Journal of Popular Romance Studies (Jul 2016)
When Sleeping Beauty Wakes: Spectacle and Romantic Fantasy In Twilight (2008)
Abstract
The Twilight film saga revisits and revises the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ fairy tale, engaging with the Perrault and Grimm versions of the tale in particular. This is evident in the films’ repeated representations of the slumbering girl awaiting her true love’s kiss. In the final film of the series, the heroine is wed to her true love, and ‘brought back to life’ by him, much like in the Perrault and Grimm iterations of the tale. Several studies have demonstrated the conservative, postfeminist impulse that lies at the heart of this romantic resolution. However, little has been made of the constant delays and ruptures enacted by the heroine within this narrative of feminine acculturation. In particular, this paper examines Bella’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’-themed fantasy and dream sequences, in which the heroine momentarily refuses her conventional position within adolescent girlhood and instead claims an active, agentic position. I read Bella’s fantasies – which construct spectacularly prettified, glittering images of Edward – as moments in which she refuses her position as Beauty, and instead forces him to bear the burden of objectification. The paper examines how Bella’s fantasy constructions of excess and spectacle disrupt narrative progress, registering the heroine’s momentary refusal of conservative closure and romantic resolution. I argue that within this space of rupture, the heroine explores agentic, disruptive and expansive ways of doing girlhood, and that these elements are central to a feminist reading of the text.
