Mirror. Mirror: Gender and Beauty in the
Twilight Series
In Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular Twilight series (2005-2008), Bella
Swan and Edward Cullen are in love. The problem is that Bella is a human and
Edward is a vampire who thirsts for her blood. Rather than giving into this
hunger, Edward controls himself so that he and Bella can be together; in doing
so, he represents a domesticated, or self-controlled, vampire. Domesticity does
not only apply to vampires in the Twilight series; instead, Meyer confines
females, particularly Bella, to traditional female roles. In doing so, the series
represents an overwhelming backlash against the struggle of feminism. The
change in vampire bodies throughout vampire texts marks a change in attitudes
towards women’s bodies, from the sexually repressed female of the Victorian
era seen in Dracula and Carmilla to empowered, contemporary females shown
in modem works such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet in Twilight, the female
is not shown as empowered, but rather a regressive figure akin to the Victorian
ideal of womanhood, creating a backlash against the empowered feminist ideal.
Bella Swan, the main character of the Twilight series, symbolizes that
backlash. Unlike Buffy whose heroine is a strong, empowered f V