bella swan: boring or bad?

Being a YA author, I've been asked what I think of Twilight. What I think of Bella Swan. Recently, this question was posed in a more pointed fashion: do I think that, as a woman writer, Stephenie Meyer should have made Bella a stronger and more self-reliant young woman? A role model for her many young female readers?

I completely see the point of this question. But my answer gets tricky, so I'm addressing it here.

As a reader, I found Bella Swan troubling. She didn't offer any logical reasons as to why she trusted this boy who crept into her room at night to watch her sleep, even as he was telling her NOT to trust him (these are red-flag behaviors, certainly). She persisted in her certainty that he was good and would never hurt her even though she knew very little about him other than his beauty. She told us more about Edward's beauty than about his character. Or her own.

But as a writer, I can't fault Meyer for any of her decisions simply because they were just that–her decisions, not mine. That was the character she wanted to create, and it is completely within her creative right to do so. I wanted to write about a murderous Countess–another work of fiction, not a role model.

Allow me a slight tangent: There are plenty of historical novels about girls growing up hundreds of years ago as tomboys who want to cut their hair and wear britches and go to war like their brothers do. They're not interested in staying home and sewing or cooking or any of those other "menial" tasks expected of women–they want an exciting life of the sea, or battle, or travel, or whatever it is that the boys are doing because they can do it just as well.

And that's all fine and good, and those stories are exciting, but those characters are anachronisms to the age in which they supposedly exist. While I'm sure there were girls who would have rather lived a boy's life than a girl's, there were many others who took the prescribed path that they were given, out of a sense of duty or otherwise. What about their stories? Are they less interesting, less worth telling? Don't they offer a more revealing and accurate picture of the time period?

That's not to say that Bella Swan is an accurate depiction of her time period (I hope not). I think she's more an accurate depiction of a character in a romance novel–which is exactly what she is. Realistically, she should not have been so trusting of Edward simply because he had a pretty face, simply because she wanted to believe that he was harmless. That is, admittedly, a dangerous message at it's core. But maybe our readers can learn from that, instead of parroting it? If authors are expected to have positive role models as their main characters, that can put a stranglehold on creativity akin to self-censorship. If every book is written to contain a role model, a moral, a lesson, our books may slip from the creative to the pedantic, and we risk losing the very readers we aim to reach.

But you know me. I write about girls who do bad things.