Wake Up, Bella!

 

 

Wake up, Bella!
A Personal Essay on Twilight, Mormonism, Feminism and Happiness

Tammy Dietz

I am a little jealous. I’ll start there to get it off my chest. First time novelist makes it big. No graduate school, no writing classes, no queries and rejections, no years and years of writing and editing and quitting and restarting. According to the bio at the author’s website, it took Stephenie Meyer under a year to whip a whimsical dream into a mega-selling series of books.

As is the nature of envy, I am critical. Twilight is the most entertaining of the 4-book series, but none are well-written. It may be in poor taste to dwell on the flaws in an artistic endeavor, particularly when the craft of writing is not the focus of this essay. Suffice it to say that in the rush to take the story from hazy dream to bound page, literary finesse does not seem to have been Meyer’s priority. But petty envy and literary style criticisms aside, I found reading Twilight to be engaging and also curiously bothersome.

I bought the novel at a Rite Aid during a family vacation at the Oregon coast. While my husband and children played Frisbee and dug tunnels and castles in the coarse northwestern sand, I unfolded a camp chair and angled my floppy hat to shade the pages of my book. Occasionally other women passed me and commented that they were Twilight fans, too. I smiled and nodded. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to count myself as a fan. Still, like many readers, I finished the first book in a matter of days and when I was done, I couldn’t quite tell why I had been compelled to turn each page.

The story seemed so familiar to me, so believable and easy to swallow, and I am not typically a reader of fantasy or romance. But something about Twilight struck an old bone that I struggled to identify.

At first, I suspected Meyer’s religious affiliation to be the culprit. I was once a Mormon, too, and the surface similarities between Twilight and Mormon theology are noteworthy, if usually unnoticed by non-Mormon readers. But I soon discovered there was more to the root of my discontent than the whiff of a harmless religion ambitious to convert new (and stray) members. In Twilight, like in Mormonism, buried behind gleaming stories and rituals that spotlight powerful human emotions such as desire, faith, devotion and love, a disturbing message pulses to a familiar beat. Twilight doesn’t just reflect Mormonism, Twilight positively glows (or dare I say, sparkles) with Mormonism’s least appealing aspect: the subtle but powerful message its worshippers receive that men are superior and women are subordinate.

To see the heart of the matter, however, we must first peel back the layers of similarity beginning with seemingly innocuous common themes in Twilight and Mormon ideology.

Twilight and Mormonism: On Chastity

First and foremost, Meyer promotes the notion of chastity in the Twilight series with a flourish. It’s fair to say that Twilight succeeds largely because Bella is chaste and Edward abstains—for a very long time. The primary conflict in the lean and simple plot of the first three books rests squarely on the sexual tension between withholding lovers. This tension is emphasized further by the nature of vampire bloodlust. Edward wants Bella in an even more potent (and threatening) way than typical human sexual desire, and Bella’s power to tempt Edward is more than ordinary magnetism. The control they must both display, Edward in particular, is symbolized by Edward’s vampirism and Bella’s humanity.

In the Mormon faith, premarital chastity is paramount for both girls and boys, but particularly for girls, who are viewed as the ones with the power to tempt. For girls, chastity is considered more important than life itself. In The Book of Mormon, Jacob recites that the Lord specifically “delights[s] in the chastity of women” (Jacob 9:28), and later in the book of Moroni, the purity of the Lamanite daughters is identified as “most precious and dear above all things” (Moroni, 9:9) [1]. Control of sexual urges prior to marriage is a core idea for many fundamental Christian and Mormons are no exception. Chastity is a requirement for a temple wedding, which, in the Mormon faith, grants women entrance to the highest levels of heaven. The pressure young Mormon women receive to remain chaste cannot be overstated.

Perhaps a personal story captures it best.

In the summer of 1979, I turned twelve and I also attended my very first annual Young Women’s conference. It was the largest young adult event I’d ever attended, with hundreds of young women from all over the region, and I wasn’t sure what to expect but was overwhelmed by the size of the gathering. The meeting was predictable, for the most part. Singing by the congregation, a few musical solos by particularly talented young women from other Wards, talks about love and honesty, the trueness of our gospel, obedience to the living prophet, all pretty much the same kinds of things I’d heard in Sunday School, from which I’d just graduated. Until the closing talk. The grand finale.

The Relief Society president stepped up to the podium and cleared her throat.

“Girls,” she began, “I want you to consider this rose.”

Her blouse was baby blue. Ruffles at the neckline. She also wore white gloves, an unusual but striking accessory. In a gloved hand, she held a single long-stemmed red rose with petals just beginning to open.

“What a beauty to behold,” she said into the microphone, and then paused.

“Now. What if I were to remove a petal from this rose. Just one petal won’t make a difference, right?”

She plucked a petal, the red of the rose garish against the white of her gloved hand.

“What if I remove another?” She removed another petal and waited a moment for us to see the slight change in shape, the imperfection. She continued removing petals until only one remained, attached but compromised. Twice she attempted to hold the last petal upright, but it slumped back down each time. She set the mutilated rose on the podium, removed her gloves, and silently clasped her bare hands.

“Girls, you are this rose,” she said. “This rose could be you.”

I was stunned and rapt by the gravity of her message and I waited for clarity to follow. She told us that just as the rose is perfect in the Lord’s sight, so, too, were we. But if we allowed ourselves to be spoiled and defaced, such sins could be forgiven but never recovered. Once our flower was plucked, it was no more. It wouldn’t re-grow its petals. It couldn’t regain its beauty. Its lovely scent would be but a memory. It would be useless.

My heart thudded in my chest. At the time, I wasn’t even quite sure I understood what she was talking about, but felt ashamed anyway.

To conclude the evening, roses were handed out. Each and every girl received her very own long-stemmed white rose along with a note that read: “You are pure. You are chaste. You are special.”

By the time I received my rose, its silky soft petals had already begun to show the tattered signs of age, and its small white head drooped like an apology. The message to we girls was a powerful one. Our beauty, our relevance, our worth was tied directly to our ability to remain chaste. The message to boys was similar, but with a slightly different flavor: while girls had the power to force the wait, boys had the power to choose the timing and the possibilities. Either way, nothing sexual was to occur prior marriage in a Mormon temple.

In Twilight, abstinence from premarital sex is so much a part of the story’s suspense that there wouldn’t be much left without it. Abstinence isn’t just a side note or a character trait. For Bella, more literally, but just as importantly as for many young women who adhere to strict bible-based thinking, abstinence is a matter of life and death.

On Family

Mormons value family very highly. In the Twilight series, the importance of a strong family unit is promoted through the affectionate characterization of the Cullen clan. They are vampires, yes, and that sets them apart from inferior humans, but among their own, they are superior because they have found one another and have formed a group headed by a calm, wise, governing patriarch named Carlisle.

Mormons are well-known for idealizing traditional, patriarchal families. In 1995, Mormon President Gordon B. Hinckley spoke at a General Relief Society meeting where he delivered a proclamation inspired by God.

“By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.” [2]

Carlisle and company, in many ways, represent the Mormon ideal of how a family should operate, and this representation is that much more striking against Bella’s less traditional, divorced parents.

On Life after Death

Many of Meyer’s ideas about immortality seem inspired by Mormonism. For example, the Cullens deny themselves their base desire—to drink the blood of humans—and for that reason they are depicted as spiritually, or at least ethically, advanced. They’ve also continued to increase their education and knowledge while immortal. In other words, Meyer characterizes the Cullens with higher virtues than other vampires and higher knowledge than the humans, eternally evolving in spite of their situation. They may be immortal, but they don’t stop improving themselves.

Similarly, Mormons believe that God was once a man and men will one day be Gods, that all of our time on earth and in the hereafter is spent growing and evolving toward that end. In Mormon afterlife, spirits can continue to progress, learn, grow and advance, continually bettering themselves until they reach a state of Godlike perfection after which men will receive appointment to watch after planets of their own. Mormon immortality, like vampire immortality, is in many ways only the beginning.

On Preordained Partnership

Meyer fictionalizes deeper theological tenets with the idea of “imprinting” as well. In New Moon and Eclipse, imprinting is explained as mating for eternity: no matter the age of his soul mate, the one who imprints knows for certain, and so he “marks” her for good keeping. While attributed to the werewolves, Edward and Bella appear to share this imprinting somehow, though it’s not fully explained. He craves her blood more than the blood of other humans and the implication is that perhaps Edward imprinted on Bella. But in the case of Jacob, Bella’s werewolf friend, there’s no question. In Breaking Dawn, Jacob imprints on Renesmee, Edward and Bella’s daughter, just after she’s born. He’ll care for her as a sibling until such time as she is old enough to unite with him more intimately. In the Twilight series, males do the imprinting (choose), females receive the imprint (wait), and the bond is accepted as paranormal, destined, and preordained, as if controlled by God.

Thinking back to what it was like to grow up Mormon, I recall two doctrines that stuck with me most: that chastity was my best virtue and that when the time was right, giving it up to my “Chosen One” after a temple marriage would be the most important thing I could ever accomplish during this lifetime. Though it’s not directly preached and can’t be found in Mormon scripture, many Mormons believe in and encourage this idea of a single individual with whom we have a pre-earthly bond. The idea is that our spiritual lives extend this one—on the front end and the back end and we’ve probably met our partner God or Goddess before this life. The most righteous and faithful Mormons whose minds and hearts are open will know the instant they meet their Chosen One. It would be a sacrilege to deny the partnership. [3]

The Relationship between Marriage and Life Everlasting

In Breaking Dawn, Bella and Edward finally wed and much like in a Mormon wedding, their bond is meant to extend beyond this life into the afterlife. With their marriage this earthly life becomes irrelevant. Marriage and immortality are interwoven ideas for the primary characters in the Twilight series. One does not exist without the other, as in the Mormon faith both are the key to reaching God. Unlike traditional Christianity that recognizes the pinnacle of the Adam and Eve story as a fall from grace, Mormons recognize a holy marriage and subsequent sexual intercourse to be just the opposite: the surest way for humans to become Gods themselves.

The Bait and Switch

Mormonism and Twilight have many things in common, but more than any other religious similarity, it was Meyer’s portrayal of Bella’s character that struck an old nerve in a way I couldn’t quite explain at first. I felt as confused about what bothered me as when I was a young woman receiving subtle messages that undermined my worth. Why did Bella’s love-struck character feel so familiar? I’m decades beyond my teens but could it be that Bella reminded me of how I once was? Why did her passive nature and Edward’s fatherly dominance irritate me so? Furthermore, why were these mediocre books such an enormous commercial success? And more personally, why did I find their success so disturbing? Twilight is a love story and stories of unfulfilled or forbidden romance are almost always a hit. Most of us can relate to the experience of wanting someone who is out of our reach for whatever reason. Am I such a curmudgeon that I can’t even appreciate a good love story anymore? Or was there something else I recognized hidden behind the provocative veil of desire?

It was a brilliant, sunny day when I finished reading Twilight and set it in the sand between my bare feet. I squinted at white-crested waves, wondering again what it was that pestered me so, when a woman and two small boys walked toward me from the shore on their way to the staircase leading up to the street. The woman carried a beach blanket and a white cane outstretched before her as she tapped at the sand and urged her boys to stay close. A blind woman, unassisted, with children. A blind woman who taking her children to the beach to play. My jaw dropped. How could I ever complain about the challenges of motherhood again?

As they passed, the woman asked one of her children if he still had his sandals. He said yes at precisely the same moment that one of his shoes slipped from his fist and dropped without a sound. I popped out of the chair to jog up behind them and fetch the lost shoe. I tapped her shoulder and she stopped and turned, her eyes shielded by dark glasses.

“He dropped his shoe,” I said, almost worshipfully. “I didn’t want it to get lost.”

“Oh,” she said reaching out, her cane dangling from a wrist strap. “Thank you so very much.” She grabbed at the space around my hand until she caught the shoe. And then, like any other mother, she added, “Like I need another trip to Target for yet another pair of flip flops!”

“Right,” I agreed as I watched her gather her boys and head toward the sandy staircase. I returned to my camp chair and picked up my book. For a moment, I considered the blind woman while studying Twilight’s striking red and black cover with those pale, feminine hands outstretched and cupping a perfectly ripened red apple. This is when it came to me in a flash. I realized, right at that moment, that it was not small jealousies or jaded romanticism or the religious parallels that reminded me of a church I had long since left behind that pestered me. Twilight bothered me on a much deeper level that had to do with what makes a heroine: Bella and the woman on the beach are opposite kinds of blind, one a champion of self-respect and the other a sheep in disguise.

Bella’s worth is only realized through companionship and subordination to a male partner and protector, a vampire in Meyer’s story but any righteous man according to the fundamental beliefs of Meyer’s religion. She is presented as awkward, bumbling and full of self-reproach no matter her advantages and intellect. Her only actions are those that contribute to her own dependency and subordination while the woman from the beach seemed brave and more than self-sufficient regardless of her challenges. One woman seems to do much with little; the other does little with much. Bella, a character made to appear romantic and desirable, is a model of ineptitude.

Only moderately disturbing is Twilight’s success among adult women. We’ve all been bred on the notion of happily-ever-after as characterized by Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty—you name the damsel. Look good, snag a protector, escape into marriage and never worry about independence and self-sufficiency. Though many of us have lived to learn the realities of this fantasy, we may still feel, at times, nostalgic for at least the easy idea of it—that having someone to look after us, care for us, and provide for us like a father will make our lives ideal.

More deeply disturbing is Twilight’s success among younger women. Meyer has captivated millions of young readers with a story about subordination, dependency, and self-sacrifice to the point of self-collapse. She portrays Bella as childlike and helpless, incomplete without her love interest, entitled to protection and in the end, willing to stunt her own development in exchange for the perception of security.

But Meyer does not portray the realities of a life spent leaning on another, nor does she reveal the myth of security. She herself has become insanely independent [4] by writing books that represent, at their very core, the trick that has been played on females for centuries, a classic bait and switch. The bait: claim a life of dependency and realize happiness. The switch: dependency on anything is an obstacle, not a vehicle, to happiness. And happiness, as it turns out, is maddeningly within our own control.

Bella the Helpless

In Twilight, the “trick” begins with Bella characterized as incapable, childlike and in need of a father. Bella’s real father, Charlie, is largely inept. He cannot even prepare his own meals, which Bella cooks for him. The sum of his involvement in Bella’s life is to provide a bed in which she can rest, to listen to her stories from time to time, and to eat the food she prepares. In essence, she has no father. Though Bella is seventeen years old when the story begins, the reader sympathizes with the father gap and in this way is primed for a replacement.

Bella is intelligent and does well in school. She spouts off in Biology and complains about the misogyny of Shakespeare’s women in English. On the surface it seems she must be remarkably independent. She has moved away from her mother to a new town. She is living with a less-than-involved father. But perhaps Bella’s most identifiable individual trait is her self-proclaimed clumsiness. Bella is, evidently, a klutz: “Possibly my crippling clumsiness was seen as endearing rather than pathetic, casting me as a damsel in distress.” [5]And that’s just one example. There are literally dozens, perhaps hundreds, of references to Bella’s uncanny knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and tripping all over herself to scramble out. She is continually falling, slipping, swooning, fainting, or somehow winding up in harm’s way without the prowess to escape.

Meyer’s use of language further relays her protagonist’s insecurities and inabilities. The words “helplessly,” “feebly,” “unwillingly,” and the like are used by the narrator ad nauseam.

Thank goodness for Edward, for without him, Bella would surely be dead. Unfortunately, he also lusts after her blood, and thus her life. Cleverly, such a dynamic creates undeniably high stakes for Bella. Behind door number one: danger of injury, pain and hardship as she outgrows her “clumsiness.” Behind door number two: death by vampire bite. But instead of facing the uncertainty, risk, and adventure of learning, growing, and successfully escaping this no-win scenario, Bella takes door number two and readers accept this because it seems to be what Bella wants. Perhaps womewhere in the deepest recesses of their psyches, readers remember wanting something similar.

Bella the Incomplete

For centuries, women have been regarded as inferior to men and deficient without them. In Twilight, in the few scenes where Bella and Edward are apart, Bella does nothing but think about being with Edward. Nearly all of New Moon is devoted to Bella’s incompleteness without him. The reader latches onto Bella’s core desire for Edward and reads 643 pages of very little action other than the protagonist’s yearning for her vampire love.

Early on in the New Moon narrative when she thinks she spies his car in her driveway, she claims to feel an “overwhelming, heady” sense of relief. [6] And later, while looking through a set of photos including one of herself and Edward, she says: “The contrast between the two of us was painful. He looked like a god. I looked very average, even for a human, almost shamefully plain.” [7] This sentiment of inequality is perhaps most poignantly expressed when Bella is attempting to converse with Jacob on the matter. Without Edward, she describes herself as an “empty shell” and as “uninhabitable” as a “condemned house.” [8] Even if it means complete self-sacrifice, she sees her partnership with and vampire transformation by Edward as her only chance for equality with him.

It’s not so unusual. I’m over forty, and now I regard myself as equal to men, but it is not difficult to recall feeling differently when I was a girl. It was a subtle thing. Inferiority was deceptively provocative. I longed for something better even if I didn’t understand what, and it felt a lot like ambition. But not. Somehow, I didn’t feel quite whole and it was more a matter of completing myself than it was about rising to the possibilities. Growing up Mormon, I received this message in hundreds of ways, from direct messages in stories and scripture to understated suggestions in art and rituals.

A mini-movie that I saw many times growing up tells it best. Johnny Lingo (1969) had been shown so often at church functions that I knew it by heart. In the story, a Polynesian trader named Johnny Lingo visits a neighboring island to trade cows in exchange for one of the landowner’s daughters. Johnny surprises the islanders by choosing a sullen and plain-looking woman named Mahana. None of the islanders, including Mahana’s father, Moke, think she is of much value and prior to the bargaining, there is gossip about how very few cows Mahana will fetch for Moke. One, it is agreed. Mahana is worth only one cow. All are so convinced that one cow is a reasonable expectation that a local advisor in these matters suggests to Moke that he ask for three so that there is room for negotiation downward. Johnny surprises everyone by upping the ante and offering Moke an unheard of eight cows for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Johnny and Mahana leave the island and months later when they return, Mahana has been transformed into a stunning Polynesian beauty complete with a brilliant red hibiscus tucked behind an ear. All agree she is now worth more than eight cows. Johnny says that her worth was never determined by what others saw but by what she truly was.

The film was always shown, as I recall, to coed groups. There I sat, a rather plain girl myself, amongst a dozen or more Mormon tweens all on the cusp of puberty. The message to boys was clear. The plain girl was beautiful inside and all that was necessary for her beauty to surface was for a boy to notice her. By opening their minds to the possibilities, boys could use their power to raise a girl’s sense of self-worth and claim a lovely mate at the same time. Boys could choose, but what was a girl to do?

As a young person, I determined that Mahana was transformed from plain to stunning because someone loved her, which I found frustrating. She could not claim her worth independently and in the end, beauty was still the ultimate display of her value. The fact that someone saw a diamond in the rough seemed arbitrary and beyond her control, which made me feel terribly self-conscious about my own appearance but more importantly, unclear as to what action I could take. Boys could choose. I got that. But girls could do what? Wait with a smile?

And the cows. Even though my father sometimes told tales of olden days when women were treated much more like commodities than people, and he’d also told me this wasn’t the case anymore – being a girl was just as good as being a boy – Mahana, a human being, had been traded like a slave. The central conflict of the story was her price.

On Motherhood

The film represented an important lesson toward subordination: that my worth was tied to recognition from and partnership with a man. Once I ingested that, the next lesson was easier to accept and also had a way of snuffing out the indecencies of the first lesson.

Motherhood. One day I would reach what was preached as my full earthly potential and become a mother. It was not only that a man would make me complete, but that I needed one in order to become a mother. And absolutely nothing should compete with motherhood.

David O. McKay, Mormon president in the 1950s, famously once said, “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” [9] There was never any question that these words were directed primarily at young women and implied that any pursuit of success outside the home was not worth the risk. And Mother’s Day celebrations in our Ward were always the same. A troupe of young girls carried pink carnations through the high-ceilinged chapel while the organist played “Home Can Be a Heaven on Earth.” Each mother was given the same number of carnations as she had children. The mother with the most carnations would be asked to remain standing for additional adulation and praise.

Being a woman meant being a mother. There simply is no other way I could have understood it.  To be a woman was to be a mother but also, in a way, a child. Beginning at age twelve, all Mormon males are ordained as members of the priesthood, which gives them the authority to give blessings of health and reform to others, baptize non-members and deliver prophecies on God’s behalf. Technically speaking, the twelve-year old son of a Mormon woman would outrank her in many matters of health and family welfare. By turning twelve and receiving the priesthood, a mother’s son becomes more like an older brother. Therefore, even when she reaches her earthly potential of motherhood, her worth is tied directly to her attachment to men—first her father and brothers, then her husband, and then her sons.

Why wouldn’t she, then, and Bella in turn, feel entitled to attachment?

Bella the Entitled

It wasn’t only the Mormon faith, of course, that taught me I was entitled to safety and protection. Like many girls, Mormon or not, I was bred on fairytales. To be so beautiful that a prince would sweep me away to a castle in the distance where peasants carried the burden of life’s hardships was the dream of this little girl.

But I left home just as I finished high school. Because I had to, I battled my way through housing challenges, cockroaches, unemployment, sleazy bosses, self-funded college, legal troubles, and more before I found my way to responsible adulthood. And I resented it almost the whole time.

Because I am female, a part of me felt entitled to be taken care of and watched over. When I found myself on the streets, sleeping in my car and begging for jobs, it seemed to me that a great injustice was underway.

In her groundbreaking book, The Cinderella Complex: Woman’s Hidden Fear of Independence, Collette Dowling writes that the consequences of choosing dependency can be dire, especially for older, widowed, or divorced women:

“This, then, is the bitter truth on which younger women—still romantic, still in love, still cushioned by the dream that women can safely allow others to take care of them—turn their backs. The myth is that security, for women, lies in remaining forever and permanently attached, coiled within and stuck to ’the family’ like mollusks with their shells.” [10]

But the consequences for the dependent woman may not be realized right away, which is why Bella is such an important and dangerous role model for young women. Bella represents this precise moment in a woman’s life when she psychologically prepares to leave childhood. A conditioned sense of inequality accompanies natural feelings of childhood incompetence as she prepares for adulthood. Here at this juncture, she will either fall for the myth and seek out a protector, or realize her blind spot, adjust, and discover self-worth. In New Moon, as Bella begins to purposefully put herself in danger in order to draw her love interest to her rescue, the reader begins to realize that she has fallen for the myth; in essence, she orchestrates her own imprisonment. The only hope we can have for her well-being is for him to indeed come to her rescue, and then prove to be a compassionate jailor.

Bella the Anesthetized

As a vampire, Edward represents more than a man: he is practically a God. He appears God-like to Bella, speaking to her mind as if a conscience, and he represents eternal life. Because he is superior and she is so desperate to be as close to his level as possible, she manipulates and lies to get there. It is as if she is in a trance, hypnotized and asleep, and only assertive passively, through manipulative actions and self-deprecating remarks intended to harness secondary power, the power of the subordinate. While pining over his absence in New Moon, she says, “Losing track of time was the most I asked from life.” [11]

By this time in the Twilight series, not halfway through the second of the four books, Bella has confessed the truth of things. Time is not worth her attention; life is not worth living without her man. She has nothing to offer of herself without him. Without Edward, our protagonist is incomplete. But with him, is she truly complete? Or is her self-esteem merely anesthetized and numbed by his presence?

In Breaking Dawn, Bella gets what she wants and becomes a vampire. The situation demands it. But as romantic and empowering as this may seem—humanly vulnerable woman turned particularly controlled and graceful vampire—I suggest that Bella’s transformation represents an ideal of women forever sleeping through opportunities for their own personal development in this life. When Bella literally gives up her life so that she can become Edward’s partner and find her identity and grace solely through her attachment to him, it is as if the real Bella has simply gone to sleep. Instead of sleeping while lying in wait for a prince, the sleep begins when Bella finds him.

But the sleep can be a restless one. In Kill the Princess: Why Women Still Aren’t Free from the Quest for a Fairytale Life, Stephanie Vermeulen writes:

“With major changes in our lives, many women now desire more than the happy-wife-and-mother role. Often those who are discontented in the role, but continue to play it, find themselves severely depressed. Rarely do they understand why. After all, society promises girls that marriage (preferably to a wealthy prince), with a good home and a bunch of children, will be fulfilling. But what the depression is showing is that the notion of prince and red roses can only exist in a fairytale.” [12]

When I was a child, I didn’t understand my mother’s illness, if that is what it was. At church, she clutched her purse with both hands and pursed her lips shut. At home she complained almost incessantly about her disappointments with our father. She’d picked the wrong prince. Or rather, the wrong prince had picked her.

She cried daily, spent enormous amounts of time receiving “counsel” from our Ward bishop, lost enthusiasm for homemaking and childcare, and by the time I reached puberty, she spent most of her time in a bathrobe sitting in her bedroom with her papers and books.

I remember her eyes. Everything I knew about my mother I learned by watching her eyes. I remember her looking down at her papers and books or looking out beyond my face, but rarely making eye contact. I remember the vacancy in her eyes that also at times appeared distraught as if a remarkable intelligence were trapped within. I remember her tears. I remember her distance. I could not get close to her, partly because I didn’t want any part of her misery but also partly because she seemed more like a ghost than a person to me. Shadowy, troubled, repeating her woes as though she were talking in her sleep, she was unable to respond to prompts from others.

After a therapist advised my father to sell his antique rifles because he was not safe in a home with both my mother and shotguns in it, she begrudgingly began to take anti-depressants. While these medications lightened her mood, she still remained a mystery. The real person beneath her exterior still seemed lost.

We all began to label my mother as mentally ill. The medication seemed to help. I felt better about her thinking that a physical illness was the cause of her inattentiveness as a mother. My father could relax and let the pills take the edge off his wife’s anger rather than examine the ways he was contributng to her suffering. And my mother could, in essence, rest through her rage.

As a grown woman looking back, however, I realize that my mother’s great sleep is a much more complex, sad and tragic story. I’ll never know how much of her “condition” is biological and how much is circumstantial, and I cannot help but acknowledge that the latter is an important factor. She is indeed a victim, but at least in part by her own choices and mindset, her own willingness to sleep.

Only once did I dare an attempt to wake her.

I am writing a memoir and one of the ideas I’d been considering was weaving my mother’s coming of age story with my own. So I sent her a list of questions about the time in her life when she made the choices that would map her future. What she enjoyed studying in high school and college, if she’d ever had any jobs and how she liked them, when she chose to marry and have children and so forth. She returned a short list of responses and from it, I learned more about my mother than I’d ever known before.

I always knew she’d married young, but I didn’t know that she’d finished college two years before my father did, though he was almost ten years her senior. I didn’t know that right after graduating with a degree in music and a state credential, Mom secured a job teaching music at an elementary school. Within the first six months she took it upon herself to form a stringed instrument program for the entire school district. My father worked at a grocery store and continued to tinker with college. His dismayed parents strongly encouraged him to finish his education, get a career, “be a man.” My mother’s teaching success further magnified my father’s disgrace in his parents’ eyes. She therefore quit working after that single academic year and never worked outside the home again.

I asked her once why she stopped teaching. She changed the subject, which in our family was the usual method for avoiding communication while still speaking. But this time, I didn’t let it go. I had never been more curious to know.

“But why did you quit that job, Mom?”

“You can look up where the school district is online, they have a website, I think,” she said.

“Yes, but did you like working there? Did you enjoy working outside the home?”

She was silent and a twinge of guilt struck me.

“I mean, I know times were different,” I said, unintentionally providing a lead to an easy answer.

She was silent.

“Are you there, Mom?” I asked.

“Yes. Do you want to talk to your father again? He’s right here?” she said.

“No, Mom, I want to talk to you. Why did you quit that job?”

Silence. So I gave her another nudge. Another out. One that would make both of our stories easier to tell, more convenient to live with. The easiest out of all.

“Dad didn’t like you working? Is that it?” I asked.

“No,” she said immediately but quietly. “But I can’t talk much when he’s right here next to me.”

“I don’t understand, Mom. If Dad didn’t mind you working then what problem would he have hearing why you quit?”

Silence. And then in the dimmest of voices, almost inaudible, she spoke.

“His parents, as I recall, felt very strongly that your father should be the man of the house.”

“So you quit because of his parents?”

More quietly she said, “Not exactly, no.”

Like a reporter grilling a politician, I felt opportunistic, mean-spirited even. What would happen to my mother if she rose from sleep now, when her hair had gone white and her hands had lost their steady?

I had questioned her into a corner, which isn’t what I wanted. I wanted to truly understand why my bright mother, who finished college expediently and with exceptional grades, who found employment immediately after graduation working in a highly specialized and desirable salaried job, who had the vision and ambition to spearhead organizational improvement right from the start, I wanted to know why this woman did not continue to work at least until she had children.

After a long pause that tugged at an age-old heartache, my profoundly unfulfilled mother said that she didn’t know why she quit working. She couldn’t remember. And she didn’t want to think about it anymore.

I told her I loved her, words we rarely said out loud. In a faraway voice, she said she loved me, too.

Wake Up, Bella

It isn’t easy to give up the fairytale. The rewards of a self-sufficient life aren’t always obvious. But this reader of Twilight has seen a real life lost to female dependency. Twilight troubled me at my core, for Bella reminded me of my own conservative upbringing and the pressures my mother faced fifty years ago. I wanted to reach through the pages and shake Meyer’s protagonist awake, perhaps take her on a Dickens-like journey to my mother’s present and hover over the bed where my mother now spends most of her days. I’d take Bella’s arm and point to my sad, frustrated, clinically depressed and either tearful or drugged-into-silence mother who can’t acknowledge that she’s helped build her own cage by agreeing to the lopsided terms of patriarchy and submitting to total dependence on a man.

In The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd takes the reader on her journey of feminist awakening from rigid patriarchal Christian beliefs to notions of the divine feminine. But it’s not a straight shot. Kidd must first recognize the pitfalls of a belief-system she embraced so wholly that she became a writer of Christian material. Her awakening later in life threatened her marriage, her career, and even her faith. About the fact that it took so many years for her eyes to open, she writes: “It’s a peculiar thing, isn’t it, that a woman can prefer the safety of cages to the hazards of freedom?” [13]

Many of us break out. Somehow or other, by circumstances that at the time felt terribly unfair to me, I grew up, made a career for myself, and escaped the prison of dependency that I thought was what I wanted. Other women do the same. But many do not. Because of this, I say: Twilight is not a love story; it is part one of a tragedy. In all of our efforts to bring feminine equality to the world stage, the fact that so many millions of women can identify so wholly with passive and dependent Bella makes me wonder: have we really broken free?  Perhaps all we’ve done is raise the height of the cage.

Twilight may be the hour in which vampires rise. But it is also the time in a woman’s life when she, too, may wake from sleep to discover an entire day has passed without her action or involvement, her influence and intelligence, without her vital contribution to the evolution of humankind. And if it truly is sunset before her eyes peel open, she will soon realize that the day can never be reclaimed.

Stephenie Meyer has capitalized on the human vulnerability toward dependency, especially for a population of young women already primed since birth by the social messages of what it means to be female. With the help of her own religious conditioning, she’s made millions selling us the oldest and most useless story ever told.

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