This Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle by Leonard Sax, whose pre­vi­ous works have included, “Why Gen­der Mat­ters” has writ­ten an op-ed piece that states that Stephe­nie Meyer’s Twi­light Saga seems to buck fem­i­nist ideas and embrace tra­di­tional gen­der rolesand this has some­how con­tributed to the suc­cess of this series.

It has been reported that Meyer’s read­er­ship is not as broad as JK Rowling’s whose read­ers included teens and adults of both gen­ders. The crux of the arti­cle as I inter­pret is to say that despite teen girls being taught that gen­der roles do not mat­ter in today’s soci­ety, Stephe­nie Meyer comes along and gives us Bella Swan, a young teen-age girl who is con­stantly being saved by her vam­pire boyfriend, Edward Cullen.

This is fic­tion after all. I do not find Meyer’s char­ac­ter of Bella Swan indica­tive of any­thing mean­ing­ful. While the author of the op-ed piece makes his argu­ments clear, I think he is really reach­ing here in think­ing that Bella Swan is some type of rep­re­sen­ta­tion of anti-feminism. As a nar­ra­tor in this series, Bella was annoy­ing and whiny and con­stantly pin­ing after a cen­tury old vam­pire who could have eas­ily made her his din­ner. I slowly grew dis­en­chanted with the series when the love story became encum­bered with forced contrivances.

I find the Twi­light series to be uneven in it’s char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and plot­ting. The oft used “love tri­an­gle” plot device that is used here and else­where was some­what a deal breaker for me. The plots often ven­tured into the ridicu­lous and unless you’re a teen, the teen-age angst was high enough to make one quit at New Moon. I don’t know. I just find Bella Swan such a bland char­ac­ter that to tack on any mean­ing behind her actions or the dis­sec­tion of her world to be fairly a waste of time.

As with any­thing that is pop­u­lar in pop cul­ture, there’s hid­den mean­ing to be found in almost every­thing that has cap­ti­vated a seg­ment of read­ers. For me, there’s fic­tion and then there’s real­ity. I think the media some­times tend to think that peo­ple do not know the dif­fer­ence. Hope­fully, some­one can address this arti­cle because I find myself lack­ing any type of moti­va­tion to do so.