Twilight:: rethinking
I was talking with a friend last night about Twilight and she mentioned something that never occured to me: this is a text in which the vampire embodies physical/sexual desire in a negative way. Sex and desire in this novel = pain and death. Wow. Now, I have this whole obsession with Dracula because it presents sexuality in such an amazingly 19C way, which I love, but I thought we were past that!
The evolution of the vampyre as I understand it (in this I use the masculine pronoun because in these texts, primarily, the vampire is pictured as masculine while the "human" is pictured as feminine, which I find important to the metaphor of sex=vampirism... you know, all the penetration and stuff):
Stoker shows the vampire as embodying all the outcasts: the foreigner, the Jew, the sexually perverse who seeks to turn helpless British women into lustful demons and thereby colonize the colonizers, and as such, he always hovers in the background, his own history is "lost" and not important. The vampire is a foggy danger on the edge of the text, always the center, but rarely seen. His embodiment of sexuality is purely metaphorical.
Anne Rice gives us the vampire as the anti-hero. S/he is still outside society, but we are able to empathize and see vampires, understand their point of view. However, sexual desire and the desire for blood are still synonymous, still intertwined, though we are now able to see it not as a danger onto the reader, but a shared lust between the reader and narrator as the vampire comes to the forefront of the plot and narrative, and not subjected to the fringes.
Whedon shows a vampire capable of seeking atonement and gaining love from a human woman... and then of a vampire seeking atonement in order to show his love for the same human woman. (The Victorian parallels in this plot sometimes is too much for me to handle!) Once again, though, sexuality is demonized, it is through sex that Angel loses his soul and through sex that Buffy emotionally abuses Spike (which he then inadvertently tries to use against her in the same way). Though Whedon struggles with showing sexuality in a positive light in a television forum, it is still an evolvement from Dracula's sexuality, in that the characters are able to deal with sexuality without it being shrouded in a metaphor of vampirism. In this text, sex and the vampire come to a head and look each other straight in the eye instead of acting as one stable metaphor. Sex is a dangerous act even for the vampire himself.
Octavia Butler's novel Fledglng re-evaluates the vampire once again, creating a feminist utopia in which sexuality and the vampire coexist in family groups, undermining the patriarchal family group and presenting a female vampire that uses her sexless body (no breasts) to incite desire in men, women, and masculine vampires alike. But, in this novel, there is no danger in sexuality for either the vampire or the human. (Instead, the danger is in racial lines, the heroine is a Black vampire and the first, which results in again forcing the vampire to stand-in for a marginalized party, but in this novel it is done head-on, no metaphors to hide behind.)
and then Stephanie Meyer writes Twilight... placing a vampire into a high school setting, but expecting the characters to behave as teenagers regardless of vampire/human status. And once again the vampire stands in as the metaphor of sexual desire: a desire that when finally consummated results in the human woman being beaten and injured, then forced to undergo a horrendous and painful pregnancy. Clearly, any development the vampire genre has made in forcing readers to come in contact with marginalized members of society-- the homosexual, the racially marginalized, etc-- has been pushed aside for a resurgence of cloaking the danger of sexuality within the body of the vampire.
All I can say is "ew"