I found this article yesterday on an author’s blog and I absolutely agree with the article (and the author’s sentiment, though I won’t link back out of courtesy to the author’s post’s request). The article’s author makes a terrific, and alarming, point about the potentially dangerous and potent message of the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. (I emphasize potentially. Not every reader will read them this way, nor should they, but the message is there, to be seen.) [A warning, dear readers: spoilers for the Twilight series will abound.]

As the article states:

If only Meyer had taken Buffy as her template. If only she had used that groundbreaking series as her foundation and built on it. If only there was a Whedonesque intelligence and modern, feminist sensibility informing Twilight and its successors. If only.

What you have instead in Meyer’s work is a depressingly retrograde, deeply anti-feminist, borderline misogynistic novel that drains its heroine of life and vitality as surely as if a vampire had sunk his teeth into her and leaves her a bloodless cipher while the story happens around her. Edward tells her she is “so interesting … fascinating”, but the reader looks in vain for his evidence.

(A disclaimer: I absolutely love Buffy and Joss Whedon; go rent Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Go. Now.)

After reading that, my first thought was, Oh, thank God someone just came out and said it in a respectable newspaper. We passionate, obscure bloggers can only do so much.

To stumble-upon-ers: I am a writer and lover of books about kick-ass girls who do things, who save their worlds, who break stereotypes and shatter tradition. I wrote a whole thesis on this. I am fervently critical and passionate about this. When I read a book in the genre I love that praises the passive female protagonist — or rather, praises her for being special when she is not — I get mad. Had the books been written from Edward’s perspective, or in third person, one could probably argue that poor Bella is not so much the protagonist — the one who makes the action happen… because she’s not — but rather the Female Love Interest, or Designated Love Interest to the more vibrant Edward. It’s so much his story. She reacts to him. In New Moon, when Bella is mostly on her own for the book with Edward’s decision to take a break, she isn’t alone. No. She finds a new male on to whom she can latch — Jacob. It’s not so much her story as the story of the dependent relationships she forms.

It’s Bella who is our narrator, Bella who is our guide into this fantasy world. But rather than guide is in and stake out her own space within it, she gets subsumed within it and dissolved by it, replaced with a character who is only a shadow of a strong, independent female; a shadow of the woman Edward keeps insisting she is. Meyer tells us how wonderful Bella is. She never shows us. Poor Bella loses herself in her relationship with Edward.

Granted, Bella has moments. Those moments are what kept me clawingly optimistic throughout my reading of the series. Whenever the plot pulled my hopes down, I clawed out of that hollow of despair and said, “No. Bella will eventually Kick Ass. She has to prove she’s Awesome. After all, why else would both Jacob and Edward love her so much? She has to be Awesome.” But that moment never came — not really. When it kind of did — in a subversive, (passive) way in Breaking Dawn (Bella’s shield) — I was disappointed. Bella doesn’t determine her own destiny, like some fantasy protagonists. She isn’t faced with a destiny she didn’t chose and proves she can brave it and make the best of it, like others. She’s not a fantasy hero or even a heroine. She’s a tragic gothic stereotype of a heroine who, rather than dying spectacularly, just keeps on living.

Here’s another disclaimer: I am engaged to be married. I will be married in March to my soulmate, a man for whom I would do anything and who would do anything for me. I am not some crazy feminist writer/blogger who loves Women Who Do Things and say that women can’t do things with men hanging attached to them. Of course women can do things while in love, while in relationships — any kind of relationship with any one, for that matter. Women can be independent and be committed at the same time. Isn’t that the trait the media most praises in a successful career mother? The woman who is able to balance kids, husband, job, personal life? She is the ideal to which we women in western society are supposed to ascribe, to shoot for.  (Which, in itself, is still sad; that women are still seen to have “complete” lives only when surrounded by that nuclear stereotype, regardless of her personal sense of completeness or fulfillment with her own life, whatever or whomever it may entail.)

And then there’s Bella. When she finally finds the balance, she’s not Bella at all, she’s some thirtysomething analogue whom we don’t recognize from the “normal” teenage girl she once was. One could argue Bella changes and grows throughout the series. I argue, rather, that she inconsistently fluxes between melodramatic anxiety and passivity until she transforms into someone who is most certainly not an organic incarnation of a grown-up Bella but rather a forced shell of who we’re told she is based on roles she is given — wife, mother, vampire… non-human being.

What’s interesting, in the context of me speaking about this on this blog, is the thought that’s occurred to me that criticizing books on this blog while being an author myself is a little… well, iffy? But I suppose the other way to look at it is this: If I met Stephenie Meyer in real life, and she asked me, “What is your honest opinion of my books?” I would, frankly, be honest. I immediately and superficially enjoyed her books — I did — but they left me unsettled. The more reflecting and discussing I’ve done, the more unsettled I’ve become. I am still unsettled, even more so after letting Breaking Dawn sink in. (My enthusiasm was so short-lived.) I won’t be able to re-read them. I know that. Having read them as a happily-in-a-relationship twentysomething, not a depressed 17-year-old bemoaning her lack of love life — oh, how those years changed me — I have a completely different view. Reading those books as a mother, I’d feel different yet again. I suppose the ultimate beauty of a blog is that you don’t have to read it or agree with what I say, but hopefully my point of view might have given you a new view from which to consider while forming your own.

But, strangely enough, I am glad these books exist. I am glad I read them.

I am sad about their ridiculous popularity, but I am a firm believer in the idea that dialogue is that which expands our minds and enables us to grow as human beings. Without two (or more) sides to any view or argument, where would the growth be? Without different opinions, what kind of people would we be?

I suppose, ultimately, what I’m hoping for is for more novels and stories (for children and young adults, especially) from the Kick Ass Woman (or strong, assertive young woman or girl) point of view. I want more books that show women doing anything and everything men can do — and have done — in both real life and in existing literature of every genre. I want female characters in fantasy that display the same depth, complexity, assertiveness, and power of many male protagonists in fantasy.

Some authors have and are succeeding at this in certain subgenres of fantasy (Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, Garth Nix, Shannon Hale, Patricia Briggs, Jeaniene Frost); some have partial yet luadable success (Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials). Some books featuring male protagonists have casts of female characters with terrific complexity and depth (Jim Butcher, Sherwood Smith, Robin Hobb, George R. R. Martin) and some with female protagonists have surprised and pleased me with the journeys of those protagonists (Trudi Canavan). We have to keep going, though. That’s why I write, that’s why I’ve always wanted to write.

As I’ve said, this also means novels featuring male main characters/ protagonists/ heroes with co- and supporting female characters who are equal to their male counterparts in complexity, emotion, and range of possibility. This is starting to happen more and more frequently; however the waif/weak/incompetent female love interest still exists, though, as supposed counterpart to her brave, heroic, and intelligent male protagonist. Why does this happen in fantasy? Think of the successful marriages you know: those couples are not fractionally as imbalanced and mis-matched as quite a few fantasy couples tend to be. Fantasy characters deserve to be as real as any real person, as any good, realistic character in any other genre.

Parents should get involved and responsible in this discussion, as well, for the sake of their young readers (in terms of children’s and YA literature). They should recognize which books contain which messages and be able to respond intelligently and with good information to the questions curious kids and teens will inevitably ask in response to books that provoke such thought. Regardless of the book, its characters, or its message, if it provokes serious intellectual conversation, I think that’s a terrific and laudable thing.