Touched by a Vampire (9 page)

1. Do you identify with certain characters in the Twilight Saga in the ways they live their lives as male and female?
   

2. How do characters in the books perpetuate gender stereotypes? How do they challenge those stereotypes?
   

3. How can stereotypes cause harm? Have you seen this in your life or in the life of a friend?
   

4. The concept of sin making it difficult to see what God intends for us is an important one. Brainstorm a list of things we tend to believe are “natural.” Are they really natural? Do they reflect God’s will as we see it in His Word?
   

5. How do you think about living as created male or female? How can we glorify God as girls and boys, men and women?
   

Baseball and Loyalty

E
DWARD’S PERFECT FAMILY
, the opposite of her own, is a large part of Bella’s love for him. Her family is broken. His family is loyal. Her family lets her down. His family would die to rescue her. The beautiful, eternal family of vampires stands in stark contrast to the ordinariness and weakness of Bella’s parents, and she comes to cherish her relationship with them almost as much as she cherishes Edward.

It seems obvious that family is important to Christians. How, then, should Christians think through the different messages about family found in the Twilight Saga?

Family in the Twilight world reflects the truth about family in
the real world in one simple way: Family disappoints us. This is certainly the case when we think about Bella’s family. Bella, like so many of us, is a child of divorce. Her mother isn’t particularly reliable, while her father is rarely in touch. So Bella learns to rely on herself.

Before she meets Edward and his family, Bella is essentially alone in the world. She has no sisters or brothers. For all practical purposes, she is without parents.

Her mother, Renee, is kindly enough, but she isn’t there for her daughter. She wants to travel with her new husband, and Bella moves in with her dad in the town of Forks in order to give her mother the freedom to do so. Thus Bella is alone at a vulnerable time. She is maturing, leaving girlhood behind and edging toward being a woman. At this crucial moment in her life, her mother effectively abandons her. Bella routinely hides things from her mother and treats her like an incompetent child. She can’t count on her mother to provide protection or a listening ear.

Bella’s father, Charlie, cares about his daughter, but he is inept and disappointing. Charlie spends most of his time away from the house. Just like with her mom, Bella takes the parental role in her relationship with him. When she moves in with him, Bella takes over the household cooking and duties. She competently whips up delicious dinners and makes sure both she and her father are well cared for. When he expresses concern about her, she tries to smooth over his worries and avoids serious conversations with him about sex.

Bella describes her new life with her dad as “like having my own place.”
¹
She enjoys this independence, but we get hints that even self-reliant Bella sometimes longs for more from her parents. When her dad shows concern for her, she tells us that her “throat suddenly felt tight. I wasn’t used to being taken care of, and Charlie’s unspoken concern caught me by surprise.”
²
She’s very self-reliant, but she’s still touched when her dad reaches out to her.

Bella sometimes can’t and sometimes won’t rely on her parents for the things children, even nearly grown children, rightly rely on their parents for. In many ways, her parents are physically and emotionally absent, but she doesn’t nurse bitterness against them. Instead, she treats them like the well-meaning and largely incompetent people they are.

They don’t protect her. They can’t. How can human parents protect a daughter from werewolves and vampires?

At every turn, though, Bella tries to protect them. One of her deepest worries about her involvement with Edward is that it will bring danger to her parents. When James tries to murder Bella, he lures Bella to him by threatening her mother. She willingly steps into danger for her mom’s sake. When Bella becomes a vampire, she’s afraid of hurting Charlie. She asks her new family to protect him.

As readers, we relate to Bella. We relate because all of our families are disappointing. Parents fail to be consistent. They show their human weaknesses. Children fail to love their parents. All families make mistakes.

Some families are far more terrible than Bella’s. Some parents grip their children so tightly that their control becomes oppressive. Much, much worse, some parents are abusive, emotionally or physically. Such families betray their children in the worst possible ways by injuring what they are supposed to protect, harming what they are supposed to nurture.

It’s also the case that many families are much less disappointing than Bella’s. Some readers of this book will think,
Hey, I have a fantastic family. They’re there for me. We really love each other
. But even the most loving families disappoint. Even the most nurturing families are still, well, human. Parents are weak, ordinary people, and all of us, as we grow up, see the weakness and ordinariness in our parents in ways we might not have noticed in the second grade.

It makes sense that we identify with Bella’s need for self-reliance. It also makes sense that we identify with her attraction to the Cullen family.

Edward’s family appears in sparkling contrast to the shortcomings of Bella’s own parents. His parents, Carlisle and Esme, are
kind, wise, and caring. Unlike her broken family, they’re also
together
. While Bella’s parents divorced, Carlisle and Esme are knit together for eternity.

Carlisle is the “father” of this vampire family because he changed most of them into vampires. In the books, though, Meyer goes to great lengths to show that Carlisle’s decision to transform them into vampires was not made lightly. He changed them only at moments when their deaths seemed otherwise certain. Vampire life, for almost all vampires besides the Cullens, is portrayed in the books as lonely and selfish. The Cullens are set apart from other vampires by their connection to and care for one another.

Edward also comes to Bella with a slew of gorgeous siblings—Rosalie and Emmett, Jasper and Alice. Not only are they beautiful; they’re also great fun (wild game of baseball on a stormy night, anyone?). It’s also nice that Alice’s ability to predict the stock market provides them with more money than they could ever need.

The Cullens are fiercely loyal to one another. Meyer portrays their family relationship with a great deal of charm. The siblings support each other but also playfully tease each other. These vegetarian vampires are willing to die for one another without missing a beat. They’re incredibly gifted, and they’re immortal. The precious bond they have will never be broken. Here, in so many ways, is the ideal family—the family Bella never had.

Bella’s grief over losing Edward dominates the story in
New Moon
. It’s important that this grief is not for Edward alone. Bella feels like she has died because “it had been more than just losing the truest of true loves, as if that were not enough to kill anyone. It was also losing a whole future, a whole family—the whole life that I’d chosen.”
³
So much of Bella’s attraction to Edward is tied up with her attraction to his family. Despite her self-reliance, she longs to be part of this close-knit group. Once they see what she means to Edward, the Cullens adopt Bella unreservedly. They shower her with warmth and consideration, with gifts and parties. She becomes one of them.

At the end of
Breaking Dawn
, it is their unique bond as a family that saves the Cullens from the massive threat posed by the Volturi. The bonds of family in this universe run deep and strong. They are unbreakable. As the Cullens prepare for their showdown with the Volturi, they are motivated by the desire to save their family. They work tirelessly to keep one another safe.

Bella’s gift as a “shield” makes her impervious to attacks from other vampires’ powers. Edward cannot read her thoughts, and the torturing Volturi cannot throw her to the ground in pain. This gift, though, becomes most valuable when Bella learns to extend it. She learns to cast her shield outward so that it protects those she loves. The shield is most important
when it becomes a shield of defense, not for only Bella, but also for her family.

Think about the difference between the red-eyed Volturi and the golden-eyed Cullens. It isn’t only that one group is immoral and the other moral, one wicked and the other good. Neither is it simply that one group lives in violence, without mercy, sustained by cold-blooded murder while the other is bonded together by their “vegetarian” choice to live in peace.

No, the key difference between the two groups is that one is a coven while the other is a
family
.

In many ways, the Cullen family reflects the hopes of the author’s Mormon faith. For Mormons,
eternal hope
is linked with family. Mormons believe that the family unit will last for all of eternity.

There is a crucial difference between this belief and the usual Christian expectation that we will know and be reunited with people we love in the kingdom of God. For Mormons, the family structure remains the basic unit of eternity. Salvation happens in, through, and for families. Eternal life is family life, continuous with family life as it is known here and now. People become holy through a good family life. A Mormon marriage is believed to be for both time (this life) and eternity (forever). This is the reason Mormons are interested in studying
their family trees. Mormon families want to find out who among their ancestors didn’t know about the Mormon faith. They provide baptism for these dead family members in the hope of strengthening their eternal families.

Families aren’t important just for eternal hope though. Hope for Mormons
in this life
is also pinned on the family. Family life is supposed to provide everything Bella doesn’t get from Charlie and Renee—stability, protection, and happiness. The Mormon family is supposed to be moral and affect society for the better. God is understood to bless faithful families.

The Mormon church distributes free literature printed with rosy, glowing images of family life. Beautiful and happy children gather around tables filled with food. Mom and Dad are together, smiling, generous, and kind. Everyone is smartly dressed, neatly brushed, attractive. Family members touch each other affectionately, casually. The pictures show families that are the opposite of the disappointment we all have known in our own families.

When we think about family in Twilight, then, two very different things are going on. On one side, Meyer captures the fragility of real human families. Our families are ordinary, weak, and disappointing. As we get older, we often realize this in new ways, ways difficult for us to accept. We realize, like Bella, that the families we grew up in can’t protect us from everything or meet all our needs.

On the other side, Meyer offers a glittering image of a family that won’t disappoint. The Cullens are a family in which happiness and togetherness can be realized, a family that can “save” Bella from her mortal life.

How should Christians think about these two images of family? Let’s begin with the weakness of our ordinary families. Even if we try to act otherwise, we all know that families are flawed. What do we do with those flaws? How do we live with them?

We get a hint from Scripture when Paul talks about weakness. When he wrote to the church in the city of Corinth, Paul wanted folks to see that God’s view of weak and ordinary things is not always what we might expect. In 1 Corinthians 1:27–29, Paul lets his readers know: “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.”