Twilight: The Glamorization of Abuse, Codependency, and White Privilege

Publication year
2014
Journal
The Journal of Popular Culture
Volume
47.1
Pages
153-173
Comment

Through the charisma of the seventeen‐year‐old Edward Cullen, the beloved Gothic vampire, and his love for the human Bella Swan, Meyer spins a romantic narrative that configures racialized gender roles in a way that the contemporary US mainstream reading public would not be inclined to accept unless veiled with the cloak of the supernatural. Twilight, like other contemporary vampire romances, employs the haunted genre of the Gothic not only to promote conservative gender roles that demand women's submission to dominant male partners, but also to idealize and romanticize abusive relationships. (154-155)

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Intertwined with its glamorization of female subordination and its justification of abusive romantic relationships, the Twilight saga promotes reactionary attitudes towards race and class. The wealthy white privilege of the vampires goes beyond Meyer's intentional symbolism of the color white as sexual purity, becoming an overt homage to white supremacy and rationalizing the inferiority of people of color. The Twilight series, set in the small town of Forks in Western Washington (a town of roughly three thousand people, 82% of whom are white) consistently exalts whiteness and class privilege as desirable and sexually attractive. Bella's excessive praise for the beauty of the pale, white skin of the vampires in Twilight expresses a thinly veiled homage to whiteness as physical, cultural, and social superiority. The extreme whiteness of the Cullen teenagers is the first thing Bella notes about them: “[e]very one of them was chalky pale, the palest of all the students living in this sunless town.” Her admiration of the Cullens, who she sees as “all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful” aligns with discourses of racial privilege (MeyerT, 18). (165)

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Even more problematic than Twilight's exaltation of whiteness and social privilege is its exoticism and devaluation of people of color. The Quileutes, Native Americans living on the LaPush reservation thirteen miles west of Forks, are cast in the Twilight series as werewolves, shape‐shifters who change from humans to wolves in order to combat vampires. These characters are portrayed as largely controlled by their bestial nature. Whereas new vampires are only “slaves to their instincts” for a year or so, the wolf‐men continue to have outbreaks of uncontrollable emotion after they mature. These volatile emotions unconsciously cause them to “phase” from human to animal form, suggesting that their instincts, rather than their rational thoughts and conscious emotions, control them. (167)

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Meyers' characterization of the Quileutes' animalistic nature stems from Mormon associations of dark skin color with blasphemy. (169-170)