Juliet
7:00 AM
 |
| John William Waterhouse, Juliet, 1898 |
You see her. She is the picture-perfect adolescent girl with pearly skin and carmine lips. She clings to a necklace with quiet yearning. You think briefly that her eyes have locked with yours, but her far reaching stare says otherwise. Her name is Juliet, and her ambitions are decidedly beyond what’s in front of her.
The Decameron’s Ghismonda from the Fourth Day, First Story shares quite a bit in common with Shakespeare’s Juliet. Both are victims of their own undoing -- culminations of romanticized desperation and familial betrayal. Yet, there’s something engaging about concentrating on these young ladies as individuals, disregarding their respective ‘Romeos.’ Romeo and Juliet is likely something we don’t need to review, but not everyone’s heard of Ghismonda’s tale. The story of Ghismonda can be summarized like so: Ghismonda falls in love with Guiscardo, a man her father (Tancred) does not approve of. Tancred decides that he’ll send his daughter Guiscardo’s heart in a cup. Ghismonda stricken with grief but also somewhat unsurprised by her father’s actions, kisses the heart. She then fills the cup with poison and commits suicide. Sounds like your typical romantic tragedy, right?
Still, there’s something we recognize about these stories other than: “don’t be a jerkwad to your kids!” or “stop glamorizing dependency issues!” It’s about women who have wills that transcend the patriarchal cage they’ve been placed in, and their willingness to rebel. Though Ghismonda’s acts of disobedience wouldn’t entirely be feminist (her actions are still centered around fatal attachment to Guiscardo, after all), it still represents a divergence from her father’s firm grasp. She tells Tancred, with a tinge of sarcasm, “It should have been manifest to thee, Tancred, being as thou art flesh and blood, that thou hadst begotten a daughter of flesh and blood and not of iron or stone.” She goes on to beg for her lover’s life, her perceptiveness of her father’s ways twisting her plea into a brash argument of her frustrations, telling her father to “begone!”
It’s in these subtleties we can find morsels of a woman’s independent thought in the strictest of male-centric societies, despite the griminess of the rose-colored narratives of suicidal infatuations in which they appear. Hence, John William Waterhouse’s Juliet possesses an exquisiteness past simple grace and beauty. Though her pose is one of longing, her look commands incentive, thought, and undeniable presence.
Juliet’s character Romeo and Juliet is defined by her relationship with Romeo and their foolhardy, self-serving behavior. Consequently, we view Romeo and Juliet as two halves of a whole. Perhaps this explains why looking at a picture of Juliet -- and only Juliet -- throws me off. What sort of story would such an impulsive girl have without meeting Romeo?
0 comments