Friends, I owe you all an apology for not posting in -- ack -- nearly five months. A variety of personal vicissitudes, as well as work, have kept me preoccupied. Then there's the other reason -- I actually forgot my password and user name for Typepad. Really. When Typepad revamped its interface a few months back, it lost all my "remember me" information. And I sure as heck didn't remember it; that's why God made cookies, right? Right. So . . . it's taken me a while to blog again. Plus I discovered Facebook and got out of the blogging rhythm.
My last post was about Twilight, so I guess it's fitting to resume there. Last week I spoke in Utah about Mormon themes in Stephenie Meyer's fiction. You can read a great summary of the presentation in the online version of the Deseret News here. (Thanks, Mormon Times!) Or, if you're interested in reading the whole paper, it will be published in BYU Studies in some future issue, so I'll be sure to post a link. Here are the opening grafs:
"It is what publishing professionals call a phenomenon. In 2008, Little, Brown sold 27.5 million copies of Stephenie Meyer’s four vampire novels; the Twilight movie grossed $191 million in domestic box office; and Meyer’s adult novel The Host sold an additional million copies and some change. Publishers Weekly crowed, 'A new queen has been crowned.' USA Today reported that Meyer was the bestselling author in the world for the year 2008, accounting for one in five of the books sold from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
'That’s not bad for an author who, as the media has incessantly reminded us, is little but a 'Mormon housewife.' It seems that nearly every major media article about Meyer’s success has focused on this label, as though Mormon housewives constitute a group of whom little can be reasonably expected. Time magazine called her 'a Mormon housewife turned novelist,' while Entertainment Weekly trumpeted the fact that back in 2003, Meyer had been 'a 29-year-old Mormon housewife' who was mystified by the rarefied world of New York publishing and was merely a member of a 'cozy, supportive' women’s writing group before being plucked from obscurity by a New York agent. The Time profile, in fact, went out of its way to attest to Meyer’s literary inexperience: 'Meyer had not written anything much before then. Her main creative outlets were scrapbooking and making elaborate Halloween costumes.' All that is said about her education is that Brigham Young University is where she met the man she wed at the tender age of twenty-one.
But, for the record, Meyer studied English literature, wrote some, and read widely before having the famous dream that birthed Edward Cullen, Byronic but noble vampire. The media would prefer to have Meyer’s pre-Twilight world intellectually limited because it makes for a better story, even to the point of reviving the term 'housewife' instead of using today’s far more common phrase 'stay-at-home mom.' The persistence of the housewife image says a good deal less about contemporary Mormonism than it does about what Americans need to believe about Mormonism."
My favorite part of the paper is actually not about Twilight but about The Host, which in my opinion is a more interesting and fully realized novel. I think this means I am officially no longer sixteen.
Mostly, I am interested in having Meyer taken seriously as a thinker and proto-theologian, whatever my arguments might be about writing style or the ways women are portrayed in her novels. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.
Mostly, I am interested in having Meyer taken seriously as a thinker and proto-theologian, whatever my arguments might be about writing style or the ways women are portrayed in her novels. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next.
Posted by: cheap gaia gold | June 20, 2009 at 02:46 AM