Why girls love chaste Edward Cullen
The vampire hero of the Twilight series shows a deeply appealing restraint when faced with temptation, says Sophie Caldecott

27 November 2009

Robert Pattinson, left, stars as Edward Cullen, and Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan in New Moon

I ignored the Twilight phenomenon for as long as I could. Being just out of teendom myself, and immersed at university in some of the world's great literature, teen vampire romance didn't hold much appeal. The rest of the world thought otherwise, however, and since the publication of the first book in 2005 the series of four novels by the American author and Mormon housewife Stephanie Meyer has been translated into at least 38 different languages and has sold over 85 million copies world-wide.

Like the Harry Potter craze before it the books have built up such a large and obsessively dedicated fan base across the world that it is now a cultural phenomenon in its own right. Displays in bookshop windows are loaded with copies, and inside the shops there are whole sections devoted purely to "vampire fiction", a genre revitalised by the success of the Twilight series (and the more "adult" television series True Blood). And what with last week's release of New Moon, the second film adaptation of the books, it is hard to avoid the beautiful, angst-ridden faces of the lead characters, plastered on to the side of every passing bus.

Succumbing to curiosity this summer I decided to see what the fuss was about and borrowed the books from a friend. Needless to say, once I started reading I could not stop, racing through the four hefty tomes in as many days and, I have to admit, nights. Badly written, but with a compelling storyline and interesting characters, these books at first glance are no more than rather seductive trash. The heroes are vampires and werewolves endowed with occult powers, and the pages are practically dripping with sexual tension and descriptions of passionate teenage desire.

It is not surprising, then, that Mgr Franco Perazzolo of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture was widely quoted last week as criticising New Moon for containing a "moral void more dangerous than any deviant message". It is also fitting that the successor to Harry Potter should be accused of "dabbling in the supernatural". As was the case with Harry Potter, however, things may not be not quite as they appear.

For one thing, despite headlines to the contrary around the world, it is quite likely the "Vatican" has condemned neither the film nor the books. When a similar story circulated about Harry Potter some years ago, it proved to be based on a series of misunderstandings, manipulated and blown out of proportion in the desire to make headlines.

For another, the vampire fantasy of Stephanie Meyer is by no means devoid of moral content. Among the normal vampires who attack and kill humans to feed their desire for blood there are a few vampires who have chosen to live differently. These "vegetarian" vampires control their urge to drink human blood and instead hunt animals to keep themselves alive. They try to integrate as much as possible into human society, and so are constantly surrounded by the temptation. When Edward, one of these "good" vampires, falls in love with Bella, a human (who, every vampire in the book admits, smells exceptionally tasty), he has to fight hard to resist the overpowering urge to feed on her whenever she is near.

Not only this, but Edward also reveals in the third book of the series, Eclipse, that he does not want to have sex before marriage because - and this bit certainly took me by surprise - it would be breaking one of the Ten Commandments, and he does not want to put his beloved Bella's soul in jeopardy. He is essentially resisting a double temptation, fighting the lust that her flesh inspires on both levels. And non-vampire Christian men think they have a difficult time of it.

When you bear in mind the prevailing sense in today's society that self-control is, far from being a virtue, something close to a vice - or at best an unhealthy and embarrassingly old-fashioned hang-up - it seems astonishing that one of the central characters in such a mainstream teen fantasy should embody and champion this very quality. Given that the romantic vampire lead of a series that spent over 235 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list manages to continually provoke an unprecedented hysteria in his countless female fans, it is worth stopping to consider what it is exactly that makes Edward Cullen quite so attractive.

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The obsession with Edward seems to fly in the face of the age-old cliché that girls are always attracted to the bad boy, the promiscuous James Bond type who is likely to seduce them and then break their hearts. True, Edward is dangerous and mysterious (he is a vampire after all) but his most defining and attractive feature is his incredible restraint in the face of all sorts of temptation.

A large part of his appeal for female fans is his selfless devotion to Bella, a devotion that expresses itself not in the typical teenage rush to consummate the relationship but in the way that he constantly prioritises her needs over his own. While she is desperate to convince him to bite her, thereby turning her into one of his own kind and ensuring that they can spend the rest of eternity together, his reservations about whether vampires can be included in salvation makes him reluctant to risk her salvation.

Something that the current obsession with Twilight reveals, on a subconscious level at least, is that there is a place for self-control and restraint in modern romance after all. Perhaps girls are afraid to express their deep desire for a relationship with a boy who loves them selflessly and is willing to put their "virtue" first (as Stephanie Meyer rather primly puts it) worried that they will be thought prudish. Perhaps boys are also afraid that it is somehow emasculating to abstain from rushing into sex, assuming that this is what girls want, and so the vicious circle continues. At any rate, despite rather muddled theological and anthropological premises, not to mention some painfully bad writing, the books do raise interesting questions. Set against the backdrop of supernatural forces, with many of the characters in possession of superhuman powers, sex is portrayed as an equally powerful force. Somewhat ironically, given his terrifying strength and natural killer instinct, Edward accuses Bella of being "the most dangerous creature" he has ever met when she tests the boundaries of his restraint by trying to seduce him.

The moral values evident in the background of the Twilight series are almost certainly an expression of Stephanie Meyer's own Mormon faith. Whether it is a conscious parallel on the author's part, the vampires represent a more extreme form of humanity; when they are good, they are god-like benevolent and powerful immortal beings, and when they are bad they are truly the stuff of any terrifying gothic nightmare - rather like the Elves and Orcs of Tolkien's Catholic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. Edward Cullen's concern with the concept of salvation is somewhat problematic, given that vampires are traditionally soulless creatures of pure evil, and a selfless vampire is, therefore, a contradiction in terms. There's no denying, however, that a being who struggles against evil is better than one who doesn't.

It is certainly worthy of note that people are attracted to a story that depicts a moral struggle rather than just straight forward moral debauchery. The worth of fantasy series like this one is a far more complex question than the knee-jerk anti-occult reaction allows for. When you strip Harry Potter of its occult references, it is essentially the Christian story of the battle of good against evil. Similarly, when it comes down to it, Twilight is really just an exploration of the battle of our fallen natures against Original Sin.