Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Breaking Faith: Disrupted Expectations and Ownership in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga

2010; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jeu.2010.0034

1920-261X

Rachel Hendershot Parkin,

Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

Breaking Faith: Disrupted Expectations and Ownership in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga Rachel Hendershot Parkin (bio) Every reading experience draws from three essential elements—text, author, and reader—that combine to create varied interpretations of individual works. The dynamics of power among these elements, however, has been affected by the wide availability of online media, particularly in the case of literature with large fandoms. Stephenie Meyer's recent Twilight saga, comprised of her books Twilight, Eclipse, New Moon, and Breaking Dawn, provides a useful case study for this phenomenon, proving how accessible and instantaneous communication on the Internet transforms interpretation and empowers readers. The Twilight saga's enormous popularity is closely tied to its author's tense relationship with her fans. Meyer's frequent interaction with fans via online media disrupts their expectations and leads to competing interpretations. In Fan Cultures, Matt Hills talks about the "loosening of identification in fantasy" (69) whereby the fantastic elements in fiction allow the reader to see past self-identification, providing more entry points into interpretation and interaction with the rest of the fandom. I would suggest that, in a similar process, the more fans interact with and read the books, the more the constructed world of the texts becomes collectively defined and anticipated. When the fandom's collective vision of the textual world is undermined, fans personally feel deceived and misled and resist the altered structure. The fandom then turns to the most accessible outlet for its frustrations—the Internet—which gives a united voice to its displeasure and a venue for its action against author and text. Meyer's saga forms expectations for the way her vampire world works, beginning with Twilight. Subsequent books disrupt those expectations and breed fan resistance, while the growing power of the Internet allows fans to assert their resistance more forcefully. The tension between Meyer and her fans thus develops from the gulf between her creation of the Twilight [End Page 61] world and the fans' expectations of it, a tension exacerbated by frequent online communication. The friction between Meyer and the Twilight fandom appears most visibly in feminist responses, which are in turn complicated by a connection to the romance genre, and in disagreements over what is "canon" in the series.1 Online communities and conversations, then, develop a sense of ownership in fandoms by creating a more shared horizon of expectation that is centred on its fans. As Meyer shows us, the result is that, by engaging with fans, authors actually empower their fandoms in a way that tips the balance of power and the ownership of text toward the reader. A Coven of Fans: Defining Fandoms A definition of "fandom" will help limit the scope of my explorations to particular types of readers and authors, thus making a study of Meyer and her avid readership a fruitful way to navigate and to understand evolving fan cultures in relation to online media. Cultural studies distinguishes a fan from an enthusiast by using a few common attributes shared among varying fan cultures. Roberta Pearson, citing help from a conversation with MIT professor William Uricchio, suggests that, rather than being simply and temporarily intrigued by a cultural text and engaging with it on a reflective level, fans actually "incorporate the cultural texts as part of their self-identity, often going on to build social networks on the basis of shared fandoms" (102). By engaging in activities such as TwiRock and TwiCon,2 by dressing up for midnight release balls, and by actively engaging in online discussions about the books, Twilight readers cross the line from enthusiast to fan. Twilight fans, like those of other fandoms, are thus characterized by a high level of social interaction and networking; they are a group of dedicated, connected, and actively perceptive readers. Henry Jenkins's and Matt Hills's concepts of dynamic fan communities illuminate the social interactions of Twilight fans and the extent to which they internalize Meyer's books. Jenkins expands the notion of fandoms as social constructs by arguing that "fan reception cannot and does not exist in isolation, but is always shaped through input from other fans" (Textual Poachers 76). Jenkins also suggests that fans do not...