Though hundreds of years apart, one rich with beautifully complex diction and another with simple vocabularies, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Martin’s Beauty have strangely similar perspectives on the so-called beauty of a maiden. First of all, both Juliet and Carla achieve their goals or what they value in life through their beauty. In Juliet’s case it was her Romeo, or to be more precise, her marriage which is every woman’s goal in the Elizabethan era: a proper marriage to a proper man. While in Clara’s 21st century where money and winners become our highest value, women’s goals expand to better life, higher income and more success. Either way, both Juliet and Clara succeed in achieving these things through their beauty. In other words, beauty is used simply as a pathway to their glorious L’Arc de Triomphe. Secondly, their beauty causes some men to value them as sexual objects. Although Romeo’s action towards Juliet is rather romantic than carnal, his dear friend, Mercutio, however, did point out that Romeo’s truely desire for Juliet is, after all, sexual need. According to Bate and Rasmussen’s William Shakespeare: Complete Works, Mercutio’s statement to Romeo “As miads call medlars, when they laugh alone. O Romeo, that she were, O that she were an open – arse, thou a pop’ring pear!”(Shakespeare 1994: 58) suggests that Juliet is no more than an object which Romeo sexually desires by comparing her to a medlar and him to a pear which resemble female and male genital organs. As for Clara’s case, her beauty certainly affects her in a sexual way too and even to the point of irritation. This issue of sexuality comes up several times in their conversation in Martin’s Beauty, such as, “Men flock.” From Bethany and Clara’s “I don’t even like sex. I can’t have conversation with out men coming on to me”. Again, they all come back to sex. Therefore, Juliet’s and Clara’s beauty makes it inevitable for men not to approach them without any sexual subtext. Last but not...