I can't believe this fucking chapter. We're still wrapping up chapter 20, “Compromise,” which is both epic in length and in scope of potential outrage. Edward undoes any goodwill he might have earned so far in this book, first by being an untrusting, physically abusive nightmare boyfriend, and now by bringing back his arrogant theologian act from New Moon. We need Daniel Plainview to get in here and slap some sense into this guy. Or maybe do worse. Previous entries can be found in the directory.
Chapter 20 (cont'd): Compromise
Edward gets Bella to agree to get married before having sex, and she groans as she realizes she is “engaged.” Edward is positively giddy, and he slips into his gentle fucking cadences of an earlier fucking century, the prick. “Do you get the feeling that everything is backward?” he says. “Traditionally, shouldn't you be arguing my side, and I yours?” Traditionally? Didn't Edward, only a few hundred pages ago, paint a picture of a wonderful time when men courted women and asked for their hands? If here by “traditionally,” Edward means “the 1990s,” then sure. Otherwise this is a really inconsistent moment!
Bella tries one last time to get laid – she assures Edward she isn't going to trick him and run to Carlisle in the morning for vamping, as he so rudely suggested. “We're completely alone – how often does that happen?” she asks. “And you've provided this very large and comfortable bed...” See, I'd have mentioned the bed first and the solitude second, because the bed is kind of unimportant. They also have access to the back seat of a car, several couches, the floor. I worry that Bella and Edward are going to have an unimaginative sex life as it is, and I don't want them to get off on the wrong foot, so to speak.
But Edward still refuses, and Bella rightly suspects, as I did, that Edward's realpolitik bargaining is actually just a cover for something else. She makes a joke about herself being a villain, trying to “steal some poor girl's virtue,” and Edward's reaction gives him away. “You're trying to protect your virtue!” Bella says, laughing it up with the rest of us. Edward (and S. Meyer) are not laughing. And then we aren't anymore either.
“No, silly girl,” he muttered against my shoulder. “I'm trying to protect yours.”
Well, fuck you! Are you kidding me with this? Mind-bogglingly, Edward employ's Pascal's Wager to try and explain why they should refrain from pre-marital sex. Blaise Pascal was an early Christian theologian, a gambler, and a moron, who proposed that we all ought to believe in God because:
- God either exists or he doesn't
- You can either believe in God or not believe in God.
Therefore:
- If God doesn't exist and you believe, you gain nothing and lose nothing.
- If God doesn't exist and you don't believe, you gain nothing and lose nothing.
- If God does exist and you do believe, you gain everything and lose nothing.
- If God does exist and you don't believe, you gain nothing and lose everything.
“How many people in this room have a soul?” he asks Bella. “A shot at heaven, or whatever there is after this life?” (Somewhere, still hiking, Alice answers “zero.” But she's not here.) Literally every word out of Edward's mouth in this section is stupid. “Now, there's a world full of dissension about this, but the vast majority seem to think that there are rules that have to be followed,” he says. Is Edward running for Congress on the Republican ticket? “Thou shalt not kill is commonly accepted by most major belief systems,” he says (and yet he uses the Christian rendering of the phrase). “And I've killed a lot of people.” What's irritating about the people who advance this kind of argument is that they also tend to insist that one particular religion is correct, and they try to bolster that by citing similarities to other religions. What does it matter, if all of those people are wrong? Pointing out moral similarities between religious belief systems undermines those belief systems. The fact of the matter is, most religions say you shouldn't kill people because that is the conclusion most reasonable people would make anyway. What separates major religions is the batshit stuff! If you ate meat or wore a poly-cotton blend on Friday you're already screwed, Edward. It doesn't matter if you killed someone on Saturday. What religious people like Edward don't realize is that Don't Have Sex Before Marriage isn't Thou Shalt Not Kill. It's Don't Mix Two Kinds Of Cloth (Deuteronomy 22:11)!
Amazingly, Bella doesn't run screaming from Edward's room. Even when he suggests that even if he can't go to heaven, “I'll be damned – no pun intended – if I let them keep you out, too.” Bella rather rightly points out that hell is being somewhere without him. Didn't Sartre write something about that? No? It's a good thing Edward's wrong about everything though, because she still ends up going along with his plan to keep her in Jesus's good graces. They agree not to have sex until they get married. Suddenly Bella wants to get married soon. She could drive over to Mike Newton's house right now and scratch this itch. Doesn't she know that? Instead, she laments the thought of the gossip that will soon ping-pong around town when the news breaks. Unfortunately, we're back to rhetorical territory in which Edward is right. It doesn't matter what other people will think when you'll never see them again. Facebook doesn't count.
Bella mentally acknowledges the fact that part of the reason the thought of gossip bothers her is that she knows she would be one of the biggest gossips around if it were one of her friends in her place. That's a nice, painfully honest moment, even if it isn't supported by anything in Bella's character at all. When has she ever gossiped about anything? She's faked it on road trips with Jessica, and the only other time it ever comes up is in New Moon, when Alice is plying Bella for local gossip and she has nothing to say. But whatever, I'm still madder at Edward!
Speak of the devil, he mentions a ring, which it turns out is already in his possession. Of course it is. Bella refuses to see it, then sees that she's hurt Edward's feelings (good), and subsequently ends up begging for it. It once belonged to his mother – a fact that I would put under the psychological magnifying glass were it not for the fact that my wife's wedding ring once belonged to my mother. (She also wears a ring from my grandmother that has my grandmother's name on it in huge letters: "Effie." My wife is kind of weird.) Bella spends a while touching the box and then looks at the ring:
The face was a long oval, set with slanting rows of glittering round stones. The band was gold – delicate and narrow. The gold made a fragile web around the diamonds. I'd never seen anything like it.
Oh, right – I remember when this ring became available for sale in the run-up to the Eclipse film:
via Videogum
And then, as if S. Meyer is trying to bamboozle us like she just did Bella, Edward gets down on one knee and proposes. Oh, is this scene supposed to be romantic? BECAUSE IT ISN'T. How is Twilight supposed to pull off being such a Great Romance if the proposal scene is built on outrage after outrage? What the fuck is this book? You'd think that Bella's emotional reaction to Edward's proposal, despite her frustrations earlier in this chapter, would at least make me smile. We've spent a lot of time with these characters, and a milestone like this should work on me almost by default. I should almost involuntarily think Awwwww, look at them! Instead I just thought Good, this fucking chapter is finally over.
My parallel chapter for Compromise: "The Cullens Go Hiking"
3 comments:
That is one god awful ugly ring. Is he sure it's his mother's and not something he got in a quarter machine?
On that note, not that Meyer is great with the historical accuracies anyway, but it's highly doubtful his mother's ring would have been a diamond anyway. The time period his parents would have been married was well before diamonds became popular as engagement rings and given their assumed socio-economic class it's even more unlikely. My great-grandmother was married in 1899 and her engagement ring was silver and turquoise (and so cool. I got to wear it in my wedding and didn't want to give it back). Couldn't Meyer have imagined something actually cool and historical instead of ugly? Though, given her description of clothing, maybe not.
I DID NOT KNOW THAT! Interesting!
wtf does she even see in this guy? First I thought Edward waiting until marriage was a weird reversal of a "gotta buy the cow before you get the milk for free" ridiculousness." which is confusing enough.
But no! "silly girl I'm trying to protect your [virtue]" So her worth is tied up in her virginity? And Jesus won't let her into heaven if she's done it? That's not even doing religion any favors because it completely undermines Jesus' message of forgiveness.
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