Sunday, March 13, 2011

BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 24: My My My Heart Like A Kick Drum


Previously: Bella returned to power, Ashley Greene's Skateland got delayed again, and an overzealous blogger tried to censor YA fiction.

Chapter 19 (cont'd): Burning

Bella is still recounting the experience of giving birth. It's all pain and blindness until she hears Edward say “Renesmee” and feels a “flood of warmth” for her daughter. Not to burst your bubble, that may just be the blood gushing out of the gaping hole in your body, Bella. Anyway, we get our first real description of Renesmee, and she sounds terrifying. [Now that we're no longer dealing with wolf-pack hive-minds, I'm reverting to setting block quotes off in italics.]

Renesmee did not cry, but she breathed in quick, startled pants. Her eyes were open, her expression so shocked it was almost funny. The little, perfectly round head was covered in a thick layer of matted, bloody curls...
Her tiny face was so absolutely perfect that it stunned me. She was even more beautiful than her father.


How many levels of impossible-to-attain beauty are we going to go through in this book? Edward is just so hot it's unbelievable. So is Rosalie. And now this fucking thing is even better. (Despite the blood-matted hair and everything, I guess. Or maybe because of it?) And then what? We need to peel S. Meyer's rhetoric off the ceiling a little. When you start at the top, you've got nowhere to go except to build a new top. And then another new top, and then another.
At the moment when Bella's heart stops, her description of the sensation of dying is a curiously secular one. It's a flood of blackness and nothingness. She considers giving in, “To let the blackness push me down, down, to a place where there was no pain and no weariness and no worry and no fear.” DO IT. GIVE IN! But seriously, where is the light and the smiling face of Jesus?

But Bella is motivated to live by the knowledge that her husband is too much of a wimp to go on without her. “And a world without Edward seemed completely pointless,” she says. Even if you're just going to plunge into all-consuming nothingness? I get that now that they are a married couple this whole submersion-of-the-self thing is kind of good, but it still isn't, really. Bella still feels no self-worth whatsoever, and since the majority of the readership of Twilight does not know anything about the realities of marriage, all of that self-sacrifice doesn't come at them packaged in the right context. It's just the same old worthless Bella, who S. Meyer apparently intended to be a stand-in for her worthless readers.

I wish Bella would feel better about herself and her own importance. That she is a married and devoted wife only masks the self-esteem problems she already had (and if shit ever goes south with Edward you KNOW she's just going to marry that Henry Francis asshole). That said, she continues to suck at metaphors.

I wasn't Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn't shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.

Bella is metaphorically pushing back a metaphorical weight, which she then metaphorically compares to a planet while metaphorically comparing herself to Atlas. Metaphors within metaphors! God, I missed you, Bella. There's some psycho-analysis to boot, when she recognizes a pattern in her life: She's never been able to do anything other than endure; she can put up with pain and suffering, but she has no agency. TELL ME ABOUT IT. Is that going to be her power, then? Super endurance? How rough is she going to need the vampire sex to be?

Bella holds back “the blackness of nonexistence by inches.” (The Blackness of Nonexistence is Alice and Jasper's old band's name.) Is she still Atlas, at this point? How literal are these inches? In pure Bella fashion, she proceeds to literally talk herself out of dying. She can't pull Edward's or Jacob's or Alice's face into view, and wonders if this is the end.

No! I had to survive this. Edward was depending on me. Jacob. Charlie Alice Rosalie Carlisle Renee Esme...
Renesmee.


Well, when you name your kid a combination of other people's names, at least it's pretty easy to remember! Renee ranks below Carlisle, by the way? Anyway, then this happens:

Like phantom limbs, I imagined I could feel my arms again. And in them, something small and hard and very, very warm.

JACOB WHAT ARE YOU DOING oh wait it's the baby. Or it is for a second. Then the spot of heat gets warmer, and spreads throughout her body. She's in hell! Or maybe it's the venom. Yeah, it's the venom. It's important (ish) for later to know that Bella's heart starts up again somewhere in here, but it's not really clear when.

There's another pseudo-scientific section in which Bella recalls conversations with Edward and Carlisle in which they plan on giving her lots of morphine before the vamping in order to prevent the usual excruciating pain. Bella realizes she can't scream or move her body and concludes that the morphine Edward's given her has only accidentally paralyzed her. Well Dr. Swan, I didn't realize you'd graduated from medical school already! What an astute analysis! Ten points for Gryffindor! Bella somewhat entertainingly begs for death for a few pages and is DENIED. At some point her spine heals, which brings the pain to the lower half of her body. I'd make jokes about burning sensations below Bella's waist, but we're all better than that.

Bella continues to fry, and eventually she starts getting off on it. Okay, not quite: “Though the fire did not decrease one tiny degree—in fact, I began to develop a new capacity for experiencing it, a new sensitivity to appreciate, separately, each blistering tongue of flame that licked [wait for it!] through my veins.” Kinky! Alice and Bella are going to have so much in common when she gets through this. As she regains movement, Bella also regains the self-control to keep herself from thrashing on her (un)death bed. “It felt like I'd gone from being tied to the stake as I burned to gripping that stake to hold myself to the fire.” Keep gripping that stake, girl! Don't let go!

S. Meyer is doing a pretty good job of this, right? Again: we're NOT getting a REAL sex scene, so the pressure is being let off, gradually, in different ways. Okay, yeah, the bloodbath a chapter ago was definitely most of the uh, release, but this is like the after shocks, you know? We're seeing an honest-to-goodness vampire transformation, which we've only heard tell of until now. The details are great here, and there's just the right amount of 'em. It feels like it takes a while without getting too boring.

In the second half of the chapter, as the transformation gets to spin cycle or something, Bella becomes more conscious of her surroundings. But she can't quite actually speak, because she's trying to keep herself from freaking out. Instead she just observes the comings and goings of the Cullens. Now, everyone else is presumably aware that Jacob has imprinted on Renesmee, at this point, yes? I guess what I'm saying is, he's dead, right? Surely they've murdered him?

Edward comes in and talks to Carlisle over Bella's body. He is (of course) wracked with guilt over the pain he is presumably putting her through. Because half of Carlisle's lines are unspoken thoughts Edward is “hearing,” they manage to talk about the Jacob situation without Bella getting wise. And the good doctor finds it real amusing!

“An interesting situation,” Carlisle responded. “And I thought I'd seen just about everything.”

You haven't seen child molesters before, Carlisle? Didn't you work at the vampire Vatican? Or is theirs not like ours? Carlisle leaves and later Bella hears a different, “rhythmic” set of footsteps. It's been a while since we've heard about how Alice is like a dancer, huh? Anyway, Alice pops and locks into the room. She informs Edward that she can “see” Bella more clearly now that she's a vampire.

“I see vampires best, because I am one; I see humans okay, because I was one. But I can't see these odd half-breeds at all because they're nothing I've experienced. Bah!”

Well, that's a new one! If only S. Meyer had planned any of this shit in advance, she could have had a nice clean explanation for Alice's powers like this one a thousand pages ago! WHOOPS. Alice starts gushing over how hot Bella looks (natch):

“She's going to be dazzling.”
Edward growled quietly. “She always has been.”
Alice snorted. “You know what I mean.
Look at her.”

Look who is appreciating you right now, Bella. What's Edward doing? Stressing out and growling quietly. Now that you've got eternity stretching out before you, look at your life! Look at your choices! When Alice electric slides out of the room Bella can hear her clothing moving against her body (hot) as well as the light buzzing and the wind blowing outside. “I could hear EVERYTHING,” Bella says.

I'm on board with the heightened senses and the superpowers, but, gay vibes aside, I feel kind of awful about how we're soon going to hear about how Bella is mega-hot now. Giving girls complexes by putting pretty girls on magazine covers is one thing, but this is some next level shit. This is like one of those photoshop abortions where they give the model LITERALLY unattainable dimensions. And super powers to boot. The message of Twilight is, in essence: hey ugly girls! Don't worry, because someday a man who is literally a magical creature will come along and love you for YOU, but he'll make you a super foxy magical creature anyway, in the end! YAY! Giving Bella that low self-esteem in maybe a misguided attempt to appeal to these sorts of girls only makes it worse.

Eventually, the fire starts leaving Bella's appendages but doubles down on her heart. She basically has a huge heart attack. Cool! It beats so fast that she says it's nearly a “single, sustained note.”

The fire constricted, concentrating inside that one remaining human organ with a final, unbearable surge. The surge was answered by a deep, hollow-sounding thud. My heart stuttered twice, and then thudded quietly again just once more.

Bella's heart was really the villain of this series, wasn't it? It dragged us into this Edward thing in the first place, then ping-ponged between Jacob and Edward for an agonizingly long time. It betrayed Bella on the issue of marriage, and then betrayed us when it suddenly fell in love with Bella's unborn baby. Now, finally, ding-dong, the witch is dead. So good riddance, Bella's heart!

4 comments:

Emma said...

I can't remember at what point in the book this shows up, or whether it's in the faq's, but Renesmee's middle name is Carlie, a mixture of Carlisle and Charlie. Smeyer obviously was having a fun name mixing time that day!
There is a lot of how Bella is mega hot now, but there's even more about how great being a vampire is. "I can see everything now. I can hear everything now. I'm so strong! Look at me, I'm so hot you puny portals should worship me. Humans suck. I even love better than you! Yay!"
That's basically the gist. In short, she becomes the biggest MarySue in all of human history. And it's so annoying.

Kim said...

I feel like Meyer's thesis is "Humans suck, Vampires are awesome, too bad for the rest of you" only not in a cool way.

The vampire Vatican is different. It only eats the kids, not molests them. Not that we really know what is going on with Jane and those old dudes...

Anonymous said...

please mind the spoilers... some people haven't reached that part of the book yet...

Kira said...

you guys, anonymous hasn't gotten to that part of this wildly popular book that is years and years old and is a huge part of popular culture, so don't ruin any of the surprises.

i mean, talk about the books, sure, but just don't tell what happens (?) until absolutely everyone in the entire world has read it, okay?