From the Files of Dr. D.: The Case of Edward C.
Week 3:
Edward's hallucinations seem to be getting darker. He believes that Bella is in constant mortal danger, both from himself and others.
I realized that our relationship could not last. It is much too dangerous for her to be around me and my family. Alice decided to throw a party for Bella on her 18th birthday. Her father, Charlie Swan, is a nice guy, but not one to throw a party... But Bella cut her finger, just a slight paper cut, and Jasper smelled her blood and tried to kill her. I realized then that I had to break up with Bella. I had to do it in order to protect her. It is too dangerous for her to be around vampires. I told her I no longer loved her, and that I did not wish to see her. How easily she believed me! She was deeply unhappy for a while, but then she began to spend time with Jacob. Jacob, the werewolf.
Jacob was good for her, but then she realized that she could hear my voice inside her head if she was in danger. And so Bella, out of love for me, began to take desperate chances, just to hear my voice. She fell off a motor cycle, she went cliff diving. Alice can see things; she has visions of the future. When she saw Bella diving off the cliff, we all believed her to be dead.
I realized I could not live without her, and I decided to die as well. Vampires do not die easily, so I decided to go to Italy, to Volterra, and plead with the ancient vampires, the Volturi, to destroy me. They refused to kill me, so I understood that I had to provoke them: I had to show myself to the public. The Volturi have lived in Volterra for over 3000 years. They are the closest thing to vampire royalty. Aro, Caius, and Marcus... They are peaceful, but they wish to keep the existence of vampires a secret. If I showed myself to humans, in full daylight, they would understand that I was different. Vampires glitter in the sunlight. If I had shown myself to the public, the Volturi would have killed me.
But Bella wasn't dead, and she and Alice came to Italy to save me from the Volturi. And when the Volturi saw Bella, they were amazed. They realized that she, although mortal, possesses astonishing gifts. I can read anyone's mind, except hers. She is resistant even to the powers of the Volturi.
My goodness - what a story! I decided to find out from Alice exactly what hadhappened on Bella's eighteenth birthday...
As it turned out, Alice had indeed arranged a party for Bella on her eighteenth birthday.
"Oh, it was lovely!" she told me, in her melodious voice. "I absolutely adore party planning, and Bella's father wasn't going to do anything... Men aren't very good at these things, you know."
"That would be Charlie, I take it? Charlie Swan?"
Alice looked very confused. "Charlie? No, Bella's father's name is Robert. And their last name is Jones." She smiled, a sudden, luminous smile that just about made my poor old heart stop. "But I'm not surprised that poor Edward wants to give Bella the last name "Swan". After all, she is as lovely as a swan, isn't she?" Alice sighed a little.
Do all young girls admire their brother's girlfriends this much, I wonder?
Swan - yes indeed, it is easy to see the symbolism in that name! The lovely Bella, as beautiful and graceful as a swan... But why would Edward insist that her father's name is Charlie? Charlie... Charlie and Carlisle... The two names are curiously similar, aren't they? Almost anagrams? Almost as if they are two aspects of the same father figure?
"And what, my dear Alice, did happen at Bella's birthday party?"
Alice flushed a little. "Oh... Well, it was my fault. I shouldn't have served champagne, obviously."
"Champagne?"
"Well, we are all a little young to drink, but I thought it would be so lovely to have a champagne toast, and Carlisle and Esme didn't mind..."
Didn't they? How remarkably open-minded of the young doctor and his wife...
Alice looked distinctly uncomfortable. "And then... Well, Jasper had a little too much to drink. They champagne went straight to his head, the poor dear. He is not used to it, you see..."
And the rest of you are...?
I leaned forward. "So what exactly happened at this birthday party, Miss Alice?"
"Well..." she squirmed a little. A lovely, graceful squirm, but a squirm nonetheless. "Jasper got drunk and tried to... well, kiss Bella, out on the balcony. And then Edward came along and saw him, and he just about lost it. The two of them had a terrible fight. Edward was sober, and Jasper was not, so I'm afraid Jasper took quite a beating, poor dear..."
"I see." I nodded. "But my dear Alice, isn't Jasper your boyfriend? Surely, this event must have been upsetting to you as well?"
Alice leaned her head a little to one side. The look she gave me was both amazingly lovely and strangely serene. "Oh. Well, of course. But I was mostly upset for Bella, of course. Poor dear, she was quite shaken up..." Alice sounded quite concerned for Bella's emotional distress.
Now, it is a known fact that no amount of psychoanalytical training can prepare a man to understand the mind of a teenage girl, but even so, this was getting odd. Jasper, Alice's boyfriend, had kissed the lovely Bella, and yet Alice was upset for Bella's sake? What-?
And then, according to Edward, Bella had started spending time with Jacob, and imaginary werewolf. Why a werewolf? Does the werewolf represent danger, a threat, the big bad wolf? Or simply another aspect of the vampire that Edward believes himself to be?
Werewolves and vampires... The blood-sucking monsters than transform their innocent victims... Both expressions, perhaps, of our ancient fears of the unknown, of monsters that lurk in the darkness, of monsters that kill... The werewolf, the man-wolf, the man who loses his humanity and becomes a monster... Perhaps the werewolf can be seen as a symbol of homicidal insanity itself, the impulse that makes a man lose his very humanity and become a monster?
But the werewolf is not just a monster in ancient legends, but also an outcast. The ancient Norsemen referred to both werewolves and criminal outlaws by the same term, vargr. For the wolf was an outlaw, and an outlaw was a wolf, cast out of society for his transgressions, transformed in the eyes of his fellow men into something less than human... Vargr... Doesn't the old Gothic Bible translation refer to Christ, the outcast, as vargr, as an outlaw, a werewolf, cast out from society? Christ the werewolf...? The werewolf as outcast and redeemer in one?
Bella confirms that she does not know anyone named Jacob. Nor, she assures me, is she given to cliff-diving or other extreme sports. She is a quiet young girl who leads an uneventful life, apart of course, from the fact that she is still in love with a boyfriend who is losing his mind...
There can be no doubt that Edwards loves her back, or that their break-up has caused him immense pain. I am watching him very closely, alert for any worsening of the suicidal impulses expressed in his delusion about the avenging Volturi.
The Volturi, the vampire royalty... Odd, how the theme of royalty recurs in Edward's hallucinations... I don't quite know what to make of this, but I suspect that it significant in some way.
Who, or what, do these Volturi, the ancient vampires from Volterra, represent? Volterra is a lovely town in Tuscany, but the name also evokes the 16th century Italian painter Daniele da Volterra, famous for one of the worst cover-ups in history: In a preposterous act of modesty, he painted loincloths on all the naked figures in Michelangelo's magnificent painting The Last Judgment. Do the Volturi also symbolize some kind of cover-up or concealment, I wonder? Or perhaps a sexual modesty as absurd as the one that earned da Volterra his humorous nickname Il Braghettone - "the pants guy"? Do the Volturi perhaps represent some kind of sexual repression?
Aro, Caius, and Marcus. What a curious trinity! Aro... The name would mean "I plough" in Latin, and it doesn't take a Freudian scholar to read erotic significance into that name. Ahem! "Ploughing" is one of the oldest sexual metaphors of humankind, perhaps as old as agriculture itself. Caius and Marcus.. Both ancient Roman names, of course. Very appropriate for someone who are said to have lived in Volterra for over 3000 years!
No, wait. Three thousand years... Even the Romans haven't lived in Tuscany that long! Surely Edward would know that. But Volterra, I seem to recall, has been around a lot longer than the Romans. Before Volterra was overrun by the Romans, it was an ancient Etruscan settlement. The enigmatic Etruscans, the ancient people who flourished in Italy before the Romans, and who eventually disappeared, leaving behind only some mysterious graves, a handful of brief inscriptions, and a few personal names that eventually found their way into the Latin language. Names like Cai and Marce, Caius and Marcus...
Very little is known about ancient Etruscan myths and legends. Some of their gods were eventually adopted by the conquering Romans. And I seem to recall something about wolves... Canu, the god of death and the underworld, is a wolf. But even the Etruscan sky god, the glitteringTinia, is sometimes called "the wolf-like one"... Edward, too, believes that he glitters in the sunlight, and Jacob the werewolf seems to be his dark alter ego...
Caius... Also spelled Gaiusby the Romans, I believe? Caesar's first name, wasn't it? Gaius Julius Caesar, the emperor. Another name evoking royalty... Edward is a well-read boy. I wonder if he has also read Shakespeare's King Lear? The poor insane king Lear has a good friend who calls himself Caius, but who is actually the Duke of Kent in disguise... Does the Caius in Edward's hallucinations also represent disguise and concealment, I wonder?
Edward is hiding something... He is hiding a secret so terrible that he would rather lose Bella than have her know what his dark secret is... But his subconscious is trying to communicate, in its strange language of symbols, what his conscious mind is trying to conceal. What are you hiding, Edward? And why do you think this secret would bring death to Bella?