Consent issues in the Twilight saga extend far beyond Bella and Edward’s age gap

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Most debates about the depiction of consent in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, which turns 20 this month, focus on the age gap between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. For the uninitiated, Edward is an undead vampire who has been frozen at age 17 for 87 years, and falls in love with 17-year-old human schoolgirl Bella.

However, I want to discuss another question – whether Bella can consent to becoming a vampire (a transformation she begs Edward for throughout the series, and is finally granted in the final novel) at all. Philosopher L.A. Paul calls such decisions “transformative experiences” – choices you can’t fully evaluate beforehand because they will permanently change who you are.

The challenge of the choice to become a vampire or not, an example Paul uses in her book, Transformative Experience (2014), is two-part, according to her transformative experience framework. First, you can’t give the experience of becoming a vampire a personal value because you have no comparable experience (such as changing species). This makes it impossible for you to choose rationally as you would in other choices, by, for example, visualising what it might be like or making a pros and cons list.

Unlike being in a love triangle (albeit with a vampire and a werewolf, the plot of the second Twilight novel, New Moon), becoming a vampire is an irreversible event you can’t test or gather data on.

This article is part of a mini series marking 20 years since the publication of Stephenie Meyer’s first Twilight novel.

Second, given that your preferences will change in ways unknown upon becoming a vampire, you can’t choose which choice – vampire or human – you would prefer. For instance, human Bella enjoys sitting in the sun reading, while her vampire lover looks on from the trees. Vampire Bella might not miss this, however, as she now is consumed by blood-lust.

Consent, or informed consent, a term often associated with sex or medical interventions, considers whether someone is able to agree to something happening to them. A valid consent is one that is informed, voluntary, and capacitous – given by someone who is capable of giving consent.

In Bella’s choice to become a vampire, and in fact most transformative experience choices, capacity and voluntariness are easily established. At 18, Bella has reached the age of majority in Washington state, where she lives, meaning she can make her own autonomous decisions. She does not suffer from any current mental health conditions – her months-long depressive episode in New Moon, from which she has recovered by the time she becomes a vampire, notwithstanding. Her choice is also voluntary. In fact, throughout most of the saga, she is the main person pushing for her vampirism, with Edward and his adopted sister Rosalie being thoroughly opposed.

The issue with consent in transformative experience decisions is with the information. By their very nature, we do not have enough facts to make a rational choice. According to at least one major informed consent framework, this does not satisfy the condition of substantial understanding of “the foreseeable consequences and possible outcomes that might follow as a result of [(not)] performing the action”. The question of whether Bella can consent to becoming a vampire is misleading then.

In fact, all transformative experiences that require a consent transaction are not doing what they purport to be doing, as there is no way to understand what the consequences and possible outcomes will be. The more everyday transactions Paul discusses in her book are: getting a cochlear implant as person who is Deaf from birth, or choosing to have a child. There is a moment of consent, of no return, involved in both of these choices, and as both are transformative experiences, there is a lack of information for you personally making the choice.

Paul’s solution to this is to reframe the question from choosing, say, vampirism or not vampirism, to choosing “revelation” – or not. “If you choose to undergo a transformative experience and its outcomes,” she writes, “you choose the experience for the sake of discovery itself, even if this entails a future that involves stress, suffering, or pain.”

This is exactly what Bella does. She chooses to become a vampire because she wants to be with Edward forever, something she reveals to him at her prom in the epilogue of the first book.

As comes to light at the end of New Moon, she also wants to protect Edward’s family from the Volturi (the vampire government). She accepts that this means leaving her own loved ones behind. She says: “This was always the hardest part […] The people I would lose, the people I would hurt [by becoming a vampire].”

However, as is the nature of transformative experiences, she ends up being wrong about her assessment of losing people. She gains her daughter Renesmee, her werewolf love interest Jacob sticks around and her dad Charlie is still in her life. In short, the outcomes were not as she feared, in part because she had no data to truly make a rational judgment about them.

So, can Bella consent to becoming a vampire? She can’t consent to vampirism in the usual informed consent sense, and as Paul argues, neither can people making other significant choices. But she can consent to revelation, which reframes what a meaningful transformative choice looks like.

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