Abstract
As Stephenie Meyer would have it, the Twilight saga is not much of a romance, or rather, “it’s a romance more than anything else, but it’s just not that romance-y.”1 Certainly, something (actually a lot of something) romance-y is happening at the level of description—”my personal miracle…Time had not made me immune to the perfection of his face”2; “my mouth glued to his…answering every unspoken question his asked.”3 And in dialogue: “Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night…you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire.”4 In genre romance, the principles’ love story does the work of the narrative: whether or not the protagonist loves and is loved, to what extent and how drives the plot to a comedy of errors or a deceptive confusion, later explained, still later forgiven. The climax, preceded by what Pride and Prejudices Elizabeth Bennett explains as the removal of “former prejudices,” is the confession: where Mr. Darcy tells Elizabeth “of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.”5 On the level of narrative form, then, the Twilight saga arrives at something like genre trouble as it departs decidedly from the structure: the climax is not Edward and Bella having (or not having) sex or a lingering, gothic death followed by a marriage, as in the much referenced Wuthering Heights. Instead, suspense is ultimately provided by and resolved through a courtroom drama, Perry Mason-style with a surprise witness (Alice!) and shocking testimony (more dhampirs!).
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Notes
Meyer in an interview with Gregory Kirschling, “Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight’ Zone,” Entertainment Weekly (5 Jul. 2008), Web. Accessed September 8, 2010. np.
Stephenie Meyer, Eclipse (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007. Print), 17.
Stephenie Meyer, New Moon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006. Print), 514.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Print), 247. Pride and Prejudice is useful here both as a text marked as an originary point for contemporary genre romance form and as one cited by Meyer specifically as an inspiration for her work, in particular for the first book. From a 2008 interview: “All of the books in the Twilight Saga have a classical inspiration. With Twilight, it was Pride and Prejudice. Very loosely related.” Meyer, Little, Brown and Company, 2008, Web. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVEvEtF08S8&feature=player_embedded.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law (New York: Dover Publications, 1991. Print), 1.
Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review97, no. 68 (1984): 4.
See Daniel A. Rudolph, “The Misguided Reliance in American Jurisprudence on Jewish Law to Support the Moral Legitimacy of Capital Punishment,” American Criminal Law Review33 (1996).
Obviously, Meyer was not filling some void of vampire young adult fiction or even a more specific void of YA vampire romance between a human girl and an unbearably hot gentleman-vampire—L.J. Smith had a successful run mining this theme decades earlier in her Vampire Diaries series, now a television show on the CW—and the year before Twilight’s release, publishers promoted the thematically similar Vampire Kisses series and Touched by a Vampire. The idea that popularity causes legal influence relies on an assumption about the working of trends in capitalism that analyzes fads qua fads, unhinged from any substantive content that might make a difference in a popular object’s appeal to a specific audience at a specific moment. The question of why, given a set of similar market variables, promotion and theme, Meyer’s Twilight succeeds over something like Mari Mancusi’s Stake That must turn for its answer in what Franco Moretti calls “a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction,” to details smaller than the text proper — here, jurisprudential sensibility—and larger—here, genre. See Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (New York: Verso, 2005. Print), 1.
Susan Honeyman, Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction (Chicago: Ohio State Press, 2005. Print), 69. Honeyman goes on: “the writer must negate the fantasy with the dream motif, realistically engineer a return to ‘reality,’ or leave that child and space accessible, somehow balancing an impossible illusion of entry despite its accessibility” (73).
Desmond Manderson, “From Hunger to Love: Myths of Source, Interpretation, and Constitution of Law in Children’s Literature” Law & Literature15 (2003).
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007. Print), 164.
See Michel Foucault, here, from Abnormal:“Thus the monster is said to be a being in which the mixture of two kingdoms can be seen…We look for a breach of human and divine law in their progenitors.” Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974–1975 (New York: Picador, 1999. Print), 64.
For a clear working of this argument, see K. A. Nuzum, “The Monster’s Sacrifice — Historic Time: The Uses of Mythic and Liminal Time in Monster Literature,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly29, No. 3 (2004): 217–227.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Straus and Giroux, 1972. Print), 143.
Susan Honeyman, “Gingerbread Wishes and Candy(land) Dreams: The Lure of Food in Cautionary Tales of Consumpion,” Marvels & Tales21, no. 2 (2007): 196.
For a detailed description of the “discovery” of American adolescence, see Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print), 154–199.
Jane Austen, Emma (London: J.M. Dent & Company, 1892. Print), 247.
John Dzienkowski, Ed., Professional Responsibility Standards, Rules & Statutes 2006–2007 (St. Paul: Thomson West, 2006), 6.
Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Print), 686.
Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 269.
See Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1988. Print), 83–108.
And for contemporary fiction, Rob Latham, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2002. Print), np.
From an early twentieth-century primer on adolescence, part of a rash of advice books that corresponded with the rise of high schools: “When rationalistic parents and teachers ask me when they should cease to command and when begin to explain common grounds of morality, I am almost tempted to the extravagance of replying that there are things for which no reason should be given till the youth is strongest and can whip his elders… argument is sometimes a poor and cheap substitute for respect to personal authority.” G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime Religion and Education (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905. Print), 534.
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© 2011 Giselle Liza Anatol
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Wallis, M. (2011). True Blood Waits: The Romance of Law and Literature. In: Anatol, G.L. (eds) Bringing Light to Twilight. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119246_7
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