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I feel that in New Moon they really resolved the psychological issues (if not all issues) that drove them but, to make sure, am rereading MS, E and BD.

I absolutely agree with you that Bella is a strong person, not weak. Actually, she is overly-strong, beyond her years, due to her upbringing. Children from dysfunctional families, as survivors, are usually stronger (though not healthier) than their peers from good homes. Bella has had to emotionally and physically take care of her parents from a very early age. That such a young person is so strong in an adult manner reflects a very skewed upbringing; such children may be world-weary little adults, but have had little to no opportunity to develop in an emotionally healthy way, and their “maturity” is flawed in many ways). Her self-contained strength does Bella no favors when she encounters feelings and situations beyond her control (and it also drives her anxieties in same.)

Because her parents are self-absorbed and, in Renee’s case especially, dependent upon her, they do not “see” Bella–the inner Bella, their own child; therefore she is invisible to them. She’s also invisible at school in Phoenix. As a result she’s invisible to herself, not seeing her own self-worth. (However, she’s highly visible to Edward, and later Jacob, who value her enough to “see” her.)

Because of dysfunctional family dynamics, a young person can be extraordinarily strong and (at the same time) also insecure. The insecurity doesn’t make her strong; the determination to not be subject to it, or the need to hide it through “covering up” vulnerability through habit from others, does. Such strength is often a false bravado, stemming from being hurt and a survivor, and grows as a thick, hard shell over insecurites, pain and low self-esteem. Bella’s heightened emotional awareness, need to fix, soothe, and hide her feelings of pain or fear, and feelings of unworthiness are so braided in with her strength, that both strength and insecurites/unworthiness must be broken in New Moon, so that she may transcend the brokenness to become a more healthy person. Her fatalism must be challenged so that she may experience hope for her future. Her anxieties must be dealt with so that her compulsive caretaking can be eased to a more comfortable level, where she can allow herself to fully experience (and reveal to others) her vulnerabilities.

Bella definitely has a wry humor, but it’s often self-deprecating. She dreads public display of her clumsiness. I too find her humor engaging.

Edward rocks Bella’s world and her solid ground of expectation that has been comfortable and understandable. And he summons an unexpected romatic love she doesn’t know how to cope with, which is unnerving. She’s no longer in charge and has lost the control which has kept her functioning so well. This is why she’s in so much conflict and has the confrontational verbal smackdowns with Edward, who takes the upper hand in the relationship, where previously it’s she who has had it in her relationships.

You write about “the present day Bella”: “This is someone who is utterly self-sufficient, living in the here and now, taking things the way they come – traveling life without any superfluous (emotional?) baggage, so to speak.” I’m sorry, but I don’t believe any of Bella’s story or behavior supports this. She’s not as free as she thinks. Her isolation has made her profoundly lonely, she’s loaded with pain and anxieties that she stuffs down for others’ sakes, and her self-sufficiency quickly crumbles when she encounters genuine love in someone stronger than she is. When Edward leaves her, she’s self-sufficient, all right–as a self-annihilating, feeling-detatched zombie.

I disagree that Bella being an outsider/misfit by choice or nature. Her reflections about school in Phoenix, and dismal foreboding about the possiblity of happiness in Forks shows that she hopelessly longs for it. Unfortunately, only Angela is a true friend (the others, revealed in Midnight Sun, are motivated by jealousy, desire for affiliation with the “hot” new girl, and selfish lust). Frodo was quite a social person before the Quest. And Hermione was crushed to tears by Ron’s remark in PS; frankly, I think she had been lonely her whole life for friends. Her friendship with Harry and Ron supersedes any other relationships in the books.

I read Twilight three times and New Moon twice before writing the essay. My “aha!” moment came during my first reading of New Moon, with Bella’s plunge into self-annihilation after Edward’s leaving. If you reread the books (having had story satisfied), I think you’ll notice repeated instances of the issues I bring up, especially Bella as an “anxious people-pleaser.”

However, I’m so appreciate of your comments, because I intend to submit my essay to the CFP: Critical Perspectives on the Twilight Saga, Edited by Maggie Parke and Natalie Wilson (see John’s Sept. 15 post, Call for Papers: Twilight Perspective). I want to tweak some parts of the essay, and perhaps I’ve not been as clear as I should be at some points, or I need further extrapolation.

I had a family counselor (who has spent decades working with young people in youth detention and from troubled families) read my essay. He told me it was “spot-on,” and “completely in line with emotional thought and behavior.”

But I ask others here for further input. Have I made my points clear enough to be understood? Do any of you think I’m “off” and why? Has Tineuvelas raised points I should consider? I want to make this essay the best possible before sending it to Parke and Wilson. So I covet your input. And I would love it if a psychologist who has read the books would read this essay.

Thanks again, Tinuvielas, for your time and thoughts. I agree with you about the first love thing, as it’s certainly apt! And not just with first time love, either.

Late to the discussion (I am into book three of the series right now), I find it somewhat difficult to post anywhere lest I say something redundant. However, perhaps I should just comment regardless as I read along in chronological order, because otherwise I’ll end up writing a book of notes on all the different aspects you and the other HogPros (not to mention several other sites) have already mentioned…

I guess my opinion on these novels is influenced by my European perspective – the perspective of a German mother of two in her forties with a degree in English literature and Narratology, to be precise. Thus, I’m not a native speaker and unfamiliar with US-teenage-culture, and I’m comparatively free from puritan concerns that seem so strong in the American reactions to both Harry Potter and Twilight.

I should also say that I read the first and second volume in the series without any preconceived ideas, that is, without having read, heard or seen anything at all about the Twilight books or stories (except for the cover text, and the fact that they have created a hype). As I was reading, I jotted down some notes on those aspects in the books that intrigued me – mainly questions of genre and perspective.

Funny enough, characterization wasn’t among the stuff that initially interested me – perhaps because I could so easily relate to both lead-characters, their feelings and actions in these two novels. Tony Heringer got it right when he wrote (at Hogshead): “Women or girls who read this aren’t stupid. They sense something about this type of writing that we don’t get.” Unlike some critics I didn’t have any issues with Bella’s reactions or with the way she behaves in the first two novels – probably because I found myself forcibly reminded of my own first, late-coming love affair (the guy wasn’t a vampire – he was Italian. Which amounts to a similar cultural difference P). In fact, I recommended “Twilight” to my husband on the grounds that imho it provides a precise picture of the inner workings of female first love – the great expectations, the idealisation of the partner as “soul-mate”, the creeping horror when you realize all is not well…, the feeling of “all or nothing”, of having lost everything worth living for when that first love-affair turns out not to work in daily life.

I remember that time very clearly. I also remember writing in my diary (or rather, on the margin of some since-lost book) something along the lines “before I was with him, I was never without fear, but that didn’t inhibit me, because I was used to overcoming it. Now that I’m with him, I’m never afraid any more when he’s present, but I’m crippled when he’s gone”. The tragedy of living up to one’s Romantic expectations… which of course is one of the criticisms Meyers’ series has received – Bella isn’t really a good role-model, if you try to apply her undying, eternal, unconditional love to real life and real men. However, if you want to ban Romance’s influence on young girls’ (women’s?) minds, you need to ban a lot of literature (and many Hollywood films) from Jane Austen to Rebecca or Gone with the Wind…

That said, I’d like to repeat and expand on something I wrote on another website in response to a criticism of Bella as “weak” and “willing to erase herself” (http://www.gospelandculture.org/2008/11/vampires-and-young-female-desire/) – a description perhaps not unlike your “invisible”, albeit phrased in a rather more negative fashion. While I do see the logic in your psychological treatment of the character, somehow I didn’t read Bella that way at all. On the contrary, in my book she deals with her initially stated “otherness” (her clumsiness, the fact that she’s not relating well to other teenagers, her lack of interest in “dating”, her competence in cooking or her taste in music etc.) in a wry, humorous way that I found engaging and rather mature. Now, I may be totally misreading the character due to my lack of insight and/or comprehension of American youth culture – but that was my first impression of Bella. I never thought of her as emotionally deprived or “an anxious people-pleaser”. Solitary, yes – an outsider, yes, but by choice, or perhaps “nature”, much in the vein of Frodo, or, indeed Hermione. I certainly never thought of her as “weak”, in spite of her clumsiness (and was therefore very much bothered by Edwards untoward “protectiveness” in the third book especially. I kept asking myself, why the heck does she put up with that?)

Thus, while you are certainly, perceptively right about Bella’s psychological background, about the circumstances that made her what she is, I would argue that “the present-day” Bella we encounter in the beginning of the first novel is nonetheless a strong, self-reliant and even self-confident young woman who isn’t ashamed of or inhibited by her “otherness” at all, but who has long since learned (the hard way!?) to live with it and accept herself, even to look at herself and her shortcomings (as well as others’ shortcomings) from a certain detached, humorous, mature perspective. Remember that phrase right in the beginning: “My carry-on item was a parka”? This is someone who is utterly self-sufficient, living in the here and now, taking things the way they come – traveling life without any superfluous (emotional?) baggage, so to speak.

My first guess was that this early maturity is probably (partly) due to the author identifying with her female character (or, as John put it, of “Twilight” being, among other things, a Mormon woman writer’s portrait of the Artist as a young woman). Upon second thought, I now think that this discrepancy between your “invisible” Bella and my “wry”, mature Bella is probably related to the other aspects I found noteworthy during my first reading of Twilight – i.e. the use of perspective/voice (more on that soon, I hope) and of Romance-conventions in a Horror/Thriller-setting.

Because what happens in “Twilight” is that, of course, all of a sudden, “invisible”, “wry”, “mature” Bella finds herself cast in the role of Romance heroine – a role she’s rather unaccustomed to, that she needs to adapt to, but that she eventually plays enthusiastically (if with the aforementioned wry humour, itself a legacy of the Romance, if you think of Jane Austen.) Edward is first and foremost a classical hero in the by-now trashy tradition of Austen’s Darcy: superior, high class, educated, a bit dark and unfriendly and arrogant at first, initially resisting the pull of the heroine, but eventually oh, what a lover… And Bella is the accompanying female: intelligent, bookish, not interested in teenage trivia or the latest fashion stuff, a woman of sense, not sensibility just like Elisabeth Bennett, doing her own thing, dealing with her childish parents, not thinking of herself (as beautiful, or at all).

But more than that, Bella is also a (female!) lead character in the vein of the monomyth, albeit in a Romance/Thriller genre-setting, which I think accounts for some of the admittedly annoying clichés and weaknesses she displays. However, again compare her to Frodo: Like him, Bella is an outsider-ish “small person” struggling against invading evil in a “Fantasy”-world inhabited by creatures stronger, faster and more beautiful than she is, and becoming the unwilling and decisive centre of attention. I won’t stretch the admittedly slender analogy (for instance, Bella has to do without a “wise mentor”-figure central to the monomyth), but I do think that Bella isn’t just your stock swooning Romance heroine. Nor is she (only) an emotionally starved, neglected child believing herself “unworthy of love”. Instead, she is a clever de-(or re?)construction of certain Romance traditions, transferred into the realm of the fantastical (since in real life and “serious” literature these traditions have become cliché), and combined with some convincing insights into the minds of adolescent girls (compare http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/twilight-vampires ). It figures, then, what a friend of mine told me about the final volume in the series (which I haven’t read yet): That Bella “really emerges as a powerful, active character. As indicated by the cover art, she’s not just a pawn on the chessboard anymore. She’s the Queen.”