The first and second book of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga: Twilight and New Moon, have many aspects of Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, as well as other theorists. In Twilight, the first book of the saga, the character of Bella, moves to Forks, Washington where she comes to live with her father. When she was a child, her mother divorced her father, taking her away with her to live in Arizona. Now that Bella is in high school and her mother has remarried, she has chosen to move back to Forks to start over with her father. Bella calls her father by name, which is Charlie, but only through her narration and not dialogue. Charlie is a creature of habit and very attached to routine that pushed Bella's mother away years before. Giving her mother and her new husband a chance to be alone and travel is what ultimately leads her to a town that has more than meets the eye.
“My mom looks like me, except with short hair and laugh lines. I felt a spasm of panic ass I stared at her wide, childlike eyes. How could I leave my loving, erratic, harebrained mother to fend for herself?” (Meyer, 4).
In Nancy Chodorow’s Pre-Oedipal Gender Configurations, she talks about Freud’s theory on femininity and a young girl’s attachment to their mother. Father’s are secondary sources, and in the feminine Oedipus complex, the affection transfers from mother to father. In Bella’s case, it happens much later in her life.
Freud says “We knew, of course, that there had been a preliminary stage of attachment to the mother but we did not know that it could be so rich in context and so long-lasting, and could leave behind so many opportunities or fixations and dispositions. During this time the girl’s father is only a troublesome rival; in some cases the attachment to her mother lasts beyond the fourth year of life. Almost everything that we find later in her relation to her father was already present in this earlier attachment and has been transferred subsequently on to her father. In short, we get an impression that we cannot understand women unless we appreciate this phase of their pre-Oedipus attachment to their mother” (Chodorow, 470.)
After Bella finally breaks free from her mother, it has been such a long separation between her and her father, that it takes a while to relinquish the child-father relationship they had when she was young. “But it was sure to be awkward with Charlie. Neither of us was what anyone would call verbose, and I didn’t know what there was to say regardless. I knew he was a little confused by my decision- like my mother before me, I hadn’t made a secret of my distance for Forks” (Meyer, 5).
In New Moon, Bella finds herself in a deep depression after her boyfriend, who is also a vampire, leaves town and swears never to return. Edward, Bella's boyfriend does this only in means of protecting her from his harsh world. Bella is so distraught that she suffers from constant nightmares and night tremors.
“I always had nightmares now, every night. Not nightmares really, not in the plural, because it was always the same nightmare….There was nothing, really. Only nothing. Just the endless maze of moss-covered trees, so quiet that the silence was an uncomfortable pressure against my eardrums. It was dark, like dusk n a cloudy day, with only enough light to see that there was nothing to see. I hurried through the gloom without a path, always searching, searching, searching, getting more frantic as the time stretched on, trying to move faster, through the speed made me clumsy…When I realized there never had been anything more than just this empty, dreary wood, and there never would be anything more fore me…nothing but nothing” (Meyer,123).
In Freud’s, The Interpretation of Dream, he says that desires and wishes are suppressed through the unconscious. These dreams consist of condensed images that eventually turn out to be translations of this unconscious material
It isn’t until Bella does something dangerous that she is able to see Edward’s face and hear his voice. “This had to be it, the recipe for a hallucination-adrenaline plus danger plus stupidity” (Meyer, 188). Bella becomes a narcissist, doing anything that risks her life, just so she can see Edward and hear him go against her actions. In Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis, the idea of narcissism according to Freud is discussed.
“[Neurotic symptoms] frequently displace desires, or anxieties, or drive energies that are unconscious onto expressive activities or compulsive thoughts. Such symptoms perform a variety of translative procedures on unconscious material, from compromise formation to inversion” (Rivkin, 390).
Twilight, and especially New Moon, contain many aspects of psychoanaylsis. From Bella's unconsious desires that relive in her nightmares, to her narcissistic behavior in order to achieve a sense of peace. Bella's character also falls victim to the Oedipis Complex with her complicated relationship involving her father Charlie.
Chodorow, Nancy. "Pre-Oedipal Gender Configurations." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 470-486. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 397-414. Print.
Meyer, Stephenie. New Moon. New York: Little, Brown and, 2006. Print.
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. New York: Little, Brown and, 2005. Print.
Rivkin, J. and Ryan, M. "Introduction:Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanaylsis." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 389-396. Print.
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