Life is a Dream by Calderon

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Growing Up All Locked Up

A person's ability to develop is due to two factors, maturation and learning. Although maturation, or the biological development of genes, is important, it is the learning - the process through which we develop through our experiences, which make us who we are (Shaffer, 8). In pre-modern times, a child was not treated like they are today. The child was dressed like and worked along side adults, in hope that they would become them, yet more modern times the child's need to play and be treated differently than adults has become recognized. Along with these notions of pre-modern children and their developmental skills came the ideas of original sin and innate purity. These philosophical ideas about children were the views that children were either born "good" or "bad" and that these were the basis for what would come of their life.

In the play, Life is a Dream, by Calderon, Segismundo is a character that has been deprived through his life of the developmental skills that are needed to become a mature, normal adult male. He is locked away in a tower, because of his own fathers fear. He learns nothing about how society is and how a person's actions are developed through interacting with others. He says, "All I know is pain and I don't understand why I must live like this, what crime did I commit? The worst thing I do is to exist. (Calderon, 7)" From this quote the reader sees the dysfunction that has been learned by Segismundo. He has done nothing wrong, and yet he feels that just being born is a crime. These kinds of feelings and thoughts can only become dominant if a person is trapped in a life that they do not know, and are taught nothing about.

Since Segismundo is locked away, and has not had the ability to develop socially it is shocking for him when waking one day outside of the prison he once lived in to find an extremely different life in a beautiful palace that is now his knew home. Not only is he overwhelmed with its splendor, but also before he gets a chance to engulf his new findings, he is found comparing his old life to the new.

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