Stories shape our hopes and dreams. They concretize in our lives as they come to serve as lenses through which we view our own possibilities. They become scripts we follow that define what we will pursue and reject. Stephenie Meyer’s staggeringly popular novel, Breaking Dawn, exploits the creaturely desire to imagine our lives as part of a great love story.
Image - Heather Saigo Weaver
The book is the most recent of four novels commanding the imaginations of legions of girls and young women. These books are massive bestsellers. People are not only buying and reading, but are dwelling vicariously, often obsessively, in Meyer’s story. Devotees drool in anticipation of the movie Twilight (based on the series’ first installment) to be released November 21st. The Internet is littered with fan sites adoring Meyer’s vampire hero, Edward Cullen. Girls identify with girl-next-door heroine Bella in longing to pour out their lives for the love of an Edward.
I’ve heard it argued that Christians might embrace the series as somehow reinforcing Christian values. Meyer, a practicing Mormon, refuses to write about premarital sex. Edward is a “good” vampire, a member of a vampire family who deny their whelming thirst for human blood and live instead by hunting game. Perhaps here Christians can find a celebration of control over sinful nature, a narrative about the possibility of refusing distorted desire. I have grave doubts about these suggestions. Rather than being glimmers of virtue, these moments are only a sort of pseudo-spirituality, seducing those who long for goodness in this dark story world.
At the core of the series’ success is its ability to embody the gamut of young female longings, fears and struggles in a narrative that renders them as fantastical and heroic. Like many young adults and adolescents, Bella is self-deprecating at every turn. For Edward, the lure of Bella’s flesh and the particular scent of her blood are uniquely tantalizing. So much so that, despite decades of practiced restraint, on meeting her he has to flee to keep from ripping her to pieces in high school science class.
This romance is founded in a visceral impulse to possess and to consume. The relationship unfolds as Edward works to master his desire to guzzle Bella’s blood. Along the way, he protects her from various monsters and her own stupidity. Bella, for the space of three long novels, literally begs him to bite. At the beginning of Breaking Dawn, Bella has agreed to marry Edward. In return, he will finally make her a vampire. First though, she wants to consummate their marriage while she is still human. Since Meyer’s vampires are insanely strong, this is a dangerous plan. It results in a very bruised bride, a husband who refuses to share her bed and injure her further, and Bella again begging for more.
Bella gets pregnant on her honeymoon and the baby begins to eat her alive. Edward and his family want to end the pregnancy, but she loves her child and protects it at any cost. A tiny part of me is compelled. Were my own life to be weighed against the life of one of my children, born or unborn, I would do the same. But Bella’s baby gives me chills. What seems, at first blush, to be a pro-life plot discloses deep ambivalence and fear about pregnancy and motherhood. Bella’s vampiric baby can only be born by causing its mother’s death. At the moment when the child’s birth is killing her, Edward transforms Bella into a vampire. She gives up her relationships with parents and friends, and even her humanity, to be with him. Her transformation is excruciatingly painful, but she hides it, often by lying to him.
Our culture is a difficult place to come of age as a woman. Girls hear they can do anything, be anything, even as their femininity is commodified and sexualized at increasingly younger ages. A cultural terrain full of landmines awaits any thirteen-year-old Christian girl who wants to develop into a mature Christian woman. Models are scarce for the young woman who wants to imagine love, sexuality, vocation, and parenting as directed towards God’s glory. It doesn’t surprise me that girls identify with Bella, a character that cannot imagine she is lovable. She trips and falls through Meyer’s four novels. Her clumsiness and willingness to erase herself form an apt portrayal of the self-understanding of many young women today. Dark romance, a love that erases the awkward heroine, is an answer to desire and self-loathing that draws on the worst cultural assumptions about what it means to be female.
Christians have a compelling story to tell about love, sex, procreation, and feminine identity. My hope is that we can recognize the desires that draw young women into this series but that we also offer them a way to turn those desires toward God. I will do anything to keep the Disney narrative of “some day my prince will come” from being the principal story to capture my daughters’ imaginations. I will plead with the church to help me help them imagine their lives as, first, part of God’s story.
Meyer’s vampire world terrifies me as a narrative about the meaning of a girl’s life. Bella’s life, which she considers utterly ordinary and insignificant, is completely subsumed in Edward’s. Her sacrifice is the antithesis of the act at the core of the Christian faith. The model of Christian sacrifice is Jesus Christ. In 1 John 3:16, we know what love is because “Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” This is our model. Bella’s self-abnegation is doable mostly because she sees her life as so very trivial. Jesus’ sacrifice is of cosmic significance exactly because of who He is as very God. Women living in a culture that often subjects them to abuse need to remember that the imitation of Christ can never be founded on despising themselves. Christian self-sacrifice is not about erasing one’s life. It is about sharing the love and grace of Jesus. Bella is too reminiscent of many women counseled to suffer anything for the sake of a man, including accepting abuse or dying for love.
Before Christians celebrate any story marketed to young adults that happens to save sex for marriage, we should remember that sexuality itself is part of the compelling narrative of God’s love for humanity. Edward and Bella defer sexual pleasure, to be sure, but there is no hint that their sexuality is about anything but one another. I see this often in Christian students who are determined to wait until they marry to enjoy the goods of sexuality but who then picture it as being ultimately about personal pleasure.
I fear the tendency to picture marriage as the limitless indulgence of a pleasure long deferred. I worry young couples will be stung and stunned when they encounter the inevitable give and take of two sinful people trying to love and be faithful to one another. I fear for Christian parents, trained to look forward to a marriage of unadulterated sensuality, when toddlers wake them up at night, leaving them tired and cranky.
Finally, when Bella joins Edward’s vampire family, she enters a life in which the two of them strive to triumph over their dark nature. Rather than live by murder, they will live for one another. I’ve already mentioned that some want to see this as a kind of image of the Christian life. If this is so, what is the dark nature so conquered? Meyer portrays the vampire desire for human blood as deep and strong. Yet, it is also portrayed as something that can be defeated. Before Christians claim this as an image of moral courage, we need to remember that human nature is very unlike this vampire nature because it cannot be overcome through effort or will. Human beings are trapped by sin. We need the grace of Jesus Christ if we are to hope for transformation.
I watch my kids dwelling in stories every day. My little son, as Beowulf, wrestles with the monstrous Grendel played by his dad. My daughter lives out the Boxcar Children, making pretend campfires and imagined stew on her bedroom floor. Rather than embody a story in which their lives would be consumed by romantic love, I hope they will receive the grace to live in the gospel story, a story in which the whole of life—including romance, sexuality, procreation, and vocation—is first for God’s glory. In that story, we tremble in need of grace. We need the blood of Jesus Christ to flow abundantly over us and we need to help our children glimpse how this story, like no other, can give shape and beauty to their lives.
Beth Felker Jones is Assistant Professor of Theology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.
