Illustration by Ciarán Butler.

Originally published in print September 2020.

 

For me, like most people, lockdown has been a scary and uncertain time. In times of worry and uncertainty, I always find myself seeking out the familiar and the known as a kind of safety-blanket to cloak myself against waves of anxiety, with my go-to comforters often being movies that I’ve seen about a million times or well-loved books with yellowed pages. I’d been planning on re-reading Twilight for a while, and Stephenie Meyer recently releasing Midnight Sun was the final push I needed to commit to falling back into that world that I hadn’t visited in a long time. This time around, my 21-year-old self found it harder to ignore some details of Bella and Edward’s relationship that were either romanticized or went unnoticed by my 12-year-old self. 

 

I was always firm in my place as a member of ‘Team Edward’, but I was surprised by some of his behaviour that I had evidently glossed over before. I remember being thrilled by Edward following Bella and her friends on a trip to Port Angeles and envious when he was sneaking into her bedroom night after night to watch her sleep. Reading Twilight as a young teenager, I had no experience with romantic relationships and so I had no frame of reference to be able to separate a healthy relationship from an unhealthy one. What my younger self saw from Edward as a desire to protect Bella, I now recognise for what it really was: Edward didn’t simply ‘follow’ Bella to Port Angeles, he was stalking her. He wasn’t cheekily ‘sneaking’ into her bedroom every night either, but rather breaking into her bedroom and breaking every boundary of privacy while he was at it too.

 

Edward’s behaviour in Twilight reminded me more of the stalker character Joe from the Netflix series You than the perfect vampire/god-like boyfriend that I remembered him to be. The popularity of modern tv series like You, which is based on a book, prove that Twilight isn’t an outlier in its portrayal of an obsessive boyfriend, and that it’s a common trope still used in fiction today. Friends also comes to mind, as a show from the 90’s that maintains a substantial level of popularity today, despite having a multitude of problematic aspects and its own portrayal of a controlling and possessive boyfriend in the form of Ross Geller.

 

Edward excuses his overbearing behaviour much in the same way that my younger self used to, by believing that Bella is so hopelessly clumsy that she simply cannot take care of herself and so she is actually lucky to have someone like Edward to watch over her, as who knows what might happen to her otherwise. This excuse both exposes a lack of respect for Bella and loses accuracy when you consider that Bella is a largely sensible person and that Edward himself acknowledges that she has acted as the responsible caretaker for her mother her entire life and has now taken on that same role while living with her father, Charlie. I think that this tendency to excuse behaviour like Edward’s is instilled in girls from a very young age. I remember being pushed by a boy on the school playground and being told that ‘he only did that because he likes you’. This mode of thinking is dangerous because it encourages little girls to confuse meanness with love and this harmful thought process followed me into my secondary school years. 

Twilight got a lot of hardship because it’s ‘cool’ to hate popular things and all too common for the validity of things that have a predominantly female fanbase to be dismissed and ridiculed unjustly. Having first been published fifteen years ago, the series is also a product of its time in a way and there is a heightened awareness today of the signs of toxic relationships that there wasn’t when I was a teenager. Despite my hit of nostalgia being semi-replaced with a dose of reality, I still adore the nostalgia of Twilight and the feeling of comfort it gives me that eases the homesickness I sometimes feel for a time in my life that’s attached to such a palpable sense of safety that I can’t ever really return to. Reading Twilight makes that return possible for me, if only for a few sentimental hours.