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The Twilight Saga as an Adaptation of Shakespeare and Austen

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Jane Austen and William Shakespeare

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Abstract

This chapter closely examines the Twilight saga as an adaptation of Austen’s and Shakespeare’s texts. In particular, my essay argues that the main focus of Meyer’s act of appropriation is Austen’s and Shakespeare’s treatments of love and compares how each uses the conventions of the romance novel genre. I show that all invoke what is called enchanted love. The authors depict love as simultaneously perilous and enchanting, thereby connecting love and fascination. In this chapter, I examine such moment of enthrallment in the works of the three authors.

Although Meyer borrows from Shakespeare and Austen, she also illustrates a way in which the romance novel conventions no longer work. Consequently, her saga provides an example of Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism. I employ Berlant’s analysis of the waning of genre conventions in order to argue that Meyer’s treatment of love is infused with the anxieties concerning intimacy and love in contemporary culture. What is more, Meyer succeeds in safeguarding her version of enchanted love only by making her heroine enter into a new ontological realm, that of the vampire. It is only in the supernatural realm that the Twilight saga can sustain a version of enchanted love based on fascination.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (London: Atom, 2006), 128. Subsequent citations given parenthetically in text.

  2. 2.

    Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 11.

  3. 3.

    Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 75.

  4. 4.

    Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead), 90.

  5. 5.

    Deborah Kennedy, ‘Jane Austen’s Influence on Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight’ , in Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony, eds. Natasha Duquette and Elisabeth Lenckos (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2015), 141.

  6. 6.

    Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke, 2011. E-book), 1–2.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 2, 6.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 2, 3.

  9. 9.

    Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 30–8.

  10. 10.

    Meyer , New Moon (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2006); page references given parenthetically in text.

  11. 11.

    M. M. Mahood, ‘Wordplay in Romeo and Juliet,’ in Shakespeare’s Tragedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Laurence Lerner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 17.

  12. 12.

    Sibylle Baumbach, Literature and Fascination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 58.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 58.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 5.

  15. 15.

    Baumbach , Literature and Fascination, 3–4.

  16. 16.

    Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 159–60; 195.

  18. 18.

    Brian Gibbons, Introduction. Romeo and Juliet (Ed. Brian Gibbons. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1980), 59.

  19. 19.

    Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 34.

  20. 20.

    Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 20–1.

  21. 21.

    Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 26, 29.

  22. 22.

    Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 51–3.

  23. 23.

    Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 35.

  24. 24.

    Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 20.

  25. 25.

    Berlant , Cruel Optimism, 4.193.

  26. 26.

    Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Claudia Johnson (New York: Norton, 2002), 129.

  27. 27.

    This section is located between the pages 84 and 93. It neither has page numbers nor is mentioned in the Contents page of New Moon. It only records the names of the months. This section emphasizes Bella’s ‘ritual death’ as a psychic obliteration that is similar to Marianne’s suffering.

  28. 28.

    Gerald Prince, ‘Disnarrated’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan (New York: Routledge, 2005), 118.

  29. 29.

    Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 122–3.

  30. 30.

    Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 36.

  31. 31.

    The recognition element between Marianne and Willoughby is present only in a modified form. When Marianne is seriously ill, Willoughby visits Elinor, confessing to her his deceitful conduct. Willoughby confirms that he loved Marianne dearly. Hence, he confirms Marianne’s conviction of shared love, but it does not lead to the union she desires.

  32. 32.

    Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 38.

  33. 33.

    Radway, Reading the Romance, 162.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 163.

  35. 35.

    Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 39.

  36. 36.

    Berlant , Cruel Optimism, 57.

  37. 37.

    Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 38.

  38. 38.

    Meyer , Breaking Dawn (London: Atom, 2008), 326; hereafter, page references given parenthetically in text.

  39. 39.

    Bloom , Shakespeare, 102.

  40. 40.

    Gibbons, Introduction, 66.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 74.

  42. 42.

    Baumbach , Literature and Fascination, 61.

  43. 43.

    Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 38.

  44. 44.

    Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 91.

  45. 45.

    Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 158.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 50, 54.

  47. 47.

    See Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 5–6.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Heta Pyrhönen

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Marina Cano

  2. University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain

    Rosa García-Periago

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Pyrhönen, H. (2019). The Twilight Saga as an Adaptation of Shakespeare and Austen. In: Cano, M., García-Periago, R. (eds) Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25689-0_15

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