Juliana

Juliana is a minor but sharply significant student in Babel whose importance emerges during the occupation of the tower. Identified as a tiny undergraduate among the six scholars who remain after most faculty and students leave, she represents the youngest and least powerful members of the besieged community. Her choices expose the human cost of institutional dependence: protected by Babel’s stipends, rooms, meals, and educational resources, she has little practical life outside the tower, yet remaining inside may mean death. When the group must decide who will flee and who will stay, Juliana chooses to stay despite her fear, making her one of the people who accept the consequences of resistance rather than retreat from them.

Identity and Place in Babel

Juliana is introduced as a very young undergraduate, described as “a tiny girl named Juliana.” She is one of only six scholars left in the tower: Professor Chakravarti, Professor Craft, the undergraduates Ibrahim and Juliana, and the graduate fellows Yusuf and Meghana. The composition of this remnant matters. Nearly all the Classicists, Europeanists, and faculty have departed, leaving a small group consisting largely of people of colour and people from the colonies, with Professor Craft as the exception. Juliana therefore belongs to a reduced, exposed community formed after the institution’s more privileged and established members have withdrawn.

Her youth and small physical presence make her seem especially vulnerable. She is not presented as a senior scholar, strategist, or public leader, and the evidence gives no indication that she possesses the authority or experience of the professors. Yet her position does not make her irrelevant. Once the tower’s resources become the basis for sustaining the resistance, the decision of even its youngest occupants carries the weight of life and death. Juliana’s presence helps turn the occupation from an abstract political action into a question of what a frightened student is willing to endure.

Institutional Dependence and Material Precarity

Juliana’s situation is shaped by Babel’s system of complete educational provision. Babblers receive room, board, tuition, and a monthly stipend of twenty shillings, along with access to a discretionary fund for course materials. Their expenses are paid directly by Babel, so students do not even see the bills; the institution can provide anything plausibly connected to study, even a gold-capped fountain pen. This arrangement gives students remarkable security inside Oxford while concealing the costs of ordinary survival beyond it.

The same dependence becomes clear when the remaining scholars consider leaving. Years of reliable stipends have allowed them to forget that they possess only enough money to live for several months. Outside Oxford, where lodgings and meals would no longer be supplied, they would have almost nothing. Juliana is thus caught between two forms of insecurity: Babel is the institution that has sustained her, but it is also the site now threatened by police, enemies, and an approaching attack. Her predicament demonstrates how protection can become confinement when the system providing it collapses.

The contrast with industrial labour deepens this material context. Reports describe children inhaling coal dust, losing fingers and toes to silver-powered machinery, and working from before dawn until nine at night. Abel explains that even these sensational accounts understate the daily misery of cramped factory floors. Juliana’s dependence on Babel belongs to the same wider economy of silver, but from the protected side of its social order: her food, education, and shelter are secured by an institution whose resources ultimately rest on the labour and exploitation that reformers are debating outside the tower.

Fear, Speech, and the Decision to Stay

Juliana’s clearest moment comes when the group debates whether anyone can leave the tower at night. She asks whether the scholars might slip out after midnight and return by morning without being noticed. The suggestion is immediately rejected as unrealistic, but it reveals her attempt to imagine an ordinary escape route within an extraordinary crisis. Yusuf answers with a practical objection, warning that they will eventually become filthy and smell, while Robin insists that the occupation is not an optional daytime activity. The exchange combines childish practicality with genuine terror: Juliana is looking for a way to preserve ordinary life while the tower is becoming a sealed political fortress.

The danger escalates when the group fears that the attackers may penetrate the wards and that Jerome may be helping them. This possibility produces frightened babbling among the remaining scholars. Juliana is part of a community whose knowledge and silver-working resources cannot protect it with certainty; the very wards that seem to divide safety from danger have become objects of anxious speculation. Her fear is therefore not irrational. The group has reason to believe that the defensive boundary may fail and that betrayal may already exist within the institution’s circle of knowledge.

When Robin asks who is ready to remain, Ibrahim declares that he wants to stay and does not want to run. He casts Juliana an anxious glance, making her decision part of a shared exchange between the two youngest students. Juliana is described as pale as paper and says nothing at first. Her silence registers fear more powerfully than a speech would. She is not transformed into a fearless hero; instead, the narrative preserves the visible bodily fact of terror while allowing her choice to acquire moral force.

The Final Division

The group eventually discovers that there is a way out. Victoire says that they can go home, and Yusuf moves to stand beside her. The remaining scholars divide without pleading, bargaining, or changing their minds. Robin, Professor Craft, Meghana, Ibrahim, and Juliana stand on one side; Yusuf and Victoire stand on the other. Robin declares that dawn is the time of departure because the attackers are coming then. Juliana’s placement among those who remain means that she has chosen the side facing the assault, not because the text presents her as unaffected by danger but because she refuses to flee once the choice becomes explicit.

This decision is the culmination of her brief trajectory. At first she searches for an improbable way to leave and return unnoticed; later, faced with a genuine route out, she remains. The movement is not from ignorance to confidence but from evasive possibility to conscious commitment. Her choice is especially consequential because the narrative defines the division starkly: it determines who flees and who dies. Juliana’s refusal to run therefore changes her status from a background student supported by Babel into an accountable member of the resistance, one whose fate is joined to the tower’s.

Narrative Significance

Juliana gives the occupation a vulnerable human scale. Babel contains the greatest concentration of silver-working materials in the country, including Grammaticas, engraving pens, match-pair ledgers, reference materials, and silver itself. Holding the tower may allow the resistance to deny the country the resources needed to maintain its silver-work until a political vote has taken place. Juliana does not articulate this strategy, but her presence makes its cost visible: the struggle for control of language and silver is also a struggle over the bodies of students who have been educated, housed, fed, and confined by the institution.

Her character also complicates any simple opposition between protected scholarship and exploited labour. The students once experienced Babel’s provisions as normal, while workers outside the university endured exhausting and dangerous conditions to sustain the silver economy. Juliana’s precarious choice at the tower’s end reveals the fragility beneath institutional privilege. She has been sheltered, but that shelter has not prepared her to survive independently; when the institution becomes a battlefield, the same system that gave her security leaves her with an agonizing binary choice.

Juliana’s final significance lies in the quietness of her courage. She is not granted a dramatic declaration or a public command. The evidence gives her a glance, a pallor, a silence, and a place in the line of those who stay. Those small details prevent her decision from becoming a conventional triumphal gesture. She remains frightened, young, and materially dependent, yet she chooses resistance with full knowledge that dawn may bring death. In the closing division of the besieged scholars, Juliana’s silence becomes an act of speech: she answers the question of whether she will run by remaining where the consequences will fall.