BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 10: The Blood-Splattered Bride

Last time, Edward bought a bed at the Ed Hardy store. Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 7: Unhappy Ending

That night, someone knocks on the door to Edward's room while Bella mopes on the couch, refusing to sleep on the nightmare bed. Hard to blame her. She assumes Alice is coming in (wishful thinking?) but matter of fact, it's Rosalie. If we were ranking ill-defined characters, I suppose Rosalie Hale would be behind Emmett, who in my mind's eye is a muscular blur, and Esme, who in my mind's eye is a maternal blur, but she is definitely in the top five ill-defined characters of this series. Therefore my reaction to this development isn't a positive or a negative one; I feel nothing about Rosalie. The door might as well have been opened by a gust of wind. There are literally more well-defined weather patterns in this book. But all of that changes now. Sort of.

I've mentioned before the way S. Meyer makes tentative stabs at writing the Cullens' dialogue as though they were from another era. Despite Bella's protestations to the contrary Edward rarely if ever speaks in “the gentle cadences of an earlier century,” but Alice occasionally employs expressions and syntax that at least have a 1920s flair about them. Rosalie's dialogue early on in this chapter is the closest to “gentle cadences” we've ever come; she's very turn-of-the-century snob. “He so rarely leaves you alone” Rosalie says of Edward, “please don't think I'm horribly interfering.” One could argue that the Cullens have claimed in the past to be exceptionally good at adapting to new eras, so writing this way doesn't make any sense – Rosalie should be saying “For shiz, homeboy never let you outta his sight, yo” - but one could also argue that the Cullens let their guard down around Bella. One could also argue that no one cares; S. Meyer has bigger problems than her ability to convincingly write deliberately anachronistic dialogue. Are you ready for the most irritating origin story ever written, by the way?

Rosalie wants to tell Bella why she thinks she should stay human. “Did Edward ever tell you what led to this?” Rosalie says, gesturing at her super-sexy vampiric body.

“He told me it was close to what happened to me in Port Angeles, only there was no one there to save you,” I shuddered at the memory.

Interestingly, this is not actually something we've heard before (even though Bella apparently has), that Rosalie was essentially gang-raped to death. Of course we can't actually say “gang rape” - this is another chapter written to sail over the heads of younger audiences, which is fine. Younger audiences don't need to hear about gang rape. Not that S. Meyer is doing them any favors elsewhere. (Insert long rant about the bizarre values imparted by this series, obsession being equated with love, domestic abuse leading to stronger relationships and so on.)

Rosalie proceeds to tell the (supposedly) sad tale of her lost potential – from the start it's clear that she's coming at this from a pretty weird mental space. She says her story doesn't have a happy ending, but none of their stories do. “If we had happy endings, we'd all be under gravestones by now.” Uh, okay Rose. I think Alice (dead in a mental hospital?) and Edward (dead of the flu?) and Esme (dead of suicide?) and Emmett (dead of bear attack?) and Carlisle (dead of vampire attack?) would beg to differ!

So Rosalie was the child of a well-off family with aspirations to be more well-off still in the midst of the Great Depression. So assholes, basically. They saw Rosalie as their ticket into higher social circles; if her parents were alive today they'd be trying to get her a reality show. Rosalie, however, was happy with her status.

“I was thrilled to be me, to be Rosalie Hale. Pleased that men's eyes watched me everywhere I went, from the year I turned twelve.”

WHOA NOW, S. Meyer. Back up. Twelve? Are we sure you want to keep this sentence in your book? The one that millions of people (and plenty of twelve-year-olds) will read? Okay. Rosalie paints a picture of herself as the most self-absorbed horror show on the face of the earth, and she is simultaneously apologetic and nostalgic about it: “I was silly and shallow, but I was content.” Uh-huh. The longer the story goes on, the more ideologically incoherent Rosalie gets. Not unlike this series as a whole.

“I also wanted the material things in life. I wanted a big house with elegant furnishings that someone else would clean and a modern kitchen that someone else would cook in...And I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't get these things.”

Okay, that's all well and good, and Rosalie seems to express remorse for these attitudes. But the ultimate moral of Rosalie's story is still that she is sad that she never ended up getting those things – she was raped by her husband-to-be and his drunk friends and left to die. She wanted to live a life of rich bliss in a Sam Mendes-like domestic hellscape and was denied the opportunity to be the center of that hellscape. Instead she was granted immortality and (one would think) the ability to see the error of her ways, but she neither asked for nor apparently wants either. She still wants the hellscape, even though she knows it is a hellscape! She wants to go back and be a rich asshole and pop out babies and complain about having to fight WWII for the damn Jews! And ultimately, she wishes she was dead (Hey Rose, I don't want to be an asshole, but... There's The Volturi).

Rosalie doesn't understand the irony inherent in a phrase like “ignorance is bliss.” And that would be fine if it seemed like S. Meyer did, but the central problem of this story – I learned something, but actually I learned nothing – isn't really acknowledged. Unless you count all of the “what?” and “huh?” I wrote into the margins.

Rosalie was also super jealous of a poor friend of hers who had a baby. She tells Bella that despite her young age she was ready for motherhood, but she doesn't exactly convince me of her maturity here. Her reasons essentially amount to “my friend's baby had really cute dimples.” Babies were her next “must have” accessory. Babies were so in that fall. So the message she seems to be sending Bella is “get out while you still have fully-functioning lady-parts.” That Rosalie's threat (you won't be able to make babies!) isn't greeted by immediate, derisive laughter from Bella is gallingly sexist, but what did you expect, exactly? All along we've been wondering what exactly the drawbacks are to being a vampire, and here they finally are. You can't start a family the way god intended. This scene needs Alice as a counter-balance.

“Um, hello, babies are disgusting and I've never had to use a condom in my life.”-Alice Cullen

But she is too busy getting laid or high or both to trifle with these bitches. Rosalie keeps talking. I'll sum it up for you. There was this guy, see, and his name was Royce, see, and he was a real mover-and -shaker at the bank. When Royce saw Rosalie, well, she was suddenly sitting pretty, a life of wealth and splendor rolling out before her. Wedding bells started a-ringing soon after Royce started a-courting. But you see Royce, he liked the sauce. And see here: one night Rose was walking home too late at night and she ran into Royce and a couple of his boys and they were all three-sheets and then some. One thing led to another and our Rose found herself lying in the street bloodied up and dying. That's when this cat Carlisle came along, sensing something amiss. Carlisle was the local MD, see, but he and his family didn't mingle much with society. So Rosalie was surprised to find the guy was no ordinary doctor at all, no ma'am, no ordinary doctor at all.

I could point out that Rosalie's story slowly degrades into S. Meyer telling the story herself with an extra layer of quotation marks -

“'Here's my Rose! Rose!' Royce shouted, laughing with them.”

- who tells a story like that? But whatever. When you get past all of the ideological incoherence, the end of Rose's story is pretty cool. She becomes a vampire at the Cullen house, aware enough of her surroundings to hear Edward complaining about Carlisle's decision to save her. Carlisle defends the choice, saying it was “too much waste” to let Rosalie die. “I mean, she's so hot,” he says. Okay, well, that's what he was thinking. It is moderately interesting to learn that at the time, Edward pretended to be Esme's brother. I'm never terribly impressed by S. Meyer's explanations as to how the Cullen's stay inconspicuous. I feel like she should have watched The Wire before she wrote this thing. Or maybe I just shouldn't have watched The Wire. I'm probably the only person wondering about the Cullen family's cell phone policy. Do they their toss burners every two weeks? (“I do, but only because my dealer makes me.”-Alice Cullen) It seems strange to me that Rosalie would still have her original last name – Jasper seems to have adopted it also – especially since apparently it was known in plenty of social circles a few decades ago. Plenty of those people would still be alive. Not in Forks, I guess, but still. It seems reckless. Avon Barksdale would not approve.

"The game is out there, and it's either play or get played, Carlisle."

Anyway, Rosalie mentions that she has a better record than most of the rest of her family – she has never tasted human blood. She says her record is a thousand times better than Edward, bringing back that bad taste in all of our mouths that comes from imagining Edward as a vigilante with a code. It's not the vigilante part that bothers me, it's the idea of what Edward's code would be.

“You are a murderer/child molester, so you have to die.”-Dexter Morgan
“You had sex out of wedlock, so you have to die.”-Edward Cullen

No mention of Alice or Jasper's record. I bet before they found the Cullens they were in the Manson Family or something. But Rosalie has only killed five people: the five men who raped her. Our Rosalie went on a roiling rampage of revenge, see? She hunted down the dastardly doers of the deed, leaving Royce for last and least. She found him well fortified, driven nearly mad with panic as he learned of the mysterious deaths of his brothers-in-arms. She made short work of a couple of his guards -

“Oops – seven murders,” she corrected herself. “I forgot about the guards. They only took a second.”

Ah Rosalie, always having a condescending attitude toward servants, even in your one shining moment. Oh well. Still this whole scene is pretty badass – Rosalie stole a wedding dress to wear when she killed Royce; that is pretty awesome. We have to cling to these details because Rosalie gets ridiculous again pretty quickly, confessing that she didn't like Bella at first because Edward found her attractive, whereas he'd never felt that way toward Rosalie herself. That's a nice wife you got there, Emmett.

Edward was also never tempted by the clan of vampires up in Denali, where Rosalie suggests that there were plenty of females for the taking. “He was balls deep in a vampire pussy,” she says. Bella's mouth tightens into a “hard line.” It's weird that she's troubled by the idea that Edward could have gotten laid a few decades ago and isn't troubled by the fact that he was a confirmed bachelor for literally a century. But whatever. Bella reminds Rosalie that she has Emmett – and Rosalie admits that what attracted her to him in the first place is that he looked like a giant version of her friend's baby. Perfect.