Analytical Essay Of Twilight From A Feminist Lens

An Analysis of The Twilight Saga from a Feminist Lens
An Analytical Essay By: Johannah Clayman

      When I turn on the tv, open a book, listen to music, or even attempt to write a story myself, there is always a reoccurring theme, Love. Not just any kind of love a lot of the modern day love stories are doomed ones. Love with flaws that inevitably must be overcome or else they will overwhelm their subjects. The most popular branch of love stories I see these days are ones of a self-destructive nature. Take for instance the Vampire craze going on. In Twilight, Bella is a young girl who has not found her place nor realized her potential in the world. She meets Edward; handsome, brooding, mysterious, sensitive, mature, and permanently seventeen. She comes to realize that he is a vampire with great compassion and loves him all the more even with the full knowledge that his dietary habits could be her death. Does she run seek a safer, healthier, haven, no. Within the first book she is begging to be made flawless immortal, she’s only 17 and has experienced nothing, never traveled, never loved, never really lived and already she begs for death. Within two years Bella has loved and lost Edward then regained him, she has wed him, become pregnant with a hybrid-vampire/mortal baby that basically kills her and forces Edward to make her a vampire or else lose her forever. She is only 19 by the series end. She may be “undead” but she has no options, she has responsibility to a child, she is shadowed by an overprotective immortal husband, and her best-friend is bound to her 6 month old daughter with or without his wanting to be. Her desperate romance has destroyed her individuality, what gives value to a human life, options, free will. Her romance was both undeniably physically, mentally, and spiritually obliterating.
    Let’s start from the beginning with the first book in the saga “Twilight”. As I said Bella is a typical attractive 17 year old girl who is struggling to...