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BELLA SWAN AND SARAH PALIN: ALL THE OLD MYTHS ARE NOT TRUE
Naomi Zack
Having It All
The four volumes of Twilight support a coherent narrative of development and transformation, from a classic situation of a young girl in love with a wonderful older man, into a mature relationship of full equality. Thus at the outset, Edward Cullen, who was born in 1901, far exceeds the contemporary high school student and mortal, Bella Swan, in mental and physical talents. He is also more beautiful than she. By the end of the fourth volume, however, Bella, as a newborn vampire, is physically stronger than Edward, just as mentally acute, and at least as beautiful.
From Bella’s point of view, Edward changes from an exalted all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful demigod, to a devoted lover and husband, whom she is able to protect with her own special gift of psychic shielding. Edward admires and supports every stage of Bella’s coming into her own powers, and is even able to accept the love of both Bella and their daughter for Jacob Black, the werewolf/“shape-shifter,” whom Edward earlier despised. Edward is very much the new sensitive and caring man to Bella’s new able, powerful, and courageous woman. He is even a so-called vegetarian vampire who kills animals for their blood instead of preying on humans.
Every Western ideal of romantic love and the contemporary success of heterosexual women is thereby fulfilled for the heroine of Twilight: She marries the vampire she loves and thereby joins a rich, cultured, and loving extended family, after which she skips through pregnancy in a couple of months, becomes a vampire to save her life, and attains the powers of a superheroine. Talk about “what women want!” If escape fiction as riveting as Twilight is really about our own mundane life and times—which I assume it is—then its fantastical elements may pinpoint exactly what young women aspire to in “having it all.” (Or else, Twilight is a sublime send-up of the notion of having it all, although the author gives no indication of that.)
All of the Myths Are True
The most fantastical element of the Twilight quartet is not so much its content, which the reader accepts as a basic premise, but Bella’s frequent pronouncement that all of the old myths are true. This self-reflexive incantation deftly connects the world of vampires and werewolves to everyday life, making it easy for the reader to vicariously live the story as her own mundane, mortal self. And so, the genre of children’s fairy tales is thereby harnessed to the desires, yearnings, and aspirations of women in the early twenty-first century. For although the Twilight series is categorized as reading for young adults, Stephenie Meyer has reported getting fan mail from women in their thirties—and they in turn may be the “scouts” for their older sisters, mothers, and grandmothers.
Consider Sarah Palin
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would suggest that Bella softened up many young white women for Sarah Palin, because the series had already sold millions when Palin began to campaign with presidential candidate John McCain in fall 2008. However, at this writing, Bella seems to have greater staying power than Sarah Palin, insofar as Palin’s team lost and Bella has been reincarnated in the movies. We should remember, though, that Palin retreated to Alaska, where she remained governor of an energy-rich state until she announced her resignation in July 2009. So in the long term, her assault on reality may turn out to be just as triumphant as Bella’s.
A Lesson for Serious Feminists
Self-styled serious feminists have much to learn from these two mass heroines, who can only be dismissed if one ignores the yearnings of existing women. The
Twilight books have sold twenty million copies and the first movie grossed $150 million in less than a month. Fifty million people voted for McCain-Palin, a number that was roughly half of the electorate, despite Barack Obama’s landslide in the electoral college and an additional three million votes.
1 Both Bella and Palin offer clues about how the dreams of contemporary young women are historically innocent to the point of complete ignorance. Indeed, the absence of history in both trajectories is perhaps the most striking fact about them. For example, in the
Twilight quartet, Jacob Black, the Native American shape-shifting character, lives in LaPush, Washington, which is the name of a real place, where the Quileute tribe has lived for at least eight hundred years. But nowhere in the
Twilight publicity were these real people acknowledged, and so far as I know, no attempt has been made to recognize the literary license taken with their identities. Similarly, in Palin’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Palin generously referred to the North Slope of Alaska as a source of still-untapped natural resources, in a manner that suggested she was completely oblivious of the effects of further drilling on natural habitats, ancestral indigenous lands, or global warming.
It is difficult to avoid the judgment that both Bella and Palin are American primitives, if not savages. Consider the picture of Palin (well circulated online during the fall of 2008) kneeling with one of her young daughters, behind a moose she had just shot.
2 Their expressions are cheerful and matter-of-fact. This picture is uncannily reminiscent of a scene from the last
Twilight novel, when Bella, with her young daughter nearby, is interrupted while drinking the blood of a moose. (It should go without saying that when Bella becomes a vampire, she adopts the so-called vegetarian practices of her husband and his family.)
Ordinary women identify with Bella and Palin. Bella’s mind is very accessible, because most of the events in the four novels are presented in the first person by her. Less is known about Palin’s inner life, but her fans have no trouble in identifying with her, based primarily, it would seem, on her successful heterosexuality and working-class background. In these current female versions of Horatio Alger, successful upward social mobility is a broad prize, not unlike the imagined joy of winning the lottery. What is important to multitudes is being able to identify with where the heroine starts out. The prizes she gets need not be either earned or deserved. It is sufficient if those who identify with her would value the same prizes. On this note, while critics who never liked Palin to begin with might make much of the hypocrisy involved in her $150,000-plus makeover, it is unlikely to perturb supporters, who may themselves have developed similar aspirations from watching early twenty-first-century makeover shows on television.
What, you may ask, is the feminist point of all this? The point is that serious scholarly feminists seem not to be aware that these three things are very important to a majority of young American women: practicing heterosexuality in the form of fulfilled romantic love and fertility; looking good according to the prevailing beauty norms of consumer culture; and attaining power in the world as it is, rather than the world as it should be. The good news is that these values and aspirations do not appear or feel like the psychic attitudes of an oppressed and exploited gender. The bad news is that this idealized configuration is not accessible to all members of the female mass, almost by definition: The chances of the majority of female teenagers finding true love with vampires, or of becoming governors of a state after they are beauty queens, are next to zero. The question is whether feminists ought to further distance themselves from existing women by repudiating idealized heterosexuality, objectified beauty, and male-identified power for women; or if they should make a more conscientious attempt to at least bridge their culture gap with the masses.
Who Are the Real Elitists?
Contemporary feminists are not alone in their elitist doctrinal purity. As philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007) pointed out, there is a persistent and unacknowledged problem with how class is dealt with in higher education. He wrote:
It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of “needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions.” . . . [S]tudents who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own. . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German school-teachers in the postwar period assigned
The Diary of Anne Frank. You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation. . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.
3“We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours” could be rephrased by many intellectual feminists as: “We are not so pro-women as to tolerate the values of women such as you.” And more specifically, we might add that contrary to what some in the mass media proclaimed, Palin is no more a real feminist than Bella is a real vegetarian. Behind such harsh rhetoric is a concern not for words but for what they stand for. Vegetarianism stands for not eating animals, and feminism stands for the interests of women and not merely their sexual or gendered identities. That is, since most of us already do not eat human flesh, it is a strange appropriation of the practice of those who already do not eat animal flesh to use the term “vegetarianism” as a positive label for those who abstain only from human flesh. And insofar as feminists, who have mostly been women, have fought long and hard for recognition of a right to choose abortion, as well as for recognition of the value of natural environments, it is a strange appropriation of feminism to contract its meaning to gender alone, so that it can be applied to someone who is militantly prolife and aggressively exploitative of nature.
The interests of women consist of social goals that would benefit large numbers of women in more or less equal ways. The error of the Bella and Palin fans is less in the content of their aspirations but in the inherent elitism of those aspirations. How many vampires could the Pacific Northwest support, without a significant decrease in the human, if not the animal, population? And as posed, how many women can be beauty queens, mothers of five, and governors of states, while running for vice president and possibly president after that, not to mention also modeling new wardrobes that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? The point is that the lifestyles of Bella and Palin are not sustainable on a mass level. The contradiction inherent in their mass admiration is that all of their fans, who are their fans because they want what they have, cannot all have what they have.
Rorty is mistaken if he is implying that the important difference between American fundamentalists and the college professors who educate their children is the content of their ideas or how they justify them. The important difference would have to lie in their life values, insofar as those values structure how they live and enable others to live the same way. Or in other words, do American Christian fundamentalists have sustainable lifestyles, capable of including multitudes on an egalitarian basis? Their homophobia and strong prolife positions alone would seem to exclude the well-being of a significant number of their very own children.
So how can intellectual feminists bridge their gap from those young women who aspire to have what Bella and Palin are presented as having? First, I think it important to engage those mass views and ideals that are strongly opposed to one’s own and try to analyze what is important and pleasurable about them to those who hold them (the compassionate move). Second, I think it’s necessary to distinguish between views and ideals that are salient only for individuals in independent, exceptional, and possibly isolated ways, and views and ideals that within them include the well-being of multitudes (the Kantian move). Third, I think it’s necessary to ask individuals to consider how their views and ideals are realized in their own lives and what practical steps it is possible for them to take to attain their ideals (the pragmatic move).
A Lesson for Feminists
The most telling lesson of Sarah Palin’s success for feminists is that gender inclusivity alone at this point barely registers as a political goal. What does and should register is group interests that political candidates and officials represent and seek to further. Until scholarly feminists succeed in broadly explaining to women what their common interests as women are, everything that they have worked for is vulnerable to being stifled by having its label “borrowed” by those who serve goals that are not in the common interests of women. The lesson for feminists in Stephenie Meyer’s success is that young women do want it all, and unless these young women are painstakingly taught that all the old myths are not true, they will all too willingly suspend their disbelief and escape into a fantasy in which eating animals is vegetarianism and endless death is endless life.
Having It All in Real Life
The idea that women can have it all has already passed into myth by compressing the components of “all” into the lives of exceptional individuals, all at once. In that mode, many young women are now vicariously having it all, although it is likely that the nature of what they are identifying with owes its magnetic cathexsis for them to an underlying fear that they might not have anything. In reality, in the United States, women still lack universal child care, not to mention universal health care. Those who work outside their homes—the majority—still take on a second shift in domestic and family work. Women are disproportionately subject to domestic violence as well as violence by acquaintances and strangers. Half of all marriages end in divorce, and economic hard times will doubtless intensify the feminization of poverty.
But also in reality, women now live much richer and longer lives than they ever did, and their potential remains untapped. Over the course of their long lives, they may indeed come to have it all, and more, but at different times. For example, if they choose to have children and significant careers, the intensity brought to each of these projects might vary over the decades of a much longer mortal life than enjoyed by poor Bella, who feels pressured to marry, die, and become a vampire herself before she is nineteen, so that she will not look too much older than Edward, who will be seventeen for eternity.
NOTES
3 Richard Rorty,
“Universality and Truth,” in Robert B. Brandom, ed.,
Rorty and His Critics (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-22.