The Great American Love Affair: Indians in the Twilight Saga

Abstract

Now a pop culture sensation, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga has been praised as an innovative reimagining of the vampire genre, albeit one that panders to teenage girl fantasy. However, Meyer’s portrayal of Indians is anything but inventive and relies on tired and well-worn stereotypes created about Native peoples since the landing of Columbus. Although Bella Swan is an atypical heroine, her two love interests—the Euro-American vampire Edward Cullen and the Indian/werewolf Jacob Black—are contrasting racial hypermasculine stereotypes. As millions of girls worldwide sigh over the impossibly gorgeous and endlessly sensitive Edward Cullen, Jacob Black presents an alternative to the artfully rich and carefully mannered vampire, embodying the space of the exoticized Other complete with warrior prowess, a bronze hard body, and glistening long black hair. Surrounded by teenage girls in a theater watching the newest movie installment of the Twilight series, New Moon, I heard both sighs and nervous giggles when Jacob Black (played by Taylor Lautner), in a moment of uncontrollable masculine concern for the wounded and conveniently accident-prone damsel-in-distress Bella, ripped off his shirt to tend to her bleeding head, leaving his ridiculously chiseled chest bare for full admiration. He and his Indian friends remain that way for much of the movie—chests bared—often dripping with rain, glistening and hot, tall, dark, and handsome temptations.

For most whites throughout the past five centuries, the Indian of imagination and ideology has been as real, perhaps more real, than the Native Americans of actual existence and contact.

—Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian