"Famine for food, expectation for content": Jane Eyre as intertext for the "twilight" saga
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This chapter argues that the nuances of the gender politics of the "Twilight" series can be usefully articulated and examined by exploring Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre as an unacknowledged or displaced intertext. Jane Eyre is one of the forebears of the contemporary romance just as it is of the paranoid woman's film, also an important precursor of the Twilight series. Despite Stephanie Meyer's lifelong devotion to Jane Eyre, which she first read at the age of nine (Valby), the series fails to mention the novel, explicitly offering instead Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet as being among Bella's preferred reading. Nonetheless, the similarities between Jane Eyre and the "Twilight" saga are both more numerous and more profound than those to be found in the avowed intertexts.
