He's perfect in the sense that the mass audience - primarily adolescent girls - decided he was a "Hunk", and therefore could be marketed as one. IF the person fit the visual description perfectly, acted perfectly, except had very little physical appeal to the adolescent girls, he most certainly would not have been accepted.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seraphina
In truth, the books try, it would seem, to sell sex, yet at the same time, to sell religion. So in truth, we can interpret them, on a scale, to hypersexualize female identity, which isn't really a bad thing, in the sense that it is natural, and a form of feminist resistance to certain forms of Victorian patriarchy, yet at the same time, to subvert the female as following the whim of the powerful, hunky, male, and ultimately denying a real sexual identity until marriage, at which point, the bildungsroman, and the sexual awakening in the earlier books, it would seem, would revert back to a place of mother/wife, instead of lover/adolescent. In a sense, Edward it would seem is the archetypal romance novel hero, in the sense that he is a) powerful (perhaps a substitution for the usual "rich"), b) good looking, c) goes after the virgin, d) waits for marriage, and e) still enforces himself in a dominating position within the relationship. Edward is the provider and the muscle - he is in control, and ultimately, he is fulfilling a pretty mediocre fantasy which does nothing. Of course, the bulk of readers here aren't naive 14 year olds, so they ultimately see passed this sort of anti-feminist, highly religious dupe (which seems to try and override everything in the past 50 years the mothers of such readers struggled for) yet for the average reader, whose shelf consists of The Potters, Twilight, Stephen King, and some Sabrina the Teenage Witch books (those were the pulp in my day, I don't know what young girls read in terms of junk fiction today, as it seems to change as quickly as pop celebrities), I think there may be a problem, in terms of context. The books are highly politicized, as almost all books are highly political, except these ones, from my perspective, serve a rather harmful political cause, and ultimately aim to "reinstate" certain values meanwhile silencing others, and doing nothing to empower, or even educate properly these young readers. Keep in mind, the goal of the text ultimately is to serve as a morality tale, except the morality is so out of whack that it's almost ridiculous.
It's a shame really. The late 80s and 90s young adult novels had so much potential; one likes to think of Tamora Pierce, Monica Hughes, Judy Blume, Mercedes Lackey, amongst others. It seems now though, that instead of just banning books that offer a sense of progression, they started writing and promoting them. In essence, Meyer's publishers most definitely read into the contexts and politics of the book - I'm sure almost every publisher writing for that age group, if they are doing a mass printing will do so - and really, it must have been planned, well out in advance, that this would be the voice of the new Young Female, in the sense that Hillary Duff, and then this new Hannah Montana were planned, planted, promoted, and sold, and eventually will be killed all by their publicists.
In essence, Twilight is the Narnia of America, though aimed at an age bracket 2-3 years older (probably because Lewis' readership could read better, though perhaps not tackle mature themes). The religious elements seem, instead of being Catholic/European to instead be the political elements that dominate concepts of religion in the states; Abortion, feminism, pre-marital sex, the family/marriage, and ultimately teen relationships, and the lives of the youth, as they are, in culture and in the book, perceived by a conservative audience as both a) innocent angels who can be corrupted, and b) contradictorily as demonic misfits who have degraded from their previous generations because of the influence of sex, drugs, and liberalism, and education.
