Woolfing it Down

For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say there was nothing the matter. Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one.

-Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Of course he wasn't interested in me, I thought angrily, my eyes stinging- a delayed reaction to the onions. I wasn't interesting. And he was. Interesting... and brilliant... and mysterious... and perfect... and beautiful... and possibly able to lift full-sized vans with one hand.

-Stephanie Meyers, Twilight

If I really did have to describe Stephanie Meyers right now, I would say she's like Virginia Woolf, minus her sensibilities, competency and feminism, but plus vampires. Now, I''m no... (Woolfian? Woolfite? Woolfeur? Considering the subject matter I'm going in a different direction.)

Now, I'm no Woolf-man, but I have done several minutes worth of research on the global repository of human knowledge that is Wikipedia. Virginia Woolf, as it turns out, was among the writers who pioneered a narrative stream-of-consciousness technique in the early twentieth century along with fellows like Joyce and Faulkner. And there are times when Stephanie Meyers sounds a bit like her.

I am aware there are people with English degrees reading this, so nobody get their aesthetics in a twist just yet. Here's the similarity. Woolf is the only one of those three I mentioned whose style of stream-of-consciousness narration is both purposefully melodramatic and purposefully feminine. I say purposefully feminine because she had political and social reasons for taking on what she considered a feminine voice (she was a favorite of the early feminist movement). I say purposefully melodramatic because I've felt a rather strong undercurrent of irony in how she depicts the wild mood-swings of her characters. Stephanie Meyers of course isn't so subtle or accomplished, but the narration absolutely draws upon the stylistic influence of writers like Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner. (Everybody does. Their influence is ubiquitous and subconscious; I doubt strongly Meyers is modeling herself after them on purpose.)

Meyers uses stream-of-consciousness of a sort, and if it sounds like anybody, it sounds like Virginia Woolf. Stephanie Meyers character Bella certainly is feminine, in the most culturally stagnant, stereotypical sense, and my God, is that poor girl melodramatic. Reading her mind (the narration is first-person) is like reading the prose equivalent of a mood-ring stuck on a mad she-chimp in heat.

Bella and Edward.

She might be insane:

Grrr.

-Stephanie Meyers, Twilight

I rest my case. Anyway, here's the chapter synopsis:

Chapter 4
Invitations

I'll give you three guesses to figure out what happens in this chapter. Got it? That's right! Bella gets invited to the school dance. Repeatedly. And that's what happens in this chapter. This chapter is about Bella being invited to the school dance no less than three times. The school dance. This is a vampire novel, by the way.

So she tells them all she's going to Seattle that weekend, and (gasp!) Edward invites her to go with him and the curtain closes. It's a date!

Here are the best sentences (the two from above are out of chapter 4 also):

-"You're welcome," he retorted.
-I tried to be crafty as I hid my horror.
-Stupid, shiny Volvo owner.
-His eyes were gloriously intense as he uttered that last sentence, his voice smoldering. I couldn't remember how to breathe.

See? Just like Virginia Woolf.