ABSTRACT
The novels of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series-Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn-recount the romance of Bella, an adolescent teenage girl, and Edward, her vampire lover, in terms of their rapturous love for each other.1 If love appears to be this unlikely couple’s dominant mutual emotion, pain-physical, emotional, or some piercing combination thereofoften overshadows their proclamations of eternal affection. In one passage among many, Bella describes the exquisite torment she feels with her lover: “Instead I clutched my arms around his neck again and locked my mouth with his feverishly. It wasn’t desire at all-it was need, acute to the point of pain” (BD 107). The tension between desire and need crackles with the same dynamic as that between volition and compulsion-people may act on their desires, but they must act on their needs, and in this passage, Bella declares she has little ability to resist her erotic drives, even when they compel her to embrace suffering. When her sexual desires metamorphose into needs and thus become implicated and intermeshed with incessant torment, Bella sacrifi ces romantic pleasures for masochistic pains, which tortuously lead her back to pleasure.
