The Twilight Drug

The Twilight craze is something I am quite familiar with by now. My aunt read the books after they first came out, and went on to convince as many family members as she could to read it. My Mother read it at her insistence, and then, to my brothers and I's horror, made us read it. By the end of their campaign, even my Grandfather had read through the first two books before declaring them a waste of his time, even if his two daughters wanted him to read them. I have grown up reading books my mother has recommended to me, some of my favorite authors are ones that she first introduced me to, but only for Twilight has she been so insistent that we all read it.
When thinking about the people I consider to be Twilight fans, I picture hysterical tween girls, obsessed with the perfection they see in Edward Cullen. My mother is clearly not a tween girl, and she rarely is able to allow herself time to sit and read the months book club book, much less unimaginative tween romance novels. So what about these books is so engaging so as to capture the attention of a market so vastly different than the one it was written towards?
In my mind the reason these books are popular with people outside the tween girl segment not because they are written particularly well, or because the characters achieve a certain level of depth that allows them to become real, but because they put a modern spin on a successful formula. Wuthering Heights is considered to be a classic, well written novel,and Twilight borrows the inner struggle for the Jacob, Edward dilemma that Bella faces. Of course, when the love triangle is no longer integral to the plot it is conveniently done away with in the last novel of the quartet.
Twilight is successful because it takes story lines first represented in novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, beloved classics, and makes them easy to digest. Because of the younger audience it was written for, the language is simpler, the story quicker to digest. People no longer have the free time to sit and read the classics, to absorb the underlying meanings and discuss plot points. As students, we have the time, really it is a part of our job to read and to think about the readings, but for most people that is a luxury. It is easy for us to scoff at the simplicity of Twilight, the lack of depth and imagination, but not everyone has the time or means to involve themselves deeply. Twilight is the twenty first century airport novel version of the classics, easy to digest and something that can be read while relaxing, it is an escape, and that is all it need be.