Stephanie Meyer’s enormously popular Twilight saga of teen vampire romance novels is commonly referred to as the young adult fiction equivalent of what the Harry Potter series was for children. Central to the series, which sells in the tens of millions globally, is an adolescent romantic relationship that, as I will show, is in many ways masochistic. Interrogating gendered subjectivity within the series, particularly in regard to its teenage narrator, Bella Swan, and her relationship with the hyper-idealized vampire hero, Edward Cullen, this article analyses the way the four narratives figure adolescent feminine desire as well as how they link eroticism and death. It also positions the series within broader feminist debates about postfeminism within popular culture, and explores how (and, with more difficulty, why) a masochistic relationship and an undead subjectivity for a teenage girl are seen as utopic sites of possibility in these narratives. If, as Nina Auerbach argues, each age produces the vampire it requires, then might Edward Cullen and his teen vampire bride suggest about the current, purportedly ‘postfeminist’, context and young women in particular?
AuerbachN (1995) Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2.
BakerJ (2009) Twilight girls learn to give up everything for love. Sydney Morning Herald, 19November.
3.
BatailleG (1986) Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. Chicago: City Lights.
4.
BaumeisterRF (1988) Masochism as escape from self. Journal of Sex Research25: 28–59.
5.
BelseyC (1994) Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
6.
BenjaminJ (1990) The Bonds of Love. London: Virago.
7.
BinionR (1993) Love beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts. New York: New York University Press.
8.
BristowJ (1997) Sexuality. London, Routledge.
9.
CaplanP (1993) The Myth of Women’s Masochism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
10.
CohnJ (1988) Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-market Fiction for Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
11.
CooperA (2006) Contemporary Psychoanalysis in America. New York: American Psychiatric Publishing.
12.
De BeauvoirS (1988 [1949]) The Second Sex. London: Picador.
13.
DoughertyN (1998) Vampires, eroticism, and the lure of the unconscious. In: KittlesonML (ed.) The Soul of Popular Culture: Looking at Contemporary Heroes, Myths and Monsters. Chicago: Open Court, 168–180.
14.
DyerR (1988) Children of the night: vampirism as homosexuality, homosexuality as vampirism. In: RadstoneS (ed.) Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction, pp. 47–72, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
15.
FreudS (1924) The economic problem of masochism. In: Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, edited by StracheyJ. London: Hogarth Press, 157–170.
16.
GedimanHK (1995) Fantasies of Love and Art in Life and Art: A Psychoanalytical Study of the Normal and the Pathological. New York: New York University Press.
17.
GelderK (1994) Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge.
18.
GordonJHollingerV (1997) Introduction: The Shape of Vampires. In: GordonJHollingerV (eds) Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Popular Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1–10.
19.
HarrisA (2004) Future Girl. New York: Routledge.
20.
IrigarayL (1985) This Sex which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
21.
KramerL (1997) After the Love Death: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
22.
KrimmerERavalS (2002) ‘Digging the undead’: death and desire in Buffy. In: WilcoxRLaveryD (eds) Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. pp. 153–164, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
23.
LayD (2009) Dark warnings about Twilight. The Sunday Telegraph, 15November: 111.
24.
McClimansLWisnewskiJJ (2009) Undead patriarchy and the possibility of love. In: HouselRWisnewskiJ (eds) Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 162–175.
25.
McRobbieA (2009) The Aftermath of Feminism. London: Sage.
26.
MannB (2009) Vampire love: the second sex negotiates the twenty-first century. In: HouselRWisnewskiJJ (eds) Twilight and Philosophy. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 131–146.
27.
MasseM (1992) In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
