Individual Text Feature: Twilight

     Isabella Swan moves from Arizona to Forks, Washington to live with her father so her mother can move to Florida with her new husband. Bella is beginning to adjust to her new high school when she notices the Cullen family, five of the most beautiful people that she has ever seen. She then realizes that she has a class with Edward. He keeps his distance from her at first, which she finds strange. However, after he leaves for a few days, he comes back to school and is being very friendly with her. She is even almost killed by a van in the school parking lot and he saves her with his incredible speed, which is the first time that we see a hint of his supernatural power. 

Bella attends an outing with some of her new friends at school, where she meets Jacob Black. He is the character that first reveals to Bella that the Cullen family are vampires. Bella is caught in a series of "sticky situations" and is ultimately rescued by Edward in all of them. Conflict really begins to arise when Billy Black, Jacob Black's father, notices that Bella and Edward are spending a lot of time together.  Edward later takes Bella into the woods on a hike to show her the way his skin glistens in the sun, this is where it is confirmed that Edward is a vampire. 

     In an article in the Washington Post, it is mentioned that Twilight invokes dark feelings of insecurities just by the text alone. It also talks about how the adolescent brain is already more vulnerable to these dark feelings. So the novel is not helping any of its readers and is probably not that appropriate for a teen to be reading. 

     Something that I find interesting is a statement that adolescents cannot think for themselves. It reads, "Here comes the question of responsibility. Writers who address young audience should, in an ideal world, be very careful about what they say. Exactly because teenage brains lack the ability to make judgments. In plain words, they may get wrong ideas. Not because they are stupid, but because their brains are wired like that. Because they are socially and emotionally unstable. The so-called social brain is under development during adolescence. Small children presumably do and believe what they are told to. Adolescents start to think for themselves, they interrogate, they doubt." 

     Let us forget about the world around us, this one book is going to fill the teenage brain with horrible ideas and they are, because of this book about vampires, going to do something dangerous and stupid. That is something that never happened before Twilight was written. Bella begs for Edward to change her into a vampire so she can have her forever with him not long after they proclaim feelings for one another. Teenage girls will make what may seem like a dumb choice in order to keep a guy around all the time. However, is this because teenage girls are going through changes and do not know how to make certain intelligent decisions and act on their pubescent overemotional feelings

     There is also a very strong argument that these "underdeveloped minds" will fall in love with a fictional character and that it is extremely dangerous. The characters are said to be less complex people that are driven by plot, but are not at all like real people and will generally have thoughts differently than real life people would. The characters do not act on psychological motivation, and this concept is very confusing to many teen girls. This places a false perception of reality on the readers that are unable to grasp this concept.

     I would like to focus on the fact that Twilights plays a fairly significant role on the way that adolescent girls today can view love, as well as the unrealistic expectations that these made up views can place on men. Younger girls today are surrounded with social media more than anyone. Twilight, being so mainstream, has taken the spotlight and gotten the attention of younger girls everywhere. There is even a “Team Jacob,” or “Team Edward,” for girls to choose their favorite male character. Both of which played the “bad boy” character that had feelings for Bella Swan. Both men are unrealistic characters that will never be found in society outside of a book or movie.

     Ultimately, the question that I want to present in my final essay is if Twilight is a little too intense for our adolescent girls to be reading today, and does it place an unrealistic idea of what love should look like in their heads? Do adolescent boys feel pressure to present a bad boy side of them to a girl that they feel interest in? Or does this allow a girl to think that it is okay to chase the bad boy, as well as defy their elders around them that are trying to tell them to stay away? Even though it features adolescent characters living an adolescent situation, should this book be more for adults?

     I believe that Twilight is a great topic for this assignment for the reason that it seems to be a pretty controversial topic about whether it is okay for teens to be reading and the effects that it can have on them and their life choices both long term and short term. I would like to find a better way to ask the questions that I have in mind for this assignment and look forward to doing more research on it in order to figure out the best way to do an effective analysis of the literature to create the best response to the prompt.