In Twilight, Isabella “Bella” Swan is the narrator, has skin described as “translucent-looking,” and is rarely described as anything other than confused, awkward, dazed, helpless, child-like, hesitant, whispering, bewildered, or curious–as well as frequently forgetting to breathe or having a wildly stampeding heart.
In a struggle, Bella cannot defend herself with even wit. As the narrator, Bella is rarely described as anything other than confused, awkward, dazed, helpless, child-like, hesitant, whispering, bewildered, or curious–as well as frequently forgetting to breathe or having a wildly stampeding heart. Meyer marinades Bella in the words moron and idiot as well. On page 55, Bella muses, “Possibly my crippling clumsiness was seen as endearing rather than pathetic, casting me as a damsel in distress.” Page 364 is the first time Bella notably picks herself up from a fall, notable only because the other 363 pages were spent using the shoulders of nearby men for support. On page 427, she firmly asserts her will when she says “I don’t want to go back to sleep,” but this is weighed down by earlier passages in which hysteria bubbles in her voice and she likens news of her boyfriend’s arrival to a life vest.
Bella is often called reckless, implying a little too much action on her part. More often than not, she simply is around when bad things happen. When cornered in an alley by a troop of nefarious older men on page 161, Bella is too weak even to scream. She only “tries to swallow” before her crush arrives to rescue her. At times, unfortunately, one must question the accidental nature of the damsel in distress. Shortly after Bella is rescued for the second time, she actually has the epiphany that she could purposefully place herself into harm’s way for the hero’s attention. The final point of the book seems to be her decision to use her own near death as an argument for why her boyfriend should change her innately and eternally into something like him. She feels this is the solution to the “inequality” in their relationship and does not want to consider what it would do to her family (pages 474-475).
On her first day of class in a new town, boys throw themselves at Bella in the form of chivalry, then antler’s clash. This happens every time Bella has an encounter with a male character who isn’t her Dad. These fleeting moments with Bella’s father are the most poignant in the book, even though Bella is lying through most of them. The only female characters are unmemorable to Bella and only truly gain names and features of their own (typically one) when needed as second choices to tie up the loose ends created by all of Bella’s new would-be suitors. The clearest definitions of these types are presented in Mike and Jessica.
When in Edward’s presence, Bella stares, is unable to think, and uses analogies to stone and angels–as well as the words perfect and perfectly–a lot. Her brief yet stellar performance in regurgitating information during Biology leaves us torn on the subject of Bella’s mental competence. After all, she mentions the word “misogyny” in relation to a paper on Shakespeare, and Mike doesn’t even know what it means. Bella must be smart.
Yet every piece of information she garners over the course of this novel is given to her by other characters through the familiar tricks of flattery and wile, if not omission and lying; the damsel in distress can, at times, be as insidious and damaging to the image of femininity as the femme fatale. Bella discovers the legend of the Cullen vamp clan by flirting with Jacob on the beach until he tells her (“I fluttered my eyelids the way I’ve seen girls do on TV,” page 122), then allowing herself the moral luxury of feeling guilty for leading him on ( “…knowing that I’d used him. But I really did like Jacob. He was someone I could easily be friends with,” when a paragraph ago, she was covertly winking to him because she was “eager to make him happy” for the information he’d given her). In a facade of empty gestures, Bella learns the secret to making vampires by imploring Alice, with the old “I thought we were friends!” bit, which she then self-validates in spite of having just met Alice that day and never really speaking to her otherwise. “And we were friends now, somehow,” Bella asserts on 413, though on page 415, right after Alice reveals how to make a vampire, Bella completely loses interest in her. “We lay silently, wrapped in our individual meditations. The seconds ticked by, and I had almost forgotten her presence, I was so enveloped in my thoughts.” She ignores Jessica in a similar fashion every single time Jessica talks, which is why she is always merely babbling in a vague nebula to Bella’s side. “She talked of nothing but the dance . . . I was far too lost . . . to notice much of what she said . . . not bothering to pretend to listen anymore . . .” (page 145) She even refers to her friends as irrelevant on page 355. Yet the Twilight universe, for some reason, hinges on her. Aside from Bella’s obvious, helpless beauty and the occasional sarcastic quip, she doesn’t seem to offer anything to hold onto by way of substance. Bella’s most glaringly frequent quality, when with Edward and when without, is her undying devotion to him.
The only problem Bella seems to have with Edward is his admitted tendency toward eavesdropping, spying, and invading her privacy; Edward is always “unrepentant.” What a romantic word for a stalker. Every time Bella is bothered by this tendency of Edward’s, she either chooses to let it go or is distracted by him. On page 292, Meyer writes, “‘You spied on me?’ But somehow I couldn’t infuse my voice with the proper outrage. I was flattered.” However, as the meaning behind Edward’s actions begins to settle, Bella sours. It’s never directly spoken, as criticism of Edward never is, but perhaps Bella comes to find his spying distasteful because it reveals an inherent lack of respect or trust. On page 306, Bella speaks “icily” of this in bed, and Edward ignores her and says “So, if you don’t want to sleep . . .”
Bella views her mother as emotional and flighty to the point that she cannot keep food in the fridge or gas in the car, but her saving grace is the man in her life, Phil. “Of course she had Phil now, so the bills would probably get paid . . .” Another perfect example is Jessica, who is often slighted as a gossip even though her lines are rarely more than paraphrased, who only becomes sincere toward Bella after she is “sure of Mike,” (79) who is “elated by the attention” from boys on page 30 and “shadows Mike” on page 118. Every human female character either suggests that women are emotionally charged to the point of incapacitation, that the primary objective in society is male attention, or both.
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