Bella’s Not That Bad, Is She?
I have to tell you that I just consume YA fiction & film like it’s going out of fashion. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read Twilight. I was one of those who pre-ordered Harry Potter and then pounced on the postman as soon as he rang the doorbell. I saw The Hunger Games movie twice… within 24 hrs.
I find myself completely fascinated by the narratives that we are communicating to our young people – the messages both subtle and not-so-subtle. And one thing that I keep coming up against in conversations about YA fiction is whether Bella Swan from Twilight is a good role model for girls, or does she represent a backward step for feminism.
She often gets compared unfavourably to Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games trilogy – fiercely loyal warrior archeress. Or to Hermione Granger from Harry Potter – strong, capable, intelligent companion and aide. Bella (as we can see in the comparison joke above) comes off a very poor third in this particular trio of heroines – weak, submissive and fragile; she, the argument goes, is not who we want to our young women to emulate.
But is she really all that bad?
You see, there’s this tendency to take a snapshot, like the one above, and determine absolute character definitions. Instead of addressing the narrative arc, there’s a zeroing in on one or two aspects with the result being superficial stereotypes, rather than rich, full-bodied engagement with story and plot progression.
An example of this is from Ancient Greek myth. If we take Hera, for instance. When we think of Hera we think ‘vengeful, angry shrew married to Zeus’. That’s her pigeonhole and that, we believe, is where she belongs. But her story is so much more complex and so much more applicable to contemporary women.
Hera moves from being single, to losing herself in a relationship, to rediscovering her sense of self before re-entering her relationship as an equal. Yes, it’s a story of betrayal and vengeance. But it’s the betrayal of self which is ignored as we focus on the myth of epic bitch as passed down through patriarchy.
Continuing with Ancient Greek myth as a source of examples, Persephone offers an incredibly profound comparison to Bella Swan. Persephone, the maiden goddess abducted to the underworld, is a goddess whose story resonates with many women. So many of us can reflect back on a point in our lives when we stood upon the border between childhood and the big bad world. A fall from innocence, a sexual initiation, the discovery that life is not quite as it seems, the maiden veil removed from our eyes… yes, this goddess has much to teach us.
But, like Hera, Persephone suffers from stereotype. We look at how she behaves pre-fall and during her abduction into shadow, and we think her vulnerable, naive, pliant. Even weak, submissive, fragile… a bit like Bella, in other words!
Persephone’s path takes her from maiden to sovereign woman – queen of her own domain and with the power to defend her boundaries, maintain balance and guide the lost and lonely. When we engage with her full story, however, we discover something much richer, much more empowering. When we limit our engagement to one small section of the narrative, we do both ourselves and Persephone a disservice.
And we do the same to Bella. We compress her character into a box, and then we judge that box deciding that her narrative is less worthy than the boxes we’ve created for other heroines.
The full narrative arc, however, tells a different story as she moves from willing submissive to a woman willing to fight for those she loves. Symbolically linked to the white queen chess piece that adorns the cover of Breaking Dawn, Bella ultimately achieves sovereignty – something that is generally overlooked by her less favorable critics.
So, to answer the question I posed in my title, I don’t find it helpful to characterise aspects of self as good or bad. All of these stories highlight parts of us, and when we refuse to integrate them, they tend to play out in obstructive or destructive ways. It’s perhaps more helpful to ask what is it about Bella’s stereotype that we simultaneously fear and desire – the two main drives in the success of popular fiction.
I’m not interested in vilifying or apologising for the stories that a culture chooses to tell itself. What I am interested in is moving beyond stereotype and into the much richer, much more valuable realm of archetype. Whole stories – not just the snippets which are twisted to fit agendas. Developing compassion rather than antagonism for these mirrors of self is infinitely more compelling. And a hell of a lot more interesting!
So what do you think? Is Bella as bad as all that? What do you think about the stories we are telling our young women through fiction and film?
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10 Comments
Maartje
Hmm, tricky.
Up front: I don’t like Bella. But NOT because when the love of her life left her, she curled up in a fetal position, wnet numb for months and then jumped off a cliff. That seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do for someone who’s battled lifelong depression and has just suffered a very tangible loss, and stories about protagonists suffering from a mood disorder are definitely stories that need to be told more.
And I do think Bella reads like a character suffering from depression – she has no hobbies besides reading the same three classics over and over and listening to the same cd over and over, doesn’t have a good word or thought about herself (she hates herself) or anyone in her life (she’s snarky in her head even about the people she says are her friends), has had to ‘parent’ her irresponsible mother for YEARS sacrifices her own happiness (being in the sun) without a second thought when she thinks her mother needs her to, uses people as pawns (pairing off the boys who fancy her with her ‘friends,’ mostly so they’ll leave her alone), ends up living with a father with the emotional vocabulary of a cucumber (who is no help) and tolerates all sorts of creepy stalkery controlling stuff from Edward, just because he’s hot. Sure, the fact that she finds a backbone and sticks to the only gun she CAN stick to (“I will have this child even if it kills me, even when all of you are pushing me to cave in to your demands yet again!”) is a positive character development for her, but only because she starts out in a deep hole. Oh yeah, and she ends up immortal and superwealthy and with a baby that raises itself, so of course she’ll feel better than before.
The problem with Bella is, while her story seems to be about a girl who suffers lifelong depression and finally finds a way out of that and even flourishes by taking advantage of her (admittedly controlling and stakerish) boyfriend’s family’s special powers, the author wants us to belive it’s a story about a relatively normal girl who falls in the kind of epic love we should all be so lucky to find. Not only does she think Bella is someone everyone can project themselves on, she thinks that Edward is 100% perfection. (I’d be willing to put up with a lot to gain that kind of immortality, but she never frames it as a choice between two evils like that.) So I think the author is wrong about what kind of book she has written, and pitches us the ‘wrong’ archetypal frame to put the story in. Judging Bella on what she says and does, she’s no more a ‘bad’ character than, say, the protagonist of The Bell Jar, who I also sympathised with tremendously but found annoying to read about. (I’m not sure whether my own history with teenage depression made me sympathetic or annoyed – maybe both.)
(I hadn’t seen that gif with Katniss in it. I know the one with Leia (caption “When the love of Leia’s life was encased in carbonite by Boba Fett and Darth Vader and taken to Jabba the Hutt, she disguised herself as a bounty hunter and rescued him”) where Leia is contrasted to both Bella and Hermione as the ‘true’ herione by taking action to GET her man instead of just muddling through with sad eyebrows like the other two girls. I don’t think Katniss is a good pick for this lineup. I adore the Hunger Games, but Katniss doesn’t care for anyone except Prim. Gale is not the love of her life, Peeta definitely isn’t the love of her life (what with the emotional manipulation and government blackmail forcing them together – she might’ve come to love him on her own, but they took that chance from her), and she spends most of the second and third books being used as a pawn and figurehead and not knowing what’s going on. Peeta would’ve been a nicer choice for the gif, since he really likes Katniss.)
Amy
Maartje – thank you so much for your response! I’m intending to do another post on The Hunger Games – that series just fascinated me.
I’m intrigued by what you mean about Meyer being ‘wrong’ and that we’re being pitched the ‘wrong’ archetypal framework. What would be the right one? And is there perhaps a more neutral position that we can take here?
To quote Rumi, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.” If we were to meet in that field along with Bella, Katniss et al. I think so much wisdom would become available to us regarding femininity and the gender construction of contemporary women.
Maartje
I think with ‘wrong’ I mean dissonant. Bella is said to be not-very-pretty yet very loving, while every man trips over himself to woo her (i.e. very pretty) and she is constantly putting everyone down in her thoughts (i.e. not very loving). Edward is sold as very loving and an excellent partner, while he constantly violates Bella’s boundaries and drags her places by the scruff of her neck, doesn’t seem to like her very much (he asks her about what movies she likes, f’rex, yet never inquires into what she loves about them; he sounds more like he’s filling out a checklist than fascinated with her), berates her for not telling him her every thought (while not sharing many of his thoughts with HER), doesn’t negotiate about things that are important to her and even breaks into her room at night – i.e. not really great partner material as-is.
And none of this would disqualify Twilight for me as a story. I like complicated personalities, problems and people making mistakes. But these things are all not acknowledged as problems in text, and hardly ever dealt with head-on (Bella blames herself for Edward having to overrule her boundaries, Bella loves it that he imperiously beckons her in the cafeteria and cross-examines her to get a list of favourite movies, Bella loves it when she finds out he watches her sleep, Bella hates him when he doesn’t want to have sex before they’re married but the text puts BELLA as being in the wrong, IMO). I think for the powerful love story to work, I need Edward to be much less domineering. Sure, sometimes he saves her by vampire awesomeness and he can’t just go about telling the vampire story to everyone, but other times he’s just being an ass and admired for it. It would be nicer for me if Bella was written as a slightly happier/more well-rounded person (would’ve made the true conflict of the story better, too – as it stands, she hardly has a life to give up when she becomes a vampire; would’ve been interesting if she had strong family ties and great friends and a happy daylight life), but as I said, I don’t mind stories about sad people.
And another way not to ring false to me is to keep Edward as he is, but make him grow. Make him learn. Make him apologise. Make Bella put him in his place when he’s being controlling. Make family and friends be concerned when they notice how Edward treats her, and have her take these warnings seriously, even if she can’t yet act on them. Of course, I wouldn’t mind if this took a while, because Bella has a ways to grow before she can do this, but I’d like someone to acknowledge these things.
So, dissonance. It’s a complicated story with flawed people cast as a simple love story between wonderful people.
OTOH, hordes of people seem to like it just fine, so it’s not WRONG in that sense. :p
Katherine Tymchuck
I completely agree with this. This was much better written than I could have expressed but it is exactly how I felt… That the real issues and problems between Bella and Edward were never addressed. They only ever addressed her friendship with Jacob (and his love for her). This conflict was not truly resolved as Jacob just runs away when he does not get Bella. Again, Jacob is made out to be far better than he deserves as well. When he has major anger issues and literally runs away from his problems. Bella is forced to just accept the life others chose for her instead of growing and being about to fight and choose her own. Edward can happily accept that he won Bella as Jacob is literally out of the picture.
On a side note the author is quite out of touch with teenage boys as all of her sexual jokes and blonde jokes given in the text are lacking… A true teenage boy has a much more colorful and cruder sense of humor. The jokes should be more subtle and far more suggestive. This bothered me a lot.
Joanna Paterson
I haven’t read the books, so I don’t know, but I like it when you write this kind of stuff Dr Palko 🙂
Amy
Aw, thank you, darling – haven’t written anything like this in ages, but this particular topic has been on my mind for so long. Finally, I’ve let it free!
Megan Potter
My guilty confession: I loved the Twilight books and I can admit to being a little frustrated/flustered by all the lambasting that Bella gets, because the books were enjoyable. And yes there are other messages but that’s not the fullness of the story. (I love your proposal Maartje that she has depression – can totally see that and I think the movie tried to convey that too.)
What fascinates me most about this is that Meyer’s other book, The Host, is a stunning story and one I believe to be a true allegory for life and how to be human. And yet no one knows about it. They’re all too busy bashing Bella and Meyer for writing her. Someday I wish I could sit down with Stephanie and talk to her about how she feels about all this stuff and how she understood Bella…
Which is my long way of saying: Thank you. Thank you for asking us to reframe the popular opinion and to consider the fullness of her journey. We all start somewhere, some of us even as lost, submissive Bella’s. It’s all a question of where we end up!
Megan
Amy
Oh I love The Host. And yes, I think it does raise some really important questions about humanity, which is exactly what really good science fiction should do!
And I totally love what you say here, Megan, about how we all start somewhere. I felt very lost as a teenager. I had no idea about who I was, what I wanted, or what my next step forward would be. And I don’t think I’m alone in that!
One of the main criticisms that I’ve read about Bella is that she’s vacuous – an empty vessel, in a way. She has no strong sense of self and so she makes it easy for readers to identify not *with* her, but *through* her… if that makes sense. But there are many many people both old and young who struggle to express their identity. And it’s this journey in particular that I find so compelling…
Susan Gallacher-Turner
I have not read any of the Twilight series. I have read the other two and loved them.
Women have been portrayed as the weak and willing for ages, damsels in distress to be saved by men. But as you point out, if you read deeply, you see that these women are growing into themselves and the world around them. Each in their own ways.
I loved your post. And your passion for the Twilight saga makes me want to read it as well.
A girl
You know, my biggest problem with Twilight is, Edward Cullen is definitely an abusive guy and we are supposed to think he’s the perfect boyfriend! Abuse is NOT love. Edward wants to take all the decisions, steals her car’s motor, watches her sleep obsessively… I watched Twilight just after dumping my abusive ex and I feel, well, weird with all those little girls saying “oh, I wish my boyfriend was more like Edward Cullen”. I wish no boyfriend was like that guy. Being “the queen” of an abusive guy is not a good choice.
I agree with you with the Persephone archetype being not THAT bad. But look at, let’s say, Tara Maclay from “Buffy the vampire slayer”. She was raised by an abusive father, she’s so shy it’s painful and she doesn’t socialize a lot. Tara looks a lot like Persephone to me. But unlike Bella, Tara does learn and evolve, she helps people and she has a personality.
* Tara runs away from her abusive dad while Bella just wants to be abused by her boyfriend.
* Bella is interested in nothing but having a boyfriend while Tara helps Buffy saving the world.
* Bella is a Mary Sue (too perfect, boring, all boys are in love with her) while Tara is a well-rounding character with real flaws.
I could say the same about Winifred “Fred” Burkle from “Angel”. She also looks a lot like Persephone (a painful past and a lot of growth) but she has personality, is not Mary Sue and learns that abuse is not love. I identify with Persephone myself. That why I think Bella Swan is one of the worst role model ever.