Romantic Hero:
They’re big these days, the
romantic heroes, prevalent in dystopian novels we get pretty comfortable with
them. Juliette is just another Romantic hero living in a dystopian world, going
against the Reestablishment. In Shatter
Me you watch Juliette grow into the role of this hero, she’s just getting started.
However, all the characteristics are there.
Juliette rejects established norms
and conventions in Shatter Me, she
fights the reestablishment’s policies every step of the way. Even from the
start she’s horrified of what the world has become while she’s been trapped
away. Adam tells her and Juliette’s reaction is real and intense, emphasized by
the first person narration. Juliette narrates, “They’re incinerating culture,
the beauty of diversity. The new citizens of our world will be reduced to
nothing but numbers, easily interchangeable, easily removable, easily destroyed
for disobedience. We have lost our humanity,” (Mafi 38). She despises the man
responsible for it all, Warner. Later in the book she disobeys him, refusing
food, clothes, luxury. She refuses to work with him, to allow him to use her
lethal touch as his own weapon. She doesn’t want to go along with the way
society is ruled because she still remembers how the world was before.
Due to her deadly touch, Juliette
has been rejected by the society. At the start of the book she has been living
in a facility for 3 years, her parents too scared of her to deny the benefits
putting her away will bring. Even
growing up she was called dangerous, isolated from the other kids. In a
heartbreaking scene the reader flashes back to those days as written, “I never
wanted to see the face everyone hated so much. Girls used to kick me and run away.
Boys used to throw rocks at me. I still have scars somewhere,” (Mafi 143). She
was only 8 and already an outsider, to her parents, to her peers, to her
teachers. They were disgusted by her because all she was to them was a hazard,
a killer. Even later at 17, when the reestablishment recruits-kidnaps- her the
soldiers are scared of her, they are all anxious, a moment away from pointing a
gun in her direction at any moment. She’s not human in society, she’s a
monster.
Radical Individualism is the final
characteristic of a romantic hero. While Juliette possess this, it fades away
as the book progresses. At the beginning she has been isolated she tell us on
the first page, “I haven’t spoken in 264 days of isolation,” (Mafi 1). She
relies on herself, the only person that she knows she can trust. Even when Adam
is introduced as her cell mate she allows him to take her bed and won’t speak
to him. She doesn’t know where to start, barely knows how to socialize. This pattern follows through the first third
of the book and is one of the main reasons why she’s so distrusting of Warner.
However, Adam worms his way into her mind, he’s all she’s ever wanted. He knows
her, doesn’t think she’s a monster and reassures her against her own
insecurities. She will always trust herself the most but Adam is a big figure
that she leans on.
Juliette is almost the definition
of a Romantic hero, fitting two of the characteristics to a tee and qualifying partially
for the last one. She doesn’t accept established norms, fighting against the
reestablishment. She has been exiled by society. Locked away at school, and at
14 sent away to an asylum to live the rest of her days. Lastly, she is a shows
radical individualism by only knowing how to trust herself.
