Jesus, it's the wedding day already? I have to say, structure-wise, this is unexpected. If anyone had held me down two weeks ago and forced me to guess what would happen in Breaking Dawn, I'd probably have predicted that the Volturi or someone else would get in the way right before Bella and Edward's wedding. And then the Cullens would have to fix the problem while also trying to get the wedding happening on time, so as not to arouse suspicion. I'd have given you something remarkably similar to the plot of The Hangover, in other words. But that is not going to happen! They're getting married right now! S. Meyer really wants to get to the fucking!Part 1: Vampire Blues
Part 2: Old Soul Song
Part 3: Planned Parenthood
Chapter 3: Big Day
Bella wakes up and kicks herself for having a weird fertility nightmare the night before her wedding. Show don't tell, Bella. Trying to shake these zipper blues, she makes Charlie some pancakes. Both of them are fidgety and grumbling about the day ahead of them: Charlie has to wait around and obsess about the fact that Edward will be fucking his daughter soon, Bella has to spend the day in Alice's bathroom. Bella got the better deal. There's all kinds of great Bella/Alice stuff to take out of context in this chapter by the way, starting here:
“Alice will be working on me all day long.”
Alice shows up then, hair “smoothed into sleek pin curls around her pixie face,” and drags Bella from the house. Charlie's all like, “Pop-pop doesn't get a treat?” as they bail. Alice starts bitching out Bella for the bags under her eyes; she's really throwing herself in to this sister-in-law thing already I guess. Alice says Bella will be able to sleep on the plane tomorrow, and Bella realizes wherever she and Edward are going, it will require a plane ride that will start tonight and continue into the following day. Edward is trying to buy as much time as possible before he has to have sex, huh? Or are they going to join the Mile High Club their first time out? I'd be impressed. Hell, Alice would be impressed.
“Damn, why'd I have to lose my virginity before the advent of commercial air travel?”-Alice Cullen
Alice says she's packed Bella's bags for her already, and that it's time for Bella to get over her “aversion” to new clothes. “I'm going to burn that fucking khaki skirt the moment you're out of town,” she says. As they pull into the Cullen driveway, Bella sees that Alice has re-used the “twinkle lights” from the graduation party. (Hey S. Meyer – that seems kind of out-of-step with Alice's character! Doesn't she never wear the same outfit twice?) She puts her hands over Bella's eyes (hot) as she guides her into the house; Bella's not allowed to see the décor yet. Clearly there is going to be some wedding porn in this chapter; Bella identifies several different flowers by smell. I'm not going to list the kinds here, because I have a penis. Also: that's some nose you got there, Bella!
In Alice's bathroom, she's got all of her “paraphernalia of a beauty salon” out on the counter (so I guess she put the usual paraphernalia away) and Bella sits there while she “masked, buffed, and polished every surface of my body.” Every surface of her body? Rosalie turns up and shocks Bella with her enthusiasm; she braids Bella's hair per Alice's instruction. Another great out-of-context line:
Alice moved back to my face.
We hear that Jasper has been dispatched to pick up Bella's mother and Phil at their hotel. Um, that doesn't seem like the smartest idea, does it? Trusting Jasper with that responsibility? Suddenly I'm stressed out. Alice leaves to go get dressed (she doesn't get undressed in front of Bella, which is disappointing and surprising) and returns in a silvery thing that S. Meyer fails to describe any further. I'm just going to assume it is primarily made of body paint. Also: hey, what does Bella's wedding dress even look like? The only sense we get is that it is old. Renee comes in after Alice and gushes over it: “You look like you just stepped out of an Austen movie.” An Austen... movie? Not an Austen... book? (The Algonquin Round Table at Renee and Phil's house is more like the Algonquin Pool Table.) A quick IMDB search reveals that one of the visual effects supervisors in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is named Emily Austen, but I can't imagine that's what she means. It's possible, though. Anyway, if this is all I have to go on, I'm picturing Bella's wedding dress as like, an antique bureau or something like that. Like Alice has spent the whole day rubbing her with furniture polish.
Renee is excited about the wedding; we learn that she's been in town for two days and Bella's been hanging out with her as much as she can. So we skipped two whole days? Again: note how quickly S. Meyer seems to want to get to this. And in two pages, note how quickly she seems to want to get it over with. She's in such a rush that she stops making sense altogether for a minute:
My mother's voice sounded a little distance away, and everything in the room was slightly blurry. “Such a creative idea, designing a theme around Bella's ring. So romantic! To think it's been in Edward's family since the eighteen hundreds!”
Alice and I exchanged a brief conspiratorial look. My mom was off on the dress style by more than a hundred years. The wedding wasn't actually centered around the ring, but around Edward himself.
What? Also: what? Grammatically, it sounds like Bella's mom is referring to the year of the ring, not the dress. And when Bella says “off by a hundred years,” which direction does she mean? Is the ring or dress from the 1900s like Edward? That would, you know, make sense. But it doesn't explain Bella's turn of phrase. When we're making a big deal about the old time-y nature of the dress/ring/groom, and someone overestimates the age of it, you don't exchange a brief conspiratorial look. You say, “no, it's not that old.” I'm half-worried that S. Meyer is trying to suggest the dress/ring is from the seventeen hundreds. Was she paying attention when she wrote that Edward was born in 1901? Does she think 1901 was in 1776?
Charlie comes in then, and he and Renee have a gift for Bella: two “hair combs” that used to belong to her grandmother, with two sapphires newly installed. Something old and something blue, see? I can see how if you were looking forward to Edward and Bella's wedding, you'd enjoy this kind of stuff. But for the rest of us, this happens:
“That's something old and something blue,” Alice mused, taking a few steps back to admire me. “And your dress is new... so here -“
She flicked something at me. I held my hands out automatically, and the filmy white garter landed in my palms.
“That's mine and I want it back,” Alice told me.
I blushed.
Ha! Thank you for that, Alice. Anyway, then suddenly the wedding is happening. Alice gives Bella a pep talk and then Charlie takes her arm and they follow Alice down the stairs to where Rosalie is playing the piano and everyone else is waiting. Bella is too busy blushing and being nervous to note much of the surroundings. That happens a lot, have you noticed? It sure must be nice having a narrator who isn't particularly observant. That way you don't have to worry about detail!
She catches sight of Edward, who breaks into a smile of “exultation” as she approaches. Charlie takes Bella's hand, and “in a symbol as old as the world” places it into Edwards. Well, it's a symbol as old as the civilized, western, patriarchal world. I guess there are certain religious types who think that is the same thing. We don't get the specifics of the vows (obviously – what, is S. Meyer going to do a Google search or something? No way!) but Bella says they got the minister to change “till death to us part” to “as long as we both shall live.” Heh. Bella realizes she's crying when she tries to say “I do.” Aw. They kiss, and Bella gets so absorbed in the kiss that the audience gets audibly uncomfortable. That's a cute (and rare) detail. (Cute Story: In my wedding pictures you can clearly see the pastor getting uncomfortable with the length of our kiss. He was a jackass, I'm glad we pissed him off. With our LOVE.)
And then it's over! S. Meyer rockets through the wedding stuff because, you know, we've got to get to the sex! Of course, if you got a good sense of where the last chapter was steering us, you'll realize that she's not eager to get to sex for sex's sake. Oh no. We've got to get to the sex so we can get the sex over with and then get to the consequences. That is all S. Meyer ever wanted out of this.
It's weird: all of Eclipse seemed to be a build up to this moment, and yet S. Meyer doesn't seem to relish it or all. She's all too eager to get past it. Why? Because now that we're here, the wedding has just become a plot device to get us to the next thing. That's fine until you remember how many other events we've blistered through in order to get to other plot points in order to get to this. Everything ultimately just becomes a plot device in the service of the next plot device. I feel like we're just plodding through every milestone in Bella's life, trying to get it over with. And here's the rub: she's going to live for-fucking-ever.
Thoughts?
4 comments:
I thought that S. Meyer had just made a blunder about what time period Jane Austen was from, but reading this I now see that she was just trying to set up Renee as being some dumb bitch that Bella thinks she's better than.
Renee WAS referring to the ring, which actually is from the 1800s, I guess, if Edward's parents were married when he was conceived. The other remarks are just to show how stupid Renee is and establish that the dress style is from the early 1900s, 100 years later than when Jane Austen's novels were published. The last sentence is just to throw in that Edward is the center of the universe, etc. The sentences could have just had numbers in front of them for how well they were strung together.
I also thought Alice was a total See You Next Tuesday (that doesn't work as well in print) in this chapter with the dressing and bossing of Bella. But I don't have the love for Alice that you do.
I totally acknowledge that Alice is being a cunt, I'm just saying Bella deserves it.
You really think that's what it is? That brief conspiratorial look really threw me off. It reads like a reaction to an underestimation, not an overestimation.
Sometimes I feel like S Meyer is an alien who only sort of got the gist of human interactions before she started writing.
The first and second times I've read this book (I decided to reread it to follow along with the blog...incredible, I know) I felt the same way, Zac. It's like, the first talk of getting married began at book 2 and here we are at book 4 and it's over just like that! Reading it the second time, knowing all the shit that I'm going to have to put up with, I'm sort of pissed S.Meyer didn't put a little more time into this wedding thing. I've earned it! Weddings are fun! Alice is fun! I'm imagining all of the fun, pretend-drunk shit Emmett and Jasper could have done, and I'm smiling already.
Plus, with all of the flowery, ridiculous bullshit that S.Meyer will waste words discussing, she couldn't bother with the vows? I feel like the vows could have been a great chance to get some insight into their relationship. What people say to each other when they get married is significant, and you'd think, given their unique situation, they'd want to say something unique to each other in front of the people who they're either never going to see again, or going to know for eternity. Guess not.
Also, I feel like S.Meyer just can't be bothered to really "write" Renee, so she just breezes in and out and we're just supposed to forget that Bella has a mother in all of our Edward-induced haze. Maybe it's just because I'm close with Mom, but I feel like if she's not going to take the time to make her a real character, have her skip the wedding.
I just realized I would have been waaay more interested if Renee had totally thrown a fucking fit about the wedding, citing Bella's age and unhealthy relationship with Edward, and refused to come to the event. What does Bella care? She's giving them up for eternity anyway! Jesus, S.Meyer, we should have talked back in 07 or whenever this thing was written.
If Meyer was a better writer I'd say she's trying to mimic the feeling you get when you're planning a wedding and it takes months and months to get there and there is so much stuff to do and then when the day gets there is goes by really quickly and you barely remember anything that happened.
I think Rosanne is right about the Austen/ring thing and Meyer is just trying to make Renee seem stupid. It's worse than usual writing, though. You shouldn't have to think through such a throwaway moment. It comes off as either Meyer not remembering how old Edward is or not being aware of when Austen was alive.
I do sort of liked that she had Rosalie help. You get the feeling that Rosalie likes to live vicariously through these moments since she's all whiny wannabe human. At least she is consistent.
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