"Freed from Desire" - The Concept of Romantic Love and the Desexualisation of the Vampire in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Novels Buchkatalog

Bachelorarbeit aus dem Jahr 2010 im Fachbereich Amerikanistik - Literatur, Universität Hamburg, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: 1. Introduction No matter what the time of day, there seems to be no escaping Twilight, Stephenie Meyer's immensely popular vampire saga centred around the morbid love story of a self-conscious teenage girl longing to die in order to spend eternity on the side of her extraordinarily beautiful vampire boyfriend. So far, all four books in the saga have sold more than 85 million copies and have been translated into 37 languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese and Croatian, whereas Hollywood's film adaptations of Twilight and New Moon have lured millions of spectators into cinemas around the world. It is to assume that this popularity with the masses is the reason why Meyer's novels stand accused of being trivial and are being neglected in literary studies, although Twilight has meanwhile become a worldwide cultural phenomenon. However, such criticism is not a novelty concerning vampire fiction. John Polidori's The Vampyre became an immediate best-seller after its publishing in 1819, but definitely not a critics' favourite. The same accounts for Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. Ever since the vampire's popularity increased alongside the advance of cinema, it stands accused of being nothing but the plain product of an unsophisticated entertainment machinery. Nevertheless, vampire novels like Dracula finally found their way into literary studies as they - like Gothic fiction in general - reflect on current developments in society as well as on the particular problems and fears of its members. This is the reason why I chose Meyer's novels as a topic for my BA paper. In her vampire saga, leaving aside some flaws in literary style, Meyer brilliantly captures the feeling of teenage angst, sexual insecurity and social alienation in a world where "misery has come home" in the shape of terrorist attacks and high school massacres. A world where divorce rates are ever more increasing, traditional gender roles no longer seem appropriate and every twelve-year-old can download pornographic videos from the internet. As in her world of vampires Meyer outlines a counter scenario to this modern world ofinsecurity she is often being criticised for promoting conservative values and anachronistic gender roles. The question whether this criticism - though not extensive, yet not insubstantial - is justified will be answered in the course of this work.