And people do choose new favorites. Faithfulness to one’s love is a rare thing in our world. So many marriages end in divorce. Many people move through a series of loves as they go through life.
In such a world, faithfulness is a dramatic witness to the beautiful love of God. And not having sex if you are not married is a dramatic kind of faithfulness. In practicing sexual purity outside of marriage, Christians are making a gigantic statement about what faithfulness looks like inside of marriage.
In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about the “mystery” in which the union between a husband and wife is an image of the union between Christ and the church. Earlier in that same chapter, Paul asks his readers to “Be imitators of God…and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (verses 1–2). Part of living that life of God involves the reminder that, among God’s people, “there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people” (verse 3). Sexual purity and faithfulness are God’s good gifts to us, and they are powerful ways we can imitate God’s love in this world.
DONE WAITING
In Breaking Dawn, the tensions of the saga are finally resolved. Bella and Edward are married at his family home. It’s a fairy tale wedding, and Bella even wears an old-fashioned wedding dress to match Edward’s old-fashioned tastes. We know the marriage means that Edward will finally transform her from human to vampire. She’ll become like him.
First, though, she wants to consummate their marriage while she is yet human. Though she has longed through the whole story to leave her human life behind, Bella doesn’t want to give up sex as a human experience. She marries Edward while still human and is determined to have her wedding night as a human bride. Since Meyer’s vampires are insanely strong, this is an incredibly dangerous plan.
The account of their wedding night is a memorable one. Meyer avoids physical details, but that doesn’t mean the telling won’t draw the reader in. The wedding night is painted with both deep intimacy and fierce intensity. Both bride and groom are nervous, and we’re reminded of Bella’s fragility and humanity when she needs some time to clean up after the long journey to the honeymoon paradise. Edward gives her this time with the teasing words, “Don’t take too long, Mrs. Cullen.”7 Instead of giving the details of what happens next, Meyer lets readers know that Bella felt like her skin was in flames and that Edward, in an effort to control the intensity of the moment, bit a pillow and destroyed the headboard. When they wake in the morning, the room is full of feathers from the pillow he destroyed.
Edward is horrified to discover that his bride has been injured. She downplays the bruises that cover her body, but Edward is incredibly angry with himself for having agreed to the plan. “Did you expect this, Bella?” he yells at her. “Were you anticipating that I would hurt you? Were you thinking it would be worse? Do you consider the experiment a success because you can walk away from it? No broken bones—that equals a victory?”8
Bella’s new husband refuses to share her bed and injure her further. Again, we find Bella begging for more. She keeps at it, and he eventually surrenders. Sex is something so powerful that they both ignore the danger. Sex is portrayed as intimate, intense, and dangerous. Edward is right to be horrified that Bella has been injured. God intends sex to be loving and mutual, never a violent experience.
If you, like many readers, find these scenes exciting, it may be because it’s part of a powerful cultural tradition in which sex is seen as dangerous, especially for women, and the excitement and intensity of sex is heightened by that sense of danger. We have to reject these lies. Sex is exciting—not because of danger, but because it’s a gift from God.
In a marriage in which both husband and wife are committed to Jesus’s command to love your neighbor as yourself, sex is not a threat to the wife. It’s a terrible shame if this wedding night story serves to glorify violent sex or to suggest that sex should involve danger if it is to be intense and exciting. This dishonors a gift that God intends for good, turning it into something hurtful.
Later in Breaking Dawn, Edward and Bella’s sexual relationship continues to show the reader the intensity and excitement between them. After Bella becomes a vampire, her physical relationship with Edward no longer poses a danger. Human sex, it seems, is nothing compared to vampire sex. Bella muses that “it didn’t feel like I was ever going to find a point where I would think, Now I’ve had enough for one day. I was always going to want more.”9 Because they don’t have to sleep, vampires have a lot of free time. The other couples in the Cullen family spend their nights having sex. His lack of a partner before Bella explains why Edward had so much time to study and practice the piano. Edward’s brother Emmett teases Bella and Edward for failing to get wild enough to reduce their house to dust. Married vampire sex is about never-ending pleasure.
A GOOD GIFT
Sex is a good gift from God. In the Old Testament, the book Song of Songs uses erotic language to talk about the love between God and God’s people and about human love. In Song of Songs, sexual love is portrayed as both beautiful and happy. Bible scholar Ellen Davis points out that the book shows human sexual love “in full mutuality and equality of status.”10 Sex is not portrayed as something dangerous. It is not a matter of one person having power over another. Instead, it is about a self-giving that goes both ways.
In recent years, churches have made great efforts to remind people that sex is not a bad thing. In a sinful world, sex is often associated with problems: people have sex with people they shouldn’t, at times that they shouldn’t, in ways that don’t reflect mutual love and self-giving. But the fact that in a sinful world sex sometimes comes with problems does not mean sex is bad. Sex is a gift from God created by God for God’s good purposes. It is a witness to God’s love and faithfulness in the world. It unites couples, bringing closeness, intimacy, and fun along with it. It is the way God has given us to bring children into the world. Churches have tried to recover the truth that sex is a good gift from God in order to free people from thinking that this gift is somehow shameful. Married people have been encouraged to enjoy the fullness of this gift.
Sex is a very good gift, but sex is not, as for Bella and Edward, merely about endless pleasure. Edward and Bella defer that pleasure, to be sure, but at the end of the day, their sexuality is only about one another. I see this often in Christians who are determined to wait until they marry to enjoy the goods of sexuality but who then picture sexuality as being ultimately about personal pleasure.
I am glad that Christians are now being told that sex is a gift from God, but I fear for people who picture marriage as an endless pleasure party. Sex in the Twilight Saga fits together perfectly with the fantasy that marriage is about limitless indulgence. But if we buy into this fantasy, if we believe married sex should look like it does for the vampires in the Twilight Saga, we will be stung and stunned when we experience the realities of daily life and commitment. Sex in marriage is about the inevitable give-and-take of two sinful people trying to love and be faithful to each other through all kinds of difficulties. I fear for young Christian parents, trained to look forward to a marriage of unadulterated sensuality, when toddlers wake them up at night, leaving them tired and cranky. I fear for young couples who have to deal with sexual brokenness or the trauma of past abuse that can make it very difficult to enjoy the goods of married sexuality. Married sex is a good gift indeed, but it is not the whole of married life.
Even in marriage, sex can all too easily become selfish. Yet God designed sex to work against our tendency to selfishness. At its best, God’s good gift of sexuality takes a person and pulls him or her out of selfishness. Sex is not supposed to be a me-first indulgence. It ought to help a married couple pay attention to each other instead of living in self-absorption. For a couple who hope for their marriage to be centered on Jesus Christ, sexuality ought to turn them away from caring about only
themselves and their own family and turn them instead toward loving and serving God. Sexuality is God’s good gift, but it is not finally about self-satisfaction. Sexuality is for the glory of God.
THINK ABOUT IT/TALK ABOUT IT
Do you have someone you can talk with honestly about the way “waiting” for sex does or doesn’t happen for you and your friends? How can we find ways to wait that don’t increase temptation?
Describe God’s faithful love. How is sexual purity a witness to God’s faithfulness?
Reflect on Bella’s feelings about the connections between vulnerable intimacy and lifelong commitment. How can intimacy without commitment cause pain?
Do you agree that faithfulness is rare in our culture? Who has been an example of faithfulness in your life?
What are your expectations, whether you’re married or not, for sex within marriage? Do you expect perfection? Do you see sex as fearful or shameful? What are the good things about married life that look different from the picture of endless and intense sex we get from movies or married vampires?
What messages about sexuality have you gotten from church, family, friends, and society? Is sex seen as something good? as something shameful?
1. Stephenie Meyer, New Moon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 52.
2. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 282.
3. New Moon, 512.
4. Twilight, 306.
5. Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007), 454.
6. Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 83.
7. Breaking Dawn, 81.
8. Breaking Dawn, 92.
9. Breaking Dawn, 483.
10. Ellen F. Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2001), 68.
Chapter 4
The Superhero and the
Girl Next Door
Gender Roles in Twilight
THE TWILIGHT SAGA CONTAINS interesting assumptions about what it means to be masculine and feminine. It’s full of characters who represent ideal and not-so-ideal males and females, and it challenges some of our assumptions about what is masculine and what is feminine. It also reinforces some stereotypes about those same assumptions.
The questions we’ve already discussed—questions about romance, love, and sexuality—are intimately tied to our ideas about what it means to be male and female. Many of the problems that come from certain beliefs about romance, love, and sexuality are connected to ideas about what it means to be male and female that are themselves troublesome. Both male and female readers may see themselves in the characters of the saga, and it’s all too easy to measure ourselves or other people by the standards portrayed in the novels.
Bella is a girl-next-door heroine. She’s competent but also full of self-doubt. Edward is Bella’s indestructible protector. What do their characters have to say about what it means to be created male or female?
AN ORDINARY GIRL
Readers identify with Bella because she’s an everygirl. “I’m absolutely ordinary,” Bella insists, “well, except for bad things like all the near-death experiences and being so clumsy that I’m almost disabled.”1 Many of us can relate to Bella’s feelings. She is ordinary, normal, nothing outside the box. At the same time, she regrets her deficiencies. She’s incredibly awkward and gets into accident after accident.
There are two sides to Bella—she is both strong and weak. On one hand, she’s unusually competent. She can run a household better than most adults I know, and she’s extraordinarily self-reliant. At the same time, her clumsiness and poor judgment come together to create conditions in which she often needs to be rescued. In general, Bella is much more aware of her weakness than she is of her strength. The most obvious feature of her character is that she puts herself down at every turn.
Her self-consciousness about her clumsiness means she won’t dance—she’s horrified at the thought of the prom. As a rule, she doesn’t want special attention of any kind, fearing that such attention will only highlight her weaknesses. While her strong attachment to Edward is the main reason she is so determined to become a vampire, she is also drawn to vampire life because it promises her the opposite of all her human weaknesses. In New Moon, she explains that “more than anything, I wanted to be fierce and deadly, someone no one would dare mess with.”2
Though Edward’s feelings for Bella are undeniably strong, though he loves her deeply, he also tends to focus on her weakness. In part, this is less about Bella herself and more about the fact that he has fallen in love with a human being, and to him, to be human is to be weak. Edward thus emphasizes Bella’s fragility, the ways that she is constantly in danger just because she is human. It is not only being human that makes Bella vulnerable though. Edward agrees with Bella’s own estimation of herself—she is particularly prone to danger. Edward, then, acts as her protector because, he says, Bella is “one of those people who just attract accidents like a magnet.”3 Edward also believes that Bella is vulnerable because she is so desirable. Her very attractiveness makes her a target for trouble. Edward tries to challenge Bella’s more negative views of herself, but it’s also probable that the overprotectiveness and concern for her weakness that dominate his interactions with her add to her sense that she isn’t very strong. As readers, we believe that Bella is an everygirl because she tells us it’s true. We also believe it because this is the main thing we know about her; in other ways, her character is left largely undrawn. Like Bella, we all have strength and weakness, and we’re likely to be familiar with her worries about her weakness.
EXTRAORDINARY GIRLS
Edward’s beautiful sisters, Rosalie and Alice, represent, to Bella, a contrast to her own ordinariness. Alice and Rosalie are poised, gorgeous, gifted, and powerful. Bella sees herself as clumsy, ordinary, average, and weak. These vampire sisters possess female beauty that goes beyond anything a supermodel on a magazine cover could ever boast.
In their differences from Bella, the characters of Alice and Rosalie embody different aspects of what it means to be female. If Bella is the self-deprecating girl-next-door, Alice and Rosalie are ideals of different ways of being a girl, ideals that Bella can’t imagine ever achieving.
Bella has two very different relationships with Alice and with Rosalie. Almost from the beginning, she and Alice recognize each other as sisters and form a close friendship. In contrast, the relationship between Rosalie and Bella is filled with tension.
Alice is small, dark haired, and fiery. Unlike most members of the Cullen family, Carlisle didn’t transform her from human to vampire. Alice remembers very little of her human life. Her sad and unclear past includes being committed to an asylum because she had premonitions—the human talent that would become her vampire gift. She was transformed by an asylum keeper but left to make her own way as a vampire. Wanting something different than the violent vampire life, she found her partner, Jasper, and together they joined the Cullen family.
For many vampires in the Twilight Saga, some talent from their human lives is brought forward into their vampire lives and strengthened into a unique gift. Alice’s gift is an ability to see the future. It’s not a fail-safe ability, because the future changes when people’s decisions change, but it is of great benefit to her family.
Alice has fun with typically girlie activities—shopping, fashion, and party planning—and she’s determined to enjoy these things in her friendship with Bella even though they aren’t Bella’s preferred forms of fun. Alice plans fancy parties and an elaborate wedding for Bella. After Edward and Bella marry, she stocks Bella’s closet with a dream wardrobe.
She is very much a sympathetic sister to Bella. She’s there for her for fun and as a confidante, and she’s also incredibly powerful. Alice is vital to Bella’s last-minute rescue of Edward from his attempt at self-destruction in New Moon. She also uses her gifts and strengths to play an important role in saving Edwa
rd and Bella’s daughter and the Cullen family from the Volturi threat at the end of Breaking Dawn.
Rosalie was an astonishingly beautiful human being, and her beauty has been carried forward and heightened in her vampire life, making her unimaginably stunning. She is hostile to Bella from the very start and often expresses her disapproval over Bella’s relationship with her brother. She is responsible in New Moon for misinforming Edward about Bella’s death and sending him on his death quest to Italy.
Rosalie’s sad human story is one in which she lived a shallow life, spoiled and petted for her beauty. While she was drawn to the real, loving relationships she saw in the life of a friend with a husband and baby, she was engaged to a man who prized her only for her beauty. One night, her cruel fiancé and his friends raped and beat her. Carlisle found her on the brink of death and transformed her into a vampire. The beautiful vampire Rosalie took her revenge on her attackers. She killed them, but she did not drink their blood.
Until we learn her story, Rosalie is an unsympathetic character in the saga—a cold and heartless beauty. The revealing of her past, though, also reveals something of her current motivations. She wishes, above all else, to protect her family, and she sees Bella as a threat to their security.
Later, when confronted with Bella’s determination to become a vampire, Rosalie is angered by her choice. “You already have everything,” Rosalie tells Bella. “You have a whole life ahead of you—everything I want. And you’re going to just throw it all away. Can’t you see that I’d trade everything I have to be you? You have the choice that I didn’t have, and you’re choosing wrong!”4 Rosalie regrets the shallowness and tragedy of her human life. She wishes for the human experiences of a true, loving relationship and, most of all, for motherhood.
Touched by a Vampire Page 5
