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When Sleeping Beauty Wakes: The Twilight Film Series, Liminal Time and Fantasy Images

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Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen

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Abstract

This chapter explores how echoes of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ continue to run through representations of feminine adolescence, and the discourses of girlhood this invokes. I read Twilight as a revision of this tale. Bella’s fantasy and dream sequences are structured around symbols of enchanted slumbers, magical suspensions of time, images of a reclining Beauty and an active, desiring gaze at the reclining figure. However, these fantasy sequences shift the gendered terms of this tale: Edward is cast as Beauty, and he is constructed as a luminous, sparkling spectacle for Bella’s gaze. In this revision, Bella reverses the terms of the gaze by positioning Edward as her object of desire. I locate Bella’s fantasy pretty images of Edward as sites of feminine adolescent power. The tale’s theme of ‘correct’ development and timely progress towards an idealised womanhood is also challenged by the delays that Bella engineers in her fantasy sequences. Bella claims her fantasy space as a rebellion, creating the potential to include other possible modes of doing girlhood.

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  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Athena Bellas

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Bellas, A. (2017). When Sleeping Beauty Wakes: The Twilight Film Series, Liminal Time and Fantasy Images. In: Fairy Tales on the Teen Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64973-3_3

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