Mirror. Mirror.
45
that my story was over” (106). To not be a vampire would mean she would not
truly have value.
Modem society’s fascination with the ideal of female beauty is what Wolf
terms the “Iron Maiden” (17). Wolf defines the Iron Maiden as “the modem
hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves (that) is [...] rigid,
cmel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to
imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women’s faces and bodies”
(17). The Iron Maiden produces a beauty backlash that “is spread and reinforced
by the cycles of self-hatred provoked in women by the advertisements, photo
features, and beauty copy in the glossaries” of magazines (73). While Bella does
not have magazines to compare herself to, she does have the vampire beauty
which she compares to “the airbmshed pages of a fashion magazine” {Twilight
19). As a result, Bella has a self-hatred for her human body, which she views as
so clumsy that it makes her “almost disabled” {Twilight 2\Qi).
Just as the Iron Maiden traps women in an ideal of perfect, inhuman beauty,
so too does being a vampire trap women in a perfect, inhumanly beautiful body.
While the vam