Stephenie Meyer: “There is No Moral of the Story”

“There is No Moral of the Story; the Point is to Have a Good Time.”

Mrs. Meyer’s interview with ‘MuggleCast,’ the podcast attached to MuggleNet, one of the more popular Harry Potter fan sites, took place on 7 August 2008 during her Breaking Dawn promotion tour. It is a very light interview with softball questions about plot points and characters they love asked by thoughtful, young fans who have just finished the series.

Laughter is the back drop of the entire interview; the author is relieved the series is finally published and the podcasters are thrilled they are talking to the author.

The only question and answer that makes this interview relevant to our discussion is the exchange in which Mrs. Meyer point blank denies her stories have any “message” or “moral.”

MuggleCast: What is the overall message to the [Twilight Saga] story?
Mrs. Meyer: You know, my editor said that to me. (laughter) When I gave her the outline, she said, “What is the moral of the story?” and I said “There’s no moral of the story; the point is to have a good time. The message is, ‘Did you enjoy the ride?’ Hopefully, because that’s what it was about. It’s about having fun and entertainment and nothing beyond that was intentional.”

It’s a little confusing about where her answer to the editor ends and where she begins responding to the question. But the idea driving this weBlog – that there are layers of meaning and artistry in the Forks Adventures that explain their popularity – is a laugher if the books have no message or moral.

First, let’s establish that if Mrs. Meyer is stating the truth pure and simple here then she was lying in almost every other interview she has given in almost all of which she talks about the books’ themes, morality, and her intentions as a writer. After that, we can come back to the interview to guess why she said what she did.
Her other interviews reflect that there is moral meaning to the stories and the evident artistry of the books reveal her deliberate attempts at allegorical and mythic meanings.

• She told an adult ABC reporter that the “themes are admittedly dark, but she says her books are about life, not death — love, not lust.”

• In her discussion with School Library Journal, she discusses the books’ themes of choice and free will.

• 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.” We also learn that “her first book Twilight was loosely based on Pride and Prejudice; the second, New Moon was based on Romeo and Juliet; the third, Eclipse, was based on Wuthering Heights, and Breaking Dawn was a mix of many others including Midsummer’s Night Dream.”

• She denied explicit religious meaning in her books while talking with RTE Entertainment, but only in the sense of not being a proselytizing tract. “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.”

“I don’t know what that comes under, what the genre title is for that so it is hard to classify it. As regards horror, I was inspired to write about vampires because I had a dream about vampires which was odd for me because I’d had no interest in vampires before I started to write about them so why I was dreaming about them, I don’t know. But it was a great dream and it wasn’t about this character being a monster. It was about this character trying to be human and that was what fascinated me and that’s what made me want to write it down.”

• In her interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg, we learn “the author, a Mormon, adds that her faith has influenced her work. In particular, she says, her characters tend to think more about where they came from, and where they are going, than might be typical. ‘Is there nothing if it all stops?’ she says. ‘They worry’.”

No themes? No message? “Just entertainment”?

Books drafting on Shakespeare, Bronte, and Austen that are about free will, choice, immortality, what it means to be human, and which are informed by the author’s LDS faith and which she hopes communicate this “message” are not books just for entertainment and without a moral.

So why did she tell the MuggleCast crew of adoring readers this time last year something completely different?

I think to understand that you have to remember she said her faith “informs” her books and she hopes that this “message comes through.” She denies there is a Twilight message, meaning, or moral on MuggleCast because it would oblige her to speak about being a Mormon. And, to risk a colloquialism, she “won’t go there.”

Isolation and Exclusion: Life as an LDS artist among ‘Americans’

To understand the position of an LDS writer in a land of gentile Muggles, Orson Scott Card is a helpful example. A renowned writer of science fiction stories, social critic, and Mormon apologist, he has been likened to C. S. Lewis, as in ‘the Latter-day Saint C. S. Lewis’ (see In the Image of God: Theme Characterization, and Landscape in the Fiction of Orson Scott Card, Michael R. Collings, Greenwood Press, 1990, pp 5-19).

About Card, Mrs. Meyer has said:

• He is her favorite living author. Her “favorite-favorite” author is Jane Austen, but Card, Austen, and Shakespeare are her three must-haves. “OSC is one of my top three favorite authors (right up there with Jane Austen and Shakespeare).”

• He is the person she would most want to have dinner with. “I’d love to have a chance to talk to Orson Scott Card–I have a million questions for him. Mostly things like, “How do you come up with this stuff?!”

• His Speaker for the Dead is “the book with the most significant impact on my life as a writer.” The Book of Mormon is the one “with the most significant impact on my life.”

• Mrs. Meyer was chosen one of Time magazine’s ‘Top 100’ in 2008; Orson Scott Card wrote her accolade.

• “I love Orson Scott Card. I’ve read all of his stuff at least twice.” This is a remarkable statement because Mr. Card is a voluminous writer with well over 50 novels, plays, and short story collections in print.

When asked who her “favorite Mormon writer” is by an LDS journalist, she bristles.

I don’t really pay attention to who is Mormon and who isn’t. I know Orson Scott Card is Mormon, but I didn’t know that until after I was already in love with his Ender’s Game series. OSC is one of my top three favorite authors…, but that has nothing to do with anything besides his magnificent writing.

Nonetheless, what links Mr. Card and Mrs. Meyer is their shared faith. Not surprisingly, the book that most influenced his life is also Smith’s Book of Mormon. “Though I was not conscious of the influence as I started writing, in retrospect the motifs and stylistic quirks I picked up from the Book of Mormon are obvious.”

More relevant to our discussion is Mr. Card’s experience as an LDS writer in a country that is not Mormon and that as often as not fears or hates the Church of Latter-day Saints. Discussing an uncomfortable moment among non-Mormons (“Americans”) at an academic conference, Mr. Card explains why he didn’t socialize with them freely:

It was because I was still afraid of situations where there was no subject matter to discuss….I can slip right in and be comfortable with any group of my own community. But this wasn’t my community. These guys were Americans, not Mormons; those of us who grew up in Mormon society and remain intensely involved are only nominally members of the American community.

We can fake it, but we’re always speaking a foreign language. Only when we get with fellow Saints are we truly at home. If it had been a group of ten Mormons, I wouldn’t have had any problem. We’d have a common fund of experience, speak the same language, share some of the same concerns. We could make jokes about the Mormon culture, talk seriously about things that you can only discuss with someone who shares the same faith.

With this group, though, relaxing would be much, much harder. I trusted their criticism, but once we were removed from the context of storytelling, they were gentiles and I would end up sitting and saying nothing or too much all night, feeling less and less comfortable.

[On Sycamore Hill,’ Orson Scott Card, p.9 (cited in Collings, op. cit., p. 9)]

I don’t doubt that Mr. Card thinks of himself as an American, too, but his primary identity is as a ‘Saint,’ and non-Mormons to him are ‘Americans.’ As Michael Collings explains, “This sense of being an individual excluded from a larger community and of a concomitant striving for personal identity and redefinition of that community provides an essential key to understanding most of Card’s central characters.” Readers of Mr. Card’s most famous books, the Enders Game series to which Mrs. Meyer referred, recall that the books turn in large part on a “Hierarchy of Exclusion” by which all animate life is qualified on a scale of “strangers.”

It’s not just Smith’s Book of Mormon’s “motifs and stylistic quirks” that shaped Mr. Card’s writings; his experience as a Mormon, isolated and a stranger in his own land for his being Latter-day Saint, is as big an influence. As he says:

The LDS Church is an exceptionally involving organization. It is as impossible for a raised-in-the-Church Mormon to escape his Mormon-ness as it is for a Jew to escape his Jewishness. Being a Mormon has shaped my experiences, and since my attitudes and experiences are the stuff of my fiction and plays, everything I have done is colored by them. (Collings, op.cit., pp 9-10)

Though he says he has “deliberately chosen to avoid overtly Mormon themes or messages in my work,” “preferring instead to let themes emerge subtly and naturally in the process of story-telling,” Mormonism and the life of a Saint among gentiles permeate his work. The “theory of philotics” in the Ender’s Game series, to cite one example, is a story-cipher for LDS teaching about the unity of spirit and matter in intelligence.

We see this permeation of doctrine and isolation in Twilight, too. Mrs. Meyer says as much.

“”Mormon themes do come through in Twilight. Free agency—I see that in the Cullens. The vampires made the choice to be something more—that’s my belief, the importance of free will to being human.” And, beyond the crossover of Mormon beliefs to Twilight themes (see Mormon Vampires and Breaking Dawn: Best or Worst of Series), there is the isolation and alienation factor.

Which brings us back to MuggleCast. Quite simply, as much fun as she was having with her young hosts on this show, I think it a no-brainer that Mrs. Meyer never forgot that none of these podCast friends and very few of their listeners were Latter-day Saints.

Mrs. Meyer denied anything but a “fun and entertainment” meaning in her books in answer to the question about the “overall message” of Twilight from the MuggleCast crew because they were non-Mormons gentiles with whom she did not feel comfortable discussing these things. The “moral” and the “message” as we have seen her say repeatedly is Mormon. Discussing this with gentiles is “meat offered before milk” at best and inappropriate, or, at worst, “pearls thrown before swine.”

Given the number of times she has discussed themes, messages, and morals in her work, I think we can overlook the one time she denied any depth to her writing as a “stranger in a strange land” Mormon-moment.

Two more quick points as after-thoughts:

Note that she bristles at Orson Scott Card being qualified as a ‘Mormon writer’ above. He is her favorite writer — right up there with Austen and Shakespeare — and his LDS faith had nothing to do with her high opinion of his writing. The lady doth protest too much, no? Perhaps she took down the very simple statement on her website that said she was a Mormon because she didn’t want to be pigeon-holed this way.

Or maybe she fears a back-lash from the gentile readers she has. As she said in a most revealing Phoenix newspaper interview in 2007:

She may write a Mormon novel someday, but for now, she’s happy working with her vampires.

“I have a novel I started that would be a Mormon comedy romance,” she says. “I do wonder what it would be like, because I have these girls who will read anything I write, so I know they’ll read it, and I can’t imagine what their reaction would be. And what parents will think about their kids reading stuff that has quite a lot of Mormon doctrine in it.”

Twilight is already something of a “Mormon comedy romance” as I discuss in Spotlight and she admits in the interview above (the Quileutes, she says, are her story version of the dark-skinned people in the Book of Mormon’s ‘Book of Alma’). That she won’t discuss her book’s having been shaped by her beliefs and the meanings and messages that are Mormon rather than ‘American’ isn’t reason for us to believe her when she says “There is no moral of the story; the point is to have a good time.” Her legion of readers love the stories because the surface story delivers this “good time” — along with a boatload of moral, allegorical, and sublime meaning that resonates in their hearts.

Your thoughts?