Is Twilight Bad Writing?  Part Two

Readers of a blog like this will inevitably sharpen one of two axes—the fans who love her work are waiting to pounce; folks who hate her are waiting to attack me as a literary softie who’s too indulgent.    

 Both sides should attack, really, since this column is about what Stephanie Meyer got right—NOT what she “got write.”

 I do not say she writes well, since there’s not much to recommend there.

 She is guilty of all the things the previous blog covered—too much verbiage, overwrought style and jaw-dropping diction  (my favorite example is Bella saying: “forbidden to remember, terrified to forget.  It was a hard line to walk.”  It’s also a hard line to read without breaking up). 

Beyond that, as a storyteller she doesn’t bring much to the party, since her characters seem to have no sense of self-realization (or self-effacing humor).  What do we say about an author who presents Bella (in Eclipse) begging Edward, for dozens of pages, to make her a vampire, then when he agrees on condition that she marry him,  has her say, “I don’t know if my mother will approve."

I’m not in the mood for puncturing written work, however, and there are endless blogs with endless barbs about the overbearing male characters in Meyer’s works.   There have been massive protests about the anti-feminism in her schema.   And there are continuous forums about the fact that her protagonist is a woman who is treated like shit by her lover.

So what did Stephanie Meyer get right?

She wrote four books about a woman being treated like shit. 

That is the most powerful element in her storytelling, and, like it or not, that element is enormously popular in literature and film.  It has always been enormously popular. 

Just to name a recent example, in the big summer blockbuster this year, The Avengers, the male superheroes, including that self-absorbed womanizer Tony Stark (Iron Man), got the lion’s share of the action, and all the good lines.  

It’s hard to remember anything the lone female superhero Black Widow got to do (or say), but she was certainly right there for her share of the “women-are-good-for-one-thing-only” jokes.   Virtually every female in every kick-ass action film is in the same predicament.   Woman-hating?  Sure.  Big box office?   Absolutely. 

Consider a recent, and massive, internet literary hit, Fifty Shades of Grey.   It began as author E. L. James’ blog, a continuous serial about a literature student who encounters a brilliant, gloriously handsome man who treats her like shit (in explicit sexual ways).   

Some reader have made feeble protests about this one—nothing major, because I suspect they, like all the other readers caught in James’ sadomasochistic web, are too busy gobbling up the details of Anastasia Steele’s incredibly erotic, utterly submissive relationship with Christian Grey.   

Go back even to the classics; pick the greatest authors around.  Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is about a good woman guilty of a single sin, whose community treats her like shit (and she never really gets to redeem herself).  Shakespeare’s Othello is about a jealous man treating his wife like shit, and as a punching bag (before he kills her).   

Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester treats her like shit; Heathcliff (in Wuthering Heights) treats Cathy like shit; Pearl Buck’s Good Earth protagonist Wang Lung treats his miraculously devoted wife O-Lan like shit.  Let’s not even get into the spousal abuse of characters such as Estella (Dickens only gives hints of wife-beating in Great Expectations) and of Nancy (much more murderous and explicit in Oliver Twist). 

Even in Jane Austen’s novels, her intelligent, strong-minded and mildly rebellious females, who are some of the finest, sharpest characterizations in all of literature, submit to marriage with men who are beneath them, at least in intuition and intelligence.   Their marriages are celebrated, since, in Austen’s society, women were incomplete until they were wives. 

Oprah may disagree, but the fact is that none of these works were written to make women stronger.  

None of them had feminist agendas (not even Austen).  None of them take women out of their social boundaries (although Austen satirized those boundaries while Dickens and Buck lamented them).   

In most of these works, the women are moths to the men’s flames. 

That’s discouraging, and it’s also hot.   Readers hate dominance, yet they love to be dominated.   The guy who says, “Treat a woman like a whore in bed” elicits the response from women: “What a terrible thing for a man to say!  What’s his number? “

Everyone from Stephanie Meyer to Shakespeare has understood, wittingly or unwittingly, that inside most readers—enough to make the bestseller lists—is a masochistic child who wants to be dominated, told what to do and then punished or abandoned, often for no reason, without a hint of moral uplift to any of it.   Readers gobble it up, from Desdemona to Harry Potter. 

Why does Bella suffer and whine?   Because she ought to, and so should we.   

That is why Stephanie Mayer is a terrible writer of terrible books, and I can’t wait for her next one.  

What a shame the series ended at four.