Bella is a lonely girl, deprived of family love and connection. Instead of her parents taking care of her beyond her physical needs, she must take care of their physical and emotional needs, sacrificing her own. Her emotional needs are not on their radar.

She meets Edward, who is not only concerned about her physical safety, but is most concerned about her emotional ones. He sees (without mindreading abilities) what those around her have not seen–a girl starved for affection, protection and concern, who has had to be unnaturally strong her whole life, sacrificing herself on the alter of selfish others.

She meets Edward’s family and views them in a fourth-wall way; this kind of family affection, kindness and care is completely foreign to her. It’s also a powerful draw. Carlisle can be seen as a loving father, Edward a loving son, the others as brothers and sisters who care for each other despite, and even because of, their differences. What a revelation!

Bella is drawn to and desires this family with whom she can be herself, one that loves her and which she can unguardedly love. And she makes the choice to become one with them, despite the sacrifices it will require.

Is this not a picture too many young people can relate to? Kids who come from broken, abusive, neglecting homes, who caretake their parents and siblings, who bear burdens alone. Kids who meet Christians and are drawn to God the father and son, who are drawn to God’s family.

As a young person who came from such a home, when I met true Christians and observed them and was with them, the longings of my heart were so strong! As a young Christian at a weekend fellowship getaway I was entranced to eat meals–together!–with others who didn’t ignore me, but embraced me. To feel one with a family was one of the most wonderful experiences I’d ever had. To know that I had them forever (even though family members in my life would change through the years) has been key to my life’s health and happiness.

I feel this metaphor/allegory? is one of the huge draws of the book; I would have loved it as a love-starved teen and I found it drew me along the same lines as a mature adult.

Perhaps you can use the Twilight story as a *general* metaphor in this way. (Of course it breaks down in several ways if taken too literally.)

I see no problem with Edward’s age, either, as he remained 17. True, he’s an “old soul” 17, but then, so is Bella. In Midnight Sun he ruminates on how he wasn’t focused on girls before being vamped, but on the glory of war–typical for adolescent boys in time of war before our “bad” wars, sex-saturated times. And through his vampire years, he hasn’t found anyone interesting or been that interested. So, I guess you could say the romantic part of his growth was arrested until he met Bella.

Maybe this is just me, but I don’t quite get the whole application of “creepy” to Edward. (It’s not just you, Rena–everybody seems to agree with you!) Isn’t accepting a man’s freezing-at-age-17-for-ninety-years, and the possible consequences thereof, part of the suspending of disbelief? Surely he shouldn’t wait for a hundred-and-five-year-old woman to come along? Or is it just that Bella is underage for the first book?

I think Bella is the “Christian everyman” in this story and Edward is less a specifically Christ-figure than a general God-figure. I might be wrong.

John, when I get to Dracula I’m going to have to keep in mind the definition of the Gothic genre as Calvinistic. I grew up a Calvinist, so even now that I’m Catholic I wonder if that’s why the genre makes such sense to me.

As I’m going back a reading this series of posts this mornng, I’m starting to buy what you’re selling a bit more. However, I think there is a significant difference between how Rowling “offends” moral “sensibility” and how Meyer does it.

The main thing that worries me is, in fact, the way Edward and Bella’s romance is presented, and the audience which is receiving it, the girls who (God willing) will be in my youth group in the next decade or so. I think that, if in fact it has as much textual support as it seems from your post, the God-man drama is brilliant. The problem is that, as much as I adore the fourfold meaning hermeneutic, what the books “mean” or effectively communicate is not “the struggle between fallenness and love for a watchful, protective God”–they present an older, superpotent, omnipresent, dangerous MAN (however noble) as the ideal to which girls should aspire in their own relationships. In HP, if you’re uncomfortable looking at Harry as “Christlike” or a “Christfigure,” he works equally well when the term and focus is shifted to a “Christian everyman.” (I’d venture to say that the two should be nearly synonymous, but that’s neither here nor there). If Edward is stripped of his “divinity,” on the other hand, what’s left is simply a pretty creepy and compelling Victorian man-in-charge. And that, sadly, is the on-the-ground consequence of Edward’s reception.

Even as relatively self-aware woman in my early twenties–one almost ridiculously prone to seeing anagogical symbolism is EVERYTHING–reading the first novel in the series in B&N, I literally had to snap myself out of it–in a bad way. The relationship is compelling, but it smacks of escapism and romantic idolatry. I can’t quite put that reality out of my mind, despite your convincing arguments to the contrary.