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Popular Culture Review
Other than her penchant for self-sacrifice and the capacity to
attract the attention of boys, Bella isn’t really anyone special.
She has no identifiable interests or talents; she is incompetent
in the face of almost every challenge. She is the locus of
exaggerated stereotypically feminine incapacities and selfloathing. She has no sense of direction or balance. She is
prone to get bruises and scrapes just in the process of moving
from one place to another and doesn’t even trust herself to
explore a tide pool without falling in. When she needs
something done, especially mechanical, she finds a boy to do
it and watches him. (133)
Typically, men watch women, objectifying the female in viewing them as a
solely sexual object. In Twilight, however, Bella takes on the gaze through her
first person narrative where she constantly watches Edward. While this might
appear empowering to have a female character assume the gaze, it is not. Mann
cites feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s argument about the masculine
gaze, saying that “when the young girl internalizes and assumes the masculine
gaze, de Beauvoir said, she takes up a perspective on herself as prey. As in the
fairy tales, she becomes ‘an idol,’ a ‘fascinating treasure,’ ‘a marvelous fetish,’
sought after by men” (136).
The Twilight series does have a fairy-tale like quality with Bella as a
damsel-in-distress. Like a fairy-tale, Bella has a handsome prince to fantasize
about. In particular, Bella is fascinated by Edward’s physical appearance which
is similar to the other vampires in the series. The vampires’ physical beauty is so
stressed that it is the first characteristic the narrator Bella observes:
I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all
devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you
never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages
of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face
of an angel. It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful
- maybe the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-haired boy.
{Twilight 19)
The comparison to “airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine” and a painted
“face of an angel” elevates the vampire beauty to a humanly unachievable ideal
Bella compares herself to. Just as the pictures in fashion magazines are
airbrushed to eliminate any flaws, the vampires have no aesthetic flaws as well.
That the vampires appear “so different” and yet also “so similar” implies that
while each one has their own individual beauty, this creates a uniform beauty
among the group.
The beautiful vampires are the products of the vampire transformation,
where their imperfect human body is turned into a “perfect” vampire one.
Instead of blood being the cause of the transformation, it is vampire venom