In After, and also the 2012 New York Times bestseller Beautiful Disaster, the female leads are desirable precisely because of the “purity” that is perceived from them being virgins. She then suffers an excruciating and obscenely gory pregnancy before dying from childbirth, after which she is turned into a vampire. Bella in Twilight is forced to wait until marriage (Edward’s demand) before they can have sex, and is covered in bruises and becomes pregnant after her first time. She then gets sent to a school for troubled teenagers, where she is told that she will die if she kisses the boy with whom she has fallen in love. In Fallen, based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Lauren Kate, a high school boy dies in a fire that starts when he and the female lead appear to be moving towards having sex.
They also all share a bizarre puritanical attitude when it comes to women having any kind of sexual agency. There’s a strange kind of irony there, given how After, 2016’s supernatural romantic drama Fallen and Twilight all make frequent references to classic works of literature such as Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice – either to feign a sense of literary gravitas or to form a parallel with the tortured romances in those works.
Hardin is played by Hero Feinnes-Tiffin – whose uncle, Ralph Fiennes, played Heathcliff in the 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heightsopposite Juliette Binoche’s Cathy.
0 kommentar(er)
