By Brent Beshore
Although Juliet falls victim to a seemingly cruel and fated world, she comes of age, making a transition from youthful innocence to assertive awareness. Beginning at the start of the play, Juliet is the typical pre-adolescent child.She is subservient to her family’s wishes and acts in a mostly passive manner, letting Romeo and others dominate the action. This is evident by looking at her conversation with her mother. When questioned about her feelings towards marriage and love, Juliet answers, “It is an honor that I dream not of.” This shows her child-like innocence towards mature issues. good first paragraph, well-focused and precise.
As the play progresses, Juliet starts to transform towards maturity. This progress is shown in her first encounter with Romeo. Much of this encounter blends two mature concepts of sex and religion, concluding with Juliet’s rightful analysis that “my only love, sprung from my only hate.” This shows that Juliet is, at the very least, grappling with these very complex and mature topics. Although she has not fully come of age, this scene begins her maturation process. This also gives the reader his/her (avoid) first glimpse at Juliet’s courage. Juliet knows that the person she loves is also her family’s sworn enemy, but she stays with him, realizing that her family would find this shameful.
The next major step towards maturation occurs in her balcony confrontation with Romeo. This scene presents Juliet in a new and different light, acting maturely and realizing her deep-seeded love. Just hours prior to this scene, Juliet told her mother that she had not even thought of marriage. Now, Juliet professes her love by saying that Romeo “is the god of my idolatry.” Whereas before she had not even contemplated love, now she has a god-like love for Romeo. This ability to love so freely stems from two polar qualities of Juliet. On the one hand, she is able to love Romeo so intensely because she is still innocent and unaware of the consequences of her love. On the other hand, she is mature enough that she realizes her truelove passion for Romeo and desire to marry him, breaking from her family’s tradition. These warring sentiments of Juliet’s character show her progressing steadily towards maturation. I like this "warring sentiments" idea, but it seems confusing. How can she be both? You could explain this further.
The final show of Juliet’s newfound maturity can be found in her two decisive actions in the fourth act. Contrast to Romeo’s whining and loathing in self-pity, Juliet takes action, showing the full thrust of her maturity. Under the instruction of the Friar, Juliet maturely agrees to the plan, seeing that action is the only way to thwart fate. The other enlightening action is her ability to reel herself back in from the brink of insanity, in order to follow through with her plan. After realizing the horrible and gruesome possibilities of her choice to take the elixir, Juliet courageously follows through with the arrangement. These two actions show Juliet’s arrival at a state of maturity.
Through this extremely tumultuous period of her life, Juliet’s innocence falls victim to the perils of her world. This loss of innocence is no more apparent than in Juliet’s final action. With her decision to commit suicide, Juliet signals her hopeless inability to move on through life. Suicide itself is the ultimate form of impurity, signaling one’s failure to see any prospect for hope in the future. In the case of Juliet, it is unfortunate that in the span of mere days, her environment caused her such anguish and pain that life was not worth living. This brevity of transformation shows the horrific possibilities and consequences for uncontrolled hate and aggression that the feud between the two families exuded. Due to Juliet’s relative innocence, she was fatally unable to effectively grapple with her dire situation. Good ideas at work here, although you could focus this more. The loss of innocence idea is most promising, as is the conflicts within Juliet. Overall an intriguing response. 9.0