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Popular Culture Review
It was just a dream, I reminded myself again. Just a
dream.. .but also my worst nightmare. {New Moon 1)
For an eighteen year old to have this fear of aging is ludicrous and
troubling. Yet for Bella, who has the ideal vampire beauty to compare herself to,
aging is a concern. While there are no “impending wrinkles” on her “ivory skin”
now, she fears that soon she will resemble her appearance in the nightmare and
be “ancient, creased, and withered” (6). Her fear of looking “ancient, creased,
and withered” reflects her deeper concerns that as she ages, her value will
decrease because Edward will no longer love and desire her. The “impending
wrinkles” on her skin she worries about not only symbolize a decline in beauty,
but also a decline in value. That she will become “ancient” implies that she will
be of no use to the eternal vampires who suggest a continuity of life. Eventually,
she will be “withered” and have no aesthetic appeal. Naomi Wolf comments on
the relationship between beauty and social value in her book The Beauty Myth:
How Images o f Beauty Are Used Against Women, saying that “without ‘beauty’”
women slide “into nothingness and disintegration;” similarly, Bella feels that
“without ‘beauty’” she too will descend into “nothingness and disintegration”
because Edward will not be attracted to her (230). Bella understands that “to
someone in the know” about the immortal vampires, growing old does not
conform to the “devastatingly, inhumanly, beautiful” ideal the vampires embody
{Twilight 19). She feels that staying human, aging, will endanger her future with
Edward because Edward will not be attracted to her as her looks fade. As she
says, “If I could be sure of the future I wanted, sure that I would get to spend
forever with Edward, and Alice and the rest of the Cullens (preferably not as a
wrinkled old lady) . . . then a year or two one direction or the other wouldn’t
matter to me so much. But Edward was dead set against any future that changed
me. Any future that made me like him—that made me immortal, too” {New
Moon 10). Being human and aging do not ensure a future; it ensures losing value
in society as an old woman. Being a vampire means having a future and more
importantly, value.
Bella’s yearning to become a vampire implies a desire to be beautiful and
have value. Her desire for the unnatural vampire beauty can be compared to
women who choose cosmetic surgery not only to enhance their physical
appearance, but also to enhance their lifestyles by increasing their self-value.
Wolf states that “Women choose surgery when we are convinced we cannot be
who we really are without it [...] Women’s fears of loss of identity are
legitimate. We ‘choose’ a little death over what is portrayed as an unlivable life,
we ‘choose’ to die a bit in order to be bom again” (258-59). Bella chooses to
become a vampire because she can not live without Edward just as women
choose surgery because they feel they cannot be themselves without it. Bella
chooses “a little death” so as to avoid “an unlivable life” without Edward. To
live without Edward, just as to live without surgery, would mean a loss of
identity for Bella. She reflects on this idea when Edward temporarily leaves her
in New Moon, “It was depressing to realize that I wasn’t the heroine anymore.