It took me almost a week to get down to writing about this chapter, but I'm glad I took a break to do a few other things on here. I read and reviewed a scary piece of fanfiction that better illuminated a lot of the cultural problems we've observed over the last few weeks, and then Justin Bieber spoke up about abortion and we were really off to the races. Plus, we all got Valentine's Day wishes from the Cullen clan. And how often does that happen? It sure beats this boring bullshit, anyway.
Carlisle and Rosalie go upstairs to get some blood for Bella, and Jacob chuckles morbidly at the “house-of-horrors” stuff he might later encounter: “Torture chamber? Coffin room?” God, I hope so. Meanwhile, Edward and Bella are staring meaningfully into one another's eyes. Any kind of flowery window-dressing Bella might have forced us to endure during this is absent; I've never been more grateful to have Jacob as our narrator. He thinks back to Leah and resolves to “never blame her again.” What is going on here? We keep coming back to this. Why? Whither Leah? Later Bella makes a big deal out of her joining the wolfpack, but like every other time she comes up, it doesn't amount to anything. Is Jacob going to start dating her? Will he imprint on her somehow, like maybe he hasn't “really” seen her yet? Maybe Jacob has been wearing sunglasses this whole time!
There's a kind of wacky gag when Rosalie blows past them into the kitchen to, as it turns out, grab a cup for the blood. No one can see her, but Edward very quietly tells her not to use the clear one she's picked out. Why dirty a cup though? I mean, isn't the blood in a bag? Pop a straw in that fucker, elementary school-style!
So S. Meyer really tries to sell the gross out factor here, which is fine even though blood-drinking in a vampire novel should really be par for the course. Jacob's heightened senses let him smell the blood and hear it “sloshing” around in the cup, and there are multiple moments where people think Bella is as disgusted by the task ahead of her as Jacob is and we are supposed to be (but aren't really). But she loves it; she moans quietly after her first sip (the first real sensual pleasure our poor girl has ever had, I bet), downs the rest of it, and asks for more.
I've been praising the way S. Meyer uses her various mind-reading characters to toy with narration, and there is more great stuff here. Bella, while drinking the blood, asks Edward if this screws with her “total,” meaning the number of people she will likely kill as a newborn. This happens:
“No one is counting, Bella. In any case, no one died for this.” He smiled a lifeless smile. “Your record is still clean.”
They'd lost me.
“I'll explain later,” Edward said, so low the words were just a breath.
“What?” Bella whispered.
“Just talking to myself,” he lied smoothly.
If he succeeded with this, if Bella lived, Edward wasn't going to be able to get away with so much when her senses were as sharp as his. He'd have to work on the honesty thing.
Edward's lips twitched, fighting a smile.
Totally awesome. I mean that. Bella feels guilty about being so enamored of blood-drinking, and Rosalie comforts her while Jacob fights the urge to gag. He's also fighting fatigue, which Bella notices and offers Jacob the use of one of the beds. Rosalie balks, and Jacob wonders what they would need beds for anyway. For SEX, obviously! For once, that's what S. Meyer seems to imply. Well, she doesn't imply anything at all, Jacob's statement is just left hanging there, probably because Alice is not in the room. (Where the hell has Alice been, by the way?) But much like those line breaks that indicated sex earlier in this book, I'm taking lack of explanation to indicate sex here. Sex is happening in every margin. (That's where Alice is!)
Despite the praise I just gave Jacob's narration a few lines ago, I do wish we were back in Bella's head for this moment. When you think about it in the abstract, this scene is important: Bella is drinking blood for this first time! This is, as she says, her “first vampire act.” And yet it feels/reads as totally inconsequential. We only know what Jacob is thinking and this isn't important to him. But it's important to Bella and it's important to us.
What's important to Jacob is this bullshit wolfpack garbage, and guess what? There's more of it. But it's also important to note that as Bella absentmindedly sucks down her blood (like Nancy Botwin with an iced latte) Jacob/S. Meyer lapses into the present tense. This happens at least once a book, and this is hardly the worst example. But it's still pretty unforgivable.
“Carlisle, just look at her,” Rosalie murmured, so smug she should have canary feathers on her lips. “This is obviously what her body wants.”
There's just a "had" missing, but still. C'mon! Anyway, Jacob goes outside and hears a warning howl. He phases so fast that he destroys his last pair of shorts, ladiezzzzz. He gets word that a couple of wolves are approaching the perimeter. Oh no what does this meahiiads,a.fhasdk.backhsadfskaf;sdg. Sorry, I fell asleep again for a second there. Jacob, Seth, and Leah converge, and they're all panicky because they can't hear the thoughts of the incoming wolves. ("You don't know what you got till it's gone!"-Joni Mitchell, Janet Jackson, Counting Crows guy, slave owners) It's Jared and Quil and some other people, and Jared is in human form so he can talk. He tells Jacob he's overreacting, that he's broken their family apart, and that now Sam Uley is feeling more moderate. Jacob suspects that Sam is actually just betting that Bella will die anyway, and that Jacob will come around when that happens.
"That's a decent strategy!"-Jasper Whitlock
Anyway, Jared wants Jacob to return to human form, and there's a weird, long section about how he doesn't want to do it because he'd be naked in front of Leah. Jacob goes on to tell us that he's seen Leah naked before, since she's pretty volatile and she-hulks on a regular basis, and that it isn't that she's not “worth looking at” but that it's not worth getting caught thinking about later. My god, my heart goes out to Leah. It's bad enough having to endure Jacob's lust directed at someone else, let alone myself! Leah tells Jacob she's seen him before too, and it doesn't do much for her.
Of course, as always it doesn't really seem like S. Meyer is using any of this to make a grand point about the wolfpack and sexism, she's just writing about naked bodies. Naked ethnic bodies, in fact! If this middle section of the book mostly shows us the inadvertent tragedy of Leah, the other thing it does is show us the weird places S. Meyer's sexuality goes when she boxes it in like she has so far. I don't think it is crazy to read the gothic gore and other strange subtopics of Book 2 as the effect of S. Meyer denying us and herself the release (pardon the expression) of an actual sex scene or two in Book 1. People say America is a violent country because we are sexually repressed. Twilight has become this abrupt body horror story because all that sexually energy James Franco saw in it that was just building and building never built toward anything. All of that pressure had to go somewhere, and in the next few chapters we will see where it goes, where the steam escapes.
Meantime, Jacob sends Leah off to check the perimeter and switches to human form so he can chat; there's more come home dude blah blah blah. It gets interesting when Jared starts getting manipulative with Seth and Leah (when she returns), invoking Seth's mother to try and coax him back to the Rez and saying this to Leah:
“Sam told me to beg. He told me to literally get down on my knees if I have to. He wants you home, Lee-lee, where you belong.”
That's a real dick move, Sam. Luckily Leah just growls, and Jared's final gambit is to make a bizarre tribal appeal to Jacob. “We'll stick to our land,” he says. “But where is YOUR land, Jacob?” Oh no, he has no land! Obviously that doesn't do it either, and we end on another bland, ambiguous note. Something has to happen sooner or later, right?
Anyway, Jared wants Jacob to return to human form, and there's a weird, long section about how he doesn't want to do it because he'd be naked in front of Leah. Jacob goes on to tell us that he's seen Leah naked before, since she's pretty volatile and she-hulks on a regular basis, and that it isn't that she's not “worth looking at” but that it's not worth getting caught thinking about later. My god, my heart goes out to Leah. It's bad enough having to endure Jacob's lust directed at someone else, let alone myself! Leah tells Jacob she's seen him before too, and it doesn't do much for her.
Of course, as always it doesn't really seem like S. Meyer is using any of this to make a grand point about the wolfpack and sexism, she's just writing about naked bodies. Naked ethnic bodies, in fact! If this middle section of the book mostly shows us the inadvertent tragedy of Leah, the other thing it does is show us the weird places S. Meyer's sexuality goes when she boxes it in like she has so far. I don't think it is crazy to read the gothic gore and other strange subtopics of Book 2 as the effect of S. Meyer denying us and herself the release (pardon the expression) of an actual sex scene or two in Book 1. People say America is a violent country because we are sexually repressed. Twilight has become this abrupt body horror story because all that sexually energy James Franco saw in it that was just building and building never built toward anything. All of that pressure had to go somewhere, and in the next few chapters we will see where it goes, where the steam escapes.
Meantime, Jacob sends Leah off to check the perimeter and switches to human form so he can chat; there's more come home dude blah blah blah. It gets interesting when Jared starts getting manipulative with Seth and Leah (when she returns), invoking Seth's mother to try and coax him back to the Rez and saying this to Leah:
“Sam told me to beg. He told me to literally get down on my knees if I have to. He wants you home, Lee-lee, where you belong.”
That's a real dick move, Sam. Luckily Leah just growls, and Jared's final gambit is to make a bizarre tribal appeal to Jacob. “We'll stick to our land,” he says. “But where is YOUR land, Jacob?” Oh no, he has no land! Obviously that doesn't do it either, and we end on another bland, ambiguous note. Something has to happen sooner or later, right?
2 comments:
I GUESS so, something should happen sooner or later....
Meh. These chapters are so boring I can't even think up a suitably scathing remark, even though there's plenty of fodder (Sexism against Leah/Rosalie, manipulation,and implied pedophilia which I am always going to imagine exists as long as Quil is still alive).
This book is like a whole bunch of crazy packed together, followed by long bouts of nothing, then more crazy, then nothing except Meyers thinks it's crazy.
You're right, though. Thank god we don't have to listen to Bella through this part. Kudos to Meyer for changing narrators.
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