Character Analysis
As an undeniably flaky twenty-year-old woman who's pursued one half-baked career idea after another and abandoned them all, Julian Baffin may seem like an odd choice for a romantic heroine. Even Bradley Pearson, who claims to have fallen head-over-heels in love with her, has few truly admiring things to say about her. We mean, really, just listen to him describe his lady love:
I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. (2.1.6)
How does this ordinary, not particularly beautiful, and not particularly clever, talented, or intelligent young woman rank against some of the most memorable women (and men) in Shakespeare? Read on to find out, because silly as she may seem, Julian Baffin is an intertextual bonanza.
When Shmoop Gets This Feeling, We Need Intertextual Healing
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Julian is the sun.
If something about that quote just doesn't seem right, give yourself a pat on the back for noticing. When Shakespeare's Romeo does his Peeping Tom bit as he stands outside the Capulet home in Romeo and Juliet, he doesn't see a heavenly babe named Julian loafing around in her bedroom—he sees his star-crossed lover, Juliet.
Although The Black Prince draws most heavily on Shakespeare's Hamlet, we would find it hard to believe that Iris Murdoch didn't have Romeo and Juliet in mind when she created Julian Baffin. Apart from the strong similarities between the two characters' first names, Julian shares a few other compelling things in common with her dramatic counterpart. For example:
- Julian and Juliet are both considered to be very young women—not so young that it would be criminal for an adult man to pursue them romantically, but young enough for other characters to warn their suitors that they are still childish and inexperienced enough to be duped and led astray.
- Julian and Juliet both pursue romantic relationships that flout social conventions and royally cheese off the 'rents.
- Julian and Juliet both apparently endure major temper tantrums on their fathers' parts when they resist their fathers' attempts to control their love lives.
These are just three biggies, and we're sure that you could find others if you compared The Black Prince and Romeo and Juliet more closely. That being the case, this is by no means the last word on Julian Baffin's intertextual connections.
But soft, the fair Ophelia.
More than one Shakespearean dude is fond of telling himself to hush up when he spots his beloved hanging around. Like Romeo, Prince Hamlet does it just after he delivers his famous "To be, or not to be" monologue, and just before he initiates one of the most bitter and rancorous conversations that he has with another human being throughout the play that bears his name.
Remember that garden scene in The Black Prince when Bradley Pearson says a lot of nasty stuff to Julian? Yeah, that whole scene is a major shout-out to a corresponding interchange between Hamlet and Ophelia in Hamlet.
By now, some of you are probably already saying, Well, then, Julian Baffin is also Ophelia. Ding ding ding. You're right on the money.
Once Bradley Pearson falls in love with Julian and starts to see himself as a romantic hero, Julian becomes the fair and insulted Ophelia to his melancholy prince. Murdoch even does us the favor of foreshadowing the Julian-Ophelia connection in the early pages of The Black Prince, just so that we won't miss it when it arrives. Remember that moment when Bradley spies a young man strewing flower petals into the road and then realizes that the young man is actually Julian Baffin?
That moment is another major shout-out to Hamlet. In Hamlet, Ophelia goes mad when she learns that her father, Polonius, has been killed by the love of her life, and in a memorable scene, she wanders onstage with her arms full of various kinds of flowers, all of them symbolic.
As she hands them out to the other characters sharing the stage with her, the audience and the play's characters alike are moved to pity by her heartbreak. Then, later, Ophelia drowns after taking her armfuls of flowers down to the bank of a brook.
So, let's rack 'em up so far: an armload of flowers, an insulting exchange in a garden, a doomed love affair… This is already lots to go on, but let's not forget one of the most important correspondences between Shakespeare's Ophelia and Murdoch's Julian—both of their fathers wind up dead. Although Bradley Pearson denies that he murdered Arnold Baffin, there could hardly have been a more Hamlet-like thing for him to have done.
As we draw this section to a close, we'll end by noting that many of the connections that link Julian Baffin to Shakespeare's Juliet are points of correspondence between Julian and Ophelia, too. Here's another handy-dandy list to help you visualize these linkages:
- Julian and Ophelia are both thought of as being young, impressionable women, and their guardians worry that they'll be duped and dishonored by the men they fall for.
- There are elements of unconventionality in both Julian's relationship with Bradley and Ophelia's relationship with Hamlet. We don't need to tell you what's unconventional about Julian's love affair with Bradley, so we'll skip straight to Ophelia and Hammy. As Denmark's prince and eventual heir to the throne, Hamlet occupies a higher social station than Ophelia does. For this reason, Ophelia's father fears that Hamlet's professions of love can't be trusted—after all, the prince is probably going to marry a fellow royal or aristocrat someday (or so Polonius thinks).
- Julian's and Ophelia's fathers both tell their daughters to break off their love affairs.
- Julian's and Ophelia's fathers are both murdered.
Phew. That's a lot to digest, but we're not done yet. If you thought that you were good to go with your newfound understanding of the correspondences between Julian and Juliet and Julian and Ophelia, then hold onto your butts, Shmoopers, 'cause we're about to knock you sideways.
Julian is Hamlet, too.
Boyish Babe in the Woods
Remember that moment early on in The Black Prince when Bradley Pearson sees Julian Baffin tossing torn-up love letters into the road? We've already told you that that scene announces her connection to Shakespeare's Ophelia, but it foreshadows her connection to Hamlet, too. Let's take a look at the scene itself so that you can refresh your memory:
In this mood of rather doom-ridden spiritual lassitude I noticed with only a little surprise and interest the figure upon the other side of the road of a young man who was behaving rather oddly. He was standing upon the kerb and strewing flowers upon the roadway, as if casting them into a river. (1.4.6)
Throughout "The Black Prince," Bradley continues to remark on Julian Baffin's boyish looks. Here he is describing her physical appearance in another early passage:
She never used make-up. She had watery-blue eyes, not the flecked hazel-brown of her mother's, nor did her secretive and dog-like face repeat Rachel's large bland freckled features. Her thick undulating mane, which had no trace of red, was streakily fair with that dark blond colour which is almost suggestive of green. Even at close quarters she still slightly resembled a boy, tallish, dour, who had just cut himself in a premature attempt to shave his first whisker. (1.4.13)
Okay, so not only does Julian Baffin resemble a prepubescent boy, but she also looks way more like her father, Arnold Baffin, than she does like her mother. No wonder Francis Marloe is convinced that Bradley's love for Julian has more than a little something to do with Bradley's repressed love for Arnold.
(Just a quick aside here, folks: there's also a moment in The Black Prince when Julian channels another of Shakespeare's male heroes. Remember that moment when she jumps the garden wall so that she can be with her true love? That's a play straight out of Romeo's book.)
Now that you've got your memory primed and pumped and good to go, cast your minds back to the moment when Bradley begins to feel as though he's fallen in love with Julian. Next, think back to the moment in the northern seaside cottage when Bradley initiates rough sex with Julian. What do those two moments have in common?
In both of them, Bradley is either imagining or literally seeing Julian Baffin dressed up as a young Prince Hamlet.
Dun dun dun.
This seems pretty major, but what exactly does it mean?
There's more than one possible interpretation here, but Shmoop is going to let you in on our own take. As we see it, the biggest takeaway here is that Julian's connection to Hamlet doesn't really tell us much about Julian herself. Instead, it tells us something important about Bradley Pearson, and about what Julian Baffin means to him.
But What Exactly Does It Tell Us?
One interpretation of this situation might be that Bradley perceives Julian as an extension of his own self. In other words, his love for her could be seen as being narcissistic.
In Bradley's version of events, Julian idolizes him, flatters him, and gives him plenty of opportunities to pontificate and expound his literary theories at length. When she talks about literature, she echoes his own most deeply held beliefs. When she talks about her father's talents as a writer, or lack thereof, she repeats Bradley's own disparaging views.
Arguably, it isn't Julian herself that Bradley really loves—what he actually loves is the version of himself that Julian reflects back to him. After all, Bradley sees himself as Hamlet, too, so if he and Julian are both Hamlet figures, isn't Bradley really just falling in love with himself?
Another interpretation might take note of Bradley Pearson's interest in classical philosophy, and in the philosophical ideas of Plato, in particular.
Using his literary depiction of his mentor Socrates as a mouthpiece, the real-life Plato argued that the experience of love—particularly love between a conscientious, philosophical man and a beautiful young boy—could help the soul to understand the Good. In this interpretation, Julian would be the beautiful young boy to Bradley's Socrates. Check out Bradley's words in 2.1.12 for more on this.
Which of these readings do you prefer? Are they mutually exclusive, or can both of them be true at the same time?
Penned by the Woman Herself
As with pretty much everything in The Black Prince, we have no way of knowing how closely Bradley Pearson's depiction of Julian Baffin resembles the real, live woman. Unfortunately, Julian's own response to Bradley's version of events doesn't give us much more to go on.
In her postscript to "The Black Prince," Julian is ambiguous and evasive when it comes to talking about Bradley, though she does admit: "I think the child I was loved the man Pearson was" (Postscript by Julian: par. 15).
At the same time, however, Julian also tells us that not only was this "a love which words cannot describe," but that it certainly hasn't been described correctly in "The Black Prince" (Postscript by Julian: par. 15). In case her meaning wasn't clear, Julian uses her final words to dub "The Black Prince" "[a] literary failure" (Postscript by Julian: par. 15).
Although it doesn't really help us to see the truth about Bradley, Julian's postscript does give us a couple of important pieces of information:
- She has apparently married Oscar Belling, the same person who wrote the love letters that Bradley depicts her as having torn into little pieces and scattered in the streets of London.
- She grew up to be a poet.
Significantly, the grown-up, poetic Julian's thoughts on the nature of art—the one topic that she actually discusses at length in her postscript—bear some striking similarities to Bradley's own words on the subject. For example, she writes:
So I am careful and sparing with words. There is a ring in what Pearson says about silence. That part I liked. He may be right that an experience is richest not talked of. As between two people talk to an outsider destroys. Art is secret secret secret. But it has some speech or it would not be. Art is public public public. (But only when it is good.) Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) It is not science or love or power or service. But it is the only true voice of these. It is their truth. It delves and chatters not. (Postscript by Julian: par. 7)
Julian also takes issue with a number of Bradley's ideas about art—particularly his claims about the relationship between art and eros (or passionate love)—and the challenges that she makes to him on these subjects are also challenges against the things that he has written in his story.
And finally, where does Julian stand on the death of her father, Arnold Baffin? She doesn't really say. Instead, she writes: "Naturally I endorse (roughly) what my mother says. However what Pearson has to say is true in its way" (Postscript by Julian: par. 14). That doesn't give us much to go on, but Julian isn't too concerned—in fact, that seems to be the way she prefers it.