Is it possible to have an original thought about Twilight?
Twenty years after its first release, Claudia Harvey reviews Twilight—and has her feminism confronted by the complexity of the fantasy teen romance genre.
Twilight. A generation-defining, teen vampire romance. The saga passed me by in its heyday. Too young for it during the original release; too cool for it during its persevering popularity; too old for it during its renaissance—these are all fallacies I spun during a tween-and-teen-hood spent allergic to the Zeitgeist, frightened of enjoying the fodder of mainstream media.
When I was at the 2025 World Scout Moot (an international scout camp for grown-ups—how I ever thought I was too cool for anything is a mystery), I befriended a Welsh aeronautical engineer/regular pub trivia champion. She radiated intelligence. She also confessed to reading not much else besides Twilight. Like the scent of Bella’s blood and the sparkle of Edward’s skin, the novels have an aura she cannot resist. Perhaps Twilight deserved a look in? Maybe, with the sand finally settled on the Edward vs Jacob debate, it was time to kick up the settled sand and get coughing and choking on the discourse?
A vision from a dream, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight asks the question: Can there be romantic love between predator and prey? Meyer writes on her website, “In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately.”
I’ll admit, I did not initially give Twilight credit for its thematic explorations. I sidled up to the first chapter, scoffed, and journeyed into Forks with the whimsy of a budget auditor, clipboard and red pen in hand. Attuned to the clichés of hapless heroines and their stoic, strapping heroes, the annotations of my first read-through lament clunky writing and misogyny—both the frank and internalised kind:
“To be perfectly honest, she’ll be unavailable every night, as far as anyone besides myself is concerned.” – Possessive. Asshole.
“I fell down a lot.” – Has her clumsiness been explained? Like, medically?
“Obviously, there would be no further discussion.” – There can be further discussion if you keep talking, ya know. STAND UP.
“Just the same, I’ll feel better when you have some sugar and food in you.” – Ugh, so caring. A man who encourages eating. Spare me.
“It fit him snugly, emphasizing how muscular his chest was.” – Please.
I rolled my eyes at the self-insert narrative of the waifish introvert inexplicably ensnaring the school’s most handsome enigma. But how can one really rail against this pop culture freight train? It’s hardly fair to accuse the millions of Twihards of being stupid.
“I didn’t relate well to people my age,” Bella narrates, “Maybe the truth was that I didn’t relate well to people, period ... Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain.”
This appeals to anyone who has ever felt misunderstood, which is everyone. When we can never know if our experience of consciousness is the same as others’, an all-consuming love seems a nice escape from our isolation. Finding someone completely devoted to us is an understandable fantasy, because, alas, it is impossible. When Bella wonders if there’s “a glitch” in her brain, her relatability confirms that neither she nor the reader who relates to her has anything wrong with them.
When Bella says, “I couldn’t stop the gloom that engulfed me as I realized I didn’t know how long I would have to wait before I saw him again,” it was easy for me to see this as lame, pathetic behaviour—I’ve never been in love. But have I ever imagined a beautiful man being hopelessly into me? Why, yes. I’ve had that thought already about four times just this morning.
Also, Bella is a teenager. Bella is obsessed with a boy/vampire, which is more easily cast as tragic. When I was a teenager and in the throes of an obsession with a television show, I would genuinely have to shake myself out of a funk when my to-do list prevented me from watching another episode. Always on my mind was: when, please, god, can I get back to my beloved!
The dream upon which Twilight is based is faithfully depicted in Chapter 13, ‘Confessions’. In it, both Bella and Edward admit to finding each other intoxicating. Edward’s skin is dazzling, and he’s promising not to hurt her despite how much he lusts for her blood. Bella is scared and mesmerised. On the precipice of fatal danger, they transgress reality toward the thrilling, excruciating passion of an impossible love, together.
To have once considered this problematic, and not a 21st-century iteration of the Gothic Sublime, makes me feel like a failure of a literature student. Fantasies of submission—succumbing to the magnetic tug of chaos, answering the call of the void—these are not psychological problems; they’re common imaginings. It seems the patronising pearl-clutchers, decrying Twilight for sullying the minds and integrity of young women, forgot that Twilight is not a high school how-to guide. It's a novel. Stephanie Meyer said herself, “I never stop and think, ‘Oh, this is a role model for people.’ It’s fiction.”
Neither does Meyer believe Bella is a “negative example of empowerment.” For Meyer, the “foundation of feminism” is freedom of choice. But in The Guardian in 2010, David Cox accused this of “imply[ing] anything a woman does is a feminist act.” Baffled by the film adaptation’s box office domination, he said, “Women are using their regained power over the picture house to trash their hard-won independence.”
What Cox contrarily implies here is that anything a woman does ought to be a feminist act. I don’t want to suggest that fictitious texts don’t influence society, but scrutinising every fem-focused narrative for a feminist bent, lest it be deemed evidence of women’s desire for their own oppression, is exhausting and unfair. Equating a vampire fantasy with a failure of feminism is exhausting and unfair.
I’m ashamed that I was only convinced to give Twilight the time of day by an obviously smart adult woman. As vehemently as I disagree with critics like Cox, I’m only just now clawing my way out of the hole down which we’d all fallen: Those silly young ladies don’t know what’s good for them!
Romance is a genre typically written for women, by women. The hero is not man, but manifestation: women’s masculinity realised within the safety of fiction. As YouTuber Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints points out, discomfiting fantasies, such as the tortured vampire boyfriend, “are an expression of something turbulent within us ... The reader is not dominated by Edward. She is Edward.”
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