Twilight, as we’ve discussed at length elsewhere, is an allegory of the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. It’s the reason we have an apple on the cover, the Genesis Garden epigraph, Bella calling herself ‘Eve’ in her first meeting with Edward, and her taking the apple from his tray in the cafeteria.
As I explain in Spotlight, though, the love-story parable doesn’t play out the way it does in the Bible. This is nothing like the Fall as St. Augustine or the Cappadocian Fathers understand it; the Fall here is a good, necessary, even salvific event in human history, as Joseph Smith, Jr., and Brigham Young explained that it was. (Think “Pelagianism.”)
New Moon picks up this Fall theme by having Bella fall down quite literally three times, each of which descents triggers a huge plot shift. The question to be explored is “How do we live without God in our lives?” “What if God leaves?” is presented quite literally as a “fall” to represent our “fall from grace” at birth. On Bella’s birthday, then, appropriately enough, she cuts her finger when opening presents at the party Alice throws for her. Jasper attacks, and, in Edward’s haste to protect her, he hits her hard enough into a table stacked with gifts and crystal that “it fell, as I did.” She cuts her arm from wrist to elbow. Bella’s fall causes Edward’s departure and prompts Carlisle’s explanation of why Edward would leave.
The other two “falls” in New Moon that serve as markers for story shifts are (1) Bella’s fall from the Cliff on the Quileute reservation, which jump, because of Alice’s misunderstanding it as meaning Bella is dead, brings on Edward’s attempted suicide in Volterra, and (2) the descent through the grate and underground sewers to enter the Volturi castle. The “fall” at the Cullens’ house causes the separation of Edward and Bella, the jump from the cliffs, inspired as it was by Bella’s desire to hear Edward’s voice, is the cause of their reconciliation, and the descent into Volterra’s slice of hell is the passage Edward and Bella take together to the crucible in which their union is sealed.
Look for Bella’s literal and metaphorically heavy falls in the movie New Moon for cues things are about to get hairy.
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There is another fall in the book (and in the movie as well) that you haven’t mentioned. It is Bella’s fall in the forest, when she is looking for Edward after he has left her.
“I stumbled often, and, as it grew darker and darker, I fell often, too.
Finally I tripped over something – it was black now, I had no idea what caught my foot – and I stayed down. I rolled onto my side, so that I could breathe, and curled up on the wet bracken.” (New Moon p73)I would argue that this literal fall is the major fall in the book, in that it pinpoints the crisis moment when Bella’s life begins to fall apart in the absence of Edward. Significantly, it is just prior to Meyer’s explanation of the book title. As she lies where she has fallen, Bella muses on the darkness of the night that seems completely without moonlight. As you have discussed elsewhere, this lack of moonlight is representative of the disappearance of Bella’s moon – Edward.
“Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight – a lunar eclipse, a new moon.
A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn’t cold.
It was black for a long time…” (New Moon p74)
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