7. Twilight, 211.
8. Eclipse, 463.
9. Eclipse, 341.
10. Twilight, 473.
11. Jo B. Paoletti, “Clothing and Gender in America: Children’s Fashions, 1890–1920,” Signs 13: 1 (Autumn 1987), 136–43.
Chapter 5
Baseball and Loyalty
Twilight and the Ideal Family
EDWARD’S PERFECT FAMILY, the opposite of her own, is a large part of Bella’s love for him. Her family is broken. His family is loyal. Her family lets her down. His family would die to rescue her. The beautiful, eternal family of vampires stands in stark contrast to the ordinariness and weakness of Bella’s parents, and she comes to cherish her relationship with them almost as much as she cherishes Edward.
It seems obvious that family is important to Christians. How, then, should Christians think through the different messages about family found in the Twilight Saga?
FAMILY DISAPPOINTS
Family in the Twilight world reflects the truth about family in the real world in one simple way: Family disappoints us. This is certainly the case when we think about Bella’s family. Bella, like so many of us, is a child of divorce. Her mother isn’t particularly reliable, while her father is rarely in touch. So Bella learns to rely on herself.
Before she meets Edward and his family, Bella is essentially alone in the world. She has no sisters or brothers. For all practical purposes, she is without parents.
Her mother, Renee, is kindly enough, but she isn’t there for her daughter. She wants to travel with her new husband, and Bella moves in with her dad in the town of Forks in order to give her mother the freedom to do so. Thus Bella is alone at a vulnerable time. She is maturing, leaving girlhood behind and edging toward being a woman. At this crucial moment in her life, her mother effectively abandons her. Bella routinely hides things from her mother and treats her like an incompetent child. She can’t count on her mother to provide protection or a listening ear.
Bella’s father, Charlie, cares about his daughter, but he is inept and disappointing. Charlie spends most of his time away from the house. Just like with her mom, Bella takes the parental role in her relationship with him. When she moves in with him, Bella takes over the household cooking and duties. She competently whips up delicious dinners and makes sure both she and her father are well cared for. When he expresses concern about her, she tries to smooth over his worries and avoids serious conversations with him about sex.
Bella describes her new life with her dad as “like having my own place.”1 She enjoys this independence, but we get hints that even self-reliant Bella sometimes longs for more from her parents. When her dad shows concern for her, she tells us that her “throat suddenly felt tight. I wasn’t used to being taken care of, and Charlie’s unspoken concern caught me by surprise.”2 She’s very self-reliant, but she’s still touched when her dad reaches out to her.
Bella sometimes can’t and sometimes won’t rely on her parents for the things children, even nearly grown children, rightly rely on their parents for. In many ways, her parents are physically and emotionally absent, but she doesn’t nurse bitterness against them. Instead, she treats them like the well-meaning and largely incompetent people they are.
They don’t protect her. They can’t. How can human parents protect a daughter from werewolves and vampires?
At every turn, though, Bella tries to protect them. One of her deepest worries about her involvement with Edward is that it will bring danger to her parents. When James tries to murder Bella, he lures Bella to him by threatening her mother. She willingly steps into danger for her mom’s sake. When Bella becomes a vampire, she’s afraid of hurting Charlie. She asks her new family to protect him.
As readers, we relate to Bella. We relate because all of our families are disappointing. Parents fail to be consistent. They show their human weaknesses. Children fail to love their parents. All families make mistakes.
Some families are far more terrible than Bella’s. Some parents grip their children so tightly that their control becomes oppressive. Much, much worse, some parents are abusive, emotionally or physically. Such families betray their children in the worst possible ways by injuring what they are supposed to protect, harming what they are supposed to nurture.
It’s also the case that many families are much less disappointing than Bella’s. Some readers of this book will think, Hey, I have a fantastic family. They’re there for me. We really love each other. But even the most loving families disappoint. Even the most nurturing families are still, well, human. Parents are weak, ordinary people, and all of us, as we grow up, see the weakness and ordinariness in our parents in ways we might not have noticed in the second grade.
It makes sense that we identify with Bella’s need for self-reliance. It also makes sense that we identify with her attraction to the Cullen family.
A BEAUTIFUL, ETERNAL FAMILY
Edward’s family appears in sparkling contrast to the shortcomings of Bella’s own parents. His parents, Carlisle and Esme, are kind, wise, and caring. Unlike her broken family, they’re also together. While Bella’s parents divorced, Carlisle and Esme are knit together for eternity.
Carlisle is the “father” of this vampire family because he changed most of them into vampires. In the books, though, Meyer goes to great lengths to show that Carlisle’s decision to transform them into vampires was not made lightly. He changed them only at moments when their deaths seemed otherwise certain. Vampire life, for almost all vampires besides the Cullens, is portrayed in the books as lonely and selfish. The Cullens are set apart from other vampires by their connection to and care for one another.
Edward also comes to Bella with a slew of gorgeous siblings—Rosalie and Emmett, Jasper and Alice. Not only are they beautiful; they’re also great fun (wild game of baseball on a stormy night, anyone?). It’s also nice that Alice’s ability to predict the stock market provides them with more money than they could ever need.
The Cullens are fiercely loyal to one another. Meyer portrays their family relationship with a great deal of charm. The siblings support each other but also playfully tease each other. These vegetarian vampires are willing to die for one another without missing a beat. They’re incredibly gifted, and they’re immortal. The precious bond they have will never be broken. Here, in so many ways, is the ideal family—the family Bella never had.
Bella’s grief over losing Edward dominates the story in New Moon. It’s important that this grief is not for Edward alone. Bella feels like she has died because “it had been more than just losing the truest of true loves, as if that were not enough to kill anyone. It was also losing a whole future, a whole family—the whole life that I’d chosen.”3 So much of Bella’s attraction to Edward is tied up with her attraction to his family. Despite her self-reliance, she longs to be part of this close-knit group. Once they see what she means to Edward, the Cullens adopt Bella unreservedly. They shower her with warmth and consideration, with gifts and parties. She becomes one of them.
At the end of Breaking Dawn, it is their unique bond as a family that saves the Cullens from the massive threat posed by the Volturi. The bonds of family in this universe run deep and strong. They are unbreakable. As the Cullens prepare for their showdown with the Volturi, they are motivated by the desire to save their family. They work tirelessly to keep one another safe.
Bella’s gift as a “shield” makes her impervious to attacks from other vampires’ powers. Edward cannot read her thoughts, and the torturing Volturi cannot throw her to the ground in pain. This gift, though, becomes most valuable when Bella learns to extend it. She learns to cast her shield outward so that it protects those she loves. The shield is most important when it becomes a shield of defense, not for only Bella, but also for her family.
Think about the difference between the red-eyed Volturi and the golden-eyed Cullens. It isn’t only that one group is immoral and the other moral, one wicked and the other good. Neither is it simply that one group lives in viole
nce, without mercy, sustained by cold-blooded murder while the other is bonded together by their “vegetarian” choice to live in peace.
No, the key difference between the two groups is that one is a coven while the other is a family.
MORMON FAMILY HOPE
In many ways, the Cullen family reflects the hopes of the author’s Mormon faith. For Mormons, eternal hope is linked with family. Mormons believe that the family unit will last for all of eternity.
There is a crucial difference between this belief and the usual Christian expectation that we will know and be reunited with people we love in the kingdom of God. For Mormons, the family structure remains the basic unit of eternity. Salvation happens in, through, and for families. Eternal life is family life, continuous with family life as it is known here and now. People become holy through a good family life. A Mormon marriage is believed to be for both time (this life) and eternity (forever). This is the reason Mormons are interested in studying their family trees. Mormon families want to find out who among their ancestors didn’t know about the Mormon faith. They provide baptism for these dead family members in the hope of strengthening their eternal families.
Families aren’t important just for eternal hope though. Hope for Mormons in this life is also pinned on the family. Family life is supposed to provide everything Bella doesn’t get from Charlie and Renee—stability, protection, and happiness. The Mormon family is supposed to be moral and affect society for the better. God is understood to bless faithful families.
The Mormon church distributes free literature printed with rosy, glowing images of family life. Beautiful and happy children gather around tables filled with food. Mom and Dad are together, smiling, generous, and kind. Everyone is smartly dressed, neatly brushed, attractive. Family members touch each other affectionately, casually. The pictures show families that are the opposite of the disappointment we all have known in our own families.
When we think about family in Twilight, then, two very different things are going on. On one side, Meyer captures the fragility of real human families. Our families are ordinary, weak, and disappointing. As we get older, we often realize this in new ways, ways difficult for us to accept. We realize, like Bella, that the families we grew up in can’t protect us from everything or meet all our needs.
On the other side, Meyer offers a glittering image of a family that won’t disappoint. The Cullens are a family in which happiness and togetherness can be realized, a family that can “save” Bella from her mortal life.
GOD’S PERSPECTIVE ON WEAK AND ORDINARY THINGS
How should Christians think about these two images of family? Let’s begin with the weakness of our ordinary families. Even if we try to act otherwise, we all know that families are flawed. What do we do with those flaws? How do we live with them?
We get a hint from Scripture when Paul talks about weakness. When he wrote to the church in the city of Corinth, Paul wanted folks to see that God’s view of weak and ordinary things is not always what we might expect. In 1 Corinthians 1:27–29, Paul lets his readers know: “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”
In fact, God uses weak things in a special way and acts in ways we don’t expect. Specifically, God acted by becoming human for us. Being human is a weak thing, but God entered into this mess with us to show us how much He cares. We read in the first chapter of the gospel of John that “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory…” (verse 14).
All through history, people have wondered how something so strange, so weak, could be true. How could a majestic and mysterious God become human? How could the holy God of Israel be born and cry, have ten fingers and toes, or enjoy a fish dinner? We’re talking about a God who is so glorious and tremendous that people knew better than to even say His name out loud. How could a God like that be known the way Jesus’s friends and disciples knew Him? God in the flesh seems weak and foolish. Flesh is as weak as it gets, after all. Flesh disappoints. It betrays us. Being flesh means we suffer and die.
Paul wants us to recognize how fabulous this is. While it seems like a contradiction to believe that the powerful Creator of the universe came to us as a tiny baby, Paul positively glories in this. It is astounding that God would become flesh, which makes it all the more wonderful, all the more full of grace. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God is in no danger of being damaged by dwelling fully with us in our weakness.
The incarnation of Jesus is the shining example of how God gives us good gifts in the middle of weak, ordinary life.
Christian thinkers have often taken another step here. If God is so good as to join us in the middle of our human mess, then this should change the way we deal with the mess.
Because God jumped into our mess, our weakness, we have to approach that mess differently. We can look at our limits, and instead of figuring that we’d better work hard to overcome those limits, we can think about the sweet gifts God gives us in the middle of weakness and limitation. Yes, we are weak and ordinary. But Jesus jumped into that weakness and ordinariness with us. That means we can find God’s gifts in the middle of everyday, ordinary life.
We don’t have to have “perfect,” ideal families for our homes to be places where God can do good work. Our families don’t have to be beautiful, well-scrubbed, always smiling folks constantly ready to be photographed for the cover of some magazine called Your Perfect Life Today. This doesn’t mean it’s all right for our parents to hurt us or for us to hurt our children or brothers or sisters. It does mean, though, that God loves ordinary, everyday people—people who fail each other and disappoint each other.
The truth is that being a family is hard. Living with other people is hard. Sometimes it’s relatively easy to be kind—or at least to tolerate—people at work or school. After all, we only have to see those people for a few hours at a stretch. But you can’t escape family. You have to see them each and every day. You have to share the bathroom and the kitchen. Every single day, you notice if they leave toothpaste in the sink or eat the last bagel, the one you wanted for breakfast. If a family member gets sick, another family member will take care of her. Have you ever changed a diaper or cleaned up after a sick child? Have you figured out how to love your brother or sister even when that brother or sister is in a really different place than you?
The weakness of ordinary family life gives all of us an opportunity to care for each other, to love each other even when it’s difficult. This kind of opportunity can be a real gift from God, who uses these opportunities to show us how love works.
The grace of weakness frees us from trying to be something we are not. It frees us to love our parents or children or spouses even when we find out they’re not superhuman. It frees us to take care of each other when we’re tired or cranky or just plain annoyed. It frees us to accept the love of our ordinary, disappointing families instead of wishing for something that isn’t real.
It’s because of who Jesus is and what He has done that our own weakness can be used for God’s power. Ordinary things matter to God. Weak things matter to God. Instead of longing for a kind of perfection we don’t have, we can think about the ways God uses us in our weakness.
HOPE IN THE BIBLE
If God loves weak, ordinary people and families, what should we do with the idealized family represented by the Cullens? Shouldn’t we still try to move toward that ideal? To be people who don’t fail one another? Who love each other through thick and thin?
Well, yes and no. God does, often, give us the strength to be better families than we would otherwise have been, but God doesn’t do this by taking away our disappointing families and replacing them with some impossible ideal. God gives us strength through our ordinary lives, not instead of our ordinary lives.<
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More importantly, God frees us from having to put our hope in an impossible ideal of a family, an ideal that can never be achieved. Christians recognize that the things wrong with the world—with us as individuals and with our families—are big things. Bigger than we could ever fix on our own. From a position of weakness, we receive the good news that only Jesus Christ can fix all that is broken.
Because Christian hope is firmly in Jesus Christ and no one else, we have no need for perfect families to save us. Since our families are all flawed, human, and weak, this is very good news indeed.
THE RIGHT PLACE FOR FAMILY
But wait, aren’t Christians interested in family values? Don’t we hope that our families are places where God’s goodness and love are shared? Places where the world can see that goodness and love?
We do hope for God to transform our families, but we have to put our hope in the right place. Hope is in Jesus, not in our parents or children. We should be warned, then, against idealizing the family. Pictures of perfect families offer false hope. They can make us dissatisfied with our own families when those families are doing the best they can in the midst of weakness. They can lead us to try to force our family life into a kind of perfect mold and thus rob us of the freedom to experience God’s grace through imperfection.
Author Amy Laura Hall talks about a “sense a woman carries with her that she, and her home and family, are surrounded by and being scrutinized by the images of perfect domesticity they find in the pages of popular magazines.”4 Have you felt the pressure to make your life or your family life conform to some image of perfection? It can be so crippling, so tyrannical, to live constantly with this sense of being scrutinized.
Hall suggests that we think about the ways messy, imperfect, normal families are actually much better witnesses to God’s goodness and grace than perfect, airbrushed families could ever be. Messy, imperfect, normal families have the freedom to be honest and real with one another, to acknowledge mistakes and limits, and to love one another anyway. Perfect, airbrushed families aren’t free to give that kind of love. They have to work all the time to measure up, to have spotless countertops and well-groomed children. What a witness to God’s goodness and mercy it can be when we love each other because we are limited and broken and human.
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