Bella's Promises: Adolescence and (Re)capitulation in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series

The literary critic Steven Bruhm argues that one difference between contemporary Gothic texts and late-eighteenth-century Gothic novels is that contemporary Gothic texts can no longer sustain the narrative project of returning the societies they portray to a “logic of historical progression.” For Bruhm, it is the psychological complexity of characters in the contemporary Gothic that renders this return impossible. He writes: History has made a promise—that one will grow from a fragile, vulnerable child to an autonomous, rational adult—but it is unable to keep this promise in the twentieth century. It can only offer a future that is already suspended between present and past. While the Gothic may ostensibly plot the movement of chronological time, it really devastates any sense of linear progression that we might use to put together our “personal history.” (267–8)