In Defense of Twilight

 

I want to begin this blog post with the above picture. I used to work at Barnes & Noble, and the fact “Teen Paranormal Romance” is a recognized genre has always been a source of humor for me. I totally missed the boat on the Twilight hysteria, and have never really been able to understand the mainstream’s preoccupation with vampires. After reading “Lenora,” “Alonzo the Brave, and Fair Imogene” and even “Mary,” my understanding of this genre as an actual genre has been enlightened. The preoccupation with death is not new in mainstream literature, and neither is a preoccupation with love. However, the fusion of these two seemingly incompatible themes makes for macabre and riveting reading. The mentioned poems deal with love’s transcendence of mortality. Typically, death is supposed to do a couple part, but somehow the limits beyond which mortality yields that love still exists is somehow really romantic, despite it being gory and disturbing. For Lenora, the death of her husband is romanticized, as he returns to her despite death and valiantly speeds her away. For Fair Imogene, the promises of love are eventually her end, as her dead knight returns from beyond the grave to take her away with him before she can marry someone else, to be with him in death forever. For Mary, the death of her love drives her mad.

I guess my point in all this is that vampire fiction isn’t all that much of a stretch; I shouldn’t have thought it so ridiculous. Stephanie Meyer isn’t original at all, and the trials and travails of undead romance have predated Bella and Edward by 200 years. I suppose what keeps our interest in the fusion of these competing themes is that we still have yet to understand them.