The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide (18 page)

“They ended up being vampires in the way they are because I have strong opinions on free will. No matter what position you’re in, you always have a choice. So I had these characters who were in a position where traditionally they would have been the bad guys, but, instead, they chose to be something different—a theme that has always been important to me.”
—Stephenie

Rosalie Hale was born to a banker and his wife in Rochester, New York. Luckily, the bank her father worked at stayed solvent through the stock-market crash and resulting economic downturn. The Great Depression did not seriously impact
Rosalie’s family the way it did many less fortunate families. Her parents were eager to do better, though—to move in higher social circles. As Rosalie grew and her beauty increased, they hoped her loveliness would open doors for them.

Rosalie enjoyed her parents’ pride in her looks, her father’s pleasure in buying her beautiful clothes, her girlfriends’ envy, and the admiration of every man she passed. The result of all this attention was that Rosalie tended to be self-absorbed and rather shallow, with a focus on the material.

“I
WAS THRILLED TO BE ME
,
TO BE
R
OSALIE
H
ALE
. P
LEASED THAT MEN’S EYES WATCHED ME
… H
APPY THAT MY MOTHER WAS PROUD OF ME AND THAT MY FATHER LIKED TO BUY ME PRETTY DRESSES
.”

—Rosalie, on her human life (
Eclipse
, Chapter 7)

At eighteen, Rosalie was considered the most beautiful girl in Rochester, and possibly the state of New York. Her family was moderately wealthy and she wanted for nothing. Rosalie envied no one… except for her friend Vera. Vera had a husband who loved her and the most adorable baby boy, Henry. Rosalie longed for a husband and a baby of her own. When Rosalie caught the eye of Royce King II, the son of the richest man in Rochester, she felt that she was on her way to having absolutely everything she’d ever wanted. Her parents were overjoyed; a whirlwind courtship and plans for an extravagant wedding quickly followed.

One night, a week before the wedding, Rosalie was walking home after a visit with Vera. A few blocks from her street she heard the drunken laughter of a group of men. A moment later, she realized one of them was Royce. She’d never seen Royce drunk before, and didn’t know the dark side of his
character. Royce and his friends brutally assaulted and raped Rosalie. Thinking her dead, they abandoned her in the road.

Moments later, Carlisle Cullen found Rosalie and transformed her to save her life. He hoped that Rosalie might make a suitable companion for Edward, but they never viewed each other in that way, though they did come to love each other as brother and sister.

One of the first things Rosalie did as a vampire was to take revenge on Royce and his friends. She hunted her attackers down one by one, saving Royce for last because she wanted him to suffer psychologically from the fear of knowing that something was coming for him. She tortured all of her attackers to death, but she didn’t drink their blood; she was repulsed by the idea of having any part of them inside her. She and Carlisle (and, later, Bella) are the only vampires in the Cullen clan who have never killed humans for blood.

Though vengeance was satisfying in its way, Rosalie remained deeply unhappy in her vampire life. She missed her human family greatly. More than that, the chance to have what she most longed for—a husband who loved her, a baby of her own—had been taken from her along with her humanity.

Two years later, Rosalie’s life changed. While the Cullens were living in Tennessee, she discovered a man, Emmett
McCarty, being mauled by a bear in the woods. Something about the man reminded Rosalie of her friend Vera’s young son, and Rosalie didn’t want him to die. She rescued Emmett and took him to Carlisle. She asked Carlisle to transform him, even though she hated her own vampire existence and knew her request was selfish.

“There are characters that I have to work for a little bit harder, and sort of get down to their motivations. A few of them—Rosalie, for example—were difficult. It took me a while to figure out what her thing was.”
—Stephenie

But Emmett didn’t see Rosalie as selfish; he fell in love with her, and he easily adapted to vampire life. He and Rosalie soon married—and did so repeatedly over the decades. Rosalie loved being the center of attention as the bride, and Emmett loved making her happy. The two have sometimes lived as a couple apart from the rest of the Cullen family.

Emmett grew up in the small town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, part of a large Scotch-Irish family. He had what his parents considered a wild adolescence; never one to worry about consequences, Emmett ran with a wild crowd that drank,
gambled, and womanized. Emmett was always a help to his family, however. He was an excellent hunter and woodsman, and always kept the McCartys supplied with game. When he was twenty years old and out on a routine hunting trip in the Smoky Mountains, he was attacked by a large black bear. Emmett was close to losing consciousness when he thought he heard a second bear fighting with the first. He figured they were battling over who would get his corpse.