Elizabeth Bennet: the Anti Bella

After reading Twilight, I should have delved into something more manly to compensate, but that was not to be.  I had already decided on Pride and Prejudice as the second book for my novels class, my plan being to read it over the summer.  That didn't happen, so with all the false confidence I could muster, I announced to my students that I would be reading this book for the first time with them.  It's lame, it's embarrassing, it's probably terrible teaching.  We are now halfway through the book, and today we were discussing comparisons between Elizabeth Bennet and other fictional characters.  The class agreed that she was pretty much the opposite of Bella from Twilight, which was nice to hear.  In fact, compared to any other character, Elizabeth was smarter, more confident, and more outspoken.  I think that, as far as female characters I've read, only Shakespeare's Rosalind rivals her in those qualities.  One girl in my class compared her to Annabeth from the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series for the same reasons.  Another contemporary character who comes to my mind is Sam from The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

I am not an expert in feminist issues, and anything I try to say on the topic will only embarrass me, I'm sure.  I have been intrigued, however, by the responses I've heard to both Twilight and Pride and Prejudice.  Some women say that Twilight is bad because Bella is a terrible role model for girls, and some say that the series honestly captures the essence and emotional intensity of teenage romance.  Most women I know who have read Pride and Prejudice love it.  The girls in my novels class are expressing desires to go back in time and live the life of an 18th century, upper-class English girl, mostly for the balls and the gowns, but also for the simplicity of the lifestyle.  They do not, however, wish for the pressure of finding a well-to-do husband or for the social limitations.  I can't help but remember that one of the things that attracted Bella to Edward was his old world charm.  He spoke eloquently, danced gracefully, played piano, and was exceedingly polite.

I also can't help thinking of Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale, in which a knight convicted of rape was given one year to answer the question, "What do women most desire?"  The answer was mastery over their husbands, but for my purposes in this post I'm not so much interested in Chaucer's answer as in the question itself.  The question is, itself, an oversimplification of the greatest degree, but it is, nonetheless, a question for which the books I'm involved in right now are positing some possible answers.  Bella wants romance, Charlotte Lucas wants security, Elizabeth will know it when she sees it, I think.  Of course, I know that she ends up with Mr. Darcy, but I don't know how yet.  So, don't ruin it for me because I'm actually enjoying this one.

Twilight

I just finished reading Twilight.  I made a deal with my novels class, "You read Dracula, I'll read Twilight."  I think most of them actually read it.  So here, in five words, are a 33-year-old man's thoughts on the infamous teen vampire romance: it's a teen vampire romance.  That's it.  As I told my class one day, "my problem is that I'm not a teenage girl."

I feel like I have no context by which to fairly judge this book, having never read a romance novel, but I'm going to judge it anyway.  Stephanie Meyer has obviously captured the imagination of millions of teenage girls of all ages, so she must doing something right.  For me, though, the book was a series of desperately hopeful build-ups, and awful let-downs.  I wanted it to be good, despite everything I'd heard, and honestly gave it a chance.  For the first 150 pages or so, I thought it was interesting, but only because I assumed it was going somewhere.  Alas, that was not to be.

I'll briefly list my chief complaints:
1. Vampires playing baseball during thunderstorms so they can literally hit the ball with a thunderous crack is the silliest thing I've ever read, and not the good kind of silly.
2. Everyone in this book, especially Bella, needs to eat more food.  Skipping lunch because your crush is mysteriously absent is a bad idea.
3. Every time I thought it was headed somewhere, that something was actually going to happen, all I got was more obsessing, more drooling over Edward.
4. A vampire sparkling in the sunlight of a secluded meadow, cuddling carefully with his human girlfriend is the most inane thing I've ever read.
5.  Will everyone please stop comparing this series to Harry Potter?  It is not at all the same sort of book, but as I was reading Twilight, I got so many questions and comments along those lines.

The worst thing about this book is that it is ALL about a lonely girl obsessing over a boy, mostly for his looks.  That's it.  Even the climax is disappointingly bogged down by pages and pages of Bella in a hotel room missing Edward, then being duped in a ridiculously simple way by her captor.

Finally, I'm not interested in the emotional complexities of loving a vampire.  By the end of the book, Bella wants to become a vampire.  She calls prom a "trite human thing."  Edward refuses to turn her into a "monster", which is supposed to demonstrate Edward's nobility, but somehow only makes him seem more self-indulgent.  The best literature, in my opinion, affirms our humanity while allowing us to escape our personal situation for a time.  Twilight, however, only affirms our desire to escape.

Kids in the 1820's

I am teaching a class on folklore this semester and have completely fallen in love with the stories of the Brothers Grimm.  Not only that, but my students have, too.  I was skeptical when I saw that my roster consisted of five guys and one girl, but I should not have been.   Seventeen-year-old guys love violence and gore, and the Brothers Grimm deliver both with a surprising and twisted sense of humor.  Stories like "The Robber Bridegroom" and "Fitcher's Bird" rival any current horror movie for shock factor.  Here's an example from the latter, translated by Maria Tatar in her delightfully titled book, The Grimm Reader:

"Imagine what she saw when she entered!  In the middle of the room there was a big basin full of blood, and in it there were chopped up pieces of dead bodies.  Next to the basin was a block of wood with a gleaming ax on it."

This is a children's story?!  I think one of my students put it best: "Kids in the 1820's were B.A."

I knew that Jacob and Wilhem had magically imbedded themselves somewhere deep in the Disney-dilluted collective cultural consciousness, and I had a hunch that by reading the raw original stories we could light up some long-dormant regions of our temporal lobes.  I'm delighted that it's working.  So far, we've worked on tracing motifs through the stories: the wicked stepmother, human-to-animal transformations, hidden identities, etc.  We've compared the Grimms' "Briar Rose" to Disney's Sleeping Beauty.  It's been fun, and I hope the good energy continues.

After The Grimm Reader, we'll be reading Yeats' Celtic Twilight, Favorite Folk Tales from Around the World (edited by Jane Yolen), and Legends and Tales of the American West (by Richard Erdoes).  Right now, though, I feel like I could linger with the Brothers Grimm all semester.  So, what do I love about them?  It's not the violence, although I can't imagine the stories without it.  It has something to do with the joy of knowing that when a certain element is at play, you know what's going to happen, but not how.  If there's a wolf, you know somebody's getting eaten, but how is the wolf going to trick them?  If there are any number of brothers and one younger sister, you know they're going to get turned into birds, or maybe a deer, and the sister is going to have to save them, but how?  At the end will the wicked stepmother be boiled in a barrel with poisonous snakes, or drug through the streets in a barrel studded with nails on the inside?

And there are always those out-of-nowhere, never-saw-it-coming moments that you can't help but laugh at, like when the young man enters hell and finds the devil's grandmother sitting in an easy chair.  It is in such moments that you can feel the oral tradition bleeding through the page.  You can imagine yourself in cottage in the black forest listening to some old woman spin the tale.  So, props to Tatar for a wonderful translation.

I'm looking forward to seeing where this semester goes.