Coming Back to Bite: Reflecting on Constructs of Adolescence and Girlhood in Young Adult Vampire Media

The YA vampire genre has experienced a great amount of success throughout the past two decades with titles including Joss Wheadon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy. Within this group, two of the most widely successful examples are Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga and the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, both of which have had a significant impact on Western popular culture. In this thesis, I use these two texts to explore the constructs of adolescence and girlhood that manifest as a result of the literary moves the writers seem to make in an effort to invite who they imagine as their prospective audience. Although the success of these efforts can be argued, their prospective impact on the prejudices society holds against young girls is traceable. Through an exploration of the concept of “innocence” and the ways in which society associates the term with childhood and adolescence, I establish the avenues through which projection of an adult construct of adolescence is possible before going on to grapple with the historical and literary patterns which are often used to socially define the adult understanding of girlhood. In my analysis of my primary texts, I lay out how these constructs manifest and can reflect back upon their readership, further perpetuating the harmful stereotypes already held in patriarchal Western society. Advisor: Gabrielle Owen