• DOI:10.21220/s2-sy93-gw28
• Corpus ID: 199200226

"What's a Nice Mormon Girl Like You Doing Writing about Vampires?": Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" Saga and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

@inproceedings{Smyth2011WhatsAN,
  title={"What's a Nice Mormon Girl Like You Doing Writing about Vampires?": Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" Saga and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints},
  author={Karen Smyth},
  year={2011}
}

• K. Smyth
• Published 2011
• Philosophy

PAGE “What’s a nice Mormon girl like you doing writing about vampires?" is the most common question Stephenie Meyer, Mormon author of the series Twilight, receives from fellow Mormons. Her fournovel series about a love story between a human girl and vampire boy has become wildly popular, yet many fans seem to be unaware of the religious overtones or undertones of the series. Meyer has given many interviews on her books where she explains that her Mormon faith is such a large part of her identity but was not consciously woven in her narrative. The books rarely discuss religion per se but instead are rife with religious themes such as free agency, eternal life, and conservative moralityand these themes are also vital to Mormon theology. Many journalists and scholars discussing Meyer’s work thus far only mention her faith in passing. In this thesis, I argue that a religious reading of the Twilight series is vital to understanding its popularity and highlighting these themes helps determine what cultural work these books are doing in America. The purpose of my study is to examine the religious and moral elements of the series that have led to its extraordinary success. The history of the vampire in literature, its permanent connection to religion, and America’s abstinence-only teen sex education programs supported by the Christian conservatives, form a substantial foundation for Twilight’s popularity. Many of its fans, including its base, female teenagers and their mothers, are nonetheless unaware of the decidedly Mormon ideology at the heart of the book. My approach to Twilight is through an emphasis on the Mormon author and the Mormon cosmology and theology present in these books. I recognize that this series is a significant departure from the Catholic-inflected cosmology evident in previous vampire literature. I will explore the Catholic cosmological background of previous vampire literature and show how Twilight reflects a pro-Mormon and somewhat antiCatholic theology through its emphasis on Mormon cosmology. I then turn to LDS theological and cultural beliefs and behavior that permeate Twilight and consider how the books allegorically articulate a stance consistent with present-day Mormonism. My final section will delve into the familial, gendered and sexual themes predominant in the series and how they relate to fundamental Mormon ideas about eternal life through the family, or eternal progression (a distinctly Mormon doctrine). Finally, I examine how the larger landscape of conservative sexual mores in America draws on a much larger audience that seems oblivious to Twilight’s Mormon influence but are drawn nevertheless to Bella’s wrestling with themes of teenage sexuality, eternity, and true love.