WaPo on Twilight: ‘Chaste Vampires Are Not Us’

Just a quick note here about just how deep the reach of interest in Twilight has gone: can you believe The Washington Post ran a story last week about our favorite Mountain Meadows couple on page A1? A front page story, not on the movie release, not on book sales, but on the embarrassment that educated, sophisticated, and liberated women feel about loving these stories? That’s reach.

Prof. Terry Mattingly wrote about the Post article at GetReligion.org on Monday.

This sprawling piece on the “Twilight” craze didn’t run in the Style section, where the lines between news and analysis are blurred more often than not. This story ran on page A1, right there in the sacred territory dedicated to politics. The double-decker headline just about says it all:

‘Twilight,’ the love that dare not speak its shame

Good, smart, literary women tried to resist the romantic-vampire phenomenon. And then, alas, they bit.

You see, this article is for smart women, the kind who still read the Post and not popular novels that are, well, more on that later.

Apparently, it was easy to write off Meyer and her shiny heroes when only the, you know, shallow and stupid women were reading them, the kinds of women who yearn for full-blooded romances and even — shocking — men who are willing to make sacrifices and be faithful to them, well, forever.

The article itself ‘Twilight,’ the love that dare not speak its shame (Monica Hesse, Thursday, November 19, 2009, Page A1) is a hoot of stunned, self-deprecation:

“I noticed in that first week of reading that I was feeling things I hadn’t been able to feel in a long time,” says Lauren Ashlock, 27. She’d avoided the “Twilight” series ever since the 2005 release of the first book, because when she saw the passion of so-called TwiHards, she thought, Wackos.

She relented last year only because she wanted to be an informed hater. She snuck the books into her house, at first reading them in the bathroom so her husband wouldn’t laugh. The floodgates opened. “I’d locked away a lot of emotions,” she says. “I’d numbed out.” It had been a terrible year, with unrelenting job stress, and yet suddenly she was feeling alive again.

The behavior that followed will make perfect sense to someone who has read “Twilight” and seem bat-crazy to anyone who hasn’t: Ashlock got three dogs and named them after “New Moon’s” werewolf pack. She and her husband traveled to Forks, the two-bit town in Washington state where Bella and Edward fictionally live. When the Ashlocks have a child, they will name it from the novels: “If it’s a girl her middle name will be Renesmee, and I don’t care if you hate the name because I love it.”

The people who have not read “Twilight” do not get it. Worse, they think that what happened to Ashlock could not happen to them. They’re so smug, talking about how they once read a chapter of “Twilight” in a bookstore and the prose was just awful. Meyer never uses one adjective when she could use three, and most of the time that adjective is a hyphenate combining “dazzling” and “chiseled.”

The people who have not read “Twilight” think they are astoundingly brilliant when they point out the misogynist strains of the series, like how Bella bypasses college in favor of love, like how Edward’s “romantic” tendencies include creepily sneaking into Bella’s house to watch her sleep, like how Bella’s only “flaw” is that she is clumsy, thereby necessitating frequent rescues by the men in her life, who swoop in with dazzling chisleyness and throw her over their shoulders.

In response: We know. We know.

The women who have succumbed to “Twilight” have heard all of these arguments before. They wrote those arguments. This self-awareness is what makes the experience of loving “Twilight” a conflicting one, as if they had all been taught proper skin-care routines but chose instead to rub their faces with a big pizza every night.

Read the whole thing.

Why are these literate women so surprised by their being overwhelmed (egad, Seduced by Twilight?) by the power of story? My guess is that it is because Twilight doesn’t satisfy their aesthetic idea of story or fit where it must in their taxonomic hierarchy to be legitimate (see The Three Literary Pigs). Knowing so much about what constitutes “good” and “great writing” by objective standards and external measures of genre, language, and artistry, they are clueless about why they read, i.e., what human needs a novel is supposed to satisfy, especially in a secular culture.

These readers are consequently stunned when, having suspended disbelief and entered a “cheesy vampire romance” novel that by their arbitrary checklist of literary do’s and don’ts is “trash,” they have the mythic, borderline religious experience the best stories deliver. What is so stunning — and embarrassing? — is less the “out of nowhere” surprise of this experience (think Susan Boyle) than that their usual fare of reading, the right sort of books, is nowhere near as engaging, even transformative as Mrs. Meyer’s “junk.”

What’s the problem? That the very well educated have a basic misunderstanding of what good writing is and isn’t.

Great story telling isn’t elevated language or literary style. It isn’t conformity to category standards or to genre formulae. And it isn’t about “speaking truth to power” postmodern nihilism.

Certainly great stories can have those qualities (except perhaps the last) and most do. But what a great story has to do, as C. S. Lewis noted in conversation with George Sayer, is make you answer “yes” to the questions: “Does it make you better, wiser, and happier? And do you like it?” (”George Sayer on C.S. Lewis’ Definition of a Great Book: Excerpts from our Conversation,” Mark Koonz, CSL, December, 2006).

For a book to do that, it has to communicate edifying meaning and produce an effect on the reader’s heart. The Three Literary Pigs tell us next to nothing about either of these Great Book signatures because the experiences are internal and the pigs of deconstruction, literary taxonomy, and aestheticism are external measures. To understad them, you need traditional iconological criticism, Ruskin’s “slow mining.”

Mrs. Meyer delivers on both internal counts with a “wow” interior experience for readers able to get past genre revulsion. That she doesn’t satisfy the “book as artifact” arbitrary literary conventions means very little to her fans. Or so at least the women interviewed in the Post article seem to think.

Your comments and corrections are coveted, as always.