Reading “Twilight” on Purpose, Chapter 19:
One thing that reading Twilight on purpose is beginning to prove to me is how little stock readers must put into plot—not good plot, necessarily, just any plot at all. Twilight moves very slowly for a book about vampires, which is maybe the problem you run into when your main vampire characters are Good—the threat that one of them could at any moment rip Bella Swan’s throat open is instantly neutralized. So it’s been a lot of conversations and a lot of sitting in pastures, and a lot of funny, chaste descriptions about Bella’s clothes (like the “long, khaki-colored” skirt she wears to meet Edward’s parents, which her vampire boyfriend describes as “tempting”). Bella hasn’t even gone to school in over 100 pages! But lest ye think I’m dismissing the book for its, shall we say, lackadaisical pace, I want to state for the record that I’m not—I’m personally kind of bored, but clearly millions of readers weren’t. And it’s not like writers of “literary” fiction are masters of plot, either—they are often really terrible at it! This is probably where I should make some grand pronouncement like, “PLOT IS DEAD!” or “READERS PREFER EXCESSIVE DESCRIPTION OF VAMPIRE CHEEKBONES,” but I’m not ready to do that yet. Just thinking about things.
But anyway, around Chapter 19 is where the plot really begins to pick up. The Cullens’ vampire baseball game (really!) is interrupted by some Bad vampires, who are now after Bella (she of the “luscious”-smelling blood). Now we are getting somewhere! However, I’d like to note that in this chapter’s fourteen pages, Bella has been physically lifted from where she is standing and moved to a different place by vampires in six separate spots. This is like a contained metaphor for the book’s halting physical movement, as well as its pretty explicit depiction of female (lack of) agency, but it is also the first place where I really related to Twilight, because in high school I used to lie on the floor and ask people around me to carry me places, because I was lazy and also probably had extremely low blood sugar.
