In Romeo and Juliet, the Capulet family was a wealthy, stable, and well respected family. The Capulet story took place in the late 1500’s in Verona, Italy. In The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds, Tillie’s family was a very poor family that had fallen apart and that everyone seemed to laugh at. This story takes place in the mid 70’s. Though it seems these two families couldn’t be more than polar opposites, they had their similarities as well as their differences.

     These two families are similar in that the mother’s weren’t all that involved in their daughters’ lives. In Romeo and Juliet, the mother in the Capulet family didn’t even know Romeo and Juliet had been married. And if she had heard, she wouldn’t have cared at all – she probably would have banned Romeo from ever seeing Juliet again. In Tillie’s story, Betty doesn’t really care about her daughter’s life. Her daughter wants to study science, and is a very smart girl. But the mother doesn’t care. She even makes Tillie stay home from school to work around the house, even if Tillie really wants to go learn. Neither mother really cared about what was important to their daughter, but cared much more about the reputation of the family and money.

     Both stories end in tragedy as well. In Romeo and Juliet, both main characters end up dying in the end. In The Marigold story, the drunk mother who hasn’t had that great of a life killed the family pet and ran the house like a “concentration camp”. She’s even willing to let her own daughter die in order to save money. That’s how the story ends, and you don’t find out what happens. So even beside all the differences between these two families, there are some similarities.

    

     The only way I could relate to this story is the way of caretaking an elderly lady. While my Grandma isn’t even close to as bad as Nanny was, she still requires a level of caretaking – if she’s stressed out, you have to go and calm her down, which usually takes a long time because Grandma can’t remember what you just told her five minutes ago. And on behalf of my family I could relate to the mother asking, “how did I get stuck with this?” But that was pretty much the only way I could relate to that play.

     In the story of Romeo and Juliet, I believe Juliet’s character both changed quite a bit and also didn’t change at all. She started out as an innocent young girl without love, pretending to be smart and not a care in the world. She seemed spoiled; you can almost hear that accent in her voice, the famous ‘give me everything I want’ tone. She was too good for all of the guys in town, in fact, she told her mother in person that she hadn’t met anyone she’d want to marry yet. But then, things started to change. She met Romeo, this young boy that was good enough for her. But that relationship had a problem; Romeo’s family hated her family. So then she undertakes a journey that would eventually end her life.

     At first, I noticed Juliet was a bit stuck up and spoiled. I imagined her as one of those girls that go around high school talking with that famous ‘give me everything I want’ tone; those girls that are too good for most everyone. She came from a rich family, so it makes sense that she might be a little spoiled. But although she’s spoiled, she does seem like a smart girl; in the garden scene while Romeo kept on professing his love for her, and asking her to marry him and all that, it was Juliet who pointed out, “hey, we just met a few hours ago. Let’s not do anything crazy.” In this sense, she’s smarter than Romeo, who is simply driven mad by love. By the end of the play, however, she loses that sense of logic completely and becomes as driven mad as Romeo. Throughout the center of the play – I believe Juliet’s character seemed to change but in the end didn’t change at all. See, time is a key player to love and to when it comes to changing a person’s character. Not much time passed throughout the play; therefore, not much of her character could change all that much. Also, she’s young and immature to the world – at least, she is in today’s world. 14 year olds aren’t even close to adults, they still have a lot to learn. Now, there are traumatizing events going on – Tybalt, her cousin, is murdered by her husband. But she takes her husband’s side in this event, seeming to weep over the fact he was exiled more than the fact that her cousin was dead; this show’s she was probably still blinded by love than moved by her cousin’s passing. So her character wasn’t changed all that much.  

     At the end of the play, when she ends up committing suicide, she really hasn’t been changed all that much since the beginning – she’s still stuck up, spoiled, and immature. The only thing that’s changed in the beginning is that she’s fallen in love with Romeo; and personally, I believe it couldn’t have been love between the two of them. Simply a childhood crush mistaken for love by their own feelings. There wasn’t enough time for it to become love. So in the end, I believe Juliet really hasn’t changed. She’s still the same; a spoiled and immature little girl. She’s just let those character traits become out of control, and she ends up killing herself for it. She’s blinded by the ‘love’ she felt for Romeo, and it escalates out of control.