Excuse me for being a little self indulgent in talking about Julia for a bit. Before class, Kim and I discussed the relationship between Julia and Lucetta at length and came up with what we thought was a pretty decent interpretation of Act 2 Scene 7. While what we came up with seemed to work for the scene, Matt brought up a very interesting point. He likened Julia to Juliet, and how she is this untouched, "untalked of" girl who has a very specific idea of love that she got from romance novels and epic poetry, and I thought that was a very interesting point. I had all along thought that Julia was naive young girl who falls in love really only because she's found someone to love her, which really isn't too far from Juliet either. This correlation between the two characters really opened some doors to Julia that I had never really seen before.
I think that this reading of the scene, which was very different from what Kim and I had discussed beforehand, marks a dramatic shift for Julia, thus making the ending even more tragic in my opinion.
Thoughts? Opinions?
I don't know how much I would agree with Julia and Juliet being similar in the hopeless romantic vein. Juliet falls in love with a dangerous stranger and then later clings to the relationship as a way to escape her trapped life. Shannon and I have had a lot of discussion about how I've noticed that Juliet always couples her romantic feelings with these morbid death images (and threats), which says to me (in a post modern interpretation of a character) that Juliet is a girl who was thinking of suicide long before Romeo showed up. Julia comes off as more similar to Proteus than Juliet, as a hopeless romantic. Proteus changes himself from friend to enemy in order to pursue the woman that he lusts after. Julia changes herself into a boy in order to pursue the man she loves. both are willing to transform in order to gain/retain the thing that they want.
ReplyDeleteInteresting observations. Of course, however a "hopeless romantic" she may be, or however influenced by romance novels, she still is more than able to take the initiative to strike out on her own in disguise. That makes a difference too and further distinguishes her from a character like Juliet.
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