Post by Remora/Juliet on May 21, 2009 18:27:41 GMT -5
Yeah, I wrote this for English and got 120% on it, even though my teacher's a Twilight fan. She told me it would've gotten a 5 on the AP lit test.
Compare/Contrast Book Report
For my book report, the book I chose that was out of my genre was Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer. I don’t really like modern books, especially romance, and since the first three books in the series weren’t really my style, it seemed the most appropriate choice. My favorite book is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, so that’s what I’m doing my comparing and contrasting with.
My favorite character of all time is Jean Valjean and my favorite author is Victor Hugo. I absolutely adore his writing style and his characters. He describes everything in such detail and makes the characters so real that his books seem more like actual historical accounts than fiction. (Although, some scenes actually are historical accounts with fiction woven into them.) From reading Les Miserables, I felt like Jean Valjean was a person I’ve known for years just based on how well he was written. His thought process was described so well that even though it was a third person novel, I felt like there were times when I was inside his head. On the other hand, Breaking Dawn was in first person and felt like Bella cared only about Edward—and Renesmee, later on. She didn’t really think about much other than how inadequate she felt compared to Edward. I had no idea what she liked to do in her spare time—well, when Edward wasn’t around—or what she wanted to be—other than Edward’s bride—since it had been made quite clear in the earlier books that vampires can’t reproduce, so she wouldn’t be able to be a mother. So I wondered what kind of hobby she would want to take up. (Since Edward took up piano and all the other vampires found something to do with their time since they became vampires.)
Stephenie Meyer’s writing style kind of bugged me. It seemed almost like she was trying to imitate the style of a classic writer and failing. It was repetitive and sometimes she used words that seemed way out of context. I tried to ignore that for the most part, but there was one part of the book where I just rolled my eyes in frustration. She used “!!!” as a sentence. Victor Hugo also used lengthy descriptions, but they weren’t repetitive and they provided quite a bit of insight to the plot. His tangent on Argot explained quite a bit about Thenardier and his lot; his detailed description of the Parisian sewers was a nice prelude to Valjean’s escape through them. Most of Stephenie Meyer’s tangents are Bella glorifying Edward and complaining about how inadequate she is. Another difference between Hugo’s and Meyer’s writing is that Hugo is a showing author and Meyer is a telling author. For example, the Bishop Myriel is a very, very compassionate man. I know this not because Hugo said, “The Bishop of Myriel was a very compassionate man” but because he included a chapter where the Bishop visited people and then he saved Valjean from being arrested again after stealing the silver. On the other hand, Bella is very contradictory. She says she’s selfless, mature, has plenty of sense and looks very plain. But she’s shown to be selfish—lying to her father and putting herself in danger because it’s what she wants—immature—judging the kids she meets at school because they’re unattractive—having no common sense—walking down a dark alley alone in a strange city; choosing to marry a vampire who will put her life in danger; keeping a baby that’s trying to eat her from the inside out—and beautiful—since she has at least five guys (Mike, Erik, Tyler, Jacob and Edward) who all want her.
The plots and settings are quite different. Les Miserables is set in the 1800’s in France and has a plot that has a nice balance of action and romance, while Breaking Dawn is set in Washington state and is very nearly all romance. While I was reading it, I was expecting the final showdown with the Volturi to be exciting, but it was a total let down. I felt it was completely contrived that Bella could shield everyone, and that then the Volturi just gave up and went home and decided everything was just wonderful. In Les Miserables, the conflict between the revolutionaries and the government was actually realistic. (Well, I guess “realistic” shouldn’t apply to a vampire novel…) I just expected that a battle between vampires would be exciting. Sure, I cried when everyone died on the barricade (except for Marius and Valjean), but I would’ve rolled my eyes if the French officials came up and said, “You know, we’re just kidding. You guys are great. We’ll fix up our government so we aren’t such big meanies and discuss everything with you over a nice lunch.” Which is pretty much what happened the Volturi.
I preferred the romance in Les Miserables to the romance in Breaking Dawn, as well. In Les Miserables, it seems a little bit over the top, but it was the romantic era, and Marius and Cosette actually end up caring very much for each other despite their “love at first sight” meeting. Edward and Bella also have sort of a “love at first sight” relationship, but Edward is disturbingly abusive toward her. (I’ve been “Team Jacob” since book 1.) Also, the platonic love seems a bit skewed. Bella says she loves her family, but she is willing to give up never seeing them again to be with Edward. Cosette, on the other hand, would be willing to leave France with Jean Valjean even though Marius will remain and fight at the barricades. Bella says she feels bad about never seeing her father again, yet she makes the choice in a way that seems like she didn’t care about him or her mother very much. She and Cosette both sneak around their fathers to date their boyfriend but in the end, Marius is a good guy who earns Valjean’s respect and Edward doesn’t truly earn Charlie’s respect and Renee flat out mentioned that she thought Edward was abusive in one of the earlier books. Even Bella’s non-vampire friends can tell he’s abusive.
In Breaking Dawn, when Bella wakes up covered in bruises, she’s fine with it and just tries to find a way to hide it. In Les Miserables, Marius watches through a hole in his wall as Thenardier abuses his two daughters, Eponine and Azelma, and he finds it horrific that the man who saved his father’s life would do such a thing. In New Moon, Bella finds out that Sam ripped half of Emily’s face off in anger once. The tribe thinks this is fine since it was an accident but he loves her and Bella doesn’t really seem to mind so much. The abuse in Breaking Dawn and the rest of the Twilight series is brushed off, while in Les Miserables, it is a look into how horrible the lives of some are and call to human empathy. And no matter how much Jacob tries to convince her that Edward is dangerous or how much Edward tries to convince her that Jacob is dangerous, she won’t listen. She doesn’t like her human friends as much.
On the issue of minor characters, Bella’s human friends are mostly ignored. Mostly, she uses them to get information and—in Mike’s case—a job. She says she cares about them, but it is never shown. In Les Miserables, the Bishop of Digne only has significance in that he showed mercy to Valjean, thus changing his life, but he is given 58 pages of character development that tell about his whole life and show what kind of man he is. The minor characters in Breaking Dawn and the rest of the Twilight series seem to be cardboard cutouts of people. Even though the main story is about Jean Valjean, the chapters devoted to the Abaisse have enough character development that by the end of them, the readers feel bad for them when they die—or not, if they didn’t like them as people. Either way, they’re real enough to have actually existed.
As far as major character development goes, at the very beginning of Twilight, Bella is a selfish, arrogant teenager. At the end of Breaking Dawn, Bella is a selfish, arrogant teenager, but now she’s immortal. She hasn’t really changed very much from the very beginning of the series despite the plethora of opportunities she has had to grow. She could have become more aware of Edward’s faults and what a jerk he was to her when he left her in New Moon, but she ran back into his arms without a single hesitation. She could have become wiser about traps and the dangers of wandering off alone halfway through Twilight when she was cornered in the dark alley, but instead, she runs away from Alice and Jasper and nearly gets herself killed. At the beginning of Les Miserables—well, the beginning of where Jean Valjean comes in, anyway—he is a very hard man, but then it goes on to explain the story of his life and how his parents died and his sister raised him. He only stole a loaf of bread to save her children whom he was caring for to repay her for raising him. Nineteen years of cruelty and injustice hardened him. The Bishop’s mercy, however, changed him and after he stole the little boy’s money, he tried to return it because of the mercy he had been shown. He turned his life around and saved the lives of those caught in a fire and ended up bringing money and success to the small town of Montreuil-sur-Mer. He even spared Fantine when Javert suggested she be sent to jail; she was sent to a hospital instead and Valjean even saved her daughter. He saved the life of Fauchelevent at the risk of his own, despite the rude things the man had said about him. This compassion and mercy, taught to him by the Bishop, stayed with him throughout his life, causing him to save the lives of many, including sparing Javert, who, in the same position, would have killed Valjean.
Javert didn’t learn from the mercy the same way. First, he threatened to arrest Valjean if they ever met again, but then, shocked from having his life saved by a man he had once thought incapable of feeling, he took his own life. Like the Volturi, he isn’t truly a villain, though he is a bit more overzealous with the law than they are. He has more motive to fight the revolutionaries than the Volturi did to fight the Cullens, though.
The female characters in Les Miserables are far stronger than the female characters in the Twilight series, which I found rather odd, considering that Hugo was a man and the book was published nearly sixty years before women were even allowed suffrage in the United States. Fantine fell in love with Tholomyès because he was clever and charming, not because he was gorgeous. In fact, he was rather ugly. Bella probably wouldn’t have even spoken to him, based on the way she acts in the book. And if Edward had ditched Bella after Renesmee was born (assuming Bella didn’t have to have a c-section via his teeth and her spine didn’t break), she would not have been strong enough to care for her alone and then to leave her with people who seemed like kind parents and then to sell everything she had to send money to care for her. Based on how selfish and stubborn she was in the books, she would have kept the child, and both would have starved to death because no one would take her in with a child and no husband anywhere around. Cosette is stronger too. She was abused and starved as a child and deserved the eventual happy ending she got. Bella had an easy childhood and hardly had to strive for anything. As role models, Cosette, Fantine, and even Eponine (who led Marius to Cosette in the end gave him the letter despite her jealousy) are better role models for girls today than Bella. Fantine because she was willing to work and sacrifice everything to save her daughter and penitent of her previous mistakes in life and Cosette because she was a good person who was capable of taking years of abuse and still being capable of love. Eponine isn’t the best example of a selfless character; in fact, she was almost as selfless as Bella, but the difference is that she gave the letter to Marius and that ended up helping to save his life by giving him hope, as well as taking the bullet for him. She had a hard life and a sad ending. I think there should be more female characters like these three in modern literature to teach teenage girls nowadays that nothing is handed out on a silver platter and that you have to earn a good, happy life. I’m not saying Bella didn’t deserve to be happy, but realistically, I would have preferred it if she had had to work for it the way Cosette did, because it’s not that easy to get a perfect ending in real life.
The messages in Breaking Dawn and the whole Twilight series have been bothering me the whole time, mostly because of the reactions of the fans. It teaches that abuse is okay because “he loves you”, that pedophilia is “adorable” (something I heard someone say about Jacob and Renesmee), and that a normal, unpopular girl can have a perfect “happily ever after” handed to her on a silver platter. The reason I have a problem with the first two is pretty obvious, but the third one bugs me because that’s not how the real world works. I’m afraid this next generation, growing up with books like this will expect to grow up and be a queen—or at least a vampire—with a prince charming—or Edward, if that’s what she’s into—who sweeps her off her plain-Jane feet and they have a perfect life and never have to do anything hard to achieve it. Now, a nice fantasy like that is fine to read from time to time, but when girls start saying “Edward can bruise me any day” or “forget real boys, I’m looking for my Edward,” that’s when I start to worry. (Those are actual icons a Twilight fan friend has used for her MSN.) Now, in Les Miserables, the love conquers all message involved struggle and hardship. Valjean’s sister was widowed, Tholomyès abandoned Fantine, and Eponine had a kind of sucky life and Marius didn’t care for her apart from pity. Marius and Cosette are the only ones that had a happy ending and both of them had hard lives as well. Real people struggle for what they want, as do real characters.
I suppose the whole point I’m trying to make can be summed up in the phrase “they just don’t write like that anymore.” Teens can keep their modern romance lit, but as for me, I’m sticking with the classics. Dickens and Hugo may have died long ago, but their writing will live on forever. The age where everything became classic is over, but I’m still watching out for something new and worth reading.
Compare/Contrast Book Report
For my book report, the book I chose that was out of my genre was Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer. I don’t really like modern books, especially romance, and since the first three books in the series weren’t really my style, it seemed the most appropriate choice. My favorite book is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, so that’s what I’m doing my comparing and contrasting with.
My favorite character of all time is Jean Valjean and my favorite author is Victor Hugo. I absolutely adore his writing style and his characters. He describes everything in such detail and makes the characters so real that his books seem more like actual historical accounts than fiction. (Although, some scenes actually are historical accounts with fiction woven into them.) From reading Les Miserables, I felt like Jean Valjean was a person I’ve known for years just based on how well he was written. His thought process was described so well that even though it was a third person novel, I felt like there were times when I was inside his head. On the other hand, Breaking Dawn was in first person and felt like Bella cared only about Edward—and Renesmee, later on. She didn’t really think about much other than how inadequate she felt compared to Edward. I had no idea what she liked to do in her spare time—well, when Edward wasn’t around—or what she wanted to be—other than Edward’s bride—since it had been made quite clear in the earlier books that vampires can’t reproduce, so she wouldn’t be able to be a mother. So I wondered what kind of hobby she would want to take up. (Since Edward took up piano and all the other vampires found something to do with their time since they became vampires.)
Stephenie Meyer’s writing style kind of bugged me. It seemed almost like she was trying to imitate the style of a classic writer and failing. It was repetitive and sometimes she used words that seemed way out of context. I tried to ignore that for the most part, but there was one part of the book where I just rolled my eyes in frustration. She used “!!!” as a sentence. Victor Hugo also used lengthy descriptions, but they weren’t repetitive and they provided quite a bit of insight to the plot. His tangent on Argot explained quite a bit about Thenardier and his lot; his detailed description of the Parisian sewers was a nice prelude to Valjean’s escape through them. Most of Stephenie Meyer’s tangents are Bella glorifying Edward and complaining about how inadequate she is. Another difference between Hugo’s and Meyer’s writing is that Hugo is a showing author and Meyer is a telling author. For example, the Bishop Myriel is a very, very compassionate man. I know this not because Hugo said, “The Bishop of Myriel was a very compassionate man” but because he included a chapter where the Bishop visited people and then he saved Valjean from being arrested again after stealing the silver. On the other hand, Bella is very contradictory. She says she’s selfless, mature, has plenty of sense and looks very plain. But she’s shown to be selfish—lying to her father and putting herself in danger because it’s what she wants—immature—judging the kids she meets at school because they’re unattractive—having no common sense—walking down a dark alley alone in a strange city; choosing to marry a vampire who will put her life in danger; keeping a baby that’s trying to eat her from the inside out—and beautiful—since she has at least five guys (Mike, Erik, Tyler, Jacob and Edward) who all want her.
The plots and settings are quite different. Les Miserables is set in the 1800’s in France and has a plot that has a nice balance of action and romance, while Breaking Dawn is set in Washington state and is very nearly all romance. While I was reading it, I was expecting the final showdown with the Volturi to be exciting, but it was a total let down. I felt it was completely contrived that Bella could shield everyone, and that then the Volturi just gave up and went home and decided everything was just wonderful. In Les Miserables, the conflict between the revolutionaries and the government was actually realistic. (Well, I guess “realistic” shouldn’t apply to a vampire novel…) I just expected that a battle between vampires would be exciting. Sure, I cried when everyone died on the barricade (except for Marius and Valjean), but I would’ve rolled my eyes if the French officials came up and said, “You know, we’re just kidding. You guys are great. We’ll fix up our government so we aren’t such big meanies and discuss everything with you over a nice lunch.” Which is pretty much what happened the Volturi.
I preferred the romance in Les Miserables to the romance in Breaking Dawn, as well. In Les Miserables, it seems a little bit over the top, but it was the romantic era, and Marius and Cosette actually end up caring very much for each other despite their “love at first sight” meeting. Edward and Bella also have sort of a “love at first sight” relationship, but Edward is disturbingly abusive toward her. (I’ve been “Team Jacob” since book 1.) Also, the platonic love seems a bit skewed. Bella says she loves her family, but she is willing to give up never seeing them again to be with Edward. Cosette, on the other hand, would be willing to leave France with Jean Valjean even though Marius will remain and fight at the barricades. Bella says she feels bad about never seeing her father again, yet she makes the choice in a way that seems like she didn’t care about him or her mother very much. She and Cosette both sneak around their fathers to date their boyfriend but in the end, Marius is a good guy who earns Valjean’s respect and Edward doesn’t truly earn Charlie’s respect and Renee flat out mentioned that she thought Edward was abusive in one of the earlier books. Even Bella’s non-vampire friends can tell he’s abusive.
In Breaking Dawn, when Bella wakes up covered in bruises, she’s fine with it and just tries to find a way to hide it. In Les Miserables, Marius watches through a hole in his wall as Thenardier abuses his two daughters, Eponine and Azelma, and he finds it horrific that the man who saved his father’s life would do such a thing. In New Moon, Bella finds out that Sam ripped half of Emily’s face off in anger once. The tribe thinks this is fine since it was an accident but he loves her and Bella doesn’t really seem to mind so much. The abuse in Breaking Dawn and the rest of the Twilight series is brushed off, while in Les Miserables, it is a look into how horrible the lives of some are and call to human empathy. And no matter how much Jacob tries to convince her that Edward is dangerous or how much Edward tries to convince her that Jacob is dangerous, she won’t listen. She doesn’t like her human friends as much.
On the issue of minor characters, Bella’s human friends are mostly ignored. Mostly, she uses them to get information and—in Mike’s case—a job. She says she cares about them, but it is never shown. In Les Miserables, the Bishop of Digne only has significance in that he showed mercy to Valjean, thus changing his life, but he is given 58 pages of character development that tell about his whole life and show what kind of man he is. The minor characters in Breaking Dawn and the rest of the Twilight series seem to be cardboard cutouts of people. Even though the main story is about Jean Valjean, the chapters devoted to the Abaisse have enough character development that by the end of them, the readers feel bad for them when they die—or not, if they didn’t like them as people. Either way, they’re real enough to have actually existed.
As far as major character development goes, at the very beginning of Twilight, Bella is a selfish, arrogant teenager. At the end of Breaking Dawn, Bella is a selfish, arrogant teenager, but now she’s immortal. She hasn’t really changed very much from the very beginning of the series despite the plethora of opportunities she has had to grow. She could have become more aware of Edward’s faults and what a jerk he was to her when he left her in New Moon, but she ran back into his arms without a single hesitation. She could have become wiser about traps and the dangers of wandering off alone halfway through Twilight when she was cornered in the dark alley, but instead, she runs away from Alice and Jasper and nearly gets herself killed. At the beginning of Les Miserables—well, the beginning of where Jean Valjean comes in, anyway—he is a very hard man, but then it goes on to explain the story of his life and how his parents died and his sister raised him. He only stole a loaf of bread to save her children whom he was caring for to repay her for raising him. Nineteen years of cruelty and injustice hardened him. The Bishop’s mercy, however, changed him and after he stole the little boy’s money, he tried to return it because of the mercy he had been shown. He turned his life around and saved the lives of those caught in a fire and ended up bringing money and success to the small town of Montreuil-sur-Mer. He even spared Fantine when Javert suggested she be sent to jail; she was sent to a hospital instead and Valjean even saved her daughter. He saved the life of Fauchelevent at the risk of his own, despite the rude things the man had said about him. This compassion and mercy, taught to him by the Bishop, stayed with him throughout his life, causing him to save the lives of many, including sparing Javert, who, in the same position, would have killed Valjean.
Javert didn’t learn from the mercy the same way. First, he threatened to arrest Valjean if they ever met again, but then, shocked from having his life saved by a man he had once thought incapable of feeling, he took his own life. Like the Volturi, he isn’t truly a villain, though he is a bit more overzealous with the law than they are. He has more motive to fight the revolutionaries than the Volturi did to fight the Cullens, though.
The female characters in Les Miserables are far stronger than the female characters in the Twilight series, which I found rather odd, considering that Hugo was a man and the book was published nearly sixty years before women were even allowed suffrage in the United States. Fantine fell in love with Tholomyès because he was clever and charming, not because he was gorgeous. In fact, he was rather ugly. Bella probably wouldn’t have even spoken to him, based on the way she acts in the book. And if Edward had ditched Bella after Renesmee was born (assuming Bella didn’t have to have a c-section via his teeth and her spine didn’t break), she would not have been strong enough to care for her alone and then to leave her with people who seemed like kind parents and then to sell everything she had to send money to care for her. Based on how selfish and stubborn she was in the books, she would have kept the child, and both would have starved to death because no one would take her in with a child and no husband anywhere around. Cosette is stronger too. She was abused and starved as a child and deserved the eventual happy ending she got. Bella had an easy childhood and hardly had to strive for anything. As role models, Cosette, Fantine, and even Eponine (who led Marius to Cosette in the end gave him the letter despite her jealousy) are better role models for girls today than Bella. Fantine because she was willing to work and sacrifice everything to save her daughter and penitent of her previous mistakes in life and Cosette because she was a good person who was capable of taking years of abuse and still being capable of love. Eponine isn’t the best example of a selfless character; in fact, she was almost as selfless as Bella, but the difference is that she gave the letter to Marius and that ended up helping to save his life by giving him hope, as well as taking the bullet for him. She had a hard life and a sad ending. I think there should be more female characters like these three in modern literature to teach teenage girls nowadays that nothing is handed out on a silver platter and that you have to earn a good, happy life. I’m not saying Bella didn’t deserve to be happy, but realistically, I would have preferred it if she had had to work for it the way Cosette did, because it’s not that easy to get a perfect ending in real life.
The messages in Breaking Dawn and the whole Twilight series have been bothering me the whole time, mostly because of the reactions of the fans. It teaches that abuse is okay because “he loves you”, that pedophilia is “adorable” (something I heard someone say about Jacob and Renesmee), and that a normal, unpopular girl can have a perfect “happily ever after” handed to her on a silver platter. The reason I have a problem with the first two is pretty obvious, but the third one bugs me because that’s not how the real world works. I’m afraid this next generation, growing up with books like this will expect to grow up and be a queen—or at least a vampire—with a prince charming—or Edward, if that’s what she’s into—who sweeps her off her plain-Jane feet and they have a perfect life and never have to do anything hard to achieve it. Now, a nice fantasy like that is fine to read from time to time, but when girls start saying “Edward can bruise me any day” or “forget real boys, I’m looking for my Edward,” that’s when I start to worry. (Those are actual icons a Twilight fan friend has used for her MSN.) Now, in Les Miserables, the love conquers all message involved struggle and hardship. Valjean’s sister was widowed, Tholomyès abandoned Fantine, and Eponine had a kind of sucky life and Marius didn’t care for her apart from pity. Marius and Cosette are the only ones that had a happy ending and both of them had hard lives as well. Real people struggle for what they want, as do real characters.
I suppose the whole point I’m trying to make can be summed up in the phrase “they just don’t write like that anymore.” Teens can keep their modern romance lit, but as for me, I’m sticking with the classics. Dickens and Hugo may have died long ago, but their writing will live on forever. The age where everything became classic is over, but I’m still watching out for something new and worth reading.