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Popular Culture Review
Hale. Pleased that men’s eyes watched me everywhere I went, from the year I
turned twelve. Delighted that my girlfriends sighed with envy when they
touched my hair” {Eclipse 155). While beauty was important to Rosalie as a
human, so too was something else. She explains: “I yearned for my own little
baby. I wanted my own house and a husband who would kiss me when he got
home from work” {Eclipse 156). While Meyer’s emphasis on Rosalie as an
example of the beauty myth and the male gaze might seem like a critique of
misogynist practices, Meyer ultimately recedes into a conservative view of
women’s roles in Rosalie’s desire for the traditional female roles of wife and
mother.
Rosalie’s vision never became real; instead, she was turned into a vampire.
When she first sees her vampire reflection, she is relieved to see that she is still
beautiful. Yet she soon realizes the serious ramifications of being a vampire:
‘It took some time before I began to blame the beauty for what
had happened to me—for me to see the curse of it. To
wish that I had been... well, not ugly, but normal [...]
So I could have been allowed to marry someone who
loved me, and have pretty babies. That’s what I’d
really wanted, all along. It still doesn’t seem like too
much to have asked for.’ (Eclipse 162)
Rosalie blames her being a vampire on beauty. Carlisle turned Rosalie into
a vampire, saying that “It was too much waste. I couldn’t leave her” (Eclipse
161). To let Rosalie die would have been a “waste” of beauty, of value. Rosalie
feels vampire beauty is a “curse,” a vampire version of the Iron Maiden; here,
the Maiden traps Rosalie into a beautiful body, making her conform to a life she
did not choose. She would trade everything to be Bella, to be “normal” instead
of “the most beautiful thing (she’s) ever seen” {Eclipse 162).
Rosalie’s conversation with Bella, highlighting the severe implications of
becoming a vampire and achieving the beauty ideal, serves as a warning in the
novels that beauty comes with a steep price: a lack of choice. Rosalie’s
background highlights W olfs main argument that society’s message is “that a
woman should live hungry, die young, and leave a pretty corpse” (231). Wolf
says that the problem with cosmetics is “our lack of choice...the problem with
cosmetics exists only when women feel invisible or inadequate without them”
(231). This argument is illustrated in Rosalie’s warning to Bella that the problem
with being a vampire is the lack of choice in lifestyle. While Rosalie’s warning
is important in stressing a feminist argument, Bella unfortunately feels that not
being a vampire would make her feel the way women without cosmetics can
feel: “invisible or inadequate” (231). Bella choosing to become a vampire
reveals Meyer’s feminist stance as hollow and conservative. Bella tells Edward
that “it just seems logical...a man and woman have to be somewhat equal...as
in, one of them can’t always be swooping in and saving the other one. They
have to save each other equally [...] I can’t always be Lois Lane [...] I want to