Breaking down Breaking Dawn

Breaking Dawn, the last book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series about a teenage girl and her vampire boyfriend who wants to eat her but doesn't because that would be immoral, represents a structural and dramatic break from the previous three novels. Hello, I accidentally re-read all the Twilight novels after reading parts of the first one to get quotes for my post titled Bella and her truck

Taken purely on literary merit, Twilight is the best book of the series. It accurately shows the inner life of a teenager experiencing the intensity of obsessive, all consuming love, sometimes termed limerence. Not everyone experiences limerence, and I suspect that people, especially women, who have experienced it, find Bella's obsessive love and complete lack of inner life except for that obsession realistic and relatable, even if it is a bit extreme. On the other hand, people who have never felt such obsessive, other-idealizing, intrusive, and painful love naturally find her boring and implausible. I will spend no time talking about the metaphor of the vampire boyfriend's desire to eat his girlfriend and the moral imperative to resist the temptation as a metaphor for bone-headed ideas about how male sexual desire works. I'm pretty sure Contra Points covers all that in her video about Twilight^[1].

Structurally, Twilight is a classic romance, before romance novels got all sexy. It's all about the build-up of emotional and sexual tension. It even has a happy ending. The second novel, New Moon is about being sad and doing a bit of light self-harm with motorcycles, cliff-diving, and werewolves. It also follows a romance plot, though this is more the part where circumstances beyond their control force the lovers to be apart before they are re-united again, more passionately in love than ever. Eclipse starts getting a bit shaky plotwise, and has to awkwardly introduce a love triangle and even greater peril to make up for lack of emotional and erotic tension in the core relationship. All three books are written in first person from Bella's point of view^[2].

Traumatic birth to hero origin story #

And then we get Breaking Dawn which starts from Bella's point of view as usual and continues that way for about the first quarter of the novel. The section ends with Bella discovering that she is improbably pregnant after having sex with her vampire husband during their honeymoon. Then the story switches to Jacob's^[3] point of view to explore the horror of Bella's pregnancy with a half-vampire baby. Sometimes when you write about something horrific, you have to create a bit of distance for the reader for them to have the space to feel upset instead of numbed. Structurally, I think that's what's happening with choosing to tell the story of Bella's pregnancy through Jacob's eyes.

While she's too in love with the vampire baby that's sucking her dry from the inside to be a reliable witness about how gory it is, Jacob can see it, but at the same time is distanced enough from the experience that the body horror can be turned down a bit. Though, as a friend once pointed out, Meyer must have had some deep-seated feelings of horror about pregnancy for it to surface like this in the story. Finally Bella gives birth, nearly dies, and then gets vampirized at the last moment so that she can be reborn in undeath.

And be reborn as a narrator of a completely new kind of story! Being a vampire fucking rocks. There are literally no downsides. Unlike most new vamps, Bella has super self-control and totally doesn't kill any hikers or her dad, despite how delicious they smell. She just leaps across streams in a single bound, breaks rocks with her strength, and has the best sex ever with her vampire husband every night all night because they don't have to sleep.

When danger approaches, in the form of the Vamp Mafia who want to kill her half-vampire baby because it's an abomination, Bella discovers that her very boring power to shield her mind from mind-readers is way cooler than she suspected and can be extended to protect other people from all kinds of psychic damage. She has a training sequence and her powers grow, activated by the need to protect her abomination baby, who is very cute and just like everyone else, constantly tells Bella how much she loves her. Oh, and vampire Bella, unlike human Bella, is able to accept that everyone loves her and thinks she's awesome. Getting turned into an immortal blood-sucking monster cured not only her hemorrhaging to death but also her self-esteem and anxiety.

The second half of Breaking Dawn is a whole different genre. The first three books were romance with a touch of gothic. I don't know how to classify the first half of Breaking Dawn. But the second half is a super hero origin story and power fantasy. It's kind of amazing. Like, OK, it has to use all the excuses of Bella literally sacrificing herself to give birth to her monster baby and coming into her power to keep protecting that baby, but after all of the "she deserves it" boxes have been ticked, Balla gets to luxuriate in her enhanced vampire senses, her beauty, her physical strength, and her cool psychic powers. She flips over from being the brave victim to being the hero who saves the day, and then she gets to live happily ever after.

That is not how gothic romances normally end.

Breaking Dawn is probably the worst book in the series on its literary merits, but it might also be the best because it's so weird. Stephenie Meyer said she was influenced by Wuthering Heights and Bella is constantly reading that book within the story as well. When I read Wuthering Heights I kept thinking what the hell is even going on with this narrative structure? And also, I can't tell if I like this book or hate it. It should be bad but somehow it's good. What is this even. And so on.

I don't mean to suggest that Breaking Dawn is as good as Wuthering Heights. It's also not even as structurally weird. But I can see how a writer really into Wuthering Heights could learn the lesson: go ahead. Be weird. Be as weird as you want. Go for it. And you know what, I'm glad she did. I feel like I ate a whole bag of gummi bears, and then at the bottom it was all crunchy peanut brittle instead, and I regret nothing, and neither should Stephenie Meyer.

Photo credit #

The header image is a cropped version of one of the photos from the press kit issued with the Lego Group's January 16, 2025 press release, Relive the Romance with New Twilight-Inspired LEGO Ideas Set From the LEGO Group and Lionsgate. The publicity for the Lego Twilight set is what got me thinking about Twilight again in the first place. And it's a Lego set so you can literally build it and break it down, get it?