Bella Swan and Dependence

Once again I’m back.

This week I’ll be changing it up. Instead of looking at the article and the novel in conjunction I plan on looking at the article first, to set the basis for my interpretation and analysis of the article.

So today I am going to be looking at the article “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union” by Heidi Hartmann in conjunction with The Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer focussing especially on New Moon. With these two texts I want to show how women’s dependence on men for financial reasons could lead to their dependence on men in other ways. How this dependence is shown in New Moon, which is a book for tweens (girls starting around age 11) and why this is problematic. To have a book which has the main female character, who is no doubt a role model for young girls, absolutely dependent on a man for her happiness does not help with building strong, independent women. I could get into many arguments over which ways this book is bad and which ways it is good but this seems the most relevant right now.

Hartmann’s article is a fierce debate about how the ideological concepts of Marxism and feminism are not compatible and inevitably one takes over the analysis of a situation. In this blog we are concentrating our analysis on the ways that men have control over women. This starts with the definition of patriarchy as “a set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women” (Hartmann, 322). Under patriarchy men are able to dominate women, which also make these women dependent on men for nearly everything. There are two parts to the material basis of patriarchy.

The first part of the material basis for patriarchy is “men’s control over women’s labour power” (322). Men are able to control when women work, where women work, and how much women work for. With these restrictions women become completely dependent upon men for their financial existence because women are not able to support themselves, or their children on the wage they make. “Despite women’s increased labor force participation ... the family wage is still ... the cornerstone of the present sexual division of labor” (326) which allows for women’s work to become secondary and unnecessary since men are able to earn enough money at their own jobs to support a family. As if making women’s work seem unnecessary through the family wage wasn’t enough there is also the wage difference that “will aid in defining women’s work as secondary to men’s at the same time necessitates women’s actual continued economic dependence on men” (326).

The second part of the material basis for patriarchy is restricting women’s sexuality. Since “[h]ow people propagate the species is socially determined” (323) the way in which people propagate as well as the reasons behind women’s role in the home are not natural. Instead there is “a need for men and women to get together for economic reasons” (323) because men will only be able to reproduce with women and women are dependent on men for their financial support. The sexual division of labour outside the home means that men are the ones in the family that are going to work full time while women will stay home with the children and do the unpaid reproductive work that is needed in the household. As women started entering the work force this reproductive work was still necessary. “The double day is a reality for wage-working women. This is hardly surprising since the sexual division of labor outside the family, in the labor market, keeps women financially dependent on men” (327).

This continued dependence on men for various reasons because of patriarchy is bound to leave some lasting effects on women. Those who become complacent enough to believe that their place should be in the home and that they need a man around to feel complete. That they should do things that they don’t want to because the man in their life believes they should be done. I want to show how the novel New Moon demonstrates this in Bella’s behaviour.

Bella Swan is a teenage girl who goes to live in a town called Forks and ends up falling in love with a vampire named Edward Cullen. This along with various adventures is the background behind The Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer. The thing that I want to look into is Bella’s dependence on Edward. She once describes “[h]is touch [brings] with it the strangest sense of relief – as if [she’d] been in pain and that pain had suddenly ceased” (Meyer Eclipse, 17). This is not just a teenage crush, or so Bella insists, but she depends upon this one boy for her entire happiness in a way that is not healthy.

In New Moon Edward leaves Bella in what he believes is a move that will eventually save her life, being around vampires isn’t really all that safe. After he leaves and Bella finds out that he has taken with him every item that he had given her she falls into a deep depression and the book shows four months where nothing happens. Bella wants to do absolutely nothing for four entire months, simply because this boy left her, and she only keeps up the facade of being back to normal for her father. When Charlie, Bella’s father, wants to send her to live with her mother again Bella refuses and Charlie tells her “‘[i]t’s been months. No calls, no letter, no contact. You can’t keep waiting for him’” (Meyer New Moon, 97). At this Bella reacts defensively ending the conversation saying that she is not waiting for anything but refusing to move away from Forks.

After Edward leaves Bella attaches herself to other males in her life, the first of these males being Charlie. Edward leaves and the only time Bella can bring herself to pay attention to what is going on around her is when they mention Charlie. “Charlie mattered, if nothing else did” (75) to Bella. Bella finds it hard to function normally after Edward leaves but does so to the best of her ability so that she doesn’t worry Charlie. When Charlie confronts Bella about being a robot her thought is “[k]eeping Charlie from suffering was the whole point of this wasted effort” (95). Bella is willing to at least put on an act of being back to normal, if not actually feeling so, just to keep her father happy.

Bella attaches herself to another male as well, this one being Jacob Black. Jacob is a boy two years younger than herself who she had met and become friends with before she had started dating Edward. Once Edward leaves Bella goes down to see Jacob and find out that she’d “forgotten how much [she] really liked Jacob Black” (131), especially because she hasn’t gone to visit him since she started dating Edward. Once Bella finds out that Jacob is happy with her and she is moving towards happy hanging out with Jacob she is around him all the time, to the point of neglecting homework and not cooking for Charlie (164-165). Bella then becomes dependent on Jacob for her own happiness telling him at one point that she sees him as her own personal sun (In the movie and book, cannot find the page #, but I know it’s in there). Once Jacob leaves to become a werewolf, the whole werewolf thing kinda takes a lot out of you and you really need a break, Bella becomes as depressed as she was before. Thinking once as he leaves that she was “feeling a little sick [herself], but not for any physical reason” (218).

Bella has attached herself and depends completely on two other men for her own happiness once Edward leaves her. It is not entirely rational, she puts on an act to try and fool Charlie and it takes her four months to notice that it is not working. But she insists on trying to do so anyways. Bella tries to change how she feels and how she acts for Charlie, to save him from any suffering of watching his daughter in pain, and then becomes dependent on Jacob for her own happiness. She is even fickle enough that once Edward returns, again part of the plot that is not integral to this interpretation, she forgives him without a second thought, attaching herself to him just as she had before.

Thanks for tuning in again,
Lady Polly