On Vampires and Chromosomes
If our entertainments reveal what’s on our collective minds, then we seem to be thinking quite a bit about human modification. Spider-Man, X-Men, the Aaron Cross of the most recent Bourne thriller: all have powers, and all are genetically different, whether bitten, mutated, or engineered.
The Twilight books, and their subsequent movie adaptations, aren’t usually thought of in this vein. But despite the air of romance, Stephenie Meyer’s four-book series, in which a human girl (Bella) falls in love with a pale yet hot vampire boy (Edward) is really about superheroes. And like the hyphenated superheroes of recent movies, Meyer’s vampires are genetically different: they have a superabundance of chromosomes. (The vampires have twenty-five pairs, unlike our twenty-three.)
In our fang-free human life, having extra chromosomes is not usually seen as a plus. Aneuploidies, including Down syndrome, have been targets of prenatal testing as long as such testing has existed. As such, those conditions attract a host of polarizing questions, not least about abortion. In Breaking Dawn—the last book in the Twilight series—these questions come to the fore. Bella, still a mortal, becomes pregnant with a half vampire child thought to be a risk to her life, and a danger to the society around her. Edward wants her to abort, and she wants to keep the child.
The quarrel, and indeed the book, is framed by genetics. The high chromosome count signifies both ultimate superpower (in the case of the vampires) and the undesirable child (in the case of Bella’s fetus). The Twilight series, in other words, evokes both our fears about human modification and our anxieties about reproduction.