By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Those who say the popular vampire saga, Twilight, promotes chastity because the main characters don’t have sex before they’re married, have a superficial understanding of chastity, says a Canadian professor.
Writing for Canada’s Catholic Insight, Dr. Christine Schintgen, an Assistant Professor of Literature at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, says the series actually presents the opposite message – one of a contraceptive mentality that celebrates lust and recreational sex.
“It’s disturbing that these books continue to be marketed for young adults and even children,” Dr. Schintgen told LifeSiteNews. “It really makes you wonder what limits if any we’re drawing for our children when it comes to what we expose them to.”
The message in Twilight isn’t pro-chastity, but of mere abstinence.
“Abstinence is just strictly, technically not having sexual intercourse before marriage,” she explained. “Chastity is a whole way of life, a whole mentality, and it has a spiritual dimension. It involves recognizing the other person as a creature of God deserving of respect. It also involves recognizing the gift of sexuality as a gift from God that has a right to be treated properly. When you look at the Twilight series and scratch beneath the surface, you find that although this couple is basically abstinent before marriage, they don’t have a chaste mentality,” she said.
For instance, throughout the saga, Edward sneaks into Bella’s bedroom every night where they lay in bed and kiss passionately.
“Bella is constantly pushing the boundaries that Edward has set up,” said Schintgen. “They’re stimulating each other to this wild sexual excitement, and yet just managing somehow to stay on the inside of that line.”
“A truly chaste relationship involves loving the other person and appreciating the proper limits that allow the other person to feel comfortable and safe and free,” she said, “and part of that is just not actually exciting each other.”
In her article, she also argues that the couple’s romantic obsession is itself unchaste. “With great insight, [the late Pope] John Paul II writes that the pleasure men and women sometimes use each other for may not be explicitly sexual,” she writes. “For some people – and women are particularly prone to this weakness – the emotional high associated with romance can be pursued as an end in itself, with a member of the opposite sex as the means to this end.”
Dr. Schintgen also points out that while the Twilight characters do abstain until marriage, when their sexual relationship eventually commences, it is very disordered.
“Bella wakes up the first morning of their honeymoon black and blue from bruises Edward has given her; Edward has broken the headboard of their bed; and feathers are flying everywhere thanks to Edward’s violent attack on the pillows.”
This is especially disturbing in light of the fact that this particular book in the series, Breaking Dawn, won the 2008 British Book Award for “Children’s Book of the Year”.
Even though Edward gradually gets himself under the control, the couple exhibit no sense of moderation and are jokingly referred to as “going at it all the time.”
” Their tasteless reduction of sex to a recreational pastime to be pursued for its own sake is yet another way in which sex in these novels is divorced from the proper sense of its subordination to the value of the person,” Dr. Schintgen writes.
Later, when Bella conceives and Edward wants to kill the child because he fears it will be part-human, part-vampire and deplete Bella of her lifeblood, Bella insists on going through with the pregnancy.
After a particularly gruesome childbirth scene that Dr. Schintgen says will certainly frighten the young girls who frequent these movies, Bella nearly dies and is saved when Edward finally bites her and brings her into the world of the “undead.”
“Although Bella’s choice to carry the child to term does contain a somewhat pro-life message, her choice to become a vampire and be done with the messiness of being human once and for all is hardly an embracing of the Culture of Life,” Dr. Schintgen writes.
“In becoming a vampire Bella turns her back not only on her own human nature but also on the ability to give life. She shuns any future act of procreation that is the natural and logical end of sexual activity. Now she and Edward can have non-procreative sex (and frequently) for all eternity.”
Dr. Schintgen cites the thoughts of the newly vampirized Bella from Breaking Dawn as proof of just how disordered this character really is:
“A very, very small part of my head considered the interesting conundrum presented in this situation. I was never going to get tired, and neither was he. We didn’t have to catch our breath or rest or eat or even use the bathroom; we had no more mundane human needs. He had the most beautiful, perfect body in the world and I had him all to myself, and it didn’t feel like I was ever going to find a point where I would think, Now I’ve had enough for one day. I was always going to want more. And the day was never going to end. So, in such a situation, how did we ever stop? It didn’t bother me at all that I had no answer.”
But what is perhaps most dangerous of all about this saga is that it presents gross immorality in a way that appears moral, and even Christian.
“I think in a way that’s more dangerous than a series or book that would just be candidly unchaste, and just present a normal run-of-the-mill immoral relationship,” she said. “Because then people would see that for what it is.”
As Dr. Schintgen concludes: “The moral poison at the heart of these novels with respect to sex bleeds into other forms of immorality as well, notably in the area of lying. The heroine lies at every opportunity, mainly to her father but also to her friends (whom she treats in the most utilitarian fashion possible) and even to Edward. There is never a suggestion that this deception is immoral, and Bella herself argues that it is better to lie if the truth would make people unhappy.
“So we see that the world that Bella inhabits is not only one of death, leading to undeath, but also one of lies, the father of whom is Satan. And Satan will be only too pleased if great numbers of Christian parents are taken in by the lie that the Twilight novels are good, wholesome fare for young readers—novels that promote chastity and will help their children negotiate the difficult passage from adolescence into adulthood with their innocence and virtue intact. The opposite is closer to the truth.”
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