Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twilight: Studies in Fiction, Media and a Contemporary Cultural Experience

By Nordic Academic Press

With contributions from various experts, this is an interdisciplinary approach to the global phenomenon that is the Twilight series, which has evolved well beyond the novels by Stephenie Meyer. This anthology contains in-depth film analyses, gender perspectives, economic and literary studies of the book market, and several articles on fans and fandom as well as contributions investigating vampire fiction traditions and vampire religious beliefs. A theoretically well-founded study, this volume maps the contemporary cultural experience surrounding Twilight and discusses multiple themes, such as fear of aging, vampire ethics and the cross-generational appeal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9789187121173

Book preview

Introduction

Mariah Larsson & Ann Steiner

Twilight shares with many other expressions of popular culture – Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter – the characteristic of having given rise to a huge production, with a seemingly endless stream of fan sites, parodies, forum discussions, academic works, spin-offs, and press material, above all on the Internet. The huge impact of the Twilight phenomenon in terms of sales and consumer or fan activity, combined with the opportunity to delve into the development of vampire literature, the romance format, and gendered aspects of the narratives, make Stephenie Meyer’s written world well worth exploring. Say what you like about Twilight – and a lot has been said already – the phenomenon is too big to be overlooked. ¹ Furthermore, as Twilight crosses borders between media, between continents, between generations, and between producers and consumers, not to mention between genres, a multifaceted approach is needed to gain a fuller understanding.

The purpose of this volume is thus to encompass several diverse aspects of the Twilight phenomenon. In this introduction, we will situate our collection and its interdisciplinary approaches in relation to how we perceive the world of Twilight. As we see it, this world is a world of business, franchises, and celebrity culture, while at the same time located at an intersection of traditions of genre and readership, and, on a micro-level, warranting closer inspection such as textual analysis and interpretation. We have gathered a number of scholars from different disciplines, some of who already took an interdisciplinary approach in their work and some whose work, in juxtaposition with others’, provides a multi-perspectival angle. The scholars contributing to this volume come from literary studies, film studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies, economics, and pedagogy. It is our contention, as editors, that the use of the anthology format in order to bring these different perspectives together is especially fruitful in interdisciplinary endeavours. Some of the contributors focus on markets or fans, others on media, religion, or history, and still others on textual analysis. In order to provide the anthology with a certain overall coherence and unity, we met for a two-day seminar at an early stage in the writing process in order to discuss the Twilight phenomenon, our respective contributions, and the volume as a whole. Our basic assumptions in preparing this anthology are that interdisciplinarity is absolutely essential to any understanding of modern, popular convergence culture and that interdisciplinary approaches work best as collaborative efforts – that is, by bringing together scholars from different fields.

We regard Twilight not merely as a set of novels that were subsequently adapted as films, but as a contemporary cultural experience, shared by millions across the globe through the novels, the films, and the Internet. For this reason we have chosen to distinguish the Twilight phenomenon by using the word Twilight without italics to indicate the phenomenon in general, such as the Twilight universe, the Twilight franchise, or the Twilight oeuvre. Nevertheless, we also regard Twilight as fiction, as part of literary and filmic genre tradition, and as a part of the modern media landscape. When italicized, Twilight refers to the first novel and/or the first film. A distinction is also made between the Twilight series in text form – the four novels, the script for Midnight Sun, and the novella The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner – and the Twilight Saga, the series title for the films (including the first movie, despite the fact that the series title was not used when it first came out).

According to Twilight’s American publisher, by early 2010 the four novels in the series had sold 100 million copies and had been translated into forty languages, with further translations under contract. ² The three films released so far have together grossed nearly $1.8 billion worldwide in cinemas.³ In addition, Meyer’s spin-off The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner (2010), Twilight: the Graphic Novel, volume 1 (2010), the detailed The Twilight Saga: the Official Illustrated Guide (2011), and merchandise in the form of jewellery, T-shirts, action figures, calendars, and collectibles are sold everywhere, not to mention, of course, film posters and soundtracks, while the draft for Midnight Sun, Stephenie Meyer’s unfinished novel which retells the Twilight story from Edward’s point of view, is available in PDF format for free from Stephenie Meyer’s official website. Moreover, there are countless examples of fan fiction (fanfics) that develop the narrative of the Twilight novels even further (and perhaps in unintended directions), as well as Internet forums where the novels and films are discussed by young people and adults alike. A fan site such as TwilightMoms has almost 44,000 registered members and 2.5 million postings on its forum.⁴ Not only has the phenomenon been parodied in Vampires Suck (2010) and two spoof novels – Harvard Lampoon’s Nightlight and Stephen Jenner’s TwiLite (both 2009) – there are also pornographic parodies (Twilight of Virginity and This Isn’t Twilight: the XXX Parody, both 2009) as well as a gay porn parody (Twinklight, 2010).

Despite its huge popularity among fans and consumers, Twilight is often overlooked in discussions about vampire fiction, and indeed about popular culture and new media. There is also an unusually sharp dividing line between those who show a keen interest in the phenomenon and those who do not. A number of very recent books on Twilight have been published, for example Bitten by Twilight (Click, Aubrey & Behm-Morawitz 2010), Nancy Reagin’s Twilight and History (2010), Bringing Light to Twilight (Anatol), and Natalie Wilson’s Seduced by Twilight (2011) show that there is considerable interest, yet, on the other hand, there is also a degree of indifference towards it as a subject, and sometimes even outright dislike. In conversation with an eminent film scholar, it became apparent he was only acquainted with the phenomenon by name: although a shrewd specialist in popular cinema, the Twilight films had completely passed him by. Even among academics studying vampires in culture there is a clear hierarchy of what is worthy of study, and Twilight is not regarded as vampire literature (or films) proper. In the recent essay collection Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms (2009), there is no mention of the Twilight series, although the Twilight hype had begun by then.⁵ During a conference on vampires in popular culture in Bochum, Germany, in December 2010, many of the papers presented dealt with Twilight, but again, there was an evident dividing line between those who regarded Twilight with academic curiosity and those who scoffed at the notion of the Cullens as vampires. Of course, it can be argued that the vampires in Twilight are ‘not real vampires’ in a generic sense of the word. It is also quite possible to argue that the Twilight novels are of small literary merit. Nevertheless, neither argument explains why the series should be disregarded by scholars, nor do they explain why there is such a hard and fast line between those who find it interesting and worthwhile to study Twilight and those who scorn to. Not always, but most of the time, this divide is gendered. The readers, viewers, and fanfic authors are mainly female, as are the academics who write about Twilight, while male readers, Internet discussants, reviewers, and academics tend to be frankly dismissive or pass it over in silence.

In Angela McRobbie’s seminal book on girls and subcultures, Feminism and Youth Culture, she argues that academics have not only neglected girls and young women in subcultural contexts but have even unthinkingly viewed them with contempt. Young, female consumers of culture are marginalized and detested.⁶ In The Lure of the Vampire, Milly Williamson observes that female vampire fans have long been derided as being ‘vulnerable to the insidious influence of these texts’.⁷

Regarding Twilight, in addition to the belittling of young female consumers, there is the historical tradition of how vampire narratives have been criticized for their depiction of gender and sexuality, for their potentially ‘insidious influence’. Since vampire fiction often is and has been regarded as reflecting contemporary society, enacting or negotiating anxieties associated with the ideological and cultural zeitgeist, it has also been susceptible to accusations of things such as homophobia, the demonization of female sexuality, or conservative, patriarchal values. For instance, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) has been analysed as expressing a patriarchal fear of growing female independence whereas Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles (1976 – 2003) have been criticized for being ‘post-feminist’ in their de-humanizing portrayal of female vampires.⁸ Nevertheless, the ambivalence toward women and sexuality in these narratives – like the homoeroticism in Rice’s Chronicles – also provide those critics and scholars who wish to defend vampire fiction as subversive or radical with enough evidence to argue their case.⁹

In the case of Twilight, the critique of the books seems to have merged with the notion of young female readers (or consumers) of romance novels as particularly volatile. In the press, Twilight fans have often been dismissed as mere screaming girls – mindless, impressionable, and without agency.¹⁰ There are postings on the Internet such as ‘8 Reasons Why Twilight Fans Are Bonafide Crazy’ on Sky Channels’ movie site, or the promise of seeing Twilighters fight outside a cinema showing Eclipse – which turns out to be a handful of girls play-fighting in the queue.¹¹ Postings and press reports such as these underline the Twilight fans’ madness, and especially their impressionable and hysterical character. It seems that the young, female Twilight reader epitomizes Andreas Huyssen’s description of modernism’s Other, the feminine and hysterical mass culture.¹² Although Williamson – without discussing Twilight, since her study predates the publication of the first novel – effectively argues that the Gothic vampire genre is complex and attracts fans who usually have an interpretative relationship to the texts, the treatment of Twilight fans in the media conforms to tradition.¹³

If, on the one hand, the sheer enormity of the Twilight phenomenon warrants serious and critical assessment, the suggestion, on the other hand, that it is disregarded because it is almost exclusively a female phenomenon further reinforces the notion that it should be taken seriously. Gender aspects of issues such as reading, desire, agency and popular culture are important to consider across the spectrum of the Twilight phenomenon, not only in the original series but in all the consumption and production related to it. Many of the contributions to this volume include a gender perspective, be it in relation to reading (Steiner); the agency of fans writing fan fiction (Isaksson & Lindgren Leavenworth); the construction of the gaze in the film adaptations (Larsson); Internet discussions (Manderstedt & Palo); or to the concept of ageing (Lövgren). Other contributions may not have an overt gender perspective but still take gender into account as part of the theoretical framework, such as the construction of the male romantic vampire hero (Pollack); the notion of the body (Nykvist and Kärrholm); the cross-generational appeal of Twilight (Siebert); or celebrity culture (Kannik Haastrup).

The Twilight story

The primary texts for the anthology are the four novels in the Twilight series, viz. Twilight (2005), New Moon (2006), Eclipse (2007) and Breaking Dawn (2008);¹⁴ and the three films released so far, Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Chris Weitz, 2009), and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (David Slade, 2010). The fourth novel has been divided into two films directed by Bill Condon and are scheduled for release as The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn in November 2011 (part 1) and November 2012 (part 2).

The Twilight novels present the story of Bella Swan, the daughter of a divorced couple, who, having lived with her mother in Phoenix for most of her life, goes to stay with her father, Charlie. He has continued to live in the small town of Forks on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, on the West Coast, where it rains from a near-constantly overcast sky. In Forks, Bella meets Edward Cullen and his siblings. Intrigued by the gorgeous and mysterious Edward, Bella simultaneously realizes that he is a vampire and falls (‘unconditionally and irrevocably’) in love with him. The rest of the first novel and all the subsequent novels deal with the impossible romance between a young human and a vampire who has been seventeen for more than eighty years. Although the Cullens are ‘good’ vampires, satisfying their bloodlust with animal blood, the temptation of Bella’s scent sometimes almost overpowers Edward. Furthermore, Bella wishes to be transformed into a vampire and to consummate their love through sexual intercourse, acts to which Edward is opposed. Edward believes that vampires are damned, and is convinced that his bloodlust will overcome him if he loses control with Bella during sex. The love story is complicated by the fact that Bella’s best friend, a Native American called Jacob Black, is a werewolf, and thus a natural enemy of the vampires. In New Moon Edward leaves Bella – to protect her from himself and his species – and during his absence Bella’s relationship with Jacob grows even closer. While not romantic per se, this relationship is intimate and has all the signs of a developing love story. In the third and fourth novel, issues connected to the love triangle are developed and made more complex.

The character of Bella Swan is designed to be ‘everywoman’. In the sense that she has very few distinct characteristics, she could be anyone, any young woman who feels out of place in the world and out of place in her body. At the beginning of the story Bella sees herself as plain (quite soon the reader learns that this is not the case), she has very few friends, and no interests or hobbies, except for reading. She is bright, yet shy, and in some ways rather sad and lonely. Bella becomes a character who it is easy to identify with, which is an important element in her appeal. Her success story of being ‘discovered’ by a man and made special and beautiful has a very strong pull as a dream come true. To refer to another slighted favourite of young women, Twilight provides a new millennium version of the classic line ‘Nobody puts Baby in a corner’ from the movie Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987). At the same time, Twilight also aligns itself with an ancient tradition of narratives – such as the myth of Orpheus – which depict character development through descent into an Underworld (see Drangsholt in this volume).

The position of Twilight in the literary field is negotiated by its genre: a mix of young adult novel, romance, supernatural, vampire fiction, and fantasy. It could be argued that the basis of its success is that it relies on all of its elements. On the other hand, one of the main criticisms is that it is not a proper romance, nor a good story about the supernatural, nor definable as fantasy. Although Meyer has claimed that she did not know anything about the vampire tradition, by evoking the notion of blood-sucking, heliophobic, exceptionally strong, and exceptionally seductive, humanlike creatures, she made it nearly unavoidable to regard the novels in relation to earlier vampire fiction – from the older, eighteenth-century versions via Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922) to the modern characterizations such as Ann Rice’s Lestat in the Vampire Chronicles (for instance, Interview with a Vampire, 1976; The Vampire Lestat, 1985; The Queen of the Damned, 1988), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film, 1992; television series, 1997 – 2003) or in Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001 – ; adapted for television as True Blood, 2008 – ). Three of the contributions to this anthology discuss different aspects of the vampire tradition in relation to Twilight (Pollack, Vajdovich, and Wiktorin).

Nonetheless, it is not correct merely to categorize Twilight as vampire fiction. The texts are, perhaps first and foremost, romances. Not only does the more conservative tradition in literary studies deal with crossover fiction with the utmost reluctance, the same tradition ranks romance at the lower end of the popular culture stratum. Furthermore, one might argue that as a vampire romance, Twilight crosses gendered genre boundaries. ‘Vampire’ in itself is only the name of the creatures inhabiting vampire fiction’s universe – there are vampire comedies as well vampire horror and action (such as Blade (1998) and its sequels), melodramatic vampires and Gothic vampires. However, the vampire has traditionally been associated with the Gothic genre as well as with horror, and whereas Gothic, like romance, historically has been coded as a feminine genre, horror and action have been coded as masculine. From this perspective, as a vampire romance, Twilight can be regarded as a feminine genre encroaching on a masculine subculture. Although this gendering of genre divisions is extremely crude and does not account for the complexities of genre and gender, nor of cult fandom and subcultures, it may still be relevant to use it to explain some of the reactions to the novels and films. For example, when Milly Williamson notes the contemptuous descriptions of female vampire fans – using the illustrative example of David Skal’s comments about ‘obese women drawn to horror literature, gothic music and Anne Rice in particular’ – she suggests that he might be trying to ‘distinguish between his own interests in the vampire and those of the female (or ‘feminised’ male) fan.’¹⁵ The contention that the Cullens and their peers are not ‘real vampires’ can be regarded as an attempt to restore order to gender and genre hierarchies.

Nonetheless, there are many other complicating factors when it comes to genre, hierarchies, and readership, which are dealt with in several of the chapters (for example, Steiner and Leffler). Williamson points out that vampires have long had a close relationship to melodrama, with ‘ties of intimacy that have complicated the emotional investments surrounding the figure’.¹⁶ However, this relation to melodrama has become more apparent in the course of the twentieth century as the figure of the sympathetic – and sometimes reluctant – vampire has come to the fore.¹⁷ The sympathetic vampire embodies melodrama’s inherent fascination with moral dilemmas, destiny, and victimhood – quite obviously manifested in Twilight, where electing not to feed on humans is a moral choice that has consequences for far more than just feeding habits. Again, melodrama is generally regarded as a feminine genre, but the historical ties between vampire fiction and melodrama perhaps indicate that the horror aspect to the vampire has not been its most dominant feature.

In an era often labelled as post-feminist, Twilight offers an ambiguous juxtaposition of feminism and post-feminism. On the one hand, it is quite possible to read the novels as a story of traditional, anti-feminist values – puritan, conservative, and patriarchal, promoting abstinence and old-fashioned gender roles. This reading places an emphasis on Bella’s subordinate position – why, for instance, does she have no ambition other than to live with Edward as a vampire? – and on Edward’s possessive and oppressive, and implicitly abusive, tendencies. On the other hand, a feminist reading of the novels is quite possible in which the focus would be on Bella’s near-exclusive role as narrator of the novels, and her determination and psychological strength. Neither reading does full justice to the composite character of modern popular culture. It may very well be that the paradoxes and ambiguities of Twilight’s politics, by being traditional and modern at the same time, not only serve the readers their cake but let them eat it too. Thus, the Twilight novels offer a site of resistance against what is regarded as an ever-harsher world.

From publishing to franchise – the Twilight business

In order to place the phenomenon in its cultural context, some initial remarks on the media, film, and book markets would be useful to provide a context for a more detailed discussion (see Kannik Haastrup, Steiner, Siebert, and Schultz Nybacka in this volume). Twilight can be explained using the rationale of the twenty-first-century cultural industry, but it can also be traced through individual experiences and cultural practices, for which the creative and imaginative worlds of general users are just as important. As an extremely widespread, creative universe where consumption spawns production and vice versa, Twilight should be regarded as an example of what Henry Jenkins calls ‘convergence culture’, where ‘old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.’¹⁸ The way in which culture converges on Twilight is mapped out in Christina Olin-Scheller’s contribution to this volume, but it is undeniably linked to the use of transmedia narratives in current cultural practices. Narratives, or ‘content’ as the cultural industry calls it, are explored and exploited in different media created by both media companies and individual consumers. The duality recognizable from the Twilight phenomenon – as business and consumer culture – marks almost every significant cultural product and experience in contemporary society.

In the case of Twilight, the narrative of ‘young girl meets supernatural beings’ is first set up in the novels, later explored in the films, and followed by a franchise. The development, both in terms of the industry and of how the story is retold in different media, is similar to many others in the present cultural market. Although one likes to think of the business of publishing fiction as small and focused, especially compared to big bucks, big business Hollywood, the contemporary book trade is in fact divided between enormous media conglomerates and a myriad of small, independent, local publishing houses. The large companies, without doubt, dominate the international publishing scene far more than they used to fifty years ago. The world’s leading media conglomerates define literature as a product that can be translated, repackaged, and sold to different markets. This is the setting of Twilight’s publication – a place where every title has to pay its own way. The type of publishing that strongly focuses on bestsellers is the one that has grown in importance in the last twenty years. Twilight’s original publisher, Little, Brown Books, is owned by Hachette Book Group, a subsidiary of one of the six largest media conglomerates in the world, Lagardère. A company this size needs a steady flow of bestsellers, and a success like Twilight can make all the difference.¹⁹ In the thick of recession and dwindling markets, Hachette Book Group described 2008 as ‘the year of Stephenie Meyer’, when the Twilight series had significant positive impact on the revenues of their whole group of international publishing houses.²⁰

The massive output of books over the last decade has created a more competitive market for fiction, thus increasing the pressure on individual titles.²¹ In critiques of the contemporary media market, transnational publishers are often described as amounting to a form of monoculture, acting in only one way, moving in only one direction. But in fact, as Simone Murray has pointed out, this is not the case. The constant shifts, mergers, acquisitions, and new imprints within even the largest of publishers show that the media system is not only unstable, it is in constant need of modification, adapting and testing new approaches towards an ever-changing audience.²² One single title, or a book series as in the Twilight case, can alter the state of international fiction publishing.

In a conscious effort to maximize its presence and potential profits, the Twilight film rights were acquired even before the publication of the first novel of the series.²³ It was then developed as an entertainment industry franchise in a similar vein to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001 – 2003).²⁴ When J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy (1954 – 5) was adapted for the screen, the production team worked on several levels to anchor the films with the cult fans of the original novels, to market the films as broadly as possible, to maximize the income potential, and to create an entire universe where the setting and the characters, as embodied by the particular actors, amounted to logos or trademarks for the films. Therefore, more traditional measures such as merchandising and other licensed products were used, as was the newer medium of the Internet. The film locations became important to a select subsection of the audience who travelled to those parts of the world where the stories were shot (in the case of LOTR) or to the sites of the stories in general (in the case of Twilight). These places become attractions on the literary and film tourist circuit, carrying the mark of their presence in books and films in their signage, place names, and local advertisements.²⁵ Meanwhile, the actors themselves take on an iconic value, replacing or standing in for other possible images or embodiments of the narratives’ characters. Interestingly, in the Twilight universe the actors and the style of the films compete with the striking covers of the original novels. Although the novels have been re-released with cover images taken from the films, the original covers with the apple, the tulip, the ribbon, and the chessboard are still as iconic, or perhaps even more iconic, than the images of the actors Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner. In a recent ‘deluxe’ edition of the novels, they were reprinted with the original covers but with a white rather than a black background. In promoting the novels, their ‘look’ is an important marketing concept.

‘Stephenie Meyer’, biographical legend and celebrity

Only one of the contributions in this volume deals with Stephenie Meyer as a person (Schultz Nybacka), but the legend and status ascribed to the author is of importance when considering Twilight’s impact. Meyer cannot be overlooked when it comes to the market, the interpretation of the novels, the impact, and the relationship with the fans – all aspects dealt with in the anthology.

Meyer is a real person and author, but her persona as an author presented in newspapers and magazines, on television, and so forth is a highly orchestrated version of the real Meyer. The Russian formalist critic Boris Tomasevskij coined in 1923 the concept of the biographical legend as a term for the position of the author and the interpretation of literary works (later more commonly used in film studies).²⁶ He argued that the author’s personal story is relevant to the interpretation of the text and affects how it is understood. In Meyer’s case it would be her religious beliefs, her personal views on family life, and her college degree in English. According to Tomasevskij, ‘these biographical legends are the literary conception of the poet’s life’, which means they are fictive and a result of a story told (rather than the actual biography of the author).²⁷ The biographical legend of ‘Stephenie Meyer’ is created through marketing and interviews, but also through her website, paratexts such as cover blurbs, and so on (Schultz Nybacka discusses how this is effected in this volume); it is this legend that is relevant to interpretations of Twilight and influences how it is received, understood, and discussed in a more general way.

The narrative of Meyer’s efforts to get published – like J.K. Rowling’s – follows the pattern of the ‘anyone can be a star’ story by placing the emphasis on her struggle before she was signed to an agent. In fact, once she found the agent Jodi Reamer the story developed in a different direction. The huge advance Meyer received was a clear indication of Little, Brown’s commitment to Twilight. It was also a publication aimed at an international audience, and well before the Bologna Book Fair of 2004 Meyer had been signed by two foreign publishers.²⁸ Contrary to an oft-repeated story, Twilight was not a surprise hit, but a well-thought-out publishing and marketing strategy with all the hallmarks of the contemporary book and media trade.

In several ways, Stephenie Meyer represents a new kind of author in the book trade, and indeed in media culture as a whole. The idea of newness is problematic as it represents a notion of development and difference, while in fact there are many hangovers of previous ways of writing, publishing, marketing, and selling. However, it can be claimed that Meyer actively and knowingly tapped into the enormous market of reading women – young, thirty-something, and middle-aged – in new ways based on identification, communication, and the creation of an easily likeable public persona.

Meyer’s position and status as an icon, particularly for Western women, also has to be understood in terms of celebrity culture, where the famous are interesting in themselves. In Joe Moran’s Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (2000) he reserves the concept of celebrity for authors who are literary in style and cultural authorities, but they also have to be equally successful commercially and in the mainstream media; they are ‘crossover successes who emphasize both marketability and traditional cultural hierarchies’.²⁹ According to Moran, literary celebrity is positioned in the middle ground between cultural and economic capital, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology. This perspective is problematic, for it leaves authors such as John Grisham, Stephen King, and indeed Stephenie Meyer outside Moran’s definition of literary celebrity. As Moran would have it, Meyer has nothing to do with real literature and thus she would not rank in the literary star system. This indicates an ambiguity among scholars towards those famous authors who are regarded as lacking in literary ability.

According to another study, Graeme Turner’s Understanding Celebrity (2004), the sign of celebrity is a high media profile and thus an author’s private life receives more attention than their professional life. In Turner’s description of celebrity, the line between the private and the public self is blurred in presentations and the media.³⁰ His analysis of modern media culture is based on sports and movie stars and thus it does not fit perfectly with the literary celebrity system that Meyer belongs to. In Meyer’s case one can argue that both her literary achievements and her private self are important. Although Moran would hardly view her as a cultural authority with a strong literary style, her readers perceive her fiction as vital for any understanding of her persona. Her high visibility in the press, media, and social forums is focused on her person and her private life, but the narrative told about Meyer constantly links her to the fictional world of Twilight.

The blurring of the lines as described by Turner is in Meyer’s case not so much between her public and private selves, but rather between her public and fictional selves. An interesting example of how this is performed is Twilight Unbound: The Stephenie Meyer Story Graphic Novel (2010), a graphic account of Meyer’s life only forty pages long, in which imagery and emphases on certain parts of her life link her to the fictional Twilight’s Bella. The dark, Gothic images framing