An Escape from Reality

It took some resistance on my part and much begging on theirs, but I finally gave in. Thanks to my students, I am reading Twilight.

Here's the thing: The book isn't written particularly well, though I am appreciative of the fact that it uses some SAT vocabulary words and the main character, Bella, likes to read and do homework - a character trait that sets her apart from the other flighty girls in the story and is, therefore, part of what the dream boy/vampire Edward admires in her. It is not a unique story, by any means, and is, as everyone deems it, a teen ROMANCE novel.

The question is, is that OK?

Edward, the ideal, who (though he wants Bella in an instinctual, predatory way) must keep his distance, physically, except for the occasional flirtatious face stroking. And maybe this will change by the end of the novel, which, in my opinion, will kill the interest. In romance novels, the lovers can't give in too easily and must make the reader wait (sometimes agonizingly) for consummation. That's what keeps us reading. Edward has to be a gentleman otherwise he wouldn't be able to control himself and would 'devour' Bella.

In the past Vampire stories (especially in places like Victorian England where staunch religion suppressed basic human nature) were sort of a way to bypass religious dogma while still playing at morality. In reading the books, men, with the unquenchable thirst for delicate, pure women, were allowed to 'take' them in a primal way, without all of the messiness of the sinful affair. And women, in reading the books, could be quite willingly 'taken'. In the end, the vampires were 'monstrous' villains and the poor helpless, though alluring, women were victims, plain and simple.

So maybe this is what Twilight is, as are all romance novels, an escape from reality where the girl who represents those of us who are ordinary - brown haired, brown eyed semi intelligent girls who want to be special enough for the ideal man to want us so much that it pains him- to be innocently seduced without feeling guilty about the seduction.

And there's nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as we remember that it is fantasy. Edward is not real. But then, neither is Bella.