anne) Montgomery (”LMM’) link to Mrs. Meyer’s Forks Saga here with some notes about Mrs. Meyer’s comments about Anne, the obvious parallels in the stories, and the several reasons well outside of plot points that I think Anne Shirley and Bella Swan are a match.

In order of least to most important, then, let’s start with the author’s Anne comments. It’s way up there on her “Great Books” and “Big Influences” charts.

Anne, for example, makes Mrs. Meyer’s Amazon.com “List of Books You Should Read” with the note that “This is another frequent reader for me. Once I begin, I can’t stop until I’ve read the entire series through.” As ‘the book’ she lists is not just Anne of Green Gables, the first novel, but the Bantam Classic Seven-Pack “The Complete Box Set,” we’re talking well over 1500 pages of re-reading, a good-sized work to which the author has been returning frequently since childhood. Outside of her statement that she has read all of Orson Scott Card twice, this devotion to LMM is the most impressive on her list of influences.

From EW’s ‘Stephenie Meyer: 12 of My Twilight Inspirations,’ #2 behind only Jane Eyre is Anne of Green Gables:

”The series influenced how my series turned out. Because I was never a fan of the stories where everything ends and they kiss at the wedding. Anne of Green Gables started out with her as a child, she had a very fully described adolescence, she had a book-long engagement, we got to see her wedding, we got to see her have her first child and lose her first child, we got to see her children grow up. We got the whole life, and I loved that.”

Also from 2005, an interview in School Library Journal, ‘Love at First Bite’:

I love Austen and the Brontës. L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books were also a big influence on me, and Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite authors. Shakespeare is a big influence. I’m always coming back to things he has done.

I think that’s enough from Mrs. Meyer to show she likes Anne. Do her Twilight books show the influence she claims, though, beyond showing “the whole story”? Neither Anne nor Twilight tells us the full life of their heroines, birth to death, of course, except in comparison with Nancy Drew or the Boxcar Children, whose characters age like Edward, but there is significant plot overlap in the PEI Classics and the Forks Saga.

We have a young female lead, of course, and the first three books in the series are prologue to the wedding of this heroine and her husband-of-destiny. We get a strong play from an alternate suitor in the Anne books during her college days at Redmond (see Royal Gardner in Anne of the Island). This is no Jacob Black but Gardner did seem a lock for Anne’s hand, with much more going for him relative to Gilbert than Jacob ever had on Edward.

Edward Cullen, though, may just be Mrs. Meyer’s ideal man borrowed from Anne, that is, Gilbert Blythe, preserved through the century between the events of Anne and Twilight via Cullen vampire-cryogenics. The better Anne stories take place in the late 19th Century but were written in the early 20th, which are Edward Masen Cullen’s formative years. If you think this is a stretch, pull down your copy of Eclipse. The third book in the Saga is heavy on Wuthering Heights with Edward and Jacob taking their roles largely from that tale of the moors. But Bella mentions Anne twice in the third book, both mentions in terms of her understanding of Edward and herself as “vintage” flashback figures from another time, Anne’s time:

I saw myself in a long skirt and a high-necked lace blouse with my hair piled up on my head. I saw Edward looking dashing in a light suit with a bouquet of wildflowers in his hand, sitting beside me on a porch swing. I shook my head and swallowed. I was just having Anne of Green Gables flashbacks.

(page 277)

And then with Alice looking at her wedding dress:

“What do you think?” she demanded.

It was my Anne of Green Gables vision all over again.

“It’s perfect, of course. Exactly right. You’re a genius.”

She grinned. “I know.”

“Nineteen-eighteen?” I guessed.

“More or less,” she said, nodding. “Some of it is my design, the train, the veil. . . .” She touched the white satin as she spoke. “The lace is vintage. Do you like it?”

“It’s beautiful. It’s just right for him.”

(page 614)

The scene of Edward and Bella locking eyes after she comes down the stairs for their marriage ceremony in Breaking Dawn (page 68) is the Reader’s Digest version of the Anne’s House of Dreams wedding:

But it was a happy and beautiful bride who came down the old, homespun-carpeted stairs that September noon – the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the mist of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses. Gilbert, waiting for her in the hall below, looked up at her with adoring eyes. She was his at last, this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride. Was he worthy of her? Could he make her as happy as he hoped? If he failed her – if he could not measure up to her standard of manhood – then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other’s keeping and both were unafraid.

Hey, don’t laugh. We waited for three books for that moment, the epiphany and the transcendent union in marriage…

(See the Anne Lexicon for more on the dress and the Anne parallel, a movie moment.)

Not enough?

As Mrs. Meyer noted, we get a childbirth parallel between the two series. In both the baby comes soon after the wedding and is anything but what the heroine expected (Anne’s child dies and she is forever changed; Bella’s baby lives and, of course, childbirth causes mom’s near death and her fictional apotheosis).

That’s about as far as I want to go with plot points, though. Forgive me — and please feel free to share in the comment boxes other shared-story-points that you have in mind and I have neglected. Lining up Marilla or Matthew with Charlie Swan as a tit-for-tat correspondence works on one level (we’ll come back to it) but this sort of thing, again, forgive me, strikes me as mechanical and forced interpretation by eye-balling the surface for any look-alike moments. Even the “hits” leave me with a “so what?” question. I’m sure there are a lot of stories with long awaited weddings at character signature homes, stories featuring women whose child-birthing experiences are transformational. (I can’t think of any of those stories right now, but I’m confident they’re out there…)

Feel free to correct me on that last. I want to move on to the meatier discussion of Anne and Twilight parallels and possible influence, beyond details like each series being conceived as a stand-alone piece that grew due to publishing contract and reader demand. For ease of reference in your comments and corrections, let’s go with three for starters: (1) ‘Mary Sue’ novels or author wish-fulfillment in story, (2) Criticism of misogynist world, and (3) the Heroine as Heart-Incarnate.

Twilight and Anne as ‘Mary Sue’ Novels

Robert Pattinson, the UK heart throb who plays the part of Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies, supposedly told E! magazine in a video interview that he has thought of the books as Mrs. Meyer’s barely repressed fantasies.

“When I read it I was convinced Stephenie was convinced she was Bella and it was like it was a book that wasn’t supposed to be published. It was like reading her sexual fantasy, especially when she said it was based on a dream and it was like, ‘Oh I’ve had this dream about this really sexy guy,’ and she just writes this book about it. Like some things about Edward are so specific, I was just convinced, like, ‘This woman is mad. She’s completely mad and she’s in love with her own fictional creation.’ And sometimes you would feel uncomfortable reading this thing.”

Even if Mr. Pattinson didn’t say that, the idea that an author’s first work is almost necessarily psychological projection is sound. I detail in the later chapters of Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of the Twilight Novels the several personal issues and circumstances Mrs. Meyer was dealing with in 2003 that she has revealed in interviews and how the novels she wrote from her first wish-fulfillment dream are fantasy resolutions of these problems.

The temptation here after recognizing that the author is writing a wish-fulfillment fantasy is to dismiss the consequent work as necessarily worthless because it had therapeutic value and inspiration. That would be an unfortunate and very silly mistake.

Most obviously, it is a mistaken impulse because, if we threw out as soiled bandages every “Mary Sue” novel in which the author acts out satisfying, compensatory dreams through a story surrogate, we’d lose a lot of great books. Start out with Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bronte’s Jane Eyre and work your way through English fiction up to and including Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter.

All of these books have their reflection in Twilight but none as much commented on as Harry’s influence on Bella. In addition to magical or paranormal settings and characters, the two series are both ‘Mary Sues.’

We can see Harry as a stand-in for Ms. Rowling, for example, in noting that they share green eyes, a birthday, and a beloved dead mother. Ms. Rowling’s painful estranged relationship with her own father is revealed and acted out in the books via the violent deaths suffered by almost every father figure in the narrative line; she admits that she only had Mr. Weasley survive the snake bites he received in Order of the Phoenix because she had killed all the other daddies in Harry’s adventures.

A character, especially the main character, serving as an author surrogate is no measure of a work’s value. It means only that the writer is human. All books, perhaps even all artistic endeavors, have a significant psychological component of the inside being expressed on the outside in therapeutic narrative. Especially, it seems, in first novels.

Every novel as a creative work represents in varying degrees a psychological exercise of its author to work through unresolved interior conflicts. The subconscious content of Mrs. Meyer’s Twilight Saga, though, asks for our reflection more than most books both because it is her first book and because its core inspiration is dream material.

Robert Anderson, a psychiatrist whose Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith (Signature Books, 1999) explores Smith’s Book of Mormon as an exercise in psychobiography, explains the importance of an author’s first composition:

It is a general truism that the first artistic creation of an artist or writer is usually most revealing of his personality, for it is hoped that the artist’s work will also be psychotherapeutic work and contribute to resolving original conflicts and problems…. If the creative work of the artist or author is psychotherapeutic (as one hopes it will be and does sometimes seem to occur), then subsequent work will become more and more removed from the original struggles and conflicts….

The creative artist may reveal aspects of his life throughout his works, but it is hoped that the artistic work will be therapeutic and maturational for the artist. When this is so, the first work of the artist is usually most revealing of his personality, and the problems or conflicts most transparent.

(pages xxx, 30)

In June 2003 Mrs. Meyer has told us that she had three sons and felt heavy, old, fragile or broken, and weighed down with responsibilities that kept her from her self-expression. She was inspired by her dream of the girl and vampire in the meadow and feverishly wrote a story in which her main character Bella has one daughter (there will be no more…), her love for the baby is acknowledged and praised by everyone as sacrificial and heroic, and the fruit of her labors are peace on earth or, at least, a stop in the fighting around Forks.

Anderson calls this sort of reversal in a psychobiography a “fantasy conquest” in which the author is “compensating for a horrible real-life experience by displacing it with a conquering fantasy.” Mrs. Meyer works out her personal issues through her story proxy Bella and writes, as Anderson believes the Mormon Prophet did in The Book of Mormon, a “fantasy compensation for [her] real life incompleteness and loss.”

Mrs. Meyer writes Twilight after being inspired by a dream, she writes it without thought of publication, and, perhaps most important in seeing the work as auto-therapy, she writes it and Forever Dawn, the first sequel or “epilogue,” for herself and her sister, the closest likeness to a mirror’s reflection she could find in another person. Her work reflects the several psychological tensions and conflicts she was working though at the time of her inspiration for the series.

This ‘Mary Sue’ author-surrogate argument is an addendum to Spotlight’s discussion of the Mormon character of the Twilight novels rather than the focus of my work because the less personal, more archetypal artistry of her books — their literary alchemy, mind-reality, and allegorical meaning — are much more important to understanding their popularity. But it is a connection with Anne of Green Gables. As much as Twilight is one woman’s wish fulfillment therapy, in which the author’s surrogate is adored by supermen and misogynists gets their due in the end, Anne in important ways takes this to deliberate heights.

My daughter Anastasia’s favorite Anne book, and mine, too, I think, is Anne’s House of Dreams. It is the fourth Anne novel and was published in 1917. She wrote it very quickly — six months — in the context of three borderline life-changing circumstances: the birth of another boy after the death of her second son on the day of his birth, the discovery that her husband, the Rev. Ewan MacDonald, was mentally unstable and subject to debilitating breakdowns, and her ongoing fight in court with publisher L. C. Page, who always seemed to get the best of her (and most of her money) even when he lost in court. House of Dreams reflects all these problems and their resolution via “fantasy conquest” and author surrogates.

Mrs. Meyer, I suspect, is still coming to terms with her books as wish-fulfillment dreams. Her comment in a TwilightMoms.com interview that she’s like to ask Jane Austen about how much of herself is in her books is telling. House of Dreams, though, written ten years after the first Anne and under the pressure from fans to continue to produce Anne stories and novels, reflects a writer who is consciously addressing her situation in fiction and who knows that her work is a “house of dreams.”

Three characters in the book seem obvious and deliberate images of LMM. First, there is Anne Shirley Blythe herself. Her marriage to Gilbert, now a doctor, is everything that LMM’s marriage was not — Gilbert, as noted, is a Victorian Romantic’s picture of the Ideal Gentleman, from his sacrificial manners to poetic heart — but Montgomery brings personal and lasting tragedy to Anne’s life in House in a way she never had before: Anne’s first pregnancy ends tragically. Her baby daughter dies at birth. As in LMM’s real life, though, Anne recovers and has a baby boy. Anne does so, of course, gracefully and heroically, faith unscathed.

As interesting is an older woman in the books who is an unbridled misandrist or man-hater, by name Miss Cornelia Bryant. The name is important, because as Anne notes, ‘Cornelia’ is assonant with ‘Cordelia,’ Anne’s true name that she begs the Cuthberts to use and to which name she makes mention throughout the series. Cornelia Bryant is a wonderfully funny woman, an “old maid” with a blistering tongue who can see little to no good in any man except ancient ‘Captain Jim’ and no good at all in any person not a Presbyterian (certainly not a Methodist). LMM, as the victim of misogynous businessmen, the wife of a Presbyterian minister, and a depressed, aging woman, I believe draws in Cornelia her comic caricature of the woman she fears she is becoming. “Just like a man” ends every one of her many tales illustrating an encyclopedia of male failings

But the write-home-about character in House of Dreams is Leslie Moore. She is the most beautiful woman in the Anne canon but her life is positively Dickensian. Her only brother dies in a freak accident she witnesses, her father in despair commits suicide (Leslie finds the body…), and then her mother forces her to marry a sadist because he holds the mortgage to their home. That man, Dick Moore, goes to sea and disappears, but Captain Jim recognizes him in Cuba and brings him home. But Dick Moore isn’t the man he was; he has suffered some kind of brain trauma so has the mental capacities of a very young child. Mrs. Moore is not abused by her husband but she is trapped in poverty and in a marriage without any hope of love or happiness.

How is this an LMM author surrogate or Mary Sue? Well, the initials LM, for one thing, and the mentally disabled husband the strikingly beautiful woman is married to are all LMM pointers except for the drop-dead good looks (but, hey, we’re talking wish-fulfillment, right?). In LMM’s House of Dreams this character achieves three fantasy reversals that indicate Montgomery is deliberately working on her issues.

First, Leslie Moore hates Anne Shirley Blythe, though she is fascinated with her. She befriends her reluctantly and with reserve. Anne, after all, has and is everything that Leslie Moore’s life events have prevented her from having and becoming, from a college education to the perfect marriage. Only after Anne loses a baby and she has faced tragedy do the walls around Leslie Moore tumble. Then the two become the best of friends: Anne tells Leslie, incredibly, at the end of chapter 21, that:

“I am your friend and you are mine, for always,” she said. “Such a friend as I never had before. I have had many dear and beloved friends — but there is something in you, Leslie, that I never found in anyone else. You have more to offer me in that rich nature of yours, and I have more to give you than I had in my careless girlhood. We are both women — and friends forever.”

That’s a remarkable statement to a new friend, certainly, from a woman who is telling the truth about having “many dear and beloved friends.” None of them, to include Diane Barry, though, is equal to Leslie Moore? This makes sense, though, if the author here is making peace in her relationship with her fictional, “house of dreams” projection and vice versa. The wish-fulfillment ex machina ending of Dreams confirms this; L(M)M’s husband, the idiot “Dick Moore” from Cuba, turns out to be his doppelganger cousin and she is free to marry the dream suitor, Owen Ford, who loves her at first sight and whose writing genius, industry, good looks, and virtues make him worthy of her many gifts.

Anti-Misogny within Conventional Limits

Remember relatively early on in Twilight when Bella is writing an English paper for Mr. Mason (!) on “whether Shakespeare’s treatment of the female characters [in Macbeth] is misogynistic” (p. 143)? I suspect this is something Mrs. Meyer or a friend she admired wrote in Stephen Wilder’s Shakespeare class at BYU, the one in which I have to think she learned about literary alchemy and story-hero-apotheosis. [See the School Library Journal article mentioned above and Shakespeare's "big influence" and her "always coming back to things he has done."] The culture warriors on the politically correct left and right have lambasted Twilight for its fostering by Edward and Bella’s example of abusive misogynist relationships, call it “Edward Stalker Syndrome.”

This criticism, of course, is not literary criticism, per se, that is, work trying to explain why and how books and stories do what they do (or why they fail to satisfy the needs readers bring to books). It is moralism driven by political ideology, religious belief, social mores, or combinations of all three. In neglecting the reason better stories connect with readers, namely, their allegorical and anagogical meaning, this kind of reading, which, alas, is most of what passes for real-thinking-about-books today, is critical nominalism or surface evaluation of narrative. Sad but true.

Curiously, this kind of nominalism makes it all but impossible for critics using these mechanical, litmus strip measures of a story being good or bad — be it aestheticism or “tween-lit pornography” concerns — to see the clear anti-misogynist message of the Twilight books, especially when written by a woman living in the most patriarchal and chauvinistic of religious cultures. If only as wish-fulfillment dream, Mrs. Meyer’s male characters, when they act like patronizing women despisers, get their come-uppance. Think of Jacob after the forced kiss, Emmett and his boring and demeaning sexual innuendo, and the Volturi at the ‘Last Battle’ in the Mountain Meadow: all of them have to admit defeat and their relative nothing-ness before the super-woman Bella after her sacrificial birthing and resurrection as the all-powerful savior of Veggie Vampires and Quileute Shape-Changers.

This is more evident in the principal allegory of the story — Bella as Human Seeker, Edward as Christ/Joseph Smith, Jr. — and in its anagogical, alchemical content that is the “wow” of Twilight (and the focus of Spotlight ) but it is even in the surface and moral layers of the story. Mrs. Meyer isn’t trying to launch a “revive the ERA” campaign, of course, but qua postmodern she is all about feminism, just within the boundaries of conventional LDS mores.

Bella isn’t going to move out on Charlie for encouraging Jacob in physical assault and she won’t forsake Edward because he takes paternalizing condescension to new depths. She loves these men and will transcend their failings in her love for and through her sacrificial “free agent” obedience to them.

This could be lifted from the Presbyterian populated pages of LMM’s Anne books. The men of these books are, for the most part, Edward Cullen wanna-bes with just enough cads and hen-pecked husbands to keep the story realistic. Anne Shirley, however, and LMM’s other story surrogates have their great victories that they earn on their merits even in direct competition with men (especially in school) and the story doesn’t end happily unless the lead women characters have found their Gibert-Edward-Owen. Even Cornelia Bryant the misandrist spinster finds a husband at the end of House of Dreams.

The Anne books for their times and even today fostered a relatively liberated idea of women’s potential despite chauvinism to achieve an edifying and full education for a happy life. They are not Suffragette manifestos by any means, of course, and I’m sure there are few women today that could agree without qualification in LMM’s definition of female happiness, as man-centered as it is:

No. 17 “Your idea of happiness?”

A good novel and a plate of russet applesl Well, that is a flippant definition. But to give a faithful account would require pages. And yet-and yet-no! Holding my little son in my arms or feeling his chubby arms around my neck is happiness. Once I might have answered “To be in Herman Leard’s arms”. I would not so answer now. But to be in the arms of a man whom I loved with all my heart and to whom I could willingly look up as my master is, after all, every woman’s real idea of happiness, if she would be honest enough to admit it. There are dear and sweet minor happlnesses. But that is the only perfect one.

The Allegorical Heart: Bella and Anne as Primary Imagination Incarnate

“No I will continue with the fantasy world. I need to dream, to imagine. I am not sure the real world is that fascinating.” Stephenie Meyer, interview with Paris Match

If you read the Anne novels, I think you have to be struck by the number of Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth allusions and quotations. As striking are the near constant descriptions, “florid” literally and figuratively, of the natural beauty of PEI and Avonlea. My Canadian Anne expert and correspondent confirms that LMM, like Anne Shirley, was a close reader of the Victorian Romantics and John Ruskin.

So what?

I think it is more than plausible that these books are as popular as they are today — and there is an international Anne fandom, especially in Japan — because of their allegorical and anagogical meanings. The anagogical meaning is in the scaffolding of beauty, the succession of natural landscape paintings LMM draws for the reader, the character of which mind-pictures work subliminally (as do our real world surroundings, eh?) to transform our interior landscape in edifying fashion.

That’s quite the jump from this sort of Modern Painters anagogical artistry to Meyer’s literary alchemy and mind-reality — just as there is a considerable chasm separating the prose heights and comic touches of both writers — but I don’t think that it is here that we see the influence of Anne on Twilight. That is in the allegorical meaning they share.

Bella, as I have explained in Spotlight, is the allegorical ‘heart’ or ’spirit.’ She averages in New Moon an astonishing two angina events per chapter in Edward’s absence and frequent cardiac events in his presence in each books because, as the Human Seeker in pursuit of union with God-Edward, she is principally her “heart,” the Biblical and patristic spiritual faculty. Twi-mania is largely a consequence of reader engagement with Bella and their experiencing her cardio-spiritual chrysalis imaginatively.

Any reader of LMM’s Anne novels knows that Anne begs her adopted family to call her “Cordelia” at their first meeting, and, unlike the several names she calls herself in the first book (to include a Coleridge Christabel reference in ‘Geraldine’), this name is recalled several times in the follow-on books. Diane Barry, for example, names her first daughter “Little Anne Cordelia” to honor her best friend, a choice which mystifies her family.

Why is “Cordelia” an important marker? I think there is a reason more obvious and more meaningful than the tragic King Lear echoes, which are something of a stretch for the later Anne Shirley to make (or for the child Anne to know!) even given Cordelia’s virtues or the original Welsh meaning (“jewel of the sea”), both of which possibilities are cited in The Annotated Anne of Green Gables as the most likely connections. “Cordelia” is from the Latin for “warm-hearted” and this is the core, if you will, of the Anne books’ allegorical meaning: Anne Shirley is the “heart,” very much as Bella Swan is.

Three quick points in this regard:

(1) In Coleridgean anthropology, the Primary Imagination is the uncreated Logos in the human person and the Secondary Imagination is the same faculty engaged in art. (See Chapter five of The Deathly Hallows Lectures for more on this.) This noetic quality is the “heart” of Christian scripture and Patristic writing, whence Coleridge’s natural theology, and of imaginative literature, especially poetry and fantasy post-Coleridge. Anne Shirley is a creature of “imagination” whose vision recreates PEI and its rather mundane existence into an endless series of visions bordering on the supernatural, which seems to infuse her world. Her life-long hope is only for a “greater scope of imagination.”

(2) There is a brotherhood of people in the Anne books, her “kindred spirits” and the “house of Joseph” from Anne’s House of Dreams, who recognize each other, usually by the light shining in their eyes and their distinctively sacramental or un-empirical way of seeing things. They are as distinct from the non-kindred and as “magical” a group as Witches and Wizards in Rowling’s sub-creation are from her Muggles or Vampires are from the human cattle in Meyer’s Twilight. This quality of light in the eyes is another pointer to Coleridgean and Romantic cardiac intelligence and logos (cf., John 1:9). Anne Shirley’s enlightened crew are another Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

(3) There is a borderline disdain for religious conformity in the Anne books, which, while never crossing over into impiety or heresy, is nonetheless always a note contrary to hollow devotion or hypocritical faith-without-living-works. The real faith of the books isn’t the Methodism or Presbyterianism LMM gently mocks as being little better than Grips or Tory political parties in their partisan differences but the vibrant faith evident in Anne’s love and her imagination. This is the logos-Christ within her heart that shines through her and transforms her world. The references to books like Drummond’s Natural Law in the Supernatural World and LMM’s constant stream of Romantic poet and scripture citations as well as the story transformations centering on hearts opening highlight this meaning repeatedly.

There is no explicit, devotional religious content in the Twilight books beyond a fairly pedestrian attempt at portraying Native American spirituality around a campfire. There is a truck-convoy load of esoteric and borderline occult meaning in the books through both Mrs. Meyer’s understanding of Shakespeare and the Radical Reformation heresies implicit in Mormonism’s magical foundations (again, see Spotlight). From each of these streams, Mrs. Meyer, like the Presbyterian LMM, infuses her story with the non-conformist, anti-empirical, and anti-nominalist Romantic view that is the literary magic delivering the archetypal or mythic experience Eliade says secular readers look for in fiction.

Anne of Green Gables and the follow-on books, then, like Twilight, are carrying a boatload of meaning, allegorical and anagogical, via the Romantic tradition’s understanding of imagination as the spiritual heart of the human person. I offer for your consideration the thesis which I think obvious, namely, that it is just these levels of meaning and artistry which account for the longevity of fascination with and the power and universal appeal of LMM’s Anne Shirley’ s adventures as well as for their 21st century echoes in the mania for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books.

To the point I mentioned about there being a Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert parallel with Charlie Swan, they are all imaginatively deprived and heart starved before their respective girls arrive, unexpectedly and to change them forever. Matthew has literal heart disease and dies from it but spiritually he and his sister are re-born in the Life that enters their lives through Anne. Much the same can be said of the Phoenix girl that comes to Forks and her effect on her father.

Your comments and corrections are coveted as always. I have posted on Anne Shirley and Harry Potter over at Hogwarts Professor if you’d like to explore that connection, too.

Travis Prinzi, James Thomas, and I record podCasts once or twice a month for The Leaky Cauldron’s ‘PotterCast.’ They call these segments ‘The Potter Pundits’ because we explore the artistry and meaning of Harry Potter from a literary angle. The segments we have done have gone over very well, if I say so myself; we get a lot of positive feedback from TLC and from listeners. I have to admit, though, that I’d do it even if Fandom gave the shows a rousing raspberry because the shows for me are a wonderful opportunity and excuse every month to get together via Skype and talk with two thoughtful, funny, and eloquent readers, both of whom I wish lived next door.

The Potter Pundit parts of PotterCast are a sufficiently big deal that that show segment has its own website, PotterPundits.com, and a Facebook page. I kid you not. We’ve talked about Luna Lovegood, the Gothic elements in Harry Potter (with guest Pundit, Dr. Amy H. Sturgis), and most recently, Christmas at Hogwarts (#211).

But why do I bring this up?

The Leaky Cauldron gives out awards at the end of the year named, not surprisingly, ‘The Leaky Awards.’ The Potter Pundits segments of PotterCasts have been nominated for a Leaky Award in the category, ‘Favorite Leaky Moment 2009.’ When I first heard about the nomination last week (and saw the competition), I thought the race in this category was for second place because LeakyCon 2009 was nominated as well. I was at that show in Boston and it was a WOW; I assumed it would crush the category competition.

But, remarkably, TLC fans have been voting for Potter Pundits and it is a neck and neck race. If you have enjoyed the Potter Pundits segments, please participate in this end-of-year polling and give us your vote. It would be the perfect touch to a fun year of podCasting with James and Travis to have the TwiWizard Cup replica on the mantelpiece. The ‘Favorite Leaky Moment 2009′ voting place is #13 in a list of 15 categories so scroll down the page until you find it. Or just follow this link for direct voting (and check out the cool map displaying national vote distribution!).

Thanks in advance if you find the time today to vote!