Literary scholar John Granger has identified a “distinctively Latter-day Saint theological-literary structure” in Stephanie Meyer’s popular books. His arguments deserve serious consideration by both fans and detractors of this pop culture phenomenon, writes Daniel Crandall.
John Granger has written extensively on the Harry Potter films. His website on that subject is the “Hogwarts Professor” and he has been dubbed by Time magazine as the “Dean of Harry Potter Scholars.” Now he brings his critical eye to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series of books and provides readers with some fascinating insight into what Ms. Meyer may be doing with her books about vampires, werewolves and teenage romance. Granger’s Touchstone article, titled “Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden,” is almost enough to make me want to sit down with Meyer’s books.
I suggest that the Twilight series is something for thoughtful people to be aware of and to think seriously about, first, because of its remarkable hold on the imagination of American readers and movie-goers, but second, and more important, because of the reason these books are so popular: They meet a spiritual need. Mircea Eliade, in his book The Sacred and the Profane, suggests that popular entertainment, especially imaginative literature and film, serves a religious or mythic function in a secular culture. When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the “suspension of disbelief” and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies. …
These Gothic romances featuring atypical vampires and werewolf champions are allegories about the love relationship between God and Man. They are, in fact, a re-telling of the Garden of Eden drama—with a Mormon twist. Here, the Fall is a good thing, even the key to salvation and divinization, just as Joseph Smith, Jr., the Latter-day Saint prophet, said it was. Twilight conveys the appealing message that the surest means to God are sex and marriage.
According to Granger, Meyer not only gives a Mormon apologetic in the guise of a fantastical teen romance, she “also incorporates substantial criticism of her church in her story.”
The depth of Granger’s understanding of Mormon history and belief is profound and his arguments concerning what many believe is nothing but a bit pop culture ephemera deserve serious consideration. Read all of John Granger’s article at the Touchstone website. This, along with some of the comments my initial review of the latest Twilight film, are enough to make me think a second time about my position concerning Twilight’s themes.
If Meyer’s work is informed by her understanding of Mormon history and belief and some readers come away from her books with what some might take to be an unflattering image of Mormonism, then the fault may not be with those readers. It might be with the portrait presented by Stephanie Meyer.
The problem with examining the Twilight series through the lens of Meyer’s religion is that no matter what one sees, it’s distorted. Meyer didn’t write novels about religion, much less about her religion in particular. Her faith is certainly a part of who Meyer is, but it’s not the story of these books. So much of the evaluation on the series focuses on that while ignoring other aspects, like genre (fantasy/horror and romance) and the wider American culture in which Meyer grew up, etc.
It’s rather like looking at Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind for how he portrays Judaism and ignoring that the movie is a science-fiction film made by an American. Any conclusions drawn about the Jewish faith would be lacking, to say the least.
I’m LDS and I have read all the books; I found them entertaining, but not worth keeping for re-reading. My own conclusion about them is that I should neither apologize for my religion, nor take credit for its role in the Twilight books. They’re not about my faith.
Daniel-
Thanks for the comments. If I’m reading your critique of my response correctly, you feel that that if Granger is correct then my criticisms amount to criticisms of Meyers’ view of Mormonism. Obviously this is true, and an understandable position, but I think it’s a bit dismissive of my case against Granger. I don’t think Granger’s position is defensible in the least, and I think that his assertions are serious enough to merit critical examination. I’d like to summarize my argument against his thesis.
First, I think Granger’s methodology is incredibly weak. If he can find a lexical or thematic parallel, no matter how tenuous, he nakedly asserts influence and from there builds up a conflicting and bizarre model of Meyers’ Mormonism. (For instance, the notion that her statement about a meadow points to the Mountain Meadows Massacre as inspiration for her novels is downright ridiculous, but he states unequivocally that such was the case.) That this model conflicts entirely with Meyers’ own statements about the influence of her faith on her writing is not even a peripheral concern for Granger. That Granger is a novice of the study of Mormonism makes the identification of these esoteric parallels all the more suspect. I find these to be be serious, serious methodological shortcomings.
There are also several indicators in his article that point to anti-Mormonism as the primary (if not exclusive) source of his perspective on Mormonism. Two examples from the beginning of his article should suffice. First, the idea that sex is one of the “surest means to God” is nothing more than a naive anti-Mormon perversion of the doctrine of eternal marriage. The most sure proof of this is the fact that Granger cannot point to a single instance of the church even remotely advocating such a view. It’s simply not a Latter-day Saint belief. His opinion does not come from Mormonism, but from uninformed misrepresentations of it.
Granger also states as fact the idea that 17th century hermeticism is the root of Mormon doctrine (“Carlisle Cullen was born in the mid-1660s, the same period when historic Mormonism was born in Europe”), which is based exclusively on a theory promulgated in a book entitled Refiner’s Fire, by John L. Brooke, which is heavily dependent upon D. Michael Quinn’s Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Granger’s ideas about alchemy also derive from Refiner’s Fire, but he does not mention this). The author of Refiner’s Fire has himself stated that he is not an historian of Mormonism and that his book is “not necessarily a well-rounded approach to early Mormonism” (Refiner’s Fire, xvii). His arguments are specious and methodologically weak, and his theory circulates exclusively in anti-Mormon quasi-academic circles. Latter-day Saint scholars responded to Brooke’s book the same year it came out (http://mi.byu.edu/publications/review/?reviewed_books&vol=6&num=2&id=151), but Granger clearly isn’t aware of this.
Granger’s position cannot be asserted to derive from an objective investigation, and he clearly is not even bothering to let the Latter-day Saint position speak for itself. He accepts wholesale what he reads from those critical of Mormonism and does not bother to verify their accusations or give a voice to an opposing viewpoint. While Meyers recognizes that her Mormonism played a role in the crafting of her story, Granger’s theory is irresponsible and reckless, and it only serves to promote an uninformed view of Mormonism and of Meyers’ motivations.
Rose, I also want to express my appreciation for sharing the link to Daniel McClellan’s response to Granger. The thing is I did not take Granger’s article as something inspired by anti-Mormon bigotry as McClellan asserts. Instead it made me think that there is a greater depth to Meyer’s books (and possibly the movies) than I had originally thought. Instead of the series being an easily dismissed mediocre fantastical teen romance, it might actually have some theological and historical depth that is not obvious to many who do not know much about Mormonism.
If the Twilight series is inspired and informed by Meyer’s Mormon faith and her understanding of Mormon history, then it also strikes me that some of McClellan’s points might have less to do with Granger’s alleged attitude toward Mormonism and more to how that faith and history might be perceived through a Twilight prism. In other words, McClellan’s argument might not be with Granger, but rather with Stephanie Meyer.
If Meyer’s work is informed by her understanding of Mormon history and belief and some readers come away from her books with what some might take to be an unflattering image of Mormonism, then the fault may not be with those readers. It might be with the portrait presented by Stephanie Meyer.
Thanks for this comment and link, Rose.
It seems to me–as one who has not read the books but only seen the movies, and who doesn’t know much about Mormon controversies–that judging from the two writers’ critiques, Meyer’s books are indeed suffused with allusions to Mormon doctrine, but that these allusions are a very natural consequence of her devotion to a particular worldview. Nothing sinister about that, in my view, and it’s her right to write what she likes.
Nor do I think it likely that young women reading the Twilight books will become more susceptible to Mormonism. That’s a big step for people to take, and the American culture is so overwhelmingly non-Mormon that it seems fanciful to see any danger to children’s souls in Meyer’s vampire fantasy books, regardless of what one might think of Mormonism.
I also think, however, that a deep and unbiased analysis of the influence of Mormonism on Meyer’s Twilight books would be a very good thing to have, for literary historical purposes.
You may want to read this rebuttal of Granger’s article. I found it interesting and helpful.
http://danielomcclellan.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/mormon-vampires-in-the-garden-of-eden/