The only time that we get a taste of Jasper Hale’s past is in Eclipse, and it’s clear that he doesn’t become a “vegetarian” vampire because of the atrocities of the human war he’d taken part in, but because of the Southern vampire wars.
#Twilight jasper hale poster free#
Louis’ guilt over killing people doesn’t make him compassionate, doesn’t make him free the Africans his family has enslaved (and that Lestat has been terrorizing).
We never actually get any remorse or understanding in the present that these vampires realize that their pre-vampire lives were… not great. In Twilight, Jasper never reckons with what it means to have been a Confederate soldier and complicit in the atrocities committed in the name of fighting for states’ rights to enslave people of African descent. Together, they proceed to feed on and otherwise terrorize the enslaved Africans on the plantation.Įven as Louis struggles with the desire to eat humans, the one thing he never struggles with are the ethics of claiming you own another person.
In the novel and 1994 film Interview with the Vampire, Lestat de Lioncourt makes himself at home on Pointe du Lac Plantation, a Louisiana plantation owned by Louis de Pointe du Lac and his family. The ethical uncertainity, the conflict over eating and killing humans, never seems to extend to the ethics of slavery, however. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas points out in The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination From Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, “Characters (and by extension, audiences) being anxious and aroused at the same time is a signal feature of vampire narratives, one that is complicated by race, gender, and sexuality.” Those complications that Thomas mentions are what make characters like Jasper - the Confederate major turned “newborn” vampire trainer - hard to love across decades of vampire fiction and fandom. Like the villains and anti-heroes we obsess over elsewhere in pop culture, vampires fit specific metaphors that represent specific personal and cultural anxieties that we have as “regular” people - about death, aging, disability, queerness, and desire. Twilight is part of a very long line of vampire media that gives us vampires who were some form of historical oppressor and those pasts are rarely something fans or the media we’re consuming deal with well. Instead of thinking of that oversight as a plot hole in an admittedly contradictory and confusing series, we’re going to put Twilight in its context in American vampire fiction.
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