Book Thoughts: Are objections to Twilight paternalistic?

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I really wish I no longer felt the need to think/speak/write about the Twilight series, but the thing is such a huge cultural juggernaut still that it's impossible to avoid. Case in point: I had almost the exact same conversation about Twilight twice this weekend - first with my husband, based on an internet post he'd seen, and second with a friend over brunch on Saturday.

Essentially the conversation was whether getting overly worked up over girls reading Twilight (and watching the films, etc) smacked of condescension. We don't get worked up over boys' media consumption, but one of the primary arguments against girls reading Twilight is that it's giving them a warped sense of romance and relationships and is doing them irreparable, real life harm. The same group of people that tends to get worked up over girls reading Twilight is the same that says playing a game like Grand Theft Auto won't turn kids (usually boys in this discussion) into car thieves. Are we placing more faith in boys over girls?

I was, and still am, of the opinion that Twilight is poor reading material at best, and is giving a damaging example of romance at worst. I can't comment on the films because I haven't seen any of them, but I gather they're following the books pretty closely. I also don't think GTA is creating a generation of car thieves, so I am the exact sort of person who is accused of not trusting girls and women - ironic right? But here's my argument, in two parts: first, the reactions we see from media consumers is different for the books versus the video games. Second, we need to look at why boys and girls are choosing these fantasy elements.

First, while both boys and girls immerse themselves in different fantasy worlds, when they emerge only one of these groups is generally saying they wish it would be like real life. When a GTA player has finished stealing cars, killing cops and beating hookers, they aren't saying "I wish I could do that for real!" There's a lot of controversy about whether or not playing violent video games leads to an increase in violent behaviors, but it seems at best to be a correlation, not causation - and there are lots of arguments attacking the methodology and conclusions of the studies that point even to the correlations.

With Twilight, on the other hand, we know there are girls who finish the story and wish it were true. Girls who say they're looking for their Edward or Jacob, and I really doubt that most of them are looking to be bit by a vampire. Instead, it's the romance they say they wish to recreate. But really, the relationships described in Twilight are far from healthy.

As the most prominent examples of their genres, both GTA and Twilight generate more than their fair share of attention and criticism. However, as these two have not only become emblematic of their genres (action video games, YA paranormal romance novels), but of an entire medium in many ways (GTA comes up in most video game discussions, just as a conversation about YA lit can't be had without mentioning Twilight), the source of the fantasies are also fair for critique. What makes these things popular - and does critiquing the game/book become a short hand for critiquing that fantasy in our culture?

For GTA, the main fantasy seems to be playing the bad guy. Especially in America, we've long has a media fascination with outlaws - wild west stories about Billy the Kid and Depression-era folk heroes/outlaws Bonnie and Clyde come to mind. GTA is an extension of these narratives into the 21st century, allowing players to participate in the story in a way previous generations were never able to.

And that "bad boy" aspect is also at play to an extent in Twilight. Bella's relationships with Edward and Jacob have an element of the forbidden in them, because of the boys' dangerous natures. The vampire and werewolves are external trappings, creating conflicts outside of Bella's romances, but the primary focus is Bella and her love/lust for these two boys.

And this is where Twilight freaks me out, because I am unable to see any way in which Bell and Edward's relationship can be interpreted as healthy (I can't comment extensively on the Bella/Jacob side because I can't make myself read past the first book, where Jacob was a minor character). There is no way to get around the fact that Edward stalks Bella. His warnings that he could hurt her sound way too much like threats. He tries to  control who she can be friends with based on his own biases, steering her away from Jacob far before Jacob shows he has a dark side of his own.

And if Twilight was the only story out there promoting this deranged view of romance, even if it was incredibly popular, I think I could let it slide, because there would be other alternatives out there. However, as Jos at Feministing wrote yesterday (after I started composing this post), Twilight is just one story with similar themes reaching ridiculous heights of popularity. Even if you're a fairly savvy young media consumer, it's pretty darn hard to find alternative stories to satisfy a romantic craving. This is why I'm concerned over the outsized role Twilight has in young adult publishing - it's becoming harder and harder to find romances where the girl doesn't become some kind of doormat.

I think it's very easy to fall into paternalistic/condescending traps when discussing Twilight under the guise of wanting what's best for young women - that doesn't, however, mean all concerns can be easily dismissed. Young women are interacting with these books we haven't seen young men interact with other objectionable media, and that is why there's more hand-wringing going on over girls than boys.

Review: Spotlight by John Granger (Part 2)

I spent Wednesday's snowpocalypse laying in bed trying to get rid of my cold and reading up on criticism of Spotlight. I really felt like I was back in college! I majored in Language, Literature and Writing, and spent as much of my time as possible critiquing popular works (I took a whole class in Harry Potter, took a film & literature course where my final paper was on the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, and my senior thesis was on the Uglies series, just to name a few). I've considered getting my master's in comparative media studies so I can be like Henry Jenkins, or even John Granger, and make my living writing all academically about "silly" things.

All of that is simply meant to explain that I'm a huge dork and while I'm still not a Twilight fan (oops, spoiler alert for that eventual review!), I had a very geeky sort of fun going through this.

I'm going to first give my critique of the book and then, thanks to Jettboy's comment on my previous post, I'll include some of the online critiques of Granger's writing and my responses to those critiques.

Spotlight is divided into two halves: Part One is titled Taking Bella Seriously: Reading Twilight as Literature and Part Two is Twilight as an LDS Midsummer Night's Dream: Reading as Dream Interpretation. The first half uses a Jungian psychological theory to break down the text, focusing on why it appeals to so many readers, while the second half looks at the Mormon imagery in the text and how Meyer's religion may have influenced her.

Granger's chosen method of literary criticism is iconological criticism - I can't provide a link to further explanation of the subject because Granger seems to have coined that particular phrase. He links it back to Northrop Frye, but so far I haven't been able to find any non-Granger works that link the two. This is a habit of Granger's, apparently, because in order to delve into the fourth level of iconological criticism, the anagogical level that I said in my last post totally lost me originally, involves understanding literary alchemy. I eventually had to go to Facebook to ask my fellow lit major friends (some of whom have gone on to get their Masters in the subject) if they had ever heard of literary alchemy as an established theory. Again, Googling the term and related ones only brought me back to other pieces of Granger's work; he doesn't explain where this theory is grounded in Spotlight - he simply says he's discussed this more at length in his Harry Potter books. Eventually our collective research led us to the Wikipedia article on alchemy which explained the Jung connection. Granger simply asks us to "[p]retend as if you accept [literary alchemy] as gospel truth that English Literature from beginning to Twilight is frontloaded with alchemical devices and images" (113). Man, I wish I'd been able to get away with telling my college professors (or my speech judges!) that my model was correct and they just needed to go with it!

So while a lot of Granger's analysis seems to have merit on the surface, we are forced to simply accept his words as truth (unless we want to hunt down the original texts he cites - however I have a huge stack of non-academic books I want to read, so I'm going to take the easy way out and pass on that one).

As I said in the Spotlight event recap, iconological criticism has four levels: surface, moral, allegorical and anagogical. The first two levels are pretty self-explanatory: on the surface we have a love story with some action thrown in at the end of each book and the moral (from Granger's perspective) is the great post-modern moral of rejecting the dominant cultural narratives and embrace those who are discriminated against. We root for the underdog, in this case the misunderstood Cullens who just want to live in peace, against the Powers That Be, the Volturi and other human-eating vampires.

The next two levels, allegorical and anagogical, require a little more legwork. The primary allegory is the entire saga re-casting the story of the Garden of Eden. Edward represents God and Bella the human who wants to know him. There are additional allegories, such as the Cullen family as a positive allegory for Mormons, a zombie allegory in New Moon, and all of the vampires that appear at the end of Breaking Dawn are supposed to be allegories for religious and other groups that are seen as sympathetic towards Mormons (except for the Amazon feminists...even Granger acknowledges there's a gap there. I'll have more on that and other gaps later), but primarily we're looking at a Medieval-style morality play about the Fall of Man (and thus it's fitting that we use iconological criticism, which has its roots in how stories were interpreted in Medieval times. At least according to Granger). Why are these allegories so important? Because "the reason we and millions of other readers around the world respond to these stories is that their allegorical and anagogical meanings are about the central drama and relationship of human existence - our life with God - told in compelling, engaging fashion" (76).

And here's where I need to pause and give my first critique of Granger. I know he's a religious man and part of his interest in literary criticism is about representations of faith in texts, but I find it to be quite presumptuous that he believes all Twihards are searching for an engaging story about God. If that were true, the only Twilight-haters would be die hard atheists. Granger makes several similar comments throughout the book that clearly imply his own biases, which puts me off a lot. I find reading about religion fascinating, but that doesn't make me a believer of any particular one I'm reading about.

Okay, now that that first bit is out of the way, we can try to tackle this anagogical layer.

Granger never provides a cut-and-dried definition of what he means here. He says "the anagogical or sublime meaning of a text is that layer of artistry, almost always beneath our conscious experience on first and even after multiple readings, that corresponds with, stimulates, and fosters our spiritual orientation and transformation" (10). If we understand the surface level of a story as information or data, the anagogical layer is spiritual knowledge or wisdom (17). He also compares it to finally getting a proof in geometry, but since I don't think I ever did a proof correctly, that comparison is lost on me, too (100). Dictionary.Com tells me it means of or pertaining to anagoge, which is "a spiritual interpretation or application of words, as of Scriptures." And this is where he begins to pull in the literary alchemy, using ancient ideas of alchemy to break down a story into three stages: a black period of dissolution or darkness, a white period of purification, and finally the red period of "spiritual accomplishment or perfection" (115). In Harry Potter, the last three books are respectively the black, white and red periods of Harry's story. For Twilight, the black period begins with New Moon (which coincidentally stars Jacob Black), then Eclipse and Breaking Dawn are the white and red stages. Granger acknowledges that, at least while writing New Moon, Meyer probably didn't recognize she was writing an alchemical story, but she has said she based New Moon on Romeo and Juliet and Breaking Dawn was based on both A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merchant of Venice, "all Shakespeare alchemical dramas" and thus by the time she was starting Breaking Dawn surely she had to recognize what she was doing (120).

There's more alchemy stuff, but I need to stop right here for another critique. Granger claims the alchemical drama is a staple of English literature - and I'm not really going to argue with him there. However in his talk last week Granger mentioned that he was sure Meyer was aware of all of this alchemy stuff because she studied English at Brigham Young University. I'm not going to say Eastern Michigan University is as illustrious a school as BYU, but I can tell you right now that studying "English" is not necessarily comparable to studying "English literature." In comparisons with Harry Potter, JK Rowling has said in interviews that she studied alchemy to figure out how she wanted her magic to work (though nowhere that I've seen did she say she studied alchemical literary theory - it's a bit of a jump in my mind to go from "what did alchemists try to do" to "how can alchemy work as a metaphor for a story's structure"), plus her stories actually qualify as being English literature since she's British and all. So if alchemy is a great English literary tradition it probably rubbed off on her in some respect, research or no. Stephenie Meyer, however, could easily have gone through an American degree program in English without spending much time at all on great works of English literature (I certainly structured my degree that way!). So without more evidence, I'm calling shenanigans on any of this alchemy stuff actually being intentional on any level. That includes the black/white/red covers - Meyer apparently was unprecedentedly involved in designing the cover of Twilight, but didn't have as much influence on later ones (as per her New Moon FAQ) - which is when she would have figured out this alchemy stuff according to Granger. Most likely the covers are all black/white/red because the first one was and, as I learned on Saturday, in a series art directors like to go for some sense of visual continuity. Striking still lifes in a limited color palette would seem to do the trick if you ask me.

With the main part of his literary criticism out of the way, I have only one more note on the subject, which comes from the lists of 10 included at the end of the book (shamelessly riffing on the top ten lists at the end of the "Dummies" books). In the list of "Ten Things the Critics Got Wrong About Twilight," Granger includes:

Reading Mrs. Meyer's books as transparencies not of historical or supernatural referents but of sociological or economic meaning (via Marxist, feminist, and deconstructive exegesis) is to skip over why the books appeal to readers. Worse, it explains why they are popular because of readers' politically incorrect or immature understanding, even their sexist, racist and class driven beliefs. This neglects Eliade's thesis in favor of a bizarre, alternate understanding of why people read, say, that the herd reads in order to confirm their moral, political, and social misconceptions. Is that why you read? Me neither (242).

First of all, I found the continual use of "Mrs." and "Mr." throughout the book rather annoying - I get annoyed reading the New York Times, too - but that's just me. What really kind of irked me here is his dig at other types of literary criticism. While Granger is correct that those types of criticism aren't intended to delve into why a book is necessarily popular, I take exception to "Is that why you read? Me neither." Why isn't the point of these other criticisms - but how we engage with a text is. And quite frankly, Twilight does pander to some awful sexist stereotypes - there's no escaping that (more spoilers for my review!) I don't think the books are popular because of those tropes, but I find it extremely disconcerting that so many people can overlook them.

All of that is just the summary of the first half of the book. This is thick, academic-style stuff. Now for the religious half:

The second half has three major chapters, examining the series as the work of a Mormon artist, a Mormon apologist, and a Mormon apostate - or how her faith influenced the novels, what parts stand out as wish fulfillment style arguments against criticisms of her faith, and then where she actively criticizes her faith. This is where people tend to get up in arms about Granger's work.

From what I can tell, Granger did indeed do a great amount of research - there's an extensive bibliography at the end of the book. Some of what he read was written by Mormons, and some wasn't. What was written by Mormons he says had a pasteurized quality, following the principle of "progressive truth" where Mormon missionaries are to speak about the "more conventional elements of the faith" before more difficult tenets (155). This means that in a lot of online critiques, Granger is accused of harboring anti-Mormon sentiments because he is citing the works of non-Mormons (who may or may not have held an anti-Mormon grudge - I haven't done further research into these authors and while Granger certainly didn't sound anti-Mormon in his talk that doesn't mean his analysis is perfect or free from anti-Mormon bias given his research sources).

It is also in this section that some of those "gaps" I mentioned earlier come into more prominence. For example, the three Cullen couples are supposed to represent the Holy Trinity, or the mind, the body and the spirit in a slightly more secular sense. But then there's Edward who is God and/or Jesus (God when Bella is seeking religion, but Jesus in the sense that she can only seek salvation (being a vampire) through him). Of course, God and Jesus are usually part of the trinity, and Granger acknowledges this...but doesn't really resolve it. There's a similar gap when we come to Bella's transformation into a vampire and Renesmee's presence. Renesmee is the child of a god and a human and "saviour" who has "brought peace between the Quileutes and Cullens and revealed the Volturi for the evil they are" - yet it is Bella who has undergone a baptism by blood and a three day resurrection process and actively saves lives in that final confrontation (145). So who the hell is the Messianic figure - Edward, Bella or Renesmee? There's never a resolution.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post (it seems so long ago!), Jettboy linked me to criticism of Granger's work written by an actual Mormon. So far I haven't been able to find any criticism of Spotlight itself; Jettboy's link critiques one of Granger's blog posts, and another post critiques an article Granger published in the November/December 2009 edition of Touchstone, a Christian journal. So some of the specifics of both of those blog posts become a little outdated when it comes to reading the full book (for example: Tyler Chadwick in the first article wishes that Granger had read Saturday's Werewolf, which is in fact cited at length in Spotlight)

The biggest problem these self-identified Mormon's seem to have with Granger's work is it comes across as anti-Mormon to them. I have a whole bunch of notes where I try to rebut their criticisms in order to "prove" Granger isn't anti-Mormon, but about halfway through I realized that I am totally the wrong person to be making that argument - just like I as a white woman don't get to correct a black person about issues of racism and I don't appreciate men telling me something isn't actually sexist, as a non-Mormon myself I can't really say what is actually anti-Mormon. So there's little I can engage with on that level - except to say that I think calling Granger an anti-Mormon is needlessly combative, just like calling someone a racist or a sexist doesn't solve those arguments, either - it's much more productive to call out the specific offensive action or word.

However, some of what they call out as anti-Mormon I had problems with as well, though for a different reason. Granger has clearly done some extensive research into Mormon history - even if some of that history was written by people with less-than-positive views of the religion. However, some of these ideas (the Mountain Meadows Massacre inspiring a dream about a meadow, Mormonism actually having roots back in 17th century England where Carlisle just happens to live before becoming a vampire) are so esoteric that I question whether someone would know them without doing extensive research. Especially if these ideas are considered anti-Mormon by the faithful, would Stephenie Meyer, a devout Mormon but by no means a fanatic or a scholar, really have come across them? Would they have stuck with her enough to form such important parts of her story? That's where my skepticism really comes in.

So what's my final verdict on Spotlight? It definitely raises some interesting questions, and provides some objective history of the writing process of the books (for example, Meyer says that the inspiration for her vampires comes more from Marvel superheroes than from vampire mythology. In some ways that makes them much more palatable to me!). If you're a geek like I am an enjoy applying scholarly thinking to popular works, you'll definitely get some enjoyment out of this - provided you can look past the fact that you've probably never before heard of any of the tools Granger uses. I'm still not a Twilight fan, but I'm definitely thinking about the books in a new light now.

The next post in this series will finally address my review of Twilight!

Previous post in this series:

• Book Events: Spotlight on Twilight
  

Book Events: Spotlight on Twilight (Part 1)

While looking for something to do "out on the town" last night, I came across a press release for a Twilight event happening at a branch of the New York Public Library. I had nothing better to do, so I figured why not go waste an hour there? I actually read the first Twilight book back at the end of December, and I've spent the last month trying to figure out how to put my thoughts into a relevant blog post; this seemed like a perfect hook! Some guy yammering on about how Twilight actually has a deeper meaning, and then me saying "Nope, wrong!" and pulling apart the book! Slam dunk blog post.

Except, if you noticed the title, this blog post is just part one. I sat down at the beginning of the night thinking I'd recap the event and the book in one post. Then as things got interesting I thought one post to recap followed by my own Twilight thoughts. Then I went and bought his freaking book so now you get this recap post, a review of Spotlight followed finally by my own Twilight thoughts. My first blog series! I'm so excited.

So let's dive in, shall we?

First of all: once again, I was one of the youngest people in the room. Right before the event started a few girls who looked like they were probably still in college slipped in, but the vast majority of the audience looked like they were grandparents of Twilight fans. I find it really weird that I go to these events on children's and YA literature and where I suspect I should be the oldest and instead find myself feeling like a whippersnapper intruding on the grown ups' space.

John Granger has previously made a name for himself as the Hogwarts Professor - he was one of the first writing academically to defend the Harry Potter novels, and his approach to both HP and Twilight were very similar. He started out sure that he was going to hate both series, but quickly found himself fascinated by them and wanting to examine them more deeply.

He's also intrigued by the backlash these super popular books receive. Sales figures for both the Harry Potter and Twilight series are astronomical (he said the estimate is that by the time the second Deathly Hallows movie is released roughly one billion Harry Potter books will have been sold), yet many people claim they're trash and hardly worth reading and anyone who does read them is childish (a defensible stance if you're actually a child but not if you're a professional adult). So when Granger comes across a book as phenomenally successful as these ones have been, he has three questions he asks: Why is it so popular? Why do some people hate it? What is the author's takeaway message?

The answer to the first one is fairly simple: these books do what we want a book to do, ie tell a good story. Both Harry Potter and Twilight tell some very fundamental stories - neither JK Rowling or Stephenie Meyer reinvented the wheel here. If we use the traditional methods of literary criticism, Twilight falls apart in seconds flat - the kindest thing you can say about Meyer's prose is it is pedestrian, with a vocabulary no higher than high school (almost exactly my original thoughts). But with over 70 million books sold, there really has to be more going on here then all of us losing our minds and finding pedestrian writing to actually be amazing.

So Granger uses iconological criticism, which dates back to medieval reading techniques, using four "senses" to break down a book: 1. Surface (what's the plot?) 2. Moral (who are the good guys, who are the bad? Still the surface, but with a little more texture) 3. Allegorical (going beneath the surface, seeing what else the text represents) 4. Anagogical (mythic elements). When a story can hit all four of these elements, then you come away with a story that speaks to part of the human experience and will draw a wide audience.

I don't want to give point by point details explaining everything about these four points, so I'll simply bullet point some highlights:

• Narrative voice is one of the first choices and author makes - and if you don't like that choice you won't like the book. This is clearly a problem for a lot of people regarding Bella - to a lot of us she comes across as a terrible character so we simply don't want to be inside her head for a whole book, let alone four huge books.
  
• The core moral resonates with us because it is explicitly the greater moral narrative of 21st century post-modernity (Confession: when this part of the lecture started, I zoned out and tweeted a shoutout to my college post-modernism professor who I couldn't freaking stand). That moral? The 21st century meta-narrative (those in power are good and right) is absolutely wrong and it's those that are discriminated against that are the true heroes (in this case, the Cullen-clan of vampires are misunderstood and persecuted by the vampire Powers That Be for their non-human-eating ways)
  
• The principal allegory of the series is God's love for man and man's longing for an eternal relationship with him. Also? It's a blatant retelling of the Adam and Eve story from Genesis.
  
• The anagogical level totally lost me. I think you'll have to wait for me to actually finish reading the book before I can fully explain this part. Spent a lot of time talking about some of the tenets of the LDS religion at this point and we were running short on time so my notes are a muddled mess.
  

Essentially, Granger's argument boils down to we can't understand Twilight without understanding Mormonism. I haven't studied Mormonism or finished reading Spotlight, so I can't speak on this as an expert, but he provided some credible examples. For instance, large parts of the Cullen-family story and Bella's story can be read as a whitewashed version of Mormon history. Meadows are frequently represented because when Meyer had her famous dream of Edward and Bella in a meadow, several books had just been published about the Mountain Meadows massacre where Mormons slaughtered over a hundred people emigrating to California. In Twilight, the Cullens are representative of the Mormon faith, and they are far from violent. In reality, the Mormon faith is an extremely evangelical one - yet when human-eating vampires visit Forks, Carlisle makes no attempt to win them over to his peaceful ways.

And, here's the part that blew my mind last night and piqued everyone's interest on Twitter and Facebook: Granger makes what is, at least on the surface, a credible argument for at least a small feminist plot point in the Twilight series.

In one of the novels, we learn Rosalie Hale's backstory: she lived in 1915 in Rochester, NY. She was attacked (presumably raped) by a man named Royce King II and left for dead. When Carlisle Cullen comes across her, he turns her into a vampire, at which time she goes on a roaring rampage of revenge against King and his buddies who attacked her.

Which just sounds like a dark and depressing back story, right? Until you know some Mormon history, for an Emma Hale was the wife of Joseph Smith Jr, the founder of the Mormon church. Meyer has spoken often of how carefully she chooses her names; there's no way a devout Mormon would have chosen a name like "Hale" without thinking of the association with Emma Hale. Additionally, when we disect the name of Royce King, "Royce" means King, King of course means King, and II is akin to being a "Jr." Joseph Smith Jr was crowned king of the world twice. And if you have a feminist bone in your body, you might understand why Emma Hale may have disliked the twice-crowned king of the world - when Smith received the revelation regarding polygamy, it allegedly included God scolding Emma Hale for talking bad about polygamy behind her husband's back. So the story of Rosalie Cullens' rape, death and revenge is actually a feminist wish-fulfillment fantasy where the wife of Joseph Smith Jr. seeks revenge for him speaking ill of her when looking for a way to get more wives.

Yeah, it blew my mind, too. I'm not saying Twilight is a feminist novel by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't think Granger wanted to imply that either, but it's a hell of an interesting way to look at a novel that is often considered actively anti-feminist.

Ultimately? I'm so glad that I stumbled across that press release and decided to go last night. John Granger was a fun speaker who definitely has a way of reading Twilight that is totally opposite from how I read it. He has a number of speaking engagements lined up over the next couple of months, discussing both Harry Potter and Twilight; if he's going to be near you I highly recommend going out to listen. Perhaps your mind will be blown as well. Also exciting for me: he's reading The Hunger Games! He claims they're lacking a little on the anagogical layer, which is why they aren't the runaway bestseller that HP & Twilight are. Hmph.

I'm hoping to finish reading Spotlight over the weekend, so part 2 of this series can go up next week!