Postmodern Red Riding Hood: Bella Swan in Twilight Series

Abstract

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series presents its protagonist Bella Swan in a fairy tale-like world where she is surrounded with vampires and werewolves. In this world, Bella, as a figure of the girl in the woods, displays similar characteristics with those of the fairy tale type Little Red Riding Hood in Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” (Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, 1697), and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” (1812). However these characteristics are ideologically rewritten and based on postfeminist politics that foreground female subjectivity through sexual agency, freedom of choice, and consumerism. In this postfeminist context, this study aims to examine Bella Swan in Twilight series as an embodiment of the deconstruction of the classic fairy tale type in terms of the politics of personal agency, sexuality and power relations. In this deconstruction, the girl victim of the classic fairy tale becomes a twenty first century postfeminist girl who, in accordance with her consumerist choices, is free to play with and manipulate werewolves and vampires in the woods.