Fragile Bodies in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series

Cultivating Perspectives: Fragile Bodies in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series by Heather Simeney MacLeod A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies University of Alberta © Heather Simeney MacLeod, 2014 ABSTRACT This dissertation project exposes the troubling engagement with classifications of materiality within text and bodies in Stephenie Meyer’s contemporary American vampire narrative, the Twilight Series (2005-2008). It does so by disclosing the troubling readings inherent in genre; revealing problematic representations in the gendered body of the protagonist, Bella Swan; exposing current cultural constructions of the adolescent female; demonstrating the nuclear structure of the family as inextricably connected to an iconic image of the trinity— man, woman, and child; and uncovering a chronicle of the body of the racialized “other.” That is to say, this project analyzes five persistent perspectives of the body—gendered, adolescent, transforming, reproducing, and embodying a “contact zone”—while relying on the methodologies of new feminist materialisms, posthumanism, postfeminism and vampire literary criticism. These conditions are characteristic of the “genre shift” in contemporary American vampire narrative in general, meaning that current vampire fiction tends to shift outside of the boundaries of its own classification, as in the case of Meyer’s material, which is read by a diverse readership outside of its Young Adult categorization. As such, this project closely examines the vampire exposed in Meyer’s remarkably popular text, as well as key texts published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, such as Joss Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Alan Ball’s HBO series True Blood (2009-2014), Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987) and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987). The constellation of vampire narratives that comprise this project share many concerns—a transient or groundless body that is ii free from foundation and based upon change rather than fixity—and reveal the body as a series of actions rather than as a state. The purpose of this project is to expose readings characteristic in particular genre classifications, as well as representations of the corporeal figure in contemporary vampire narratives, so as to illuminate current reactions to particular “types” of bodies. As such, it clarifies the displaced subject formation and decentred body regardless of favorable or disagreeable readings of action or passivity. iii For, my brother, Kevin MacLeod shine on you crazy diamond iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Imre Szeman, and committee members Natasha Hurley and Terri Tomsky for seeing this project to its completion. Stuart Pyontz and Michelle Meagher both posed challenging and productive questions. Thanks to Patricia Demers and Corinne Harol for their thoughtful and considerate support. I am grateful to Cecily Devereux, for her assistance with this project throughout its stages. Her kindness and generosity were crucial in its completion. Michael O’Driscoll’s careful reading during the early stages was invaluable. I learned a great deal from the intellectual generosity from my friends and colleagues in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, especially from Brent Ryan Bellamy, Elena Del Rio, Dan Harvey, Lisa Haynes, David Houseman, Sarah Krotz, Keavy Martin, Lucinda Rasmussen, Christine Stewart, and Dorothy Woodman. I am indebted to the administrative staff, who worked in the Department of English and Film Studies throughout my degree—particularly Kim Brown, Kris Calhoun, Mary Marshall Durrell, Courtney Gullason, Marcie Whitecotton-Carroll, and Robbie Zopf—for their warmth, kindness, and humour. Thanks to those other friends who made Edmonton a stimulating environment and a place to call home—Trisia Eddy, Katherine Holland, Shauna Mosbeck, Karen Pentland, Mehda Samarsinghe, and Richard Van Camp. To my friends in other parts of the world, I am thankful—despite distance—for their support: Katy E. Ellis Jr., Mary Finlay-Doney, and Shellie Franklin. Many, so many, v thanks to Rebecca Fredrickson for her friendship and from our protests on Government Street, army boots, and Pearl Jam to Mumford and Sons, Burberry, and tweed, thank you. Of course and especially, thanks to Jennifer Rensch for her steadfast friendship. For their being in common: Cameron, Josh, Kaira, and the Cali boys—Kevin, Nick, and Will— thank you. I must thank my mother, Mazie Ann Beeds, and my brother, Kevin MacLeod, for their unconditional love and unwavering support. I am grateful to my grandparents and my niece Sarah Grace all of whom I continue to miss. Of course, Richard—whose absence my imagination could not trace. Because of my grandfather Simney Beeds, I understood the fragility of the body, and the tenacity of the mind. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION POLITICS OF GENRE AND CORPOREALITY 1 CHAPTER ONE THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL: THE ENCHANTED BODY OF BELLA SWAN Anchor of Perspective 21 Princess Charming 29 The Ugly Duckling 38 Mark of Difference 46 CHAPTER TWO CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS: THE BOUNDARY OF THE BODY A Body at Rest Remains So 48 Cultural Constructions in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series 55 Blush of the Adolescent 67 Do Not Trouble the Flesh 77 CHAPTER THREE “WILL I STAY THIS WAY FOREVER?:” THE BODIES OF MONSTERS AND HEROES “The Process of Becoming” 80 Another Copernican Revolution 83 “Going through the Motions” 92 “To Be Like Other Girls” 107 CHAPTER FOUR REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISM: STEPHENIE MEYER’S REPRESENTATION OF THE CHILD IN THE TWILIGHT SERIES “It was Sort of the Kiss of Death” 113 Geography of Hope 122 The Triad of Man-Woman-Child 132 ”Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” 140 vii CHAPTER FIVE A KEEPER OF ARCHIVES: CHRONICLE OF THE BODY IN THE TWILIGHT SERIES The Inconsequential 144 The Contact Zone 157 Here the Road Forked 165 The Consequential 175 CONCLUSION MATERIALITY AND CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN THE BODY OF GENRE AND IN THE BODY OF CORPOREALITY Plague of the Dead 182 Postfeminism, Posthumanism 187 New Materialisms 190 WORKS CITED 196 viii INTRODUCTION Politics of Genre and Corporeality If it will not do to see literature as an ‘objective’, descriptive category neither will it do to say that literature is just what people whimsically choose to call literature. For there is nothing at all whimsical about such kinds of value-judgement: they have their roots in deeper structures of belief which are as apparently unshakeable as the Empire State building. What we have uncovered so far, then, is not only that literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but that these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others.” (Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction 14) Late capitalism has catapulted us out of centuries-old bodily practices which were centred on survival, procreation, the provision of shelter and the satisfaction of hunger. Now birthing, illness and aging, while part of the ordinary cycle of life, are also events that can be interrupted or altered by personal endeavor in which one harnesses the medical advances and surgical restructurings on offer. Our body is judged as our individual production. We can fashion it through artifice, through the naturalistic routes of bio-organic products or through a combination of these, but whatever the means, our body is our calling card, vested with showing the results of our hard work and watchfulness or, alternatively, our failure and sloth. (Susie Orbach, Bodies 6) At the intersection between these quotations from the literary theorist Terry Eagleton and social critic Susie Orbach, it is possible to position both the political force in the conventional belief of the values that literature—in all its changing significances—embodies, as well as the crucial confrontation to the construction of the body. For Eagleton, literature is not impartially established; it is not a structure of capricious selection on random standards of taste. It exhibits social representations, which illuminate attitudes within unrelated social ideologies; it develops from persuasive nuances of social tenets characterizing entrenched—often invisible— systems of belief; and it props up the conventions of societal arrangements by which 1 privileged groups practice and preserve control. If the labour of literature for Eagleton is simply to reproduce the status quo in the construction of societal norms, writers such as Joss Whedon, Stephenie Meyer, and Richelle Mead, as well as Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, Cassandra Clare, and many other so-called Young Adult popular writers have produced a more involved position for literature in the defiance of classification, as well as an often troubling and problematic construction of corporeality and subjectivity. For these writers, transforming and shifting the genre of Young Adult literature has emerged through a consideration and an ongoing discussion in the practices of biology and technology and the intersection between the two. The crossing of boundaries between human and monster, human and animal, and human and machine are particularly relevant in these texts examining biotechnology, as well as the prospective transformation of the human form. These tropes are persistent in Young Adult literature in the early twenty-first century. For Eagleton, there is a necessary position expected for literature, a reflection of the position of dominance within social constructs. For these other writers, such as Stephenie Meyer and her contentious vampire narrative, the Twilight Series (2005-2008), the importance of shifting genre and the problematic body transformations are theorized as reciprocally urgent in the essential necessity to reject dominant social constructions in America in the early twenty-first-century.

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