the body project
Who wants to have what so fittingly are called impurities on the body surface when that clearly connotes dirtiness within? In spite of being a product of nature, the body is never positioned outside the cultural realm of language; it is never pre-linguistic, pre-cultural, never simply matter. The body is always a sign, from the very start. In Twilight, this becomes apparent not only in the way that the bodies of the series are signs telling of traits and character, but also in how these bodies are markers of history, telling stories of the characters’ past. The fragility of Bella’s body echoes her unsure self, much in the same way the diamond shimmer of vampire skin signals strong vampire, and the size, heat, and muscularity of Jacob’s body signals werewolf. Scars abound, such as Bella’s scar from her encounter with James, Emily’s scarred face, and Jasper’s scarred body. The motif is as old as literature itself: remember how Ulysses’ scar gives away his identity upon his return to Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey. Jacob cuts his hair off when he changes into a werewolf/shape-shifter – in the film New Moon, a tattoo is also added, marking his body further. In this writing of bodies, the text underlines the dilemma of the characters. The body is inscribed with history, connecting the person that is to the one that was. As modern identity is forever changing, the experienced stability of the body is what ensures personal continuity. In Bella’s case, however, that will not happen. She will cross a threshold and get a new body: in a post-Cartesian world her worries are quite logical. Jacob is another Twilight character who enacts this very problem: his body is constantly changing, between boy and wolf, but also in startling ways from boy to unbelievably huge man. Thus, the Twilight narrative deconstructs the notion of stable identity in a way that surprisingly often can be found in soap operas and melodrama. In melodrama, the losing and finding of identity, and for that matter, memory, is a common motif, and people who were lost turn up in new and unexpected shapes.10 One example is the television series The Vampire Diaries, where two characters, the vampire Katherine and the human heroine Elena, are played by the same actress. Enacting this classic Doppelganger motif, while using one body for two selves, makes identity fluid and insecure in a postmodern way. The question of self and identity is important in a time when 35