Free Touched by a Vampire by Beth Felker Jones Page B

gender stereotypes? How do they challenge those stereotypes?
How can stereotypes cause harm? Have you seen this in your life or in the life of a friend?
The concept of sin making it difficult to see what God intends for us is an important one. Brainstorm a list of things we tend to believe are “natural.” Are they really natural? Do they reflect God’s will as we see it in His Word?
How do you think about living as created male or female? How can we glorify God as girls and boys, men and women?
    1. Stephenie Meyer,
Twilight
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 210.
    2. Stephenie Meyer,
New Moon
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 263.
    3.
Twilight
, 109.
    4. Stephenie Meyer,
Eclipse
(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007), 166.
    5.
Twilight
, 79.
    6.
Eclipse
, 439.
    7.
Twilight
, 211.
    8.
Eclipse
, 463.
    9.
Eclipse
, 341.
    10.
Twilight
, 473.
    11. Jo B. Paoletti, “Clothing and Gender in America: Children’s Fashions, 1890–1920,”
Signs
13: 1 (Autumn 1987), 136–43.

Chapter 5
Baseball and Loyalty
Twilight and the Ideal Family
    E DWARD’S PERFECT FAMILY , the opposite of her own, is a large part of Bella’s love for him. Her family is broken. His family is loyal. Her family lets her down. His family would die to rescue her. The beautiful, eternal family of vampires stands in stark contrast to the ordinariness and weakness of Bella’s parents, and she comes to cherish her relationship with them almost as much as she cherishes Edward.
    It seems obvious that family is important to Christians. How, then, should Christians think through the different messages about family found in the Twilight Saga?
F AMILY D ISAPPOINTS
    Family in the Twilight world reflects the truth about family inthe real world in one simple way: Family disappoints us. This is certainly the case when we think about Bella’s family. Bella, like so many of us, is a child of divorce. Her mother isn’t particularly reliable, while her father is rarely in touch. So Bella learns to rely on herself.
    Before she meets Edward and his family, Bella is essentially alone in the world. She has no sisters or brothers. For all practical purposes, she is without parents.
    Her mother, Renee, is kindly enough, but she isn’t there for her daughter. She wants to travel with her new husband, and Bella moves in with her dad in the town of Forks in order to give her mother the freedom to do so. Thus Bella is alone at a vulnerable time. She is maturing, leaving girlhood behind and edging toward being a woman. At this crucial moment in her life, her mother effectively abandons her. Bella routinely hides things from her mother and treats her like an incompetent child. She can’t count on her mother to provide protection or a listening ear.
    Bella’s father, Charlie, cares about his daughter, but he is inept and disappointing. Charlie spends most of his time away from the house. Just like with her mom, Bella takes the parental role in her relationship with him. When she moves in with him, Bella takes over the household cooking and duties. She competently whips up delicious dinners and makes sure both she and her father are well cared for. When he expresses concern about her, she tries to smooth over his worries and avoids serious conversations with him about sex.
    Bella describes her new life with her dad as “like having my own place.” 1 She enjoys this independence, but we get hints that even self-reliant Bella sometimes longs for more from her parents. When her dad shows concern for her, she tells us that her “throat suddenly felt tight. I wasn’t used to being taken care of, and Charlie’s unspoken concern caught me by surprise.” 2 She’s very self-reliant, but she’s still touched when her dad reaches out to her.
    Bella sometimes can’t and sometimes won’t rely on her parents for the things children, even nearly grown children, rightly rely on their parents for. In many ways, her parents are physically and emotionally