Vampires and Werewolves Transformed: Deleuzean Difference in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Sagas

Difference, as a critical concept, has been long disputed among philosophers from the early days of Plato down to the contemporary critics including Gilles Deleuze. At first, the exploration of difference was based on the subsequent definition of Form and Identity. Forms could be uniform, similar, or different. In philosophical terms, identity is a relation between two forms while the two forms have only a unique Immanence, and any alteration would cause a difference. The present paper investigates Stephenie Meyer’s Gothic novels, Twilight Sagas, particularly Twilight and New Moon, in terms of the Deleuzean concept of Difference which was developed in his later work Difference and Repetition. In Gothic texts, vampires and werewolves are depicted as terrifying creatures, the beings to be loathed and run away from. In Meyer’s novels these specimen are depicted otherwise. The protagonist’s reaction towards these devilish beings is not expected from a human being. According to the Deleuzean definition of Difference, each notion merely contains one implication to itself; therefore, differences provided in a conception give it a novel identity. The changes in the Gothic creatures are thus examined through the exploration of Gothic concepts of vampires and werewolves in Meyer’s novels, in light of Deleuzean Difference. The investigation of Twilight and New Moon demonstrates numerous dissimilarities at work between the previous characteristics of vampires and werewolves defined in Gothic texts and those presented in the novels under exploration