Breaking Dawn or Broken Down?

The fantasy novel, and particularly the vampire novel, has become an incredibly popular genre especially among teenage audiences. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter was a world wide phenomenon, and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire remains a popular read. More recently, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga captured the attention of these teenage audiences. There is even a movie made from the first novel and there is another on the way this winter. The Twilight Saga is a quartet of books about a teenage girl, named Bella, who moves to the small, drizzly town of Forks in Washington State. On her first day at the new school, Bella is enthralled by a lunch table full of inhumanly beautiful students and one boy in particular. The boy who catches her eye is Edward, and the two soon fall madly in love. The catch is that Edward and his “family” are actually a coven of vampires who gave up drinking human blood so that they could coexist peacefully with humans. Instead they subsist on animal blood, and pose as humans, the younger ones going to school while the older two vampires, Carlisle and Esme, pose as their adoptive parents. Edward learns to overcome the temptation of Bella’s blood and to reign in his superhuman strength and speed around her. As the story progresses, we also find out that Bella’s best friend, Jacob Black, and his friends are actually a pack of werewolves.
The series was never going to be literary gold, but it had its charms. That is, until Breaking Dawn, the fourth (and hopefully final book) came out in August 2008. When eager fans finally got their hands on the long awaited book, many were simply stunned. Many critics trashed the book. Reese from Entertainment Weekly says that, “Meyer takes her supernatural love story several bizarre steps too far.” Hand from The Washington Post calls it “frankly, dreadful,” saying that “Meyer’s prose seldom rises above the serviceable... like reading a young teenage girl's blog.” The defense against criticisms like this is that this is, after all, just a teen novel. Vikas Turakhia, a reviewer for The Plain Dealer and a teacher at Copley High School, gives Breaking Dawn a lukewarm review, endorsing it for teens but not for adults. He claims that “teenage girls will devour these pages,” but that he is left “craving a more substantial meal.” This seems like a backward attitude for a high school teacher. Why should a full grown, fully educated mind need a more substantial meal than a growing, developing teen mind? Isn’t it just as important for children and teens to have access to sophisticated, well written literature?
Teens need books that are well thought out, developed, and insightful, not just fun and exciting. Breaking Dawn was none of these things, and while adults were happily labeling it ‘just a teen novel’ the teens were making up their own minds. On Teen Book Review, an online forum where teens and young adults can review and discuss books, many young teenage girls express disappointment with the book. Jocelyn says, “now that I’ve finished I don’t feel like I’ve gained anything,” while Nessa posts that, “it feels like something was left out.” Clearly these girls are left just as dissatisfied as Mr.Turakhia. The problem is that Breaking Dawn reads like a rough draft. There are too many contradictions in the plot, the characters are flat and unrealistic, and the explanations offered for events, when any are offered at all, are ludicrous.
Readers have trouble getting into the book because the numerous contradictions make the events rather hard to swallow. In the first three books of the series, Meyer builds a fantastical world with only a few hard and fast rules. In Breaking Dawn Meyer throws each and every one of these rules out the window. For example, Bella’s most important characteristic is that she is as unwavering and self-sacrificing in love as a fairytale damsel aught to be. Because of her love of Edward, Bella decides to become an immortal vampire so that she can spend an eternity with him. The issue of Bella’s potential immortality is a major focus of the last three of the four novels. It is painted as a huge sacrifice, not just because it is a painful experience, but because of what Bella will have to give up. She will never grow older, or be able to have children. She will never be able see her family or friends again, since it is forbidden for humans to know about vampire’s existence. If her family guessed the truth about Bella’s sudden, dramatic changes the Volturi, the Vampire Royalty, would kill them. In fact, Bella will probably have to spend her first few years as a vampire in isolation until she can control her thirst for human blood. Even after she has adapted, it is said that being around humans will still be a painful temptation. Most terrible of all to Bella, is the idea that she will never again be able to see her best friend. Jacob, the werewolf who has always been in love with Bella, is the sworn enemy of all vampires. He is so repulsed by the idea of Bella becoming a vampire that he and his pack threaten to declare war on the Cullen’s Coven if they go through with it. When it comes down to it though, all the consequences that make Bella’s choice a sacrifice completely disappear. Before she is turned, Bella inexplicably becomes pregnant with Edward’s child. After a gruesome pregnancy, Bella gives birth to a semi-mortal vampire baby named Renesmee. To the surprise of the other vampires, after Bella is changed, she does not have that much trouble fighting off the temptation of human blood. She adapts almost immediately, and no definite explanation is given for this. Bella’s father remains part of Bella’s life, with the stipulation that he not ask too many questions. Even Jacob, who was so violently opposed to Bella’s transformation that he would rather she die in earnest than become a “bloodsucker,” sticks around. The explanation for this is perhaps more disturbing than if none had been given. Jacob imprints on the infant Renesmee. This means that the first moment he lays eyes on her, he becomes hopelessly devoted to her and that the two will eventually become lovers. As a result of this bond, which is somewhat common for werewolves, but still sacred to their kind, the pack will not declare war on the Cullen’s Coven. Meyer systematically negates Bella’s sacrifice and deconstructs the laws of her own world. This not only undermines the imaginative qualities of the book but it makes the book completely unbelievable.


Renesmee presents another extremely dramatic contradiction. Bella’s pregnancy is so ghastly and graphic that the audience is repulsed and sure that the baby will come out as the Anti-Christ. The scene in which Bella actually goes into labor, told from Jacob’s perspective, is positively horrific:
It was not just a scream, it was a blood-curdling shriek of agony. The
horrifying sound cut off with a gurgle, and her eyes rolled back into her
head. Her body twitched, arched in Rosalie’s arms, and then Bella
vomited a fountain of blood.
This is just one of many violent and macabre descriptions of Bella’s terrifying pregnancy. However, once the baby is born all the characters fall instantly in love with her. When they mention her it is with “almost religious devotion.” The reader is expected to be as in love with this baby as all the characters. All the normal baby cliché’s are applied. The newborn Renesmee is described as having her mother’s eyes, her father’s smile, and “the most beautiful face in the world.” While the character’s are all cooing over their new bundle of joy, the audience has trouble forgetting that this little angel drinks blood and had to be gnawed from its mother’s womb by her father. The contradiction is so dramatic that it is irreconcilable.
As purely fairytale stories, the first three books had their place, but Breaking Dawn departs from the fairytale. Meyer takes a stab at science-fiction and pokes her own eye out. She attempts to offer scientific explanations for events, when it would have been better to invent magical explanations. When Edward, the vampire, accidentally impregnates his human wife, Carlisle, a vampire and a doctor, explains that it is because vampires have twenty-five chromosomes rather than the ordinary twenty-three. Meyer does not seem to understand what most teenagers learn in biology class. While the audience can accept that it is magically possible for a vampire to impregnate a human, they know that it is scientifically impossible for a species with twenty-five chromosomes to reproduce with a species with twenty-three. Meyer’s nonsensical explanations make the book more confusing and muddled.
To give the die hard fans their due, the criticism for the Twilight Saga, and specifically the final book Breaking Dawn, is split. Meyer’s defenders, which mostly consist of parents and teachers, claim that Breaking Dawn “tempted the imagination” and is “an excellent read.” They point to the fact that the main characters practice abstinence until marriage, and claim that the series promotes good morals.
Twilight’s champions claim that Bella, the female protagonist of the series, is a responsible and relatable role model for teenage girls. This is an alarming idea. The book is surprisingly misogynistic for something authored by a woman and is completely devoid of positive, strong female examples. Bella’s mother is ditzy and irresponsible, needing her husband to take care of her. Alice, who as a vampire aught to be a physically strong and intelligent character, is small and delicate, dances instead of walks and is overly obsessed with fashion and clothing. Bella, like all the other female characters, is weak and shallow. Bella, from whose perspective the story is told, is a self-deprecating, unambitious, and submissive girl. She does not want to attend college and has no career goals what so ever. Her only ambition in life is to become a vampire, like Edward, and spend the rest of eternity with him. Bella constantly claims to be unworthy of Edward’s affection. She describes herself as “fragile” and “so accident-prone, so much the victim to my own dangerous bad luck, apparently I need a tank-resistant car to keep me safe.” (page8). Bella and Edward play out the damsel in distress and white knight drama ad nauseum. Edward’s main role in the story is to protect and rescue his danger prone lover. Bella herself notes that Edward is “Worrying, always worrying. How different would it be when he didn’t have to worry about me anymore? What would he do with all his free time?” (page 26). In fact, Edward’s protectiveness goes so far as to become obsessive and controlling. He never leaves her alone unless forced to by his need to hunt. Even then, he usually leaves Bella with his family, or with Jacob, so that they can protect her in his absence. He will not even kiss her too enthusiastically for fear of injuring her, which incidentally is the reason that they remain abstinent.
Throughout the story Bella is portrayed as helpless and childish. She is never held accountable for her own actions, because she lacks self control and cannot be expected to help herself. Even in their sexual relationship, Edward has to be the one to draw the lines. At the wedding in front of all the guests, Bella looses control when he kisses her:
He began the kiss, and he had to end it; I clung to him, ignoring the titters
and throat-clearing in the audience. Finally, his hands restrained my face
and he pulled back.
Even though Bella puts her own life in danger when she tempts Edward too much, she is incapable of the necessary restraint. When Bella loses her temper, Edward is the one who apologizes for it. Countless characters excuse Bella for various misbehaviors, by saying that she does not seem to be able to help herself. Bella merely accepts this, though sometimes she worries that it is unfair to Edward.
Bella is further stripped of her decision making abilities when she is portrayed as not knowing what is best for her or even knowing what she really wants. Bella is very against the idea of marriage, worrying to the point of making herself ill about what people will think. Edward has to cajole, bribe, and blackmail her into it, but when Bella actually makes it to the alter she is overjoyed. Once Edward has forced her to go through with it, she says, “I saw just how silly I’d been for fearing this.” This dynamic puts Edward in a fatherly position over Bella, and allows him to adopt a ‘for-her-own-good’ mentality. As a result, Bella holds little power to influence her own life or the plot, except as a “danger magnet” which she is frequently called. Bella, the supposed heroine of the story, is little more than a McGuffin, affecting the plot only by motivating other characters.

Bella is also physically diminished in comparison to the males in her life. Bella is constantly being carried and pushed around by the men in her life and she is frequently passed from one male character to another. For example, after the wedding Edward passes his bride off to Jacob: “Edward kept his grip under my elbow until another set of strong hands caught me in the darkness.” Elsewhere in the novel Bella usually appears with Edwards arm around her, sitting in his lap, or wrapped in his arms. The fact that Bella is rarely seen to stand on her own undermines her physical identity as an individual. Even though Bella describes her self as being of average height, the men are constantly towering over her. All the male characters are unusually large and strong necessitating that weak, little Bella be at their mercy. In the third book, when Jacob comes dangerously close to sexual assault, Bella is forced to defend herself. She tries to punch him, but only manages to break her own hand and Jacob barely even feels it. In Breaking Dawn Bella is forced to seek help from her sisters-in-law and mother-in-law, to prevent her husband and father-in-law forcing an abortion onto her.

Furthermore, Bella is completely unbelievable and unrelatable because, she does not develop as a character. Her identity is made up of such insubstantial things that everything that the reader identifies as Bella disappears when she is transformed. Immortality comes with, by Meyers’ own definition, stunning beauty, paleness, intelligence, impeccable grace and physical prowess. Bella, having been defined by her clumsiness, weakness, aptitude for getting herself into danger, and blushing frequently from embarrassment, disappears. She is no longer clumsy or weak, she now has the heightened senses to avoid danger, and can no longer blush since she no longer has blood pumping through her veins. What are we left with? Bella’s entire identity now becomes Edward’s wife and Renesmee’s mother. Is this the message we want young girls to take away from the books they read? Sacrifice your identity for your love, submit to your husband, and rely completely on the men because they are stronger, smarter, and more capable than you?
Stephanie Meyer single handedly took the genre of the teen novel back several centuries to the gothic novel, which was considered to be nothing but unsophisticated, sensationalist women’s entertainment. It is unfair to excuse Breaking Dawn by calling it a mere teen book, when other author’s have done such amazing things in the genre. Is it fair to explain away Meyer’s half baked scientific explanations when Madeleine L'Engle brings us the fourth dimension and the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time? Can we really hold up Bella Swan, the wilting violet, as a teenage girl’s role model when Tamora Pierce brings us Alanna in The Song of the Lioness and Alianne in Trickster’s Choice? (Kirkus Review’s calls Alianne a, “fully formed, a snarky, talented uber-heroine…[who’s] difficulty with the complexity of colonialism adds surprising, welcome depth.”) Bella pales in comparison to a sixteen year old girl who manages to incite a rebellion and overthrow an oppressive empire, while struggling with enslavement, grief, racial politics, and her first love. Rather than writing off the genre, teachers and parents aught to be praising authors who take teen novels seriously and speaking out against authors who produce empty, thoughtless books for mass consumption.

Works Cited
Hand, Elizabeth. “Love Bites: The final book in a mega-selling series sucks the romance out of teen vampires.” Washington Post. 10 Aug. 2008: BW07.

Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Meyer, Stephanie. Breaking Dawn. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

Pierce, Tamora. Trickster’s Choice. New York: Random House, Inc., 2003.

Reese, Jennifer. “Breaking Dawn (2008) Stephanie Meyer.” Entertainment Weekly. 8 Aug. 2008.

“Review: Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer.” Teen Book Review. 3 Aug. 2008.
< http://teenbookreview.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/review-breaking-dawn-by-stephenie- meyer/>

Turakhia, Vikas. “Book Review: Vampire Series Finale ‘Breaking Dawn’ Ties Up Loose Ends.” The Plain Dealer Aug. 2008.