Fragile Bodies in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series

217 Pages·2014·1.14 MB·English

Cultivating Perspectives:
Fragile Bodies in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series

by

Heather Simeney MacLeod

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
in
English

Department of English and Film Studies

University of Alberta

© Heather Simeney MacLeod, 2014
ABSTRACT

This dissertation project exposes the troubling engagement with
classifications of materiality within text and bodies in Stephenie Meyer’s
contemporary American vampire narrative, the Twilight Series (2005-2008). It does so
by disclosing the troubling readings inherent in genre; revealing problematic
representations in the gendered body of the protagonist, Bella Swan; exposing
current cultural constructions of the adolescent female; demonstrating the nuclear
structure of the family as inextricably connected to an iconic image of the trinity—
man, woman, and child; and uncovering a chronicle of the body of the racialized
“other.” That is to say, this project analyzes five persistent perspectives of the
body—gendered, adolescent, transforming, reproducing, and embodying a “contact
zone”—while relying on the methodologies of new feminist materialisms,
posthumanism, postfeminism and vampire literary criticism. These conditions are
characteristic of the “genre shift” in contemporary American vampire narrative in
general, meaning that current vampire fiction tends to shift outside of the boundaries
of its own classification, as in the case of Meyer’s material, which is read by a diverse
readership outside of its Young Adult categorization. As such, this project closely
examines the vampire exposed in Meyer’s remarkably popular text, as well as key
texts published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such as Joss
Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Alan Ball’s HBO
series True Blood (2009-2014), Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987) and Joel
Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987). The constellation of vampire narratives that
comprise this project share many concerns—a transient or groundless body that is
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free from foundation and based upon change rather than fixity—and reveal the body
as a series of actions rather than as a state. The purpose of this project is to expose
readings characteristic in particular genre classifications, as well as representations of
the corporeal figure in contemporary vampire narratives, so as to illuminate current
reactions to particular “types” of bodies. As such, it clarifies the displaced subject
formation and decentred body regardless of favorable or disagreeable readings of
action or passivity.

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For,
my brother,
Kevin MacLeod
shine on you crazy diamond
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Imre Szeman, and
committee members Natasha Hurley and Terri Tomsky for seeing this project to its
completion. Stuart Pyontz and Michelle Meagher both posed challenging and
productive questions. Thanks to Patricia Demers and Corinne Harol for their
thoughtful and considerate support. I am grateful to Cecily Devereux, for her
assistance with this project throughout its stages. Her kindness and generosity were
crucial in its completion. Michael O’Driscoll’s careful reading during the early stages
was invaluable.
I learned a great deal from the intellectual generosity from my friends and
colleagues in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of
Alberta, especially from Brent Ryan Bellamy, Elena Del Rio, Dan Harvey, Lisa
Haynes, David Houseman, Sarah Krotz, Keavy Martin, Lucinda Rasmussen,
Christine Stewart, and Dorothy Woodman.
I am indebted to the administrative staff, who worked in the Department of
English and Film Studies throughout my degree—particularly Kim Brown, Kris
Calhoun, Mary Marshall Durrell, Courtney Gullason, Marcie Whitecotton-Carroll,
and Robbie Zopf—for their warmth, kindness, and humour.
Thanks to those other friends who made Edmonton a stimulating
environment and a place to call home—Trisia Eddy, Katherine Holland, Shauna
Mosbeck, Karen Pentland, Mehda Samarsinghe, and Richard Van Camp. To my
friends in other parts of the world, I am thankful—despite distance—for their
support: Katy E. Ellis Jr., Mary Finlay-Doney, and Shellie Franklin. Many, so many,
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thanks to Rebecca Fredrickson for her friendship and from our protests on
Government Street, army boots, and Pearl Jam to Mumford and Sons, Burberry, and
tweed, thank you. Of course and especially, thanks to Jennifer Rensch for her
steadfast friendship. For their being in common: Cameron, Josh, Kaira, and the Cali
boys—Kevin, Nick, and Will— thank you.
I must thank my mother, Mazie Ann Beeds, and my brother, Kevin
MacLeod, for their unconditional love and unwavering support. I am grateful to my
grandparents and my niece Sarah Grace all of whom I continue to miss. Of course,
Richard—whose absence my imagination could not trace. Because of my grandfather
Simney Beeds, I understood the fragility of the body, and the tenacity of the mind.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
POLITICS OF GENRE AND CORPOREALITY 1

CHAPTER ONE
THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL: THE ENCHANTED BODY OF BELLA SWAN

Anchor of Perspective 21
Princess Charming 29
The Ugly Duckling 38
Mark of Difference 46

CHAPTER TWO
CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS: THE BOUNDARY OF THE BODY

A Body at Rest Remains So 48
Cultural Constructions in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series 55
Blush of the Adolescent 67
Do Not Trouble the Flesh 77

CHAPTER THREE
“WILL I STAY THIS WAY FOREVER?:” THE BODIES OF MONSTERS AND
HEROES

“The Process of Becoming” 80
Another Copernican Revolution 83
“Going through the Motions” 92
“To Be Like Other Girls” 107

CHAPTER FOUR
REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISM: STEPHENIE MEYER’S REPRESENTATION OF THE
CHILD IN THE TWILIGHT SERIES

“It was Sort of the Kiss of Death” 113
Geography of Hope 122
The Triad of Man-Woman-Child 132
”Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” 140

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CHAPTER FIVE
A KEEPER OF ARCHIVES: CHRONICLE OF THE BODY IN THE TWILIGHT SERIES

The Inconsequential 144
The Contact Zone 157
Here the Road Forked 165
The Consequential 175

CONCLUSION
MATERIALITY AND CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE BODY OF GENRE AND
IN THE BODY OF CORPOREALITY

Plague of the Dead 182
Postfeminism, Posthumanism 187
New Materialisms 190

WORKS CITED 196

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INTRODUCTION
Politics of Genre and Corporeality

If it will not do to see literature as an ‘objective’, descriptive category neither will it
do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For
there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their
roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the
Empire State building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that
literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by
which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements
themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply
to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and
maintain power over others.”
(Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction 14)
Late capitalism has catapulted us out of centuries-old bodily practices which were
centred on survival, procreation, the provision of shelter and the satisfaction of
hunger. Now birthing, illness and aging, while part of the ordinary cycle of life, are
also events that can be interrupted or altered by personal endeavor in which one
harnesses the medical advances and surgical restructurings on offer. Our body is
judged as our individual production. We can fashion it through artifice, through the
naturalistic routes of bio-organic products or through a combination of these, but
whatever the means, our body is our calling card, vested with showing the results of
our hard work and watchfulness or, alternatively, our failure and sloth.
(Susie Orbach, Bodies 6)

At the intersection between these quotations from the literary theorist Terry
Eagleton and social critic Susie Orbach, it is possible to position both the political
force in the conventional belief of the values that literature—in all its changing
significances—embodies, as well as the crucial confrontation to the construction of
the body. For Eagleton, literature is not impartially established; it is not a structure of
capricious selection on random standards of taste. It exhibits social representations,
which illuminate attitudes within unrelated social ideologies; it develops from
persuasive nuances of social tenets characterizing entrenched—often invisible—
systems of belief; and it props up the conventions of societal arrangements by which
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privileged groups practice and preserve control. If the labour of literature for
Eagleton is simply to reproduce the status quo in the construction of societal norms,
writers such as Joss Whedon, Stephenie Meyer, and Richelle Mead, as well as
Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, Cassandra Clare, and many other so-called Young
Adult popular writers have produced a more involved position for literature in the
defiance of classification, as well as an often troubling and problematic construction
of corporeality and subjectivity. For these writers, transforming and shifting the
genre of Young Adult literature has emerged through a consideration and an
ongoing discussion in the practices of biology and technology and the intersection
between the two. The crossing of boundaries between human and monster, human
and animal, and human and machine are particularly relevant in these texts
examining biotechnology, as well as the prospective transformation of the human
form. These tropes are persistent in Young Adult literature in the early twenty-first
century. For Eagleton, there is a necessary position expected for literature, a
reflection of the position of dominance within social constructs. For these other
writers, such as Stephenie Meyer and her contentious vampire narrative, the Twilight
Series (2005-2008), the importance of shifting genre and the problematic body
transformations are theorized as reciprocally urgent in the essential necessity to reject
dominant social constructions in America in the early twenty-first-century.
In examining the modes in which the body and its theories of materialization
and construction are illuminated in contemporary vampire material, it is clear that
vampire narrative is a controlled space for the examination of the body because it
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