Abstract
Displaced from her beloved home in arid Arizona, Bella Swan of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga finds herself overwhelmed by greenery. Her new home on the Olympic Peninsula is surrounded by temperate rain forests lush with ferns, sitka spruces, and dripping mosses; even the tidal pools of the nearby beach are “teeming with life.”1 This profusion of green initially marks the landscape as a surprising setting for a gothic novel; as vampire heartthrob Edward Cullen quips, “No coffins, no piled skulls in the corner; I don’t even think we have cobwebs…what a disappointment this must be for you.”2 Edward’s comic reference to the crypts, dungeons, and graveyards of the traditional gothic acknowledges how firmly we associate vampires with scenes of death; after all, these monsters are the undead, animated corpses lurking in dark corners and ancient castles, lying in wait to drain the life from their unwitting victims. The landscapes they inhabit are landscapes of terror, where our most irrational and unnatural fears come horribly true.
…one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape…
—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
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Notes
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Print), 117.
Stephenie Meyer, “The Story Behind Twilight.” The Official Website of Stephenie Meyer. Web. Accessed January 15, 2010.
David Sobel, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education (Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society and the Myrin Insistute, 2004. Print).
Simon C. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” ISLE16.2 (2009: 203–225. Print), 205. Ecocritics study the “relationship between literature and the physical environment,” taking “an earth-centered approach to literary studies” (Glotfelty xviii). For a good introduction to their work, see Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: Univeristy of Georgia Press, 1996. Print) or consult the articles in ISLE, the journal produced by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.
Edward O. Wilson and Stephen R. Kellert, eds. The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993. Print), 31.
Hilliard 688. Tom J. Hilliard. “‘Deep Into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” ISLE.16.4 (2009): 685–695. Print.
Bram Stoker. Dracula. Ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York: Norton, 1997. Print.), 172.
Spencer 199, emphasis in original. Kathleen Spencer. “Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis.” ELH59:1 (1992). Print.
Columbus 36; Bradford 168. Christopher Columbus. “Letter to Luis de Santangel Regarding the First Voyage,” pp. 34–36, and William Bradford. “Of Plymouth Plantation,” pages 157–96. The Norton Anthology of American Literature.6th Ed. Volume 1. Ed. Nina Baym et al. New York: W. W Norton & Company, 2003. Print.
Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind.3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Print), 24.
Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel.1960. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997. Print), 160.
Henry David Thoreau. The Maine Woods. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print), 71.
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1995. 69–90. Print), 89.
The highly publicized death of Iris Kenna from a mountain lion attack in 1994 prompted a fury of debates in California over wildlife management and suburban encroachment into the animals’ territory; see, for example, Marc Peyser’s discussion in “Predators on the Prowl,” Newsweek, January 8, 1996,
And Joe Deegan’s “Mountain Lion Hype,” The San Diego Reader, September 9, 2004. Issues of wildlife management and suburban encroachment have also been hot topics in New Jersey, where a perceived overpopulation of bears led the state in 2003 to institute its first bear hunt in 33 years;
See, for example, Tina Susman, “Not Grinning, Nor Bearing It: Humans Threatened by Growing Presence,” Newsday, September 28, 2003: A 16.
Twilight188. Several philosophers have considered the complexity of this metaphor; see, for example, Jean Kazez, “Dying to Eat: The Vegetarian Ethics of Twilight”, and Nicholas Michaud, “Can a Vampire Be a Person?” in Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarianism, and the Pursuit of Immortality (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009). I want to emphasize here that the Cullens use the term “vegetarian” as a joke, recognizing full well the animal source of their blood diet; when they talk about sustainable hunting practices, however, they reveal a serious awareness of their impact on the environment that is worth noting.
See William Stolzenburg’s Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009) for an account of the role of top predators in biological diversity,
And Aldo Leopold’s classic “Thinking Like a Mountain,” A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), for his succinct observations on how predators support the environment by checking the population of foraging animals such as deer.
Stephenie Meyer. New Moon. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006. Print. 122.
Stephenie Meyer. Eclipse. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Print. 109.
See, for example, Naomi Zack’s “Bella Swan and Sarah Palin: All the Old Myths are NOT True” and Bonnie Mann’s “Vampire Love: The Second Sex Negotiates the Twenty-First Century” in Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarianism, and the Pursuit of Immortality (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Print), 386.
For examples of the work of the cited writers, see The Art of Seeing Things: Essay by John Burroughs, ed. Charlotte Zoë Walker (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: HarperCollins, 1998);
And Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), particularly chapter 2, “Seeing.”
George Beahm, with the Forks Chamber of Commerce. Twilight Tours: An Illustrated Guide to the REAI Forks (Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 2009. Print), 19.
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American literature (New York: Viking Press, 1969. Print), 51.
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© 2011 Giselle Liza Anatol
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Parmiter, T.K. (2011). Green is the New Black: Ecophobia and the Gothic Landscape in the Twilight Series. In: Anatol, G.L. (eds) Bringing Light to Twilight. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119246_17
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