A Vampiric Take on Weber in the Twilight Saga

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A Vampiric Take on Weber in the Twilight Saga

Hailey Lisboa

    Jacob's shirtless, his bicep tattoo and muscular figure on display, while he watches the star couple he holds in utter contempt. Bella and Edward, dressed head-to-toe modestly, contrast with Jacob and align with each other.  Not to mention, Jacob's on the exact opposite side of the frame from where Bella and Edward converse. The entire scene is situated within the lush forest near Forks, Washington, giving an external manifestation to the overwhelming, jungle-like thoughts swarming through Bella's mind. She's torn between loving her old friend and resident werewolf Jacob or her mysterious, seductive 117-year-old classmate from high school. "Don't make me choose..." she whispers to Jacob, then bites her lip and says, "...because it'll be him."

    At this point in the saga---the end of New Moon, the second movie, to be precise---Edward has just come back from a long hiatus with no contact with Bella. Mind you, she's deeply infatuated with Edward, and wants him to turn her into a vampire so that they can live together forever. He wanted to protect her after all the drama from the first movie, in which two violent vampires hunted her down, nearly killing her. Jacob, meanwhile, has been keeping Bella distracted and even feeling better through their motorcycle repair project together. He functions as Bella's main source of male comfort during this movie. But when Edward  is reunited with Bella and Jacob finds out, a quasi-territorial battle for Bella in this love triangle rears its head. The scene ends when (spoiler!) Edward says his one condition to turning Bella into a vampire is if she marries him.

    96 years before the first installment in the Twilight saga came out, Marianne Weber was in Germany writing an essay called Authority and Autonomy in Marriage. Industrialization was chugging full-steam ahead, making drastic changes to what the usual spheres women belonged to were, and questioning the role of women in relation to men in the modern age. One of the key points that Weber argues in her essay is that originally, a man married to a woman served to protect her from other men, which was justification for her subordination and for staying in the domestic sphere (Weber 2003:87). This is what Weber calls a form-principle, or the line of logic that relationships are built on. But with the introduction of women to the working class, women were workers just as men, leading Weber to ask if subordination can be justified in this new reality. However, what solidifies this subordination rather than a simply unspoken form-principle is what she calls legally protected predominance, in which husbands are implicitly (but sometimes more explicitly) given power by law to control some or more aspects of their wives' lives. (Weber 2003:90). Relatively recently in American history, laws giving husbands control over if a woman could open a credit card or sell her assets without her express permission have been examples of these widely called Head and Master Laws.

    Being human is freedom in a way. Bella is allowed to experience the highs and lows of life, make meaningful memories, and then pass away once her time has come. While traditionally, living forever seems to grant one the power of doing things one can't do within one lifetime, forever is forever. In a semi-Nihilistic sense, if there's no end to life, then there's no point to it either. So, while Bella would live forever with Edward and his family, would that be enough to eternally satisfy her even after the death of her parents, friends, and everyone else in her life? In a sense, becoming a vampire for Bella is like signing a contract to give up her freedoms to live alongside Edward. This is highly similar to Marianne Weber's idea of a woman subordinating herself to her husband---yes, Bella has the decision to become a vampire forever, and no, Edward is not forcing her. But at the end of movie, the condition he makes if she wants to become a vampire is simply this: to marry him.

    Marriage, in the context of this scene, is Edward's way of "protecting" Bella. He puts a territorial mark on her so that Jacob and his bestial pack of wolves can't interact with her. And although it's not explicitly forced, the condition to marry him is communicated to Bella in a way: "If you want to become a vampire, you must become mine and mine forever." It's like a codependency with no end, especially because Bella is being completely cut off from everyone else that she cares about in her life. This is Edward's way of turing their relationship form-principle into legally protected predominance over Bella, so that he has more backing to assert his control. In any sense, their power dynamic is extremely asymmetrical, given that Edward may look like a 17-year-old but he is actually a centurian, and he has physical capacities that he's shown as a threat to her before. I'm recalling the scene in the first movie in which he tells Bella that he's a killer as he's got her all alone in the middle of the woods. At least in a psychological sense, this is a tactic of intimidation and a clear sign of emotional avoidance. With Bella's response of "I don't care," she's enabling him to act this way, and over the course of the next movie, he becomes empowered enough to assert his dominance over her by asking for her hand in marriage. 


References

"Stills from The Twilight Saga: New Moon: Bella, Jacob and Edward in the new movie." The Telegraph, November 18. Retrieved April 14, 2026 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/6598650/Stills-from-The-Twilight-Saga-New-Moon-Bella-Jacob-and-Edward-in-the-new-movie.html)

Weber, Marianne. 2003. "Authority and Autonomy in Marriage." Sociological Theory 21(2): 86-95.    






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