Coming_of_Age_Speech

Coming of age is something that everyone will go through at some stage in their life, whether it’s when they’re toddlers, children or teenagers. It is individual to everyone. The main age group of this topic is usually in teenagers, and focuses on issues, insecurities and doubts that they may have about life. A way for them coming of age is finding out how they deal with these doubts or troubles. Through the novel “Touch Me” by James Moloney and the film “Ten Things I Hate about You”, directed by Gil Junger, we can identify examples of coming of age through the characters in both stories. The key issues discussed will be peer group pressure and the search for identity. In the novel “Touch Me” by James Moloney, one of the main characters names is Xavier McLoughlin who definitely is a great example of a teenager with issues in his life. Xavier, also known as Xave, is a teenage boy in year 12 who is a typical footballer. He meets a girl called Nuala. They both go to different schools but happen to see each other at the train station on their ways home from school every day. Xavier and Nuala eventually, in time, start going out. Nuala isn’t like every other girl though, she is different. She dresses in her dad’s clothing – baggy and manly. In pages 102-103, we see emotive language from Xavier when he says “piss off!”, as he’s expressing the way he feels and showing his so called friends that he’s annoyed because his friends are calling her a “Dyke”, which is colloquial language. This shows his friends paying him out and that they are not supportive of Xavier. The reason Xavier likes Nuala is because she is different. He is finally experiencing different things in his life and has found someone he loves. For the first time in his life, Xave felt like he didn’t belong, because he realized really how cruel others can be, to perfectly normal people. Xavier does what is right and chooses Nuala over his friends, as he realizes that he was peer pressured into not going out with her and that he has been hanging out in the wrong crowd. We can see Xavier is coming of age as he is more accepting of people’s differences and accepts people for who they are, without being immature and teasing them. In the movie ”Ten Things I hate about You”, the character Bianca Stratford is a high school student, with her Sister Kat in year 12 at the same school. Bianca and Kat are very different people, Bianca is a very popular, pretty girl, with a lot of attention from boys, where as her tempered sister, Kat, refuses to go out with boys and has very strong opinions. Bianca is just a young girl who wants to go out and party, but she is not allowed to date. There are 2 boys chasing her, one who’s a model and very up himself, and the other who is a nice, genuine boy. All Bianca wants to do is experience being a teenager and go on dates with boys, but people like her sister and her dad are stopping her. We can see the sadness she experiences in the movie as the music is soft with emotional lyrics which set the mood. When she is finally allowed to go to a party, everyone gets drunk, and she realizes that the boy she’s chasing is obsessed with himself and only wants her because of her image, where as the other drives her home safely. She discovers going to parties isn’t all it’s cracked out to be. She only wants to do what all teenagers experience, and her sister thinks she is helping her by not letting her date. Bianca’s sister feels she is doing the right thing by not letting her experience bad things that she has experienced in her life which weren’t necessarily good, but in Bianca’s eyes see feels Kat is doing the wrong thing. In the end, Bianca realizes that her sister was right. She identifies who she should be and that she is also hanging out in the wrong crowd. So in conclusion, here is a boy who is peer pressured into going out with someone who is classified as “normal or cool”, and here is a girl who just wants to experience going on dates and partying but is limited to what she can do because of an older sister with not so good experiences and a very protective father. Coming of age is individual to everyone, as shown in both the movie “10 things I hate about you” and the book “touch me” through the characters of 2 teenagers.