Content Note: Cheating in Relationships, Imprinting on ChildrenAna's Note: Comments that negatively audit the real life actions, words, or beliefs of Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and/or Stephenie Meyer are subject to deletion, if I so choose. This post is about a Twilight Theme, and not about bashing the fallible people connected to the Twilight franchise.
As many of you are no doubt aware, the tabloids exploded this week over the news that Robert Pattinson (the actor who plays Edward Cullen in Twilight) left his shared home with Kristen Stewart (the actress who plays Bella in Twilight) after a "cheating scandal". Kristen, who had been photographed in an intimate situation with the "Snow White and the Huntsman" director Rupert Sanders, released this statement to the press:
After the magazine hit newsstands Wednesday, Stewart admitted to cheating and issued a public apology. "I'm deeply sorry for the hurt and embarrassment I've caused to those close to me and everyone this has affected," she said in a statement to People. "This momentary indiscretion has jeopardized the most important thing in my life, the person I love and respect the most, Rob. I love him, I love him, I'm so sorry."
This post isn't about Kristen Stewart or Robert Pattinson, but for what it's worth, I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for Pattinson, because I believe it can be very hurtful to be confronted with evidence of cheating. I feel sorry for Stewart, because I believe it can be very easy to make a mistake that changes your entire life for the worse. Who among us has not at least once in their life wished for a time machine to take back something? I know I have.
Hardcore Twilight fans, the ones who openly identify Pattinson as Edward and Stewart as Bella may well be crushed and saddened by this turn of events; I've seen the polls demanding that the star couple "make a baby" so that it will turn out to be a real life adorable Reneesmee. But, of course, these actors aren't their characters, nor should they be.
And yet, I find myself in the midst of this turning back to Twilight. Pattinson and Stewart have been together for all of three years; Edward and Bella's relationship encompasses 2005 to 2007. The relationship between Pattinson and Stewart has been irreparably damaged by a kissing-and-maybe-more incident between Steward and another man; the relationship between Edward and Bella is ultimately only strengthened after her canoodling with Jacob Black. I don't think these comparisons make Pattinson or Stewart look somehow "worse" than Edward and Bella. Rather, I think these contrasts highlight that Twilight is fiction, and perhaps one reason why its so compelling.
After this post, where I ended with urging people to tell their loved ones that their love is unconditional, I asked Husband if he loved me unconditionally. He gave me a funny look and said that no, he didn't. He pointed out that he could imagine some things that, were I to do them, he wouldn't love me anymore. I gave him an exasperated look and told him that "'unconditional love' doesn't mean 'unconditionally', alright?" He laughed and affirmed that, in that case, yes he loved me unconditionally. Whatever that means.
The love in Twilight really is unconditional. The imprinting that the werewolves are subject to, and the blood bond between Edward and Bella that is essentially imprinting but with different words, are all formed completely, totally, eternally without condition or possibility for removal. In Eclipse, Jacob Black describes imprinting as having the entire world revolve around your loved one:
“It’s so hard to describe. It’s not like love at first sight, really. It’s more like . . . gravity moves. When you see her, suddenly it’s not the earth holding you here anymore. She does. And nothing matters more than her. And you would do anything for her, be anything for her. . . . You become whatever she needs you to be, whether that’s a protector, or a lover, or a friend, or a brother.
“Quil will be the best, kindest big brother any kid ever had. There isn’t a toddler on the planet that will be more carefully looked after than that little girl will be. And then, when she’s older and needs a friend, he’ll be more understanding, trustworthy, and reliable than anyone else she knows. And then, when she’s grown up, they’ll be as happy as Emily and Sam.”
The Twilight wiki even goes on to invoke the word "unconditionally":
When a shape-shifter imprints on a specific person, he becomes unconditionally bound to her for the rest of his life. When it happens, the experience is described as being gravitationally pulled toward that person while a glowing heat fills him; the connections of everything else become severed, or simply secondary, and only the imprintee is left to matter, leaving the shape-shifter with a deep need to do anything to please and protect the person.
Deeply creepy, especially when you add children into the mix? Undoubtedly. But if you can remove the children and the issues of consent and choice (and I don't blame you if you can't, because whoa), there's a fantasy underlying all this and I think the fantasy is that of being loved unconditionally. Not in the way that Husband and I use the word, but in the truest, strictest sense: Edward will always love Bella, no matter what she does.
And I think that carries out through the series. (Mind you, I haven't read all the books, yet, so I'm digging into the So I've Heard bucket here.) Edward doesn't castigate Bella for having moments of genuine attraction to Jacob. He seems genuinely willing to step back and play second fiddle so that Bella can have a human life, with Edward loving her distantly from afar. And -- I think -- the possibility of polyamory comes up, when it becomes clear that Edward can't make love to Bella without hurting her. (Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I seem to recall Edward suggesting it in his usual heavy-handed way.)
Not all lovers are going to be so flexible on these issues, to say the least. (Nor am I suggesting they should be. People are complicated and we're not all cut out for polyamory pansexual ElfQuest fun-times. Though I sometimes wish I was, Because ElfQuest.)
Bella isn't as flexible as Edward, and she certainly has moments of intense jealousy when confronted with attractive women vying for Edward's attention. But she loves Edward unconditionally in her own way, never minding too much his abusive behavior towards her, and being more than happy to excuse his years of vigilante serial killings in order to satiate his blood lust. As the series progresses, it becomes more and more clear that there really isn't a viable way for Edward to drive her off or cross a line that will irrevocably damage her love for him; I harbor a private suspicion that Edward could kill and eat his new in-laws and Bella would chalk it up to a tragic accident, best forgotten.
I'm not going to say that this fantasy of being unconditionally loved is unhealthy, but I do think that it's... unrealistic. As much as I say I unconditionally love my husband and parents, I am aware that there are lines that must not be crossed, both for them and for me. I think that's relatively normal, and not a particularly controversial position to hold.
But I understand the appeal of being truly unconditionally loved. Of someone for whom there is never a need to "start over", someone who cannot be driven away, someone for whom you never have to worry that you've crossed an un-take-back-able line. Bella will never have to long for a time machine to repair her relationship; Edward will never have to worry that he's lost the person who means the most to him. They have an eternity before them, yes, but they'll never get tired of one another's company, they'll never fall out of love, they'll never risk being hurt and alone.
It's a powerful fantasy. I almost, almost because boundaries exist for Good Reasons, wish that life worked like that. But I don't think it usually does.
41 comments:
There's a long history of cultures viewing love as a form of irrationality, even madness. Imposing conditions is pretty much always part of at least an attempt to treat things rationally, so the view of love as fundamentally irrational perhaps just is the same as the view of love as unconditional. Of course, historically it has also been very common to see this as an extremely problematic feature of love; the widespread view of unconditional, irrational love as a virtually unmixed good seems particularly Western and relatively recent.
And, going back to last week, we've got this deeply bizarre situation where Edward loves Bella unconditionally no matter what she does, and yet he's constantly angry at her and abusive towards her over things that aren't her fault. Unconditional love apparently doesn't preclude treating your lover like dirt.
And, of course, unconditional love seems to just spontaneously spring into existence. I think Ana's right here, and I understand the fantasy, but it strikes me as a lazy fantasy I could never be happy with. Eternal, unbreakable, unconditional love with a flawlessly beautiful, rich, privileged, etc. man that just gets handed to you by fate? It's like the Chosen Ones I was grumping about on an earlier thread: if I get all this just because fate decided to smooch my back porch, what does any of it mean? My own fantasies are to earn respect, admiration, wealth and such. To bring down the Dark Lord because I'm inspiring enough to bring people together. To outfight him in the final duel because I'm just that good. It's a lot more satisfying.
We also have the deeply bizarre situation where Kristin Stewart is being removed from any Snow White and the Huntsman sequels (or her role is being scaled back, but they totes decided that earlier) while the director who she kissed -- the married director -- is still attached.
As I recall from the first three books, Edward wasn't really okay with Jacob once he finally decided that it was okay for him to be with Bella. When he was trying to let Bella go for her own good, sure; later on, not so much. But I could be mistaken.
RPatz has impressed me, I have to say, with what little I've seen of his handling of the whole thing. Granted, this amounts to The Daily Show and a couple articles I skimmed in the Metro on my way to work, but he seems to be trying to maintain some vestige of privacy and, importantly, *not* to be trashing Stewart or what's-his-name or throwing tantrums in public. I don't know how he is as an actor, but that definitely puts him above a lot of celebrities, so...Decency Cookie, I guess.
Also what Jill Heather said. Not that I think the director should be removed--this is between him, his wife, Pattinson, and Stewart, and not really any of our business, and certainly should not affect anyone's professional career--but the double standard is ridiculous.
The whole concept of unconditional love always bugged me. At least from human beings. If someone likes me, or loves me, I want to think that it's because I'm awesome: otherwise it's not as fun to be awesome. But I'm Performer Chick, so that might just be me.
...Kannazuki no Miko...
*jaw drops*
I have seen this anime, but I have no memory of that!
My brain-censor must be very powerful. That's creepy. I wonder what else I've missed in my years of watching fansubs.
So at some point I want to write about the movie D.E.B.S., yesterday I tried and got a start yesterday and sort of burnt out, yesterday, I also randomly bumped into the thread where I first mentioned said movie here apparently seven months ago.
Anyway, the appearance of genuine affection between the two leads, which stands in stark contrast to Twilight (books, I haven't seen the movies), allows me to forgive basically all of the numerous problems of the movie because the relationship it is built around works (in my opinion.)
Anyway, there's a line in it that jumps out at me and gets a reaction of, "Ok, in a movie, maybe, but in any other setting no. No. No, no, no. No. Bad." That line is this:
"I think love should be irresistible, like a drug, you know, I think when it happens you should just not be able to help yourself."
That seems like a really bad idea. Especially since it's in the context of why she broke up with her boyfriend who was an asshole. What if it had been irresistible, but he'd still been an asshole. She'd be stuck with him and have no choice in the matter. Love should be resistible. And, in the movie in fact, it is resistible. It isn't resisted forever because that would make for a crappy story, but it's resistible as evidenced by some resistance put up (by the very person who had the quote I disagree with.)
Unconditional or irresistible love is a scary concept because it's like life debts or any other kind of slavery that takes root right in your mind. It's what got me to write this thing of Bella being callously evil.
That said, I do think that there's an argument to be made that if someone crossed X line they wouldn't be the same person, so maybe you can unconditionally love them because anything that they could do to make you stop would be accompanied by the realization, "No longer the person I unconditionally loved, warranty is void when character is changed to not-the-same-person degree."
I think part of the reason the director's still on board is that his wife is - I think - the producer and therefore the only one who actually matters a damn from a Hollywood business point of view. That is, unless I've confused her with someone else entirely, which is quite possible.
Well, that and there's the usual bucketload of double standards going on.
In all of the movies without exception, Edward and Bella tend to look like they physically nauseate each other. Some of the reviews I watched or read like SpoonyOne had a hard time with the romance for that simple fact alone, much less the mountains of other issues; the on-screen chemistry just isn't there. Edward especially, uh. Some of the best moments of the first movie's Rifftrax involve the commentators making strained noises whenever they see his face, seeming to imply that he looks like he, uh. Really hasn't gone to the bathroom in like a hundred years. Which is possible, actually.
Now that I think about it, it may just have been in the manga, and one of the things that the anime decided, uh, was probably better just left out entirely.
Sigh. Why can't we just have good yuri without something happening like they all die or something like what I mentioned before? In /u/ on 4chan (think the nicer part of a red light district) I've seen a lot of 'this is such a niche' or 'it's not really popular' as explanations but that's a load if I've ever heard one. Especially with a noticeable lack in the market even to this day, it should be prime territory for some really good stuff to be put out there and be successful.
Kannazuki no Miko was... still is... my guilty pleasure. My Twilight, as it it were. I know it has very little redeeming value but it makes me cry and have happy feelings.
Content Warning: Rape
Chikane's plan in the manga was to save Himeko by making her ineligiable as a shrine maiden by taking her virginity by raping her with her sword hilt. That they had to stay maidens was manga-only. Chikane did this so that she would have to be the one sacrificed. In the manga, Himeko had been chosen to be the sacrifice by Chikane's grandfather who was the head of the Oorachi religion. By her actions, Chikane invalidated Himeko as the sacrifice and make sure she would have to be killed instead. What she did was evil, and she knew it, and her hope was that Himeko could not and would not ever forgive her. That Himeko eventually did was... not realistic, but very Japanese manga trope-y. In the anime, her assault on Himeko is much more suggested, but an assault of some kind did happen in order for Chikane to make herself so detestable to Himeko that she would kill her this cycle, as they are cursed to do every time the two girls are reincarnated. She paid for her crime as well- not only did Chikane die, she was erased from existence. [/ end warning]
In the manga they're reincarnated as twins in their next life.
Yet it is still loads better than Twilight. Himeko, Chikane and Souma are friends and while misunderstandings about, they tend to be genuinely caring for each other and other people. What Chikane did is terrible and not glossed over, but Himeko's niche is forgiving others. It's a nice fantasy. That Souma loved Himeko enough to completely let Himeko go, and still fight for her (without the creepy reward that Jacob gets) is far more meaningful for me than what happens with Jacob. Sigh. I know this story has no real redeeming qualities but it doesn't take itself too seriously... so... Yeah.
STILL BETTER THAN TWILIGHT.
All this talk of "unconditional love" and "destiny" always gets me thinking of Tim Minchin's "If I Didn't Have You" and Greta Christina's "A Skeptic's View of Love".
And it’s gotten me thinking about the whole idea of soul-mates, and romantic destiny, and there being one perfect love for you in the whole world. All of which I think is a load of dingo’s kidneys.
TRiG.
I first learned of all this by heating of the breakup and infidelity accusations. It may be my black heart, but the first reaction I had was "They got together? Was this because they spent many years on the same set and grew to like each other, or is this a case of them believing their own propaganda/fan expectations for them?"
Which is awful to think about any combination of people supposedly romantically interested in each other.
Similarly, it seems like there's a but of Hollywood expectation, like politics, that there will be fooling around and the like, even for couplings that are supposedly commuted to each other. Perhaps I have very low standards and expectations.
More substantively, unconditional love in the verbatim sense is good fantasy material, but reads more like "love spell" to me than "romance forever." I want someone who can forgive and adapt and be open to possibilities, but someone who will take anything and everything without question is probably someone you don't want to play with. Its why saying you have "no limits" its frowned upon heavily - everyone has limits. Even if yours is only "no, you can't kill me."
Okay, I don't know about Patterson's or Stewart's personal life, and I quite frankly don't think it's any of my (or anybody else's business besides their family's and friends). But am I the only one that thinks this romance is staged?
Patterson is getting swamped by fans, all wanting him to be Edward. He hates it (he says interviews about how much he hates it). Stewart is, by all accounts, a very professional and compassionate actress (even if I still think she's terrible at it). Why is it a completely unreasonable assumption that they got together for a) Patterson to stop getting swamped by fans and b) to drum up press for their movie? Every time I saw them on tv or a magazine, they seemed nice, but not in love. Suddenly, the movie isn't filming anymore, Patterson is trying to get a career doing ANYTHING else, Stewart's already sewn up another movie- she decides to take the "Oh, I was cheating" hit and away everyone goes. Patterson, being grateful and a class-act, goes "My private life is private, Kristen is wonderful, but now I'd like to move on". The end.
Yay Tim MInchin song. I visit that theme a lot in poetry. "My love for you is like...a bunch of pretty-good things. Because seriously, there's no need for melodrama."
Lonespark--"My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun"? :D
as a romantic, I think this needs to be said - "I love you forever" doesn't have to mean "I'll stay with you forever." You can love someone unconditionally, with a love that will never break, no matter what they do, and still choose to end the relationship for the best interest of either or both of you.
OT
"Yeah. The fantasy itself, like all fantasies, is Okay but I'll take issue with the execution of it here. It's like taking a fantasy like 'I want to be the President of the United States' and then proceeding to immediately and unintentionally show us why it would Never Work and why it would really suck and have tons of downsides..."
"I'm going to fix the American economy, and I'm going to fix it good and proper. I'm going to fix it by selling it off in nice round lots to anyone with a yen or a yuan or a rouble to pay for it. Don't say I didn't warn you."
"...like if a novel about a random person suddenly becoming the President Because the Cool-Aid Man is Red had the first three hundred or so pages be about the paperwork in the first week, arranging security with the secret service, reviewing judicial appointments, having to produce your Kenyan birth certificate, etc, instead of, I dunno, going out and flying a fighter plane against aliens or something."
Didn't LaHaye and Jenkins write something more or less like that? {racks brain}
That sentiment sums up how I felt about my first boyfriend after we broke up. Twenty years after that, I realized he was actually a pretty horrible boyfriend, and I didn't love him anymore.
I'm not sure I've loved *anybody* 'forever'. I don't think, for me personally, 'forever' is all that desirable. Because 'forever' means that I can't change significantly, nor can the other person. But I *have* changed significantly over time, and I expect that I will continue to do so.
I like the old Celtic idea of handfastings for a year and a day, and then you decide if you want to renew them or not. If you don't, no harm no foul. That might make things easier for people who are serial monogamists.
Content warning: mind control
We've played with these themes in roleplaying games quite a bit. In general, the response when a decent person discovered that someone loved him irrationally and unconditionally was to be concerned and upset; the games are generally fantasy-genre and many of the plausible explanations for this are bad news, and anyway the state itself isn't somewhere you'd like to see a friend end up. The fact that the ship-captain in _Sun in Splendor_ learned to accept and like having some of his crew soul-bound to him was the key demonstration of his personal corruption, the thing that justified the eventual mutiny; in the end, the thing that transformed him into a sort of Flying Dutchman.
We currently have two characters, twins, who believe on shaky but not implausible evidence that they have only one soul between them, and who have arranged to be able to contact each other telepathically 24/7. It's as close to a non-coercive form of unconditional love as I think I've seen in gaming. It's also two people who disagree vehemently and frequently--Blackie disagrees with her sister almost on principle, to the point of switching sides in arguments in order to keep disagreeing. It's two people who could easily, while still loving each other, also hate each other quite a lot; who could end up hating each other with a soul-destroying hate. It's also been very hard for the other sister, Lily, to let Blackie go--to let her marry, leave town, develop her own authority. We're now seeing Lily working on a long-range plan to bring Blackie's husband under her sway so that she doesn't really have to "share" Blackie with anyone outside her inner circle.
They are not good people. Perhaps their relationship is one of the better things about them, but it's not a model of good health either. If they really do only have one soul between them, that's somewhat tragic for Blackie in particular. Lily is a noblewoman of an exceptionally corrupt Empire (Blackie would be too, except she's visibly non-human) and I suspect she'll eventually be Empress, which is not going to happen without a tremendous amount of moral compromise which Blackie might not want to countenance. Lily could very easily drag them both (literally!) into Hell.
Content warning: childbearing, pressure to abort
And -- I think -- the possibility of polyamory comes up, when it becomes clear that Edward can't make love to Bella without hurting her. (Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I seem to recall Edward suggesting it in his usual heavy-handed way.)
"-Amory" isn't the term I'd use for it - Edward suggests that Jacob act as breeding stud for Bella so she could have babies if she'd abort his Vampire Baby, Devourer of Mothers. At that point, both boys know that Bella would never love anyone but Edward, so I think the term "polyamory" implies a relationship that would be much fairer to Jacob than the proposed scenario.
Oh! Icing on the cake! Ladies and gentlemen, we have speciesism, too! Exact quote (taken via Mark Reads):
"I don't care about anything but keeping her alive," [Edward] said [to Jacob], suddenly focused now. "If it's a child she wants, she can have it. She can have half a dozen babies. Anything she wants." He paused for one beat. "She can have puppies, if that's what it takes."
This story, from way back, was mostly about how weird, "Your not my Parent! You're just the person who raised me," is in fiction, but it was also about how loving something doesn't mean not, say, killing them in a massive showdown between good and evil.
We were talking about the Redwall series at the time, as I recall.
There's also the little matter, that Mark of Mark Reads pointed out: Neither of them is actually consulting with Bella about what she wants to do.
We also have the deeply bizarre situation where Kristin Stewart is being removed from any Snow White and the Huntsman sequels (or her role is being scaled back, but they totes decided that earlier) while the director who she kissed -- the married director -- is still attached.
I've heard speculation that this had more to do with their respective salaries...
I found your WOT fascinating. Thank you for writing it.
This might be of interest:
http://www.genevievevalentine.com/2012/08/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-kstew/
Chris, you said exactly what I wanted to say, only clearer and more eloquently than it was in my head. I hope that if I ever turn into "not-me" enough that I do purposely hurtful things to the person who unconditionally loves me, that person will break up with me. I want someone who loves me unconditionally when I'm not fun to be around, and when I'm hurting, and when I need them to do irrational, inconvinent things to make my life a better place. But if I ever turn into a deliberately cruel person, I love this person enough that I want the relationship to end.
That's as much fantasy of "unconditional love" as I can handle. Anything more than that seems creepy.
@ bekabot: Very interesting point that I've never thought about before. Could someone give examples from other works?
I could come up with a couple dozen examples off the top of my head, since the convention I'm talking about is part of the fabric of American fiction, and is especially evident in what is called "classic" American fiction. (It's so much a part of classic American fiction that some of the classical American authors who used it used it in a clued-in fashion, with a smirk, but used it anyway.) The reason I don't want to do it here is that the list would be too long. But I can, and will, come up with a shorter list. Here goes:
One of the most frequent forms the division of labor between dark and light characters in American fiction takes is that the dark characters tend to stand for emotional life (as opposed to conscious, intellectual life) and emotional nurture. The part of a light-skinned character's emotional nature which he/she either doesn't care to acknowledge or can't find time to deal with gets embodied in a dark-skinned character. (Or an emotional relationship which the light-skinned character badly needs but either can't articulate the need for or is too proud to request gets offered/provided by a dark-skinned character.) So:
- Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook. Natty Bumppo is an orphan and a loner and would be completely isolated without Chingachgook, who has lost his own society and who more or less adopts Natty, with whom he hunts and wanders. Natty is the protagonist and the focus of the reader's attention, while Chingachgook "stands for" the part of Natty on which the reader is not expected to concentrate — the hunter and "savage".
- Little Eva and Uncle Tom. Augustine St. Clare is not up to the job of being Little Eva's father, so Uncle Tom takes over that function.
- Huck Finn and Jim. Pap Finn is so not up to the job of being Huck's father, so Jim adopts Huck and takes on the task of raising him.
- Scarlett and Mammy. Ellen O'Hara, as the Ideal Southern Lady,is bloodless enough not to be adequate to the burden of raising a child, so Mammy raises Scarlett and provides her with emotional support. (Separate but related: remember how Prissy, during the fall of Atlanta, acts out emotions Scarlett can't afford to own.) At the end of GWTW when Scarlett decides to "go home to Mother" she's planning to return to Mammy, not Ellen.
- Ishmael and Queequeg. Ishmael is emotionally an orphan (raised by a stepmother) and is totally isolated at the beginning of Moby Dick, and he would have stayed isolated aboard the Pequod, were it not for Queequeg, who more or less adopts him, first taking up with him in New Bedford, with zero motivation as far as the reader can see. But Ishmael needs an alternative self (as a comparatively flat character he needs to be rounded out and provided with a "shadow"), so Queequeg duly appears to provide him with one. The relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg is more perfunctory than the one between Natty and Chingachgook, but the former echoes the latter in many ways.
Natty and Chingachgook, like Ishmael and Queegueg, are "blood brothers". Eva and Tom, Huck and Jim, and Scarlett and Mammy, are all adopted children with adopted parents. (Remember how insistent Bella is, despite rejecting Jacob as a lover or a husband, in having him as part of her "family".)
That's enough for now. I'm facing time constraints and have to quit. Hope this will do. Once again, I'm not endorsing everything I discuss.
Unconditional love is the way you should love your children or your pets. ...When we grow up, we don't need unconditional love anymore, and I think most healthy people no longer want it.
I see love as the deepest appreciation for who you are as a person and the corresponding respect that comes with it. I think that no one person can unconditionally love you because no one else can fully and completely know you. I love my husband, but I can't unconditionally love him because I can't read his mind. I wouldn't want to - the idea of having "no boundaries" is hugely problematic, as other posters have pointed out - but I also don't think it's possible between two humans. However, I do believe in unconditional love in my religious relationship, in terms of the unconditional love God has as my creator. In my theology, God is my parent, knows me better than any person can be, and has the ability to have "no boundaries" when it comes to my behavior. Some people find that framing problematic, but that's how I understand it.
What I find interesting about Twilight is how the conception in-book of "unconditional love" reflects the ideas of "how to love God" that many evangelicals (and I'm guessing Mormons, considering Stephanie Meyer's religion) hold. For example, Edward loves Bella with so much intensity of emotion, yet treats her like crap. Similarly, many evangelicals emphasize intensity of spiritual feeling while having a complete lack of respect for their neighbors and fellow churchgoers. There's a serious emphasis on how a person feels as opposed to how they act. I find this particularly baffling, considering that no one else can really tell how you feel, but how you act has a deep effect on them.
TW, rape: The director's older than Kristen, obviously has more pull with whoever's in charge of paychecks on the Snow White sequel, is quite possibly physically intimidating to Kristen should he catch her alone...why is everyone assuming Kristen consented? I mean, it's possible she did, but from here it doesn't look real likely.
TW: rape (continued)
To the best of my (quite limited) knowledge, it's based on Stewart's characterisation of events, which didn't imply consent problems. Which in turn doesn't guarantee that everything was consensual, because Overton windows and rape culture and actresses trying to charge directors with sexual assault have a track record of getting hell thrown at them from all angles.
Hopefully Stewart would be supported in making it clear if she was assaulted, but I doubt it. Conversely, trying to diagnose other people's consent from a distance strikes me as a bad idea in most contexts.
bekabot, I like your analysis greatly (though like you, I'm disgusted by the trope - and don't worry, I didn't think you approved of it even prior to the disclaimer). I remember learning in college how racist tropes have done a 180 in the past several centuries - in Othello, Shakespeare shows traces of Roman racism, which attributes unmitigated passion to lighter skin (think Roman contact with German tribes) and cold intellect to darker skin (think Roman contact with North Africa). Romans, of course, were in the happy medium/perfect balance of the two. Othello loses control not because he is overly emotional, but because he is overly repressed emotionally. Now I'm wondering if any classical literature demonstrates the inverse of the American trope...
One of the fun things about classical literature (such of it as I've read) is that a certain amount of it is given over to the analysis of the lighter-haired-and-skinned-tribes whom the classical European peoples (medium brunets, tempered blonds, some redheads) kept contacting whenever they crossed the Alps. There was a lot of "sure these characters make great soldiers; they learned how to forge iron much earlier in their cultural history than we did, but can we say they're capable of becoming truly civilized? After all---they're so violent, all their societies display that: it sure looks congenital. The Army is the place for them and they do very well there, but is it really reasonable to suppose they can fit in---not as individuals but in the mass---anywhere else?"
Tacitus admired the Germans and said so, but not everybody was on his side.
But this is getting way OT.
One might suspect this, but according to the version of the story I heard, Patterson only agreed to take the role of Edward (whose character he hated passionately) in the first place was that he wanted to get with Stewart. I think it might even have been what got him the role, regardless of any on-screen (lack of) chemistry he had with Stewart- Patrick thought Edward was a self-hating asshole, so that's how he played him. Which of course makes him the definitive Edward.
^ oops Patterson, not Patrick. I thought of Star Trek and got confused.
...huh.
Just this morning someone posted, I think on Facebook, something about how Anglo-Saxon culture is built up from uncivilized barbarism and therefore...something about white people being assholes? I don't know, but it just struck me as a really stupid way to go about fighting prejudice. There may have been a bit of anti-Germanic-paganism thrown in for kicks.
Well, I didn't mean anything like that, which is one of the reasons I attach disclaimers to some of the stuff I type. It would be totally possible for people to interpret it wrongly, because American fiction is color-coded, very strongly so — it's more color-coded than British fiction is, and British fiction is the next-most-color-coded of any literary tradition I'm aware of. It would be easy to translate a recognition of that fact into the wrong kind of preoccupation with it.
What I was getting at is this time is that I'm not surprised to learn that other people historically have had literary color codes of their own and that their color codes, when examined, prove not to match up with our color codes, the ones which still influence our books today. (Though the influence of those codes is growing fainter than it once was; one of the unusual things about the Twilight books is the simon-purity with which the older patterns reappear. That's one of the things that tags the Twilight books as old-fashioned, and it's one of the ways a reader can spot S. Meyer as a James Fenimore Cooper fan.)
While I'm pretty confident and at-ease when discussing American and British literature, both of which I know middling-well, I am neither confident nor at ease when discussing Classical works, and with reason, because it's there that I start not to know what I'm talking about. So, if I didn't make that sufficiently clear above, I'd like to emphasize it now. Still, I'm inclined to think that Kirala is onto something, because the arrangement she describes survived into British literature even later than Shakespeare's day. Joseph Addison wrote a play titled Cato early in the 18th century. (The play is about the embattled state/eventual suicide of one of Julius Caesar's critics.) One of the lead character's best buds is a North African prince named Juba, who is a stalwart warrior, but also a super cerebral, wonky dude. His lines today come across as if spoken by Barack Obama or Mr. Spock.
Unconditional love is the way you should love your children or your pets. ...When we grow up, we don't need unconditional love anymore, and I think most healthy people no longer want it.
I see love as the deepest appreciation for who you are as a person and the corresponding respect that comes with it. I think that no one person can unconditionally love you because no one else can fully and completely know you. I love my husband, but I can't unconditionally love him because I can't read his mind. I wouldn't want to - the idea of having "no boundaries" is hugely problematic, as other posters have pointed out - but I also don't think it's possible between two humans. However, I do believe in unconditional love in my religious relationship, in terms of the unconditional love God has as my creator. In my theology, God is my parent, knows me better than any person can be, and has the ability to have "no boundaries" when it comes to my behavior. Some people find that framing problematic, but that's how I understand it.
What I find interesting about Twilight is how the conception in-book of "unconditional love" reflects the ideas of "how to love God" that many evangelicals (and I'm guessing Mormons, considering Stephanie Meyer's religion) hold. For example, Edward loves Bella with so much intensity of emotion, yet treats her like crap. Similarly, many evangelicals emphasize intensity of spiritual feeling while having a complete lack of respect for their neighbors and fellow churchgoers. There's a serious emphasis on how a person feels as opposed to how they act. I find this particularly baffling, considering that no one else can really tell how you feel, but how you act has a deep effect on them.
I could come up with a couple dozen examples off the top of my head, since the convention I'm talking about is part of the fabric of American fiction, and is especially evident in what is called "classic" American fiction. (It's so much a part of classic American fiction that some of the classical American authors who used it used it in a clued-in fashion, with a smirk, but used it anyway.) The reason I don't want to do it here is that the list would be too long. But I can, and will, come up with a shorter list. Here goes:
One of the most frequent forms the division of labor between dark and light characters in American fiction takes is that the dark characters tend to stand for emotional life (as opposed to conscious, intellectual life) and emotional nurture. The part of a light-skinned character's emotional nature which he/she either doesn't care to acknowledge or can't find time to deal with gets embodied in a dark-skinned character. (Or an emotional relationship which the light-skinned character badly needs but either can't articulate the need for or is too proud to request gets offered/provided by a dark-skinned character.) So:
- Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook. Natty Bumppo is an orphan and a loner and would be completely isolated without Chingachgook, who has lost his own society and who more or less adopts Natty, with whom he hunts and wanders. Natty is the protagonist and the focus of the reader's attention, while Chingachgook "stands for" the part of Natty on which the reader is not expected to concentrate — the hunter and "savage".
- Little Eva and Uncle Tom. Augustine St. Clare is not up to the job of being Little Eva's father, so Uncle Tom takes over that function.
- Huck Finn and Jim. Pap Finn is so not up to the job of being Huck's father, so Jim adopts Huck and takes on the task of raising him.
- Scarlett and Mammy. Ellen O'Hara, as the Ideal Southern Lady,is bloodless enough not to be adequate to the burden of raising a child, so Mammy raises Scarlett and provides her with emotional support. (Separate but related: remember how Prissy, during the fall of Atlanta, acts out emotions Scarlett can't afford to own.) At the end of GWTW when Scarlett decides to "go home to Mother" she's planning to return to Mammy, not Ellen.
- Ishmael and Queequeg. Ishmael is emotionally an orphan (raised by a stepmother) and is totally isolated at the beginning of Moby Dick, and he would have stayed isolated aboard the Pequod, were it not for Queequeg, who more or less adopts him, first taking up with him in New Bedford, with zero motivation as far as the reader can see. But Ishmael needs an alternative self (as a comparatively flat character he needs to be rounded out and provided with a "shadow"), so Queequeg duly appears to provide him with one. The relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg is more perfunctory than the one between Natty and Chingachgook, but the former echoes the latter in many ways.
Natty and Chingachgook, like Ishmael and Queegueg, are "blood brothers". Eva and Tom, Huck and Jim, and Scarlett and Mammy, are all adopted children with adopted parents. (Remember how insistent Bella is, despite rejecting Jacob as a lover or a husband, in having him as part of her "family".)
That's enough for now. I'm facing time constraints and have to quit. Hope this will do. Once again, I'm not endorsing everything I discuss.
TW, rape: The director's older than Kristen, obviously has more pull with whoever's in charge of paychecks on the Snow White sequel, is quite possibly physically intimidating to Kristen should he catch her alone...why is everyone assuming Kristen consented? I mean, it's possible she did, but from here it doesn't look real likely.
TW: rape (continued)
To the best of my (quite limited) knowledge, it's based on Stewart's characterisation of events, which didn't imply consent problems. Which in turn doesn't guarantee that everything was consensual, because Overton windows and rape culture - actresses trying to charge directors with sexual assault have a track record of getting hell thrown at them from all angles.
Hopefully Stewart would be supported in making it clear if she was assaulted, but I doubt it. Conversely, trying to diagnose other people's consent from a distance strikes me as a bad idea in most contexts.
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