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Until now, Twilight's sexism has been sort of nebulous or at least easily explained away: This might be a book primarily written about a few boys and how awesome they are, but it's still written by a woman. Bella doesn't have a lot of agency now, but the day where she's a vampire is coming. The whole character of Emily is outrageous and offensive, but it's more of a finger in the eye to domestic abuse victims than women in general.And yet now, three books in, we get two Women Behaving Very Badly (directly against the wishes of men) right in a row. Leah Clearwater, we shall see, is the truly troubling part. Bella has a brief, shining moment defending the sisterhood, but immediately thereafter becomes the most manipulative she has ever been. Previous entries can be found in the directory.
I want to take a moment once again to endorse the vaguely threatening tumblr “Reasoning With Vampires” - the anonymous author over there is really stepping up his or her game. Check this out, for instance:
Chapter 18 (cont'd): Instruction
In the clearing, Bella bonds with Wolf-Jacob while the Cullens stare in disgust like they're watching a donkey show or something. Then Edward and Jacob start having some kind of telepathic argument. We only hear Edward's half until Jacob runs off into the woods to switch back into human form; Bella notes the cord securing the jorts to the wolf's leg. Why does S. Meyer feel like she has to have such rigid continuity when it comes to Jacob's clothes? Does she think our minds are constantly in the gutter?
Jacob returns, and Jasper comes back from getting blown by Alice in the woods, and there is a long conversation about what to do with Bella during the battle (which it turns out is happening on Saturday, incidentally the same day as the concert Bella was supposed to take Alice and Edward to. Well, thank god for that! We've been spared S. Meyer's description of the Linkin Park/Coldplay concert or whatever it was. Bella decides to subject Angela and Ben to it instead. The concert, not the description. There were only two tickets? So Bella wasn't going? Maybe Alice uninvited herself. Smart girl). The worry is that one of the newborns could slip out of the fray, wander into Forks, and kill her. After some various arguments, someone suggests that Jacob disguise Bella's scent by carrying her around the woods for a while. That is the most chaste and least fun way to disguise one's scent, you guys. But whatever. Jacob carries Bella off and around the woods for a while against her will (as if that part needs to be mentioned. Jacob doesn't do anything unless there is a woman who actively opposes it).
Alice and Jasper try to follow the trail Jacob leaves and can't pick up Bella's scent. Or they pretend to get lost so they can fuck. Jasper comes back with an idea that involves using Bella's scent to lead the Newborn Army directly into the clearing – Jacob will lead her back out so the trail will end there. Or something. Scent-science is kind of dubious. Jasper proposes that Bella actually be in the clearing, which would drive the newborns crazy and make them easy targets. Jacob and Edward are appalled. Alice steps on Jasper's foot (cute). Bella doesn't say anything.
Instead they decide Bella will be up on a mountain nearby, guarded by one of the newer wolves who's job is to basically be a walkie-talkie between Bella and the battle on the ground. Sure, that sounds like a foolproof plan that won't go wrong in any way! Edward and Jacob are both excited and grinning at each other. Now is the time to propose that threesome, Bella.
Chapter 19: Selfish
Bella wakes up in the afternoon – she slept all day. That is exactly what you should do the day after you graduate high school, but part of me wonders what Charlie thinks happened at that party. I don't know, which is worse: thinking your daughter was up all night doing blow off of Edward's chest between fucks or thinking she was helping to plan a violent battle between mythical creatures? It's probably a draw. Bella puts some Pop-Tarts in the toaster (I think the Pop-Tarts are supposed to be symbolic here. They're the breakfast of aimless post-grads!) and grimaces at herself in the “reflective chrome.” Well nobody looks good in a toaster, Bella.
Edward looks at Bella's wolf-charm danging from her wrist and needles her for a while about how he's not allowed to give her gifts. He wants equal representation on Bella's wrist. If you were hitting that, you wouldn't need a fucking charm to mark your territory, Bro-seph Gordon-Levitt! But anyway, he seems to get her to tentatively agree to receiving a “hand-me-down” gift from him sometime in the near future. When I was a kid I couldn't audibly separate the words in the phrase “hand me down” - the first few times I heard it, I heard it as “hamidown." That's life in New England, I suppose – people talk too fast so the new talkers have an extra handicap. Then we grow up and talk even faster than our parents and the cycle intensifies. I also used to think, until I was a teenager actually, that it was “for all intensive purposes.” Neither term made any sense to me until I realized which words they actually entailed – to discover each was revolutionary. Bella says something about how Edward has already given her himself (“Not really!”-Me, Alice Cullen, in unison) and that is enough of a gift (“[Barfs]”-Me, Alice Cullen, everyone, in unison).
He processed that for a moment, and then rolled his eyes. “The way you regard me is ludicrous.”
Now we're getting closer to gentle cadences of an earlier century, S. Meyer! Is it at all possible that "hand-me-down" is actually a sexual euphemism? Alice calls, and we gather that Bella has solidified her plans to intervene in the battle while sleeping. Some brain you got there, Bella. We don't get to hear what Alice is saying, unfortunately.
“I want you to choke that bitch, Edward. You need to send a fucking message. Break something she uses a lot. Okay, I gotta go, Jasper's giving me a hand-me-down."
But Edward tells Bella that Alice's vision was just of Bella stumbling around in the woods, lost. In other words, she would not have been successful. Bella counters that one possibility Alice could not have seen is utilizing Seth Clearwater, the young wolf on her detail, to find her way to the battle. There's a lot of complicated bullshit where Bella points out that Sam Uley would go along with Jasper's plan, but Edward says Jacob wouldn't, and informs Bella that Jacob is the second-in-command of the wolf-pack and that his orders have the full force of the law as well. Turns out Edward got quite the peek into the pack's hive mind last night. He starts cryptically laughing about how wolves get so surprised when their mythology turns out to be incorrect, and Bella is like, “just say it, you coy motherfucker.” Turns out there is a girl in the wolfpack now: Seth's sister and Sam's ex, Leah Clearwater. Well, how about that!
In the clearing, Bella bonds with Wolf-Jacob while the Cullens stare in disgust like they're watching a donkey show or something. Then Edward and Jacob start having some kind of telepathic argument. We only hear Edward's half until Jacob runs off into the woods to switch back into human form; Bella notes the cord securing the jorts to the wolf's leg. Why does S. Meyer feel like she has to have such rigid continuity when it comes to Jacob's clothes? Does she think our minds are constantly in the gutter?
Jacob returns, and Jasper comes back from getting blown by Alice in the woods, and there is a long conversation about what to do with Bella during the battle (which it turns out is happening on Saturday, incidentally the same day as the concert Bella was supposed to take Alice and Edward to. Well, thank god for that! We've been spared S. Meyer's description of the Linkin Park/Coldplay concert or whatever it was. Bella decides to subject Angela and Ben to it instead. The concert, not the description. There were only two tickets? So Bella wasn't going? Maybe Alice uninvited herself. Smart girl). The worry is that one of the newborns could slip out of the fray, wander into Forks, and kill her. After some various arguments, someone suggests that Jacob disguise Bella's scent by carrying her around the woods for a while. That is the most chaste and least fun way to disguise one's scent, you guys. But whatever. Jacob carries Bella off and around the woods for a while against her will (as if that part needs to be mentioned. Jacob doesn't do anything unless there is a woman who actively opposes it).
Alice and Jasper try to follow the trail Jacob leaves and can't pick up Bella's scent. Or they pretend to get lost so they can fuck. Jasper comes back with an idea that involves using Bella's scent to lead the Newborn Army directly into the clearing – Jacob will lead her back out so the trail will end there. Or something. Scent-science is kind of dubious. Jasper proposes that Bella actually be in the clearing, which would drive the newborns crazy and make them easy targets. Jacob and Edward are appalled. Alice steps on Jasper's foot (cute). Bella doesn't say anything.
Instead they decide Bella will be up on a mountain nearby, guarded by one of the newer wolves who's job is to basically be a walkie-talkie between Bella and the battle on the ground. Sure, that sounds like a foolproof plan that won't go wrong in any way! Edward and Jacob are both excited and grinning at each other. Now is the time to propose that threesome, Bella.
Chapter 19: Selfish
Bella wakes up in the afternoon – she slept all day. That is exactly what you should do the day after you graduate high school, but part of me wonders what Charlie thinks happened at that party. I don't know, which is worse: thinking your daughter was up all night doing blow off of Edward's chest between fucks or thinking she was helping to plan a violent battle between mythical creatures? It's probably a draw. Bella puts some Pop-Tarts in the toaster (I think the Pop-Tarts are supposed to be symbolic here. They're the breakfast of aimless post-grads!) and grimaces at herself in the “reflective chrome.” Well nobody looks good in a toaster, Bella.
Edward looks at Bella's wolf-charm danging from her wrist and needles her for a while about how he's not allowed to give her gifts. He wants equal representation on Bella's wrist. If you were hitting that, you wouldn't need a fucking charm to mark your territory, Bro-seph Gordon-Levitt! But anyway, he seems to get her to tentatively agree to receiving a “hand-me-down” gift from him sometime in the near future. When I was a kid I couldn't audibly separate the words in the phrase “hand me down” - the first few times I heard it, I heard it as “hamidown." That's life in New England, I suppose – people talk too fast so the new talkers have an extra handicap. Then we grow up and talk even faster than our parents and the cycle intensifies. I also used to think, until I was a teenager actually, that it was “for all intensive purposes.” Neither term made any sense to me until I realized which words they actually entailed – to discover each was revolutionary. Bella says something about how Edward has already given her himself (“Not really!”-Me, Alice Cullen, in unison) and that is enough of a gift (“[Barfs]”-Me, Alice Cullen, everyone, in unison).
He processed that for a moment, and then rolled his eyes. “The way you regard me is ludicrous.”
Now we're getting closer to gentle cadences of an earlier century, S. Meyer! Is it at all possible that "hand-me-down" is actually a sexual euphemism? Alice calls, and we gather that Bella has solidified her plans to intervene in the battle while sleeping. Some brain you got there, Bella. We don't get to hear what Alice is saying, unfortunately.
“I want you to choke that bitch, Edward. You need to send a fucking message. Break something she uses a lot. Okay, I gotta go, Jasper's giving me a hand-me-down."
But Edward tells Bella that Alice's vision was just of Bella stumbling around in the woods, lost. In other words, she would not have been successful. Bella counters that one possibility Alice could not have seen is utilizing Seth Clearwater, the young wolf on her detail, to find her way to the battle. There's a lot of complicated bullshit where Bella points out that Sam Uley would go along with Jasper's plan, but Edward says Jacob wouldn't, and informs Bella that Jacob is the second-in-command of the wolf-pack and that his orders have the full force of the law as well. Turns out Edward got quite the peek into the pack's hive mind last night. He starts cryptically laughing about how wolves get so surprised when their mythology turns out to be incorrect, and Bella is like, “just say it, you coy motherfucker.” Turns out there is a girl in the wolfpack now: Seth's sister and Sam's ex, Leah Clearwater. Well, how about that!
What could have been a kind of progressive turn for this book gets insulting almost immediately: Bella starts thinking about the heartbreak she's seen on Leah's face and realizes she is now privy to Sam's innermost thoughts. Her first thought is “Poor Leah.” Edward's first thought is “Leah is an unbelievable bitch.”
Edward snorted. “She's making life exceedingly difficult for the rest of them.”
There's a girl in the boy's club! Cooties! Ahhhhh! This conversation, in which Edward defends everything male and Bella speaks up for the ladiez (for once), would be perfectly fine if it didn't end with Edward being right. Because Leah is being a shrew. Why does the one girl have to be “deliberately malicious,” S. Meyer? She's rubbing Sam's face in his mistakes daily, as well as constantly bringing up the fact that (due to multiple secrets clumsily explicated here by Edward rather than in any sort of plot action) Embry is a bastard who's real father might be the father of one of his wolf-brothers. Hey, that's helpful, Leah. Hey, that's helpful, S. Meyer.
Edward agrees that Leah has reason to be upset, and compares the imprinting phenomenon to A Midsummer Night's Dream. I could take this time to talk about how seeing the magic spells in Midsummer as real is actually a kind of reductive, surface reading of the text – that Shakespeare was simultaneously mocking the idea of ascribing things to “magic” and undermining that line of thinking every step of the way, which is maybe something S. Meyer should be doing instead of insisting that imprinting is the be-all and end-all. But let's not do that and say we did.
Edward was right – this was exactly like a soap opera.
SHOW DON'T TELL, Bella. They leave this conversation before Leah can actually be redeemed; Bella tacitly agrees that she's a bitch and moves on. Okay, well, that was a troubling and sexist moment, but maybe we can move on and forget about it. Right, guys? Right? Bella starts insisting she be in the clearing, and when that doesn't work she tries something else. Uh oh.
It wasn't so much that I had to be in the clearing. I just had to be where Edward was.
Cruel, I accused myself. Selfish, selfish, selfish! Don't do it!
I ignored my better instincts. I couldn't look at him while I spoke, though. The guilt had my eyes glued to the table.
“Okay, look, Edward,” I whispered. “Here's the thing...I've already gone crazy once. I know what my limits are. And I can't stand it if you leave me again.”
Oy gevalt. She's invoking New Moon – trying to make Edward feel as guilty as possible. We've seen Bella be manipulative before, but it was always somewhat unknowing. This is some next-level shit; Bella's dark side has become self aware.
Edward snorted. “She's making life exceedingly difficult for the rest of them.”
There's a girl in the boy's club! Cooties! Ahhhhh! This conversation, in which Edward defends everything male and Bella speaks up for the ladiez (for once), would be perfectly fine if it didn't end with Edward being right. Because Leah is being a shrew. Why does the one girl have to be “deliberately malicious,” S. Meyer? She's rubbing Sam's face in his mistakes daily, as well as constantly bringing up the fact that (due to multiple secrets clumsily explicated here by Edward rather than in any sort of plot action) Embry is a bastard who's real father might be the father of one of his wolf-brothers. Hey, that's helpful, Leah. Hey, that's helpful, S. Meyer.
Edward agrees that Leah has reason to be upset, and compares the imprinting phenomenon to A Midsummer Night's Dream. I could take this time to talk about how seeing the magic spells in Midsummer as real is actually a kind of reductive, surface reading of the text – that Shakespeare was simultaneously mocking the idea of ascribing things to “magic” and undermining that line of thinking every step of the way, which is maybe something S. Meyer should be doing instead of insisting that imprinting is the be-all and end-all. But let's not do that and say we did.
Edward was right – this was exactly like a soap opera.
SHOW DON'T TELL, Bella. They leave this conversation before Leah can actually be redeemed; Bella tacitly agrees that she's a bitch and moves on. Okay, well, that was a troubling and sexist moment, but maybe we can move on and forget about it. Right, guys? Right? Bella starts insisting she be in the clearing, and when that doesn't work she tries something else. Uh oh.
It wasn't so much that I had to be in the clearing. I just had to be where Edward was.
Cruel, I accused myself. Selfish, selfish, selfish! Don't do it!
I ignored my better instincts. I couldn't look at him while I spoke, though. The guilt had my eyes glued to the table.
“Okay, look, Edward,” I whispered. “Here's the thing...I've already gone crazy once. I know what my limits are. And I can't stand it if you leave me again.”
Oy gevalt. She's invoking New Moon – trying to make Edward feel as guilty as possible. We've seen Bella be manipulative before, but it was always somewhat unknowing. This is some next-level shit; Bella's dark side has become self aware.
What is going on, S. Meyer? The women in this chapter are behaving so admirably! We even have Embry's mom cheating on her husband back there for texture and shading! Is it any wonder that Alice only appears over the phone? She had the good sense to stay away from this shit.
2 comments:
i LOATHE this recurring, fully unexamined aspect of bella's personality.
i think the part that i loathe the most about it is how common this behavior is already in real life women, and how this is just reinforcing that behavior in a whole new generation of manipulative female pieces of shit.
i'm not a very critical reader, in general. i kind of just shove books in my eyes as fast as possible, and i have to really force myself to pay attention and think things through while i'm reading most of the time.
one of the games i make myself play is to keep a list of positive and negative personality traits in characters. and one of the things i notice is the balance between how many of the negatives are referred to explicitly and addressed, and how many remain just THERE.
rereading harry potter, all the characters have well-defined personalities and the same lame traits keep popping up, but the has the sense and talent to show the cost of those traits. it's not like "oh, yeah, sometimes ron is a total dickhead but then it's okay." or "harry has a bad temper and says awful, hateful things to people he loves but whatever. it's cool." they do things that suck and bad things happen as a direct result. i prefer to have my authors agreeing that, yes, these are undesirable traits.
so, all throughout the twilight books, bella has been manipulating the crap out of literally every dude. mike newton, her dad, jacob, edward, all of them get full blasts of her vagina mind voodoo powers. and it's never really mentioned. stephenie meyers never has any of the characters take her to task.
so to have THIS be the first time this trait is explicitly referred to, and to have her be like, 'yikes! oh well. go for it!' makes me SO annoyed. it's like stephenie meyers giving this behavior a pass. "bellas gonna bella, you know?" WHAT?? NO. NOOOO. NO.
that is all.
"That's life in New England, I suppose – people talk too fast so the new talkers have an extra handicap."
I'm sure you mean "hand-me-cap"
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