the body project
no longer be compatible if and when her body grows old. The fact that Edward’s body is over a hundred years old is irrelevant: the look of his body shell gives him the identity of a young man. All of these worries and paradoxes point to ancient human dilemmas. Where exactly is the self posited? Is it inside or outside the body? And, furthermore, are we a body or do we have one? What happens to the sense of self when the body changes – through illness, accident, or mutilation? This ambivalence towards the body becomes apparent in language: people often talk about their bodies as something other, that they do things to it and it does things, although, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once pointed out, ‘No one ever says, Here am I, and I have brought my body with me.’5 The body and the self are two as well as one, simultaneously. When Bella watches her body in the mirror she watches her own self – the two cannot be simply separated. But you do not have to know your Lacan to realise that she is also othering that self, observing it from a distance. And since the body she sees does not look right, there is a rift, a discrepancy between her body and her self. This experience of discrepancy draws on the idea of the mind – or soul – and body being separated as well as the two being one and the same. The body of Bella is an image of this paradox as much as the story of Twilight is an enactment of it. ‘You’ll still be Bella’, is Edward’s promise and simple answer to Bella’s worried question.6 This would suggest that to Edward the body and mind are clearly separated, and, furthermore, that the mind heavily outweighs the body, which is secondary. But Edward is a paradox. He, who favours the mind above the body, seems to believe he is nothing but body: Bella is the only one who believes he has a soul. Edward’s paradoxical being illustrates the complicated relationship between body and mind/soul in the Twilight narrative and the culture surrounding it. Being described as a statue, as ever-unchanging marble, he is pure material and can as such be regarded as being body only, pure matter. But he is quite the opposite. His mind is so strong it can encompass and listen to all other minds around him (except Bella’s). It is also so strong that it wins over the body; in the chapter in Twilight so aptly called ‘Mind over matter’, Edward tells 33