I recently finished reading the book Twilight, the first book in an extremely popular series about a romance between a vampire and a teenage girl. I hated the book. There is the usual problem systemic of the romance novel genre - weak plot and average writing. However, I also found the book quite disturbing. The vampire, although he looks like a teenager, is in fact almost 100 years old. His body hasn’t aged but his mind does have all that experience, and there he is – romancing this 17 year old girl. Not only that, he comes to her room to watch her sleep without her knowing this. To me this was not romantic, but quite creepy. This brings up two issues in my mind.
First is the concept of romance itself. I will admit that romance has never been my genre. In high school, a lot of girls used to read these romance novels, so I tried some too. Most of these were terrible. It is not that I am too cynical to believe in love or romance, I just don’t buy the version that these books try to peddle. I can enjoy books with love stories - I just require that they be well written with interesting and complex characters. Somebody once said that Women only love "love" i.e. women don’t fall in love with a person but with the fact that, that person loves them. That might explain the popularity of romance novels among women. But doesn’t that just continue to perpetrate the delusion?
The second issue is whether I would let my daughter read a book such as Twilight. I have often been presented with the argument that whatever gets a child to read is good enough. Parents of children who are on the internet all the time say “Well at least she is reading!”. But I wonder - does reading just for the sake of reading provide any value once we are beyond the stage of teaching a child how to read? Presumably a teenager knows how to read, so should her habit of reading romance novels be encouraged using the argument "at least she is reading”. Aren’t we forgetting why reading is glorified in the first place? Reading books is useful because it expands one’s horizons and encourages new ideas. That is why we want children to read. Do romance novels serve that purpose? To me it seems like they contract rather than expand the mind. So should we let children read anything, just because they are reading?
Raising kids in a non-native environment while constantly worrying about striking the right balance.
1 comment:
Wow, that sounds like a really truly awful book. It seems weird that the series is so popular. That reminds me of the song "Every Breath You Take," a song that Sting wrote about smothering possessiveness, but which the public took as a beautiful love song. Though this book is creepier than that, I think, because it sounds like the author intended it as a wonderful romance, while Sting intended his song to be a bitter social commentary.
I think if my child wanted to read this book, I would let him or her, but I would read it too, or, if the child is young enough, even read it out loud to the child so that we would be going through it together. Then I'd start lots of serious discussions about the issues that it raises. In general I think kids learn more from being exposed to things that I disagree with and discussing them than they do by being sheltered from them.
There are definitely some things that I would *not* show to my kids because they are too disturbing. I haven't read this book to see if it's one of them.
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