Abstract
Guided by these fundamental principles, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight2 saga stands at the forefront of a popular resurgence in the genre of vampire literature since its debut in 2005. These three tenets, culled from the thoughts of Isabella Swan, Meyer’s adolescent protagonist, function as more than mere obiter dicta to both Bella and an audience built primarily of young adult women. These rules lay the foundation for a rather unusual reconceptualization of the vampire mythos, where passion still remains tied up in blood, but the desire for blood is not tied up in sex—at least for the vampire in question above. In a conventional sense, this idea seems somewhat paradoxical: the penetration of the victim’s skin inflicted by traditional vampires has long been associated with the penetration of sexual intercourse; sating the vampiric yearning for blood reads as parallel to gratifying sexual lust. Thus, Edward’s behavior is just plain queer.
About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him … that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him. 1
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Notes
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown & Co, 2005. Print), 195.
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Print), 100.
David Halperin has suggested that being queer is “by definition, whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, [or] the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative.” David Halpern, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print), 62.
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1950), 65.
Martin Wood, “New Life for an Old Tradition: Anne Rice and Vampire Literature,” The Blood is the Life, eds. Leonard Heldreth and Mary Pharr (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green SU Popular Press, 1999, 59–78. Print), 73.
Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 3.
Stephen Marche, “What’s Really Going on With All These Vampires,” Esquire Online, October 13, 2009. http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/vampires-gay-men-1109.Web.
David Denby, “Twilight,” New Yorker, December 8, 2008. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/twilight_hardwicke.Web.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 321.
Sophie Chen, “Bloodlust: Why women are suckers for bloodsuckers.” Psychology Today42 (Nov-Dec 2009), 18.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 48.
Terry Castle, “From The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture,” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Norton, 2007. 757–72, Print), 757. Castle argues that the repression of lesbian sexuality can be noted by the absence of lesbians in literary history. The “lesbian apparition” simply has not received the status of cultural recognition. The presence of the gay boyfriend seems to suffer the same kind of invisibility. Yet, the cover of going unnoticed seems to be something that vampires and Edward as a gay companion to Bella enjoys. Unlike the lack of recognition, or outright denial, that the lesbian receives in Castle’s reading of her, Edward’s beauty makes him a prime target of young heterosexual desire, as noted by his popularity among young female readers.
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© 2011 Giselle Liza Anatol
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Sommers, J.M., Hume, A.L. (2011). The Other Edward: Twilight’s Queer Construction of the Vampire as an Idealized Teenage Boyfriend. In: Anatol, G.L. (eds) Bringing Light to Twilight. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119246_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119246_12
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