Is Bella a zero? Or a hero?

The New Moon cast. Will anyone not saved by Bella raise their hands? Nice try, Jessica. If you only knew.

It’s been a while since I posted formally to the Meaning of Twilight blog. So here goes. MSNBC posted an article today which includes:

The books are written about Bella’s life and through her perspective — taking the reader through the teen’s innermost thoughts about love, death, vampires and unnecessary cold medications. But even that intimacy fails to engender sympathy for a character who comes off to many as whiny, self-involved and weak.

“Never have I read a story written in the first person where I really cared less about the person who is doing the talking,” said Sharmila Badkar-Bhan, 33, of San Francisco. Jones described Bella both as “a girl who was born to whine” and also “the worst female protagonist in the world of fiction.”

And Bella “comes across as a weak, boring thing who always needs to be rescued,” said Catherine Shattuck, 36, of San Francisco.

I think the readers of Twilight quoted above, as well as many others, may misunderstand the series. Twilight is* a God-and-man allegory showing Bella — an unreliable narrator, with an unpolished narrative style — who reaches divinization through commitment, love, and sacrifice. The key here though is that she, like many people, fails even to see her own self very clearly (as her Edward points out often) until the very, very end of Breaking Dawn. You will notice many references to lying in the series, suggesting that Bella is “lying,” or at least incorrect in how she sees things. The surprising thing, at least to me, is that so many people believe her wholeheartedly.

For example, she is lonely for the god-like presence of the Cullens after they depart in New Moon, the possibility of reaching a heavenly state in their presence, and when she seeks comfort with the earthy wolfpack, readers assume that she is hopelessly dependent upon men. Yet she saves every other character in the series, especially the men, who are hopelessly mistaken and wrong-headed in every decision they make. The girls, especially Bella, need to rescue everyone else over and over again. Still, feminist critics complain that she is weak. Just because Bella views herself as weak doesn’t mean the readers shouldn’t notice that she is the dominant savior for the entire series.

Others complain that the stories are morally bereft because she is sleeping with a vampire. Only sleeping, but still they complain. Yet Edward is expressly said to be her “guardian angel” repeatedly in the series. He is watching over her, and providing a tangible goal as she sets out to discover the godly in life and within herself. When she herself becomes a demi-God, the most powerful vampire in the world because she has diligently sought to be more godly, these readers still complain. Who among them strives to “see as she is seen” by God as Bella has?

Then there’s the Bella = zero readers. Why all these other complaints if she is merely nothing? Surely the reader enjoys a profoundly subjective experience through Bella’s first-person perspective — which is why 100 million readers have become immersed into the story. But if she had no perspective, what is with the hundreds of opinions that litter the entire series? She hates occasions, values her friendships, worries that she is unnaturally clumsy, and so forth. She has an opinion on virtually everything she sees. The immersive experience of seeing life through Bella’s eyes is not only not a nothing, it is a “something” which they not only engage with, she is someone they aspire to become more like. Why? Her fans enjoy watching her choices, because they then feel empowered to make their own choices in their own lives. The cause-and-effect, Law of the Harvest order of the universe is revealed, a path to success is sketched out, and her readers begin to apply those principles in their own lives — a transformation that begins to rival Bella’s own experience.

And it concerns me when a cultural milestone like this awakes so many in our culture, yet is so widely misunderstood by its critics and is criticized not on what it offers, but on what they imagine it doesn’t offer.

There is more there than meets the eye. Which is Meyer’s main point — for Bella, for the series, and for each of her careful readers who she rewards in remarkably profound ways.

*Among other things, simultaneously. Nothing wrong with hitting several levels of meaning at the same time, which the Twilight saga certainly does. Another sign of it’s significance and glut of weapons in its arsenal.