GAIL COLLINS “A Virginal Goth Girl” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/opinion/12colllins.html
現在米国でThe Twilight Sagaというファンタジー小説のシリーズが大ヒットしていることを知る。吸血鬼の少年に恋してしまった少女の物語であるよう。曰く、
“Twilight” and its successor novels are about a girl who falls in love with a vampire. There seems to be a lot of this going on lately. If you want to become a best-selling novelist, I would definitely advise that you start by making your hero a little bit undead.Even given this important thematic advantage, however, the Twilights are a phenomenon. According to a spokeswoman for the author, Stephenie Meyer, the first three books sold 6.5 million copies in the United States alone in less than three years. The fourth, “Breaking Dawn,” is scheduled to arrive in the stores on Aug. 2, when it will be greeted by midnight parties in at least 4,000 bookstores. In New York City, there will be a preparty concert of music that Meyer says inspires her writing. When the tickets went on sale, all 2,000 were gone within 45 minutes.
作者のStephenie Meyerは”a Mormon mom who was a stay-at-home housewife in Phoenix when she wrote her first book”。
The heroine is Bella, who gets sent off to finish high school in a really, really rainy part of the state of Washington. She catches the eye of a gorgeous boy in her biology class named Edward. He turns out to be a member of a commune of vampires, who have banded together to fight their inclination to drink human blood.Edward, who has never been attracted to a woman, mortal or immortal, in more than a century of postdeath existence, falls for Bella at first sniff. (It’s all about the smell.) And he is going to be faithful to her forever, even when she gets old and dies. But as much as he adores her, he won’t have sex with her because he worries he might kill her with his superstrength in the heat of the moment.
So, they are forced to spend all their time kissing and cuddling and talking about their feelings.
また、このテクストではJessica Valenti*1とCourtney Martin*2という２人のフェミニストが言及されている。現代の女性は「貞節」と「淫乱」、Good GirlとGossip Girlの間で引き裂かれている云々。
Jessica Valentiについては、
Molly Bennett “Jessica Valenti: Full Frontal Feminism” http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/bennett
