What brand of heroine can be found in the Twilight series? What discernible characteristics of a heroine can be found in gothic fiction and do these characteristics contribute to a social definition of girlhood/womanhood? In an analysis of the Twilight series' protagonist as a gothic heroine in contrast to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, I claim that the author, Stephenie Meyer, constructs a particular category of contemporary gothic heroine. Drawing on the statement made by the novel's leading male character, Edward, to Bella that she is his “brand of heroin,“ this article plays with the idea that Meyer merged elements of the bildungsroman and the Female Gothic to create her brand. This brand of heroine fulfills the three distinct categories of girlhood/womanhood that characterize both the Gothic novel and the bildungsroman: a dependent stage, a caretaker stage, and a wife stage.
Search Results
“You are exactly my brand of heroin(e)“
Convergences and Divergences of the Gothic Literary Heroine
Julianne Guillard
Coming Out of the Coffin
The Vampire and Transnationalism in the Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse Series
Deborah Mutch
This article reads Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels as contemporary developments in the Gothic genre reflecting current issues of group and national identity. It extends the trope of the vampire as a site of national anxiety to a globalised, post 9/11 context where national identity is renegotiated and transformed. In Harris's novels, the vampires reveal themselves as Other to humans but integrate by accepting human definitions of nation and race which are then superceded by globalised trade. In Meyer's series, supposedly discrete groups of humans and non-humans evolve niche groupings that transform and react to the exigencies of history. Drawing upon Bill Ashcroft's use of the term 'articulation' to describe the cognizant construction of identity through the influences of social, national and religious traditions, the contemporary vampire is read as the place where renegotiations of national identity in a transnational era are visible.
(Para)normalizing Rape Culture
Possession as Rape in Young Adult Paranormal Romance
Annika Herb
consent. Paranormal Romance: Hush, Hush (2009) and Swoon (2009) Revitalized by the Twilight series in 2005, the paranormal romance features a human female protagonist introduced to paranormal forces through a supernatural love interest. The