essay on twilight book

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 9

Chapters 10-17

Chapters 18-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, is a young adult adventure-romance about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire. Her struggle to build a relationship in a world filled with suspicion and danger helped make the book a number-one New York Times bestseller. The novel launched the Twilight book series, which has sold more than 100 million copies and received multiple young reader awards. The series also has been adapted into a set of popular films that have earned more than three billion dollars.

Along with the four Twilight books, author Meyer published alternate versions, including one from the vampire’s perspective and one that reverses the genders of all the main characters. She also writes novels for adult readers.

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Plot Summary

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Bella Swan moves from her mother’s home in sunny Phoenix to live in cloudy, rainy Forks, Washington, with her father, Police Chief Charlie Swan . Bella is smart and pretty but solitary and clumsy, and she dreads navigating a new social world at Forks High School . The kids there, however, are friendly and take an interest in her, especially three boys who want to date her. Another boy, Edward, pale-skinned and handsome, is rude at first but later goes out of his way to be nice to her, and she feels greatly intrigued by him.

One chilly morning, as Bella arrives at school, a student loses control of his van on an ice slick and skids toward her. Edward suddenly appears next to her, pushes her out the way, and physically stops the van with his bare hands. Bella hits her head on the ground and is rushed to the hospital, but she’s ok. She demands to know from Edward how he managed to save her, but he’s tight-lipped. He tells her it’s better if they’re not friends.

For weeks, Edward is polite but distant. Bella dreams of him every night. Other boys invite her to a school dance, but she begs off—her clumsiness extends disastrously to dancing—and plans to spend the day in Seattle instead. Edward, saying he’s tired of avoiding her, offers to drive her there. Stunned, Bella accepts.

Bella can smell blood , and it nauseates her. During a blood-testing exercise in Biology class, she nearly faints. Edward takes her to the nurse’s office and then drives her home. They talk about their families and discover that they have the same taste in music.

Bella joins several students on a trip to the beach at the La Push reservation. Several young Quileute natives join them. One, Jacob Black , is the son of Charlie’s best friend, Billy Black , whom Bella remembers from her visits to the reservation as a very young girl. Jacob tells her the Quileute legend about how their men turn into werewolves to fight vampires. Today, they have a truce with a family of vampires led by Dr. Cullen. Jacob thinks it’s all nonsense.

On a visit with Jessica and Angela to Port Angeles , Bella gets lost on a back street. Four surly men surround her and close in, but Edward drives up out of nowhere, and she escapes with him. Edward admits that he’s been keeping an eye on her and warns that he’s a vampire. Bella says she knows and doesn’t care.

Edward drives her to school daily; they spend free time together there and after school, asking questions about each other’s lives. She learns that Edward and his family don’t attack humans but instead hunt large animals for their blood. One weekend, Bella and Edward go for a hike in the woods, and he shows her his skin in the sunlight: It glitters like diamonds. They kiss, and she gets woozy with happiness.

Back at home, she asks Edward to stay with her. He admits he’s been visiting at night to watch over her; strangely, this makes her happy. Quietly, to not alert her dad, they snuggle and talk, and she falls asleep in his arms.

The next day, Edward takes her to his home deep in the forest. Inside the beautiful, three-story house, she meets his adoptive family of peaceful vampires—Dr. Carlisle Cullen , the town surgeon who treated her after the van accident; his wife, Esme; cheerful Alice; and quiet Jasper. Rosalie and her husband, Emmet, aren’t there: Rosalie is still making up her mind about Bella. Edward plays a gorgeous piece of piano music he wrote for Bella, then gives her a tour of the house. He explains that Carlisle, the son of an English pastor, became a vampire in the 1640s but learned how to survive without hunting humans.

Jacob and Billy Black visit Bella at home. Privately, Billy warns Bella that dating Edward is a serious mistake; Bella rebukes him for intruding; she adds that she knows more about Edward than he thinks.

Bella watches the Cullens play baseball on a meadow in the mountains. They play during a storm because the crack of their bats sounds like thunder. During the game, they’re interrupted by visiting vampires who smell Bella and want to hunt her. Carlisle talks them out of it while the other Cullens whisk her away.

Edward says one of the vampires, James , is a tracker who loves a challenge and is already searching for Bella. They decide to take Bella to Phoenix while Edward and Carlisle try to find and kill James. Bella pretends to her father to be upset with Edward and wants to return to her mom; she leaves before he can stop her. Alice and Jasper drive Bella at high speed to Phoenix while Esme stands guard over Charlie.

Alice has a vision of James sitting in an empty ballet studio that looks like the one Bella attended as a child. Bella receives a call from her mom that’s interrupted by James, who tells Bella he’s holding her mother hostage and that Bella must go to him. She eludes Alice and Jasper and meets James at her childhood ballet school, where she realizes her mom’s voice was taken from an old family video recording. James taunts her; she tries to escape, but he hurls her against a mirror, which breaks several of her bones and slices open her scalp. As he moves in for the kill, he’s interrupted by five Cullens, who dispatch him violently.

They discover that James bit Bella’s hand; Edward gallantly sucks the poison from the wound and manages to resist taking the rest of her blood. They rush Bella to a hospital, where Edward and Renée watch over her until she wakes up. Renée thinks the Cullens came to Phoenix so Edward and Bella could reconcile and that clumsy Bella managed to fall down some stairs and crash through a window.

Weeks later, Edward and Bella dress up and attend the school prom. Still wearing a leg cast, Bella dances by putting her feet on top of Edward’s. Jacob also attends. He tells Bella that his father will be keeping an eye on her and Edward. Bella asks Edward to turn her into a vampire so they can be together as physical equals. He refuses, but he promises always to be with her.

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Twilight: Introduction

Twilight: plot summary, twilight: detailed summary & analysis, twilight: themes, twilight: quotes, twilight: characters, twilight: symbols, twilight: theme wheel, brief biography of stephenie meyer.

Historical Context of Twilight

Other books related to twilight.

• Full Title: Twilight
• When Written: 2003
• Where Written: Phoenix, Arizona
• When Published: 2005
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Young Adult Fantasy; Romance; some consider it to be Gothic
• Setting: Forks, Washington
• Climax: Edward sucks the vampire venom out of Bella’s arm
• Antagonist: James
• Point of View: First Person

Extra Credit for Twilight

It Just Doesn’t Add Up. In 2006, a professor in Florida argued that mathematically speaking, the existence of vampires is impossible. He proposed that had the first vampire appeared on January 1, 1600, and then fed monthly—and had every victim turned into a vampire who in turn fed monthly—it would’ve only taken two and a half years for the entire world population to turn into vampires. 

Literary Tourism. Forks, Washington—and the Olympic Peninsula as a whole—has become something of a tourist destination since Twilight was published. In Forks, visitors can see the Swan house (the house that inspired Meyer’s descriptions in the novel), see costumes and props from the film at the visitors’ center, and enjoy Twilight -themed events during the Twilight Festival in September. However, some visitors do come away disappointed as, due to permitting issues, none of the movies were filmed in Forks.

At Its Core, the ‘Twilight’ Saga Is a Story About ________

A field guide to the many, many intellectual movements that have laid claim to “Twilight”

TO THE NAKED EYE, IT MAY APPEAR THAT: The Twilight saga is a story about love. And vampires. And family. And abstinence. And racism. And the founding of the Mormon faith. And orphans, in a really weird way.

BUT ACCORDING TO SOME EXPERTS WHO THOUGHT REALLY HARD ABOUT THIS: Twilight is a story about all of these things. And more things.

Since the series’ debut in 2005, multitudes of thinkers and scholars have claimed to know the real, profound meaning behind Stephenie Meyer’s famous vampire-romance novel series. This tends to happen sometimes when books ignite widespread consumption and discussion: Just run a quick Google search on “The Great Gatsby is a story about” if you need further proof. But the degree to which Twilight has been analyzed, re-analyzed, reframed, and close-read makes it something of a lit-crit Choose Your Own Adventure story.

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So because Breaking Dawn—Part 2 , the final film in the mega-selling Twilight movie franchise, comes to theaters this weekend, it might be wise to decide just what strain of liberal arts-y interpretation you subscribe to. Take your pick: Twilight and its sequels are one big story about …

The power (and powerlessness) of women.

It’s arguably the most notorious complaint about Twilight : That meek, indecisive teenager Bella Swan may be something of a sketchy role model for its largely teenage, largely female fan base. For instance, in 2010, David Cox of the Guardian expressed some concern in a story called (amazingly) “ Twilight: the franchise that ate feminism .”

“In a climactic argument, [Bella’s two suitors Jacob and Edward] debate what’s best for her,” he wrote. “As they decide her future she sleeps between them, the epitome of submissive passivity. Bella’s fate isn’t only dispiriting; it’s also deceptive. On the whole, beguilement by a teenage bad boy, however courtly his manner, doesn’t lead to eternal love; nor is self-abnegation a reliable route to bliss. It’s therefore understandable that some have questioned the merits of Twilight’ s message for womankind.”

That was, of course, not the end of that conversation. Critics, fans, and feminist thinkers have continued to squabble among themselves over how to conceive of Twilight ’s all-consuming love story between Edward and Bella—as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unbalanced relationships, or as a commentary on the virtue of an unswervingly committed partner. In her essay “Bella and the Choice Made in Eden,” from the 2010 essay collection The Twilight Mystique , Susan Jeffers characterized Bella as a quietly complicit abused lover:

[Edward’s] behavior toward Bella for the first three books is frightening in many ways. Over the course of the series, he watches her sleep, constantly tells her she is absurd, and tries to control who she sees and who her friends are. This abusive behavior is rooted in his inability to recognize Bella's agency, his inability to acknowledge that she can decide for herself what she needs. His refusal to allow her to become a vampire is further evidence of that paternalism. The three later novels focus both on Bella’s becoming a vampire and Edward’s dawning recognition of Bella’s status as an agent. ... Edward’s controlling behavior continues in Eclipse , but he is able to make some meaningful compromises. At the end of Eclipse , he finally says, “I’ve clung with idiotic obstinacy to my idea of what’s best for you, though it’s only hurt you … I don’t trust myself anymore. You can have happiness your way. My way is always wrong.”

Later on, though, Jeffers asserts that Bella might be a somewhat feminist figure after all, in that she “rejects the violence inherent in a patriarchal system” because she “refuses to allow Edward and Jacob to remain rivals, and she engineers circumstances that require them to put their differences aside and work together.”

Meanwhile, just a few pages away in the same volume, Lori Branch’s “Carlisle’s Cross: Locating the Post-Secular Gothic” cast the protagonist as a “post-feminist” heroine who revealed a few unforeseen effects of the feminist movement: “The remarkable phenomenon here is the recognition in Meyer’s fiction … of the abjected ‘Gothic’ desires of our culture. Bella’s popularity as superstar Gothic heroine reveals precisely that we as a culture have already travelled a feminist road, and that it has left apparently not a few readers with very particular unfulfilled longings and misgivings.”

When creator Stephenie Meyer was asked whether the heroine she’d created was a feminist or an anti-feminist one, she responded on her website with the following:

In my own opinion (key word), the foundation of feminism is this: being able to choose. The core of anti-feminism is, conversely, telling a woman she can't do something solely because she’s a woman—taking any choice away from her specifically because of her gender … One of the weird things about modern feminism is that some feminists seem to be putting their own limits on women’s choices. That feels backward to me. It’s as if you can’t choose a family on your own terms and still be considered a strong woman. How is that empowering? Are there rules about if, when, and how we love or marry and if, when, and how we have kids? Are there jobs we can and can’t have in order to be a “real” feminist? To me, those limitations seem anti-feminist in basic principle.

Other thinkers have identified elements of the Twilight series as clear allegories—and apologias—for the Mormon faith, to which Meyer belongs. According to John Granger’s Touchstone magazine article “ Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden: What the Bestselling Twilight Series Has in Store for Young Readers ,” the series is a thinly veiled retelling of the formation and survival of the Church of Latter-day Saints.

While most of Meyer’s vampires are dangerous—heartless, blood-atonement-driven religious believers who prey on non-believers—this is not true of the Cullen family, who are the Celestial-life Mormons of the story. (The Volturi, on the other hand, the ancient vampires in Italy who lead and police vampires everywhere, are a thinly disguised Roman Catholic Church, the “Whore of Babylon” to Joseph Smith, Jr., and his nineteenth-century followers.) … Carlisle Cullen was born in the mid-1660s, the same period when historic Mormonism was born in Europe. He became a vampire when he was bitten but not slain by a weakened vampire. His heroic choice to turn away from vampirism and to eat animal rather than human food turns his eyes golden rather than blood red. Over the next two centuries, he learns all he can about medicine and in the mid-1800s becomes a doctor, saving rather than taking human lives. By placing the birth of the Cullen “vision” in the same time and place as the birth of Mormon beliefs (see Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1640–1844, by John L. Brooke) and by having Carlisle take up medical practice in the 1840s, the same time as Joseph Smith’s “restoration” of the gospel in America, Meyer indicates the allegorical—and apologetic—meaning of her story … The summer of 2003 saw the publication of three books that focused on the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which tragedy Mormon faithful in Southern Utah executed more than 120 men, women, and children on their way to California from Arkansas. All three books paint the Mormon faith as inherently bloodthirsty, violent, secretive, and abusive to women and non-believers. The Twilight novels, especially Breaking Dawn , can be understood as a response to the challenge they posed to Mormon believers like Mrs. Meyer. In brief, Meyer was inspired to write works in which she addresses and resolves in archetypal story the criticisms being made of Mormonism by atheists and non-believing gentiles. Twilight is essentially an allegory of one gentile seeker’s coming to the fullness of Latter-day Saint faith and life. Bella, though, as Mrs. Meyer’s stand-in, is also a modern American woman who struggles with Edward's patronizing misogyny and over-protectiveness. Her mind is the only one in the book not open to him, which serves both as an indication of her reverential reserve towards him as God or prophet and her resistance to being totally subject to him. Though devoted to and in love with him, she sounds notes throughout the series that reflect something like feminism. Bella’s life works out happily ever after, but that of another character, Leah Clearwater, the lone female werewolf in the story, stands as a reminder of the isolation and emptiness experienced by an intelligent, gifted woman not tied to a man in this community of believers.

“Orphans” in search of parent figures.

According to still others, Twilight is about abandoned kids in search of families. Edward, an orphan after losing his mortal parents to a rare strain of the Spanish influenza, cobbles together a family from a traveling pack of fellow vampires. Bella, daughter of a long-absent father and a newly absent—as well as “loving, erratic, [and] harebrained”—mother, arrives in Edward’s life with little to no strong connection to either parent. According to Anna Silver’s Studies in the Novel article “ Twilight Is Not Good for Maidens,” “Although Edward and Bella are the center of the novel’s narrative, the series is equally concerned with the contemporary American nuclear family, and a woman’s role within that family … Twilight is a series very much concerned with the practice of mothering.”

“Meyer depicts Bella as inappropriately mothered,” Silver writes, and in the wake of Bella’s mother’s departure to follow her baseball-player husband around the country, “Meyer provides room for Edward’s adopted mother Esme to become an alternate mother figure.­”

Mothering solves a few of Bella’s problems in another way, too:

In the final book of the series, Breaking Dawn , Meyer allows Bella to become the kind of mother that she never had, the apotheosis of the self-sacrificial, selfless mother, who is willing to die for the good of her unborn vampire child, and the warrior-mother who successfully protects the integrity and survival of her family. Meyer thus proposes that marriage and motherhood provide women with equality that they do not possess as single women. Motherhood becomes a location not only of pleasure and satisfaction but also of power.

It’s not just about moms, though. In Silver’s reading, finding a real dad figure is just as crucial.

Edward’s appeal is, throughout the novel, paternal. Edward is the father that Bella never had … Edward is not just lover but father. Edward frequently refers to or treats Bella as a child. When he first met Bella, Edward tells her later, he considered her “an insignificant little girl.” Later he calls her “little coward” and “Silly Bella.” These infantilizing endearments are underscored by the fact that he saves the perpetually clumsy and unlucky Bella again and again … The reader can be forgiven for viewing Edward as Bella’s father after reading repeated scenes in which Edward cares for Bella as if she were a child rather than a young adult. She is, for example, habitually carried around by Edward (and later by Jacob).

Other analyses suggest that the Twilight saga is a story about racial prejudice; about the “good white people” versus the “bad dark-skinned people.” In a Psychology Today article titled “Is Twilight Prejudiced?,” Melissa Burkley points out that Edward and his extraordinary family are described as possessing impossible beauty characterized by pale white skin. Their skin sparkles in the sunlight; their bodies as solid, perfectly carved, and smooth, like marble statues—which are white. Just as the Cullens exude purity and kindness, they’re also strongly associated with this whiteness. “When Bella is hurt, she even mistakes Edward for an angel, the ultimate symbol of virtue,” Burkley points out. “Stephenie Meyer’s use of such imagery capitalizes on the reader’s already entrenched association that white is good. It is simple math: if white equals good, and vampires equal white, then it must be that vampires equal good.”

So it would only follow that the Cullen clan’s mortal enemies, the Quileute werewolf pack, would be characterized with similarly alarming color coding. Sure enough:

First, consider the juxtaposition between Edward and Jacob. Whereas Edward has pure white skin, Jacob is Native American and therefore is described as having dark features: copper skin, black hair, and dark eyes. Not only does Jacob have dark skin, his last name, Black, clearly associates him with darkness rather than light. Although Jacob does not necessarily represent badness or evil , he is described in a way that suggests he is more associated with dark than light. Secondly, consider the character of Sam Uley. He is an even better example than Jacob of how the werewolves represent the “black equals bad” association. Like Jacob, Sam is Native American and has dark skin and dark hair. However, the description of Sam’s wolf form is even more telling. Jacob and the other clansmen have brown or red fur, but Sam has dark, black fur. In Eclipse , we learn that the wolf’s physical appearance is a reflection of what the man inside is like. By making Sam’s fur black, Meyer tells the reader that Sam is the blackest of the black creatures. Quil Ateara says it best when he states, “So that’s why Sam is all black … Black heart, black fur.” In addition to his appearance, Sam also has dark sides to his personality.

Yep. Even though the principal lovers don’t even make it past second base until they’re legally wed, Time ’s Lev Grossman called it in 2008 : Twilight is pretty much all about sex. Except without, you know, the sex.

What makes Meyer’s books so distinctive is that they’re about the erotics of abstinence. Their tension comes from prolonged, superhuman acts of self-restraint. There’s a scene midway through Twilight in which, for the first time, Edward leans in close and sniffs the aroma of Bella’s exposed neck. “Just because I’m resisting the wine doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the bouquet,” he says. “You have a very floral smell, like lavender … or freesia.” He barely touches her, but there’s more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter . It’s never quite clear whether Edward wants to sleep with Bella or rip her throat out or both, but he wants something, and he wants it bad, and you feel it all the more because he never gets it. That’s the power of the Twilight books: they’re squeaky, geeky clean on the surface, but right below it, they are absolutely, deliciously filthy.

AND THUS, WE CAN CONCLUDE THAT: No one reading of Twilight ’s underlying message can be declared the correct one, because Stephenie Meyer clearly wrote her bestselling series with all of these strains of logic in mind. Clearly.

Home / Essay Samples / Entertainment / Twilight / Twilight Book Review: A Tale of Romance and Vampires

Twilight Book Review: A Tale of Romance and Vampires

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• Topic: Book Review , Twilight

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