“Always a Step Behind, Dazed”: Romanticized Gender Violence and Melodramatic Convention in Twilight

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See Danielle Borgia’s “Twilight: The Glamorization of Abuse, Codependency, and White Privilege” and Victoria Collins and Diane Carmody’s “Deadly Love: Images of Dating Violence in the ‘Twilight’ Saga.”

² In formulating his theory of melodrama’s emotional structure, Buckley builds on Carolyn Williams’s conceptualization of the melodramatic form as an “oscillation between introversion and extroversion” in her analysis of the tableau (110).

³ Considering the relationship between ambiguous heroism and melodrama’s emotional structure helps us to understand not only Twilight, but other recent melodramas that feature romanticized intimate partner violence like Fifty Shades of Grey, Gossip Girl, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Hush, Hush.

⁴ These publishers include Ace Books, Appleton-Century-Crofts, Doubleday, Dell, and Fawcett Crest.

⁵ Many critics have touched on Edward’s moral ambiguity by categorizing him as a Byronic hero; see Danielle Borgia, 155–7. Katie Kapurch and Abigail E. Myers compare Edward Cullen’s Byronic tendencies with those of his namesake, Edward Rochester of Jane Eyre; see Kapurch 104–8 and Myers 149–60.

⁶ The other notable exception to this rule of exteriorization is Bella. Aro (a member of the Volturi) and Edward are both unable to read Bella’s mind. But Bella, like Edward, undergoes her own process of exteriorization. See Sara K. Day’s “Narrative Intimacy and the Question of Control in the ‘Twilight’ Saga,” which traces Bella’s progression from the beginning of the series, when she possesses a developed interiority that is shared freely with the reader, to the end of the series, when that interiority has diminished and Bella “makes the conscious decision to share her thoughts and feelings as openly with Edward as she once did with the reader” (77).