With graphic storylines, dramatic love scenes and gruesome portrayals of vampire life, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels have become required reading for British teenagers. They were thanked for the 5 percent rise in children’s book sales recorded last year and are a popular feature of school libraries. But now researchers are investigating whether they are bad for teenagers’ brains.
At a conference at Cambridge University last month, neuroscientists and literary, education and media academics came together to investigate whether dark novels such as Twilight are affecting children’s brains in a worrying way. Maria Nikolajeva, professor of education at Cambridge, who organized the conference, says teens are particularly vulnerable to the power of literature because of their stage of development. “Neuroscience has shown that the adolescent brain is particularly unstable, since during this period we switch from focusing on ourselves towards understanding other people and becoming social beings,” she explains.
“All this chemistry makes teenagers confused — as we who have gone through it all know. There’s a risk that they might fail to recognize the conservative ideology of the Twilight series — like the horrendous gender stereotypes, and conservative family values.” Nikolajeva flags up the way leading lady Bella’s “only concern is to get a boyfriend and get married — as with all her female friends. And while [Bella’s vampire lover] Edward is handsome, strong and smart, she is feminine and silly,” she adds. “He makes decisions, she is submissive. Since the brain and mind of an adolescent is unstable, they have problems making decisions and judgments, and quite a vague sense of their own psychological, social and sexual identity. It is then easy to fall victim to something superficially glamorous, like Twilight.”
The inspiration for the conference — where talks included “What is it about good girls and vampires?” and “My life would suck without you” — came after Nikolajeva tried to interest a psychologist colleague in the role of adolescence in children’s literature. She was keen to widen the research into the effect of dark novels, but her colleague responded by saying: “And what might you know about it?” Nikolajeva recalls. “I felt it was high time we — psychologists, sociologists, historians, art educators and literary scholars — learned more from each other.” The 70-plus attendees came from 20 different countries and included teen-favorite author Meg Rosoff and American linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath.
But despite teens’ vulnerability to literature, the academics also concluded that Twilight could be an “excellent training field for understanding how other people think, feel and act,” says Nikolajeva. “Through literature, young people can test situations — including extreme situations — which they, in most cases, fortunately will not be exposed to in real life,” she adds. Meyer’s books can therefore act as a kind of brain-training for teens.
Many academics believe this issue will become increasingly important as young adult novels become all the gorier, as authors try to out-shock each other. Nikolajeva flags up The Hunger Games, the young adult sci-fi trilogy by Suzanne Collins, as “getting bigger than Twilight,” in part because it is “still darker and more violent and ethically dubious. It is as if writers compete about who can stretch the boundary further still.” But she hopes that authors heed the advice of How I Live Now author Rosoff, who at the conference spoke about how her own wild adolescence fed into her writing, and warned of adult writers’ responsibility when addressing young people, including the idea that “there must always be some hope left, even in the darkest fiction.”
The conference also outlined a major benefit of the Twilight series and books like them: Neuroscientists said that if certain skills, such as literacy, do not develop properly before adolescence, they may be lost forever. So parents might not want to lock away the books. “It’s good for young people to be exposed to narratives of all kinds,” Nikolajeva reports. “It would be best if they were exposed to narratives of highest artistic quality — which Twilight books are not — but through them they may discover other books.”
Nikolajeva adds: “If they read Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights because the back covers say ‘Bella’s [Twilight protagonist Bella Swan] favorite book,’ then that’s great. Anecdotal evidence from the peak of Pottermania is that it made children come to the library to ask ‘have you got more books?’ Also, teenagers get confident through reading a novel of 500 pages, and by writing fan fiction or blogs, they also learn to write. That’s a welcome side-effect of Twilight.”
That’s borne out by evidence from librarians, like those of Bexleyheath school, a comprehensive in Kent, who write on its Web site: “Without doubt the most popular book in both libraries is Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. This book has been in continuous demand by all year groups, including members of staff.”
And compared to the real world, a dose of escapism may not be such a bad thing, concludes Nikolajeva. “Young people today are well aware of the world around them, with ecological issues, poverty, terrorism, AIDS and so on,” she says. “There is no point telling them that the world is a nice place, and young adult fiction, unlike literature for younger children, has always dealt with serious and often dark issues.” So Twilight looks set to continue its bookshelf domination — at least until the next literary trend comes along.
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