An Insult to Literature Everywhere

As I was browsing through Barnes & Noble this weekend while visiting my brother in Washington, DC, I came across something so disturbing, so horrific, even, that I knew it was time to take a stand.  Now, I hesitate to write this post because the topic about which I am going to write is something I hardly even deem worthy of the thirty minutes it will take for me complete this complaint. I am not a hater.  I understand that some people of the younger female generation are held enthralled by grotesquely pale, sparkling young men who have an uncontrollable urge to bite and thus kill the women they love. This is weird to me, and I don’t understand it, but I was okay leaving it at that. I wasn’t going to read it, but I tried REALLY hard not to judge those who did fall under its spell too harshly.

Yes, if Twilight had stayed on its designated shelf in the Tween Fad section of the store with the rest of the obnoxious literary disgraces, I would have been perfectly happy to live and let live. But no. It wasn’t content to stay in its place. Like Eliot’s slinking yellow fog, it spread its polluting influence to places in which it has no business being.

When I saw this book lying there on the New Fiction table in a bookstore I had previously respected, a little part of me died. It still makes me shudder. I don’t know if this recent abomination is a direct result of the Twilight series, but I imagine it comes from the same general fad beginning in the 90s with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other such TV shows. I never understood the attraction to this phenomenon; I thought it was strange and silly. But it didn’t bother me, so long as it stayed in its place. (Let me say here that the vampires Twilight and other such renderings romanticize are a completely different species than the old-school vampires of Dracula or even B-grade horror films.)

But this is just ridiculous. How in the world could anyone ever compare Fitzwilliam Darcy, one of literature’s leading men—a timeless, classic heartthrob whose charm has lived on for almost 200 years—to a pale, sparkling, emo vampire? It blows my mind. I could handle the previous Pride and Prejudice spinoffs. I even read a couple of them. But I can guarantee that I will not be reading this one, and I will not hold back my wrathful judgment of anyone who does.

And it’s not even just the comparison of these two leading men. To even begin to compare the literary quality of the writings of Jane Austen and Stephenie Meyer would be a joke. I will readily admit that, as a want-to-be writer, I harbor anger and dislike for these sensational writers (like Meyer and Dan Brown) who become overnight successes, despite the fact that they are not exceptional writers. Far from it. In fact, I know many people who can write much better than them and are much more deserving of national renown. We should be rewarding the next Joyces, Shakespeares, Eliots, and Kerouacs of the world.

But I digress. My point is, Austen was an incredibly influential writer who, while her novels are considered by some (uneducated in the intricacies of irony and early feminism present in the novels) as romantic and silly fads, she was a talented writer with some important commentary on her society. She wrote love stories, yes, but they are much more than that to the exacting reader. Twilight on the other hand…well, unless Meyer is trying to tell young girls to search out unhealthy relationships with men who will never be available (or even exist in real life, for that matter), I’m not sure what the saving grace of her books might be.

Don’t get me wrong. I think any book that gets kids to read is fine. I’m a huge proponent of Harry Potter, for instance. (Although I would argue that JK Rowling is a much more talented writer than Meyer will ever be. And I haven’t seen any Mr. Darcy, Wizard books lying around, either.) Yes, they may be fun to read—escapist and a catalyst for daydreams, but that is all. And that is precisely why they need to stay with others of their kind, not infiltrating historically great literature. The next thing you know we’ll be seeing Hamlet’s dead father coming back as a zombie to rip Claudius to shreds while Hamlet emerges as a reluctant emo-punk star of the Shakespearean world. (Although the latter part of that scenario doesn’t actually seem too far from the reality of the play, come to think of it…)

As a final note, I feel that my argument would be incomplete without pointing out that Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy was 100 times more attractive than Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen could ever hope to be.