BEAUTY AND THE BEAUTIFUL BEAST

Abstract

This paper interprets Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga as a contemporary rewriting of the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ fairy tale in which the heroine, Bella Swan, quests for a sexual subjectivity and agency not readily available to her in mainstream heterosexual culture. Using work on the ‘missing discourse’ of female desire, it is noted that a normative understanding of heterosexuality still allocates the ownership of desire along gender lines, where young men can claim sexual agency as an integral part of their identity, whereas young women are pressured to disavow their own desire if they are to be accepted as ‘good girls’. In this context Twilight articulates a fantasy of claiming a carnality and sexual subjectivity for its heroine through her association with a supernatural ‘beast’—Edward Cullen, a vampire. Twilight is positioned as one title in a growing publishing sub-category of Young Adult supernatural romance in which young female characters claim a sexuality that transgresses heterosexual norms by forming erotic ties with human–creature hybrids. It is argued that, despite its conservative features, Twilight is an attempt to inscribe this ‘missing discourse’ of female desire through a reclaiming of the beast's sexuality for its heroine.

Notes

1. At the time of writing, various editions of the series occupy nine of the top ten slots on the national bestseller list, while some estimates put national sales at 10,000 a week (Hawker 2008). See also Stephenie Meyer's official website (Meyer 2010).

2. Research into the impact of Bush-era abstinence-only sex education in US schools suggests that, in American culture, young women are under increasing pressure to reject their own sexual desires as a threat to their long-term aspirations for college education and a career. Burns and Torre note that, in this context, ‘a discourse of girls’ sexual desire was not so much missing as it had become … “a dream deferred”’ (Burns and Torre 2004, 128).

3. A third option offered to women characters in recent vampire fiction is to maintain a defensive stance in relation to the male vampire lover. This female-hero character type stakes and slays her way through the local undead population and, while she may have relationships with vampires, they remain somewhat tenuous and unresolved. In these fictions, the female human remains empowered and is not in danger of being either punished for her desires or devoured. The price she pays for this strong stance is an aloof existence. The most well-known of this character type is Joss Whedon's Buffy Summers from the 1992 film Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and the television series by the same name (1997–2003). Other fictional portrayals include Anita Blake in Laurell K. Hamilton's Club Vampyre (1996) and Riley Jenson in Keri Arthur's Full Moon Rising (2006).

4. In addition to Meyer's series, other recent popular titles include: Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely (2007) (a faerie king lover); Becca Fitzpatrick's Hush Hush (2009) (in which the hero is a fallen angel); Linda Gray's Evernight (2008), Stargazer (2009) and Hourglass (2010) (in which the heroine is a vampire–ghost hybrid in love with a human boy); and Cassandra Clare's City of Bones (2007), City of Ashes (2008) and City of Glass (2009) (in which both the hero and heroine are Nephilim, or human–angel hybrids).