Synopsis and general review

The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer tells the story of 17-year-old Bella Swan, who moves to gloomy Washington State to live with her father, where she meets and falls in love with a dashingly beautiful, and surprising good, vampire by the name of Edward Cullen. The Cullen family (or coven) is made up of seven vampires who are peculiar in that they feed only on animals and hold human life to be precious. Bella is lucky in that she has met a vampire who wants very much to drink her blood but has too much conscience to do so, and instead falls in love with her too. The story is comprised of four books and one partial manuscript of a book the author is no longer sure she will finish (though I certainly hope she will). It all ends with Bella becoming a vampire and facing a happy eternity with her vampire love. For a complete synopsis of the series and information about the author, see wikipedia .

I came to this series late. I saw the movie Twilight before I got my hands on any of the books, but I have to admit I became as quickly obsessed with it as everyone else (reading most of the books straight through in all-day/night binges). The books, though not what I would have called well-written when I first started reading, are extremely easy to read and very hard to put down. I would definitely qualify them as a guilty pleasure. The story seems to have universal appeal with women of all ages, due mostly, I suspect, to its general theme of eternal love. The character Bella, also, represents the universal woman very well. She is insecure in herself, bewildered by the attention of her ideal man, and clumsy. These appealing characteristics combined with an entertaining and mostly morally clean story written for a young adult audience make the books irresistible.

The books do not contain descriptions of sex at all, and beyond some spicy kisses and (in the fourth book) a bit of marital behavior, which is handled very gently with mostly innuendo rather than description, the books stayed very much within the realms I would consider appropriate for the intended audience. The language gets no worse than an occasional “damn” or “hell,” and these words are often times used for their actual meanings rather than as swear words. Taking into account that the books are secular fiction and do not observe a Christian moral code, one of the only objectionable elements that could be argued over is the subject matter of vampires, so this is the first topic I’d like to discuss at length in my first of several critical-thinking posts on this intriguing series.

Vampires, demons, and angels

As mythological demons that occur in almost all folklore, vampires seem to have little to redeem them as sympathetic characters (and yet in modern fiction, they are almost always presented that way). My brief research into vampire myth reveals that the stories seem to have mostly arisen from medieval superstitious fear of the dead. While it was churchmen and governments who helped perpetuate the wide spread panic over vampires in the 1700s, vampires don’t have any real connection to anything biblical. The only Scripture I’ve ever come across having anything remotely to do with vampires (in a modern sense) is the prohibition against eating blood in Leviticus 7:

Moreover, you shall eat no blood whatever, whether of fowl or of animal, in any of your dwelling places. Whoever eats any blood, that person shall be cut off from his people (Leviticus 7:26–27).

Blood is biblically important. It represents the Old-Testament sacrifices that cleansed people of their sins and the ultimate sacrifice of Christ on the cross for the sins of the world. The drinking of Christ’s symbolic blood is a central practice in Christian Communion—as a symbol of Christ’s sacrificial covering of our sins with his blood. It makes sense that the perverted use of blood would become an object of superstition and a form of reverence in various pagan practices. It’s also easy to see how medieval peoples with their imperfect understanding of disease and death could have fallen prey to myths of undead people drinking blood. It annoys me that churchmen of past centuries perpetuated the myth by encouraging people to dig up graves and stake corpses. There is nothing biblical about such practices. While resurrection from the dead is a central tenant of Christian belief (Romans 10:9), I really can’t see how sane, Bible-believers can justify the idea that demons can inhabit corpses and prey on God-fearing people. And while Christians are given to understand that there is spiritual warfare (Ephesians 6:12), this is a matter for fervent prayer asking God to intercede and not violent physical action against anyone—living or dead.

However, legend aside, Meyer pretty much takes her own spin on the vampire legend. The vampires in her story have none of the legendary weakness of the demons of lore. They have no problem with crosses, holy water, or the sun, and in fact, the leader of the Cullens, Carlisle, is the son of a Protestant vicar and has religious leanings even as a vampire. In New Moon , the second book in the saga, Carlisle betrays that he still has some belief in God and hope for an eternity apart from what he is currently living:

“So I didn’t agree with my father’s particular brand of faith. But never, in the nearly four hundred years now since I was born, have I ever seen anything to make me doubt whether God exists in some form or the other. Not even the reflection in the mirror … . I’m sure all this sounds a little bizarre, coming from a vampire … But I’m hoping that there is still a point to this life, even for us. It’s a long shot, I’ll admit, … By all accounts, we’re damned regardless. But I hope, maybe foolishly, that we’ll get some measure of credit for trying.” (New Moon, pages 36–37)

Whether or not vampires have any real or spiritual significance as demons in folklore or myth, there really isn’t anything offensive about the main characters of Meyer’s books. Like with any fantasy or science fiction tale, the vampires in Meyer’s story represent something outside of reality that helps create the story. Monsters, evil, and the fear of death make great archetypes for any story—and are especially impacting when combined with romance. There is nothing in these books that would make any reader crave evil, even though Bella spends the entire saga craving to be immortal alongside the object of her love.

There is one other approach to the vampire myth that I want to hit on very lightly. There is a reference in Genesis to a group of people referred to as the “sons of God”:

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown (Genesis 6:1–4).

This passage is universally debated and the identity of the “sons of God” and the “Nephilim” are not generally agreed upon. I’ve heard one interpretation of this passage once that claimed that the sons of God were fallen angels and that their interaction with women (bearing children with them) was an attempt to pervert the line to Christ, and the Flood was God’s action to stop the perversion and purify the human race. This interpretation popped into my mind when I read the last book in the Twilight Saga , in which Edward (the vampire) impregnates Bella (still human at this point) and she bears him a half breed child, who has most of the characteristics of mortality but yet does not age after she reaches maturity. Since Bella constantly refers to Edward as an “angel,” this interpretation of the characters may even have been subtly intended by the author.

More to come soon! In my next post, I will discuss how Meyer deals with species origins and ultimate destinations.

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