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Journalism of Courage
Twenty years ago, the world was introduced to a ‘twilight’ world of a sparkling vampire and the clumsy girl who loved him. What followed was not just a publishing phenomenon, but a cultural schism. While millions of teenage girls saw a swoon-worthy romance, critics and comedians saw a target, deriding the series as melodramatic, poorly written, and embarrassing.
Twilight, Stephenie Meyer’s romantic saga of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, became one of the most successful and simultaneously the most ridiculed works of fiction in modern memory. The books were flawed, but the intensity of the mockery was never really about the quality of the prose or the angst-ridden plot. Twilight was never the problem. Our contempt for teen girls was.
The ridicule was not confined to highbrow litterateurs and critics. Comedians, cultural commentators and even fellow writers mocked it so much that it almost became synonymous with bad taste, something read by air-headed teens and tweens. The image of young women queueing at midnight book launches or weeping at film premieres was presented as a comic pathology.
The vehemence of this response reveals uneasiness of the so-called cultural custodians around the inner lives of girls, and how swiftly we trivialise their enthusiasms, desires and fantasies.
It would be disingenuous to pretend that Twilight is above reproach. Its central romance is marked by troubling dynamics. Edward’s omnipresence in Bella’s life, his watchfulness shading into surveillance, offers a textbook example of how protection collapses into possession. Bella’s self-abnegation, her conviction that life without Edward is not worth living, troubles contemporary readers who see in it a denial of agency and a declaration that a woman’s life is not worth living without a man (New Moon).
The novels rehearse a morality of abstinence that feels, at times, less like choice than coercion. One does not need a feminist training to perceive, in these pages, patterns of gaslighting, unhealthy dependency, and a troubling conflation of desire with annihilation. Yet to remain hung-up on these shortcomings is to conveniently and deliberately oversee the fact that Twilight compelled a mainstream audience to debate these questions in the first place. The novels were criticised in schools, in op-ed columns, in living rooms, not merely as pulp romance but as texts with social consequences.
In this sense, Meyer’s work became a catalyst. Meyer should get props for bringings conversations about consent, autonomy and the romanticisation of control to the surface of public discourse.
Still, what struck me most at the time was not the critique but the contempt. Twilight was not simply criticised, it was mocked. Its fans were lampooned as hysterical, deluded, or shallow. Stewart’s performance was parodied endlessly, and Robert Pattinson could scarcely conceal his ambivalence at the role that made him famous.
Why such eagerness to sneer at a cultural phenomenon that rivaled Harry Potter? The answer lies in whose voices animated the phenomenon. Popular culture has long harboured a discomfort with teenage girls, whose enthusiasms are routinely cast as trivial or laughable.
The cultural imagination has space to romanticise the obsessive fervour of men, whether it is the encyclopaedic seriousness of comic-book collectors or the ritualised devotion of football fans, yet greets the passions of girls with derision. What was so intolerable, one wonders, about young women reading their way into a romantic escape?
The contempt for Twilight was thus overdetermined. Certainly, it reflected unease with the novels’ themes. But it also betrayed a deeper cultural suspicion that when girls gather in great numbers to desire, to imagine, to dream, their voices are drowned in laughter than taken seriously.
And yet the girls were not wrong. By the end of its run, Twilight had sold over 160 million books and grossed more than $3 billion at the box office. It redefined the publishing landscape, ushering in a decade of supernatural romance, fan-fiction empires, and women-led billion-dollar franchises.
Without Twilight, there would be no Fifty Shades of Grey, no Vampire Diaries or Shadowhunters, abd perhaps no proof that a female-led blockbuster could dominate the global market.
It is easy, two decades on, to dismiss this as mere commercial saturation. Yet what the saga offered its readers was not simply escapism but a way of articulating the raw, unmediated force of longing. Bella’s desire to be chosen absolutely, Edward’s tormented restraint, the gothic melodrama of forever-love, all of this spoke, however imperfectly, to adolescent experiences of yearning and self-definition.
Rereading Twilight today is to encounter many moments of unintentional comedy. The dialogue is florid (remember: ‘and so the lion fell for the lamb,’ ‘you are my life now’), the metaphors overwrought, the plotting uneven. But even this awkwardness is part of its legacy. The very excesses that critics derided are what made it legible to its audience. Melodrama, after all, has always been a language of the marginalised, particularly of women, because it dares to make emotions louder than decorum allows.
What the backlash missed was that the girls’ enthusiasm was itself meaningful, regardless of the novels’ deficiencies. Their devotion signalled not gullibility but a hunger for recognition, for stories in which their desires took centre stage. To mock them was not to defend literature but to reassert a hierarchy of taste in which young women’s pleasures are always already beneath contempt.
The girls were right
Two decades later, the vitriol of the 2000s reads as faintly embarrassing in itself. Twilight is not a masterpiece, but it was never the disaster its detractors imagined either.
It was a flawed, fervid, generational text that gave a voice, however compromised, to adolescent longing. It opened conversations that needed to be had. And it proved, if proof were needed, that the imaginative lives of girls can move markets, shape genres and alter the direction of popular culture.
The girls who carried their copies of Twilight into classrooms and cinemas were not silly. They were, as it turns out, ahead of the curve.
