I think Stephanie Meyer might be a genius. There, I said it.
I hate to marginalize some male readers, but Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series is, first and foremost, about a girl. A brief synopsis for anyone who has steered clear of the phenomenon: clumsy high school girl moves to a super depressing town in Washington, falls in love with a vampire and spends the next two years of her life trying not to get eaten by various enemy vampire clans. The books have dominated literary popular culture for the past six years and kick-started a vampire craze in television, film and, let's be honest, probably pornography. Praise and criticism of the series is a rather exhausted topic, its supporters pointing to its message that love conquers all and its critics citing the books' frequent use of non-words.
I tend to side with the critics, yet I still find myself drawn to the books in a way I don't typically experience when reading other novels: I don't have to think. And there's something so purely refreshing about going from James Joyce's "Ulysses" to Stephanie Meyer's two-page subplot about making a grilled cheese sandwich. But the books aren't popular simply because they're easy reads. Rather, they appeal to our fundamental appetites for undying love and sexual tension. Yet if that's all it took to take the female population by storm, every romance novel would be a No. 1 best seller. What makes Stephanie Meyer different is the fact that she was the first to take all the conventions of young adult fiction and push them beyond the limit of rationality, creating absurdity to the point where no greater themes could really be extracted. After you finish "Twilight" you're not musing over the moral implications of the cliffhanger ending; you're googling pictures of Robert Pattinson. Does it make her books significant contributions to the canon of English literature? Absolutely not. Does it make her a millionaire? You bet.
One staple of many young adult love stories, for example, is the "bad boy" character, the rebel who intrigues the quietly intelligent female protagonist. Who could be more of a rebel against society than a blood-sucking creature? Stephanie Meyer created the ultimate bad boy - she turned the man on a motorcycle into the sexy serial murderer. It doesn't make sense, but it makes us drool. In regard to the central conflict of the novels, most famous love stories introduce a roadblock which prevents the characters from being together - wealth, pride, family feuds, etc. Stephanie's Meyer's roadblock? One character wants to kill the other. Surely anyone in her right mind would find a way out of such a relationship, but not the remarkably devoted Bella Swan. But when he kisses her in that meadow it's just so beautiful!
The conversations between the two characters are vague and uninspiring, yet you prod on to get to the parts where they make out on her bed. Stephanie Meyer is not an author of the mind. For some, she may be an author of the heart, but I can't concede that much. What has brought her books so far is their focus on the extremes of our deepest desires. She abandons the literary convention of making us think and hones in on our basic instincts toward sex and our thirst for a devoted peace of man meat. It's similar to the feeling you experience when you see a work of art and think, "Please, I could have done that." Well, yeah, you probably could have. But did you?
She may not have addressed any real problems in anyone's life. She may not have illuminated some fundamental truth about the state of the modern world. She may not have made a lot of sense. But Stephanie Meyer may in fact be smarter than all of us. We can criticize all we want, but in the end, we just want to be swept off our feet by a marble-skinned mythical creature who may or may not be a serial killer. Perhaps, after a long day of asserting that her characters really mean something to her audience, Stephanie Meyer plops down on her couch stuffed with $100 bills and laughs, because she's translated teenaged angst into a cultural phenomenon. Perhaps she delves into "Ulysses" before going to bed. Perhaps she hums herself to sleep with the shamefully true mantra, joke's on them.
But she probably just makes a grilled cheese sandwich.
Chelsea's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at c.spata@cavalierdaily.com.
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