Need help summarizing this! thanks :) As James B. Twitchell observes in his essay “The Vampire Myth”, the story of the blood-sucking revenant “is a cultural scenario learned early and repeated again and again through the pre-teenage years” (110). Most 21st-century children and young adults are indeed familiar with the figure of the vampire, not the least through the various movie adaptations of the most popular vampire novel, Dracula by Bram Stoker. Whether it is Wes Craven’s overtly erotic and handsome Gerard Butler as a Dracula who was condemned to attack beautiful young females because he, in his mortal life as Judas, betrayed Jesus, or Francis Ford Coppola’s Gary Oldman who dramatically dies in the arms of young Mina, these modern versions often portray Dracula as a somehow sympathetic and “attractive figure – far more attractive in every sense of the word than the vampire in folklore or earlier literary versions” (Senf 2). In general, the idea of the vampire in the late 20th and early 21st centuries greatly differs from the traditional image. Even though she is not specifically writing in the tradition of vampire stories, Stephenie Meyer’s Edward Cullen is no exception to that new image. In fact, he even carries the idea of the vampire as the handsome gentleman villain, if he is a villain at all, to a new level.
As various critics have pointed out (among them Montague Summers in one of the earliest serious vampire studies, The Vampire. His Kith and Kin, from 1928) the folkloristic revenant is often depicted as a blood- or energy-sucking spirit, ghost, or monster that haunts graveyards, attacks unaware travellers or kills little children [1]. “The most startling part of the folkloric vampire is that he must first attack members of his own family” which, for Twitchell, “makes all too clear the vampire’s sexual function” (Twitchell, “Vampire” 111). The idea of the return of the dead and their incestuous sexual desire is not common only in superstition but also in the vampire literature of the 19th century. Even though we can find many similarities between Twilight and works like The Vampyre (1819), Wuthering Heights (1847), Jane Eyre (1847) and Carmilla (1872), Twitchell’s above named prerequisite is exactly the one characteristic which Edward does not share with his famous predecessors - the lack of which adds a great deal to the series’ success among female readers.