City of Glass

The complications surrounding Jace and Clary’s relationship increase in these chapters. Jace’s conflicted feelings about his desire for Clary (which he believes to be evil) forces him to grapple with his own instincts and intentions, highlighting one of the central themes of the story—What Makes a Monster? Is he a monster because of his desires? Can he keep from becoming a monster if he doesn’t act on them? These questions plague Jace, causing him to lash out self-protectively at the people around him to try and conceal his shame rather than confronting it directly. Rather than telling Clary the truth about why he doesn’t want her in Idris, Jace lies and insults her, hoping the pain will drive her away. Worried that his fear for her safety will reveal the depth of his feelings, Jace doesn’t tell Clary that his growing distrust of the Clave makes him fiercely protective of her but instead treats her poorly in order to protect her without showing emotional vulnerability, fulfilling the “bad boy” trope of young adult fiction: a character who is typically tough, sarcastic, and physically dominant on the outside but hiding a soft and caring interior. A notable problem with this trope is that it can be used to excuse or even celebrate behavior that contributes to a pattern of abuse in a relationship, repackaging it as devotion. In an effort to keep their softness a secret, the “bad boy” lashes out and hides behind banter that helps reify his dangerous and uncaring image. After everything he’s learned and been through since the series started, Jace feels vulnerable, both regarding his identity and his feelings for Clary. He doesn’t want her to know he loves her, but he also struggles to hide his feelings. He believes insulting her accomplishes two things—getting her away from Idris/the Clave and making his feelings clear. Ultimately, it does neither and allows Jace’s insulting tirade against Clary to go unchecked, without meaningfully interrogating the trope.

In Chapter 9, Clare offers additional context to Jace and Clary’s relationship, as well as their backstories. The images the angel shows Clary and Jace hint at their pasts, showing key moments and snippets of conversation that both fill gaps in their knowledge and leave them with more questions. Clare gives the angel omniscience, a decision that turns the angel into a rhetorical tool to impart information to Clary and Jace (and, by extension, the reader) that they wouldn’t otherwise have. The angel accesses conversations and events it was not privy to, suggesting it can see and understand things beyond its own experiences. Despite this omniscience, Clare limits the information the angel gives in order to build dramatic tension in her plot. For example, the angel doesn’t make it clear that Jace and Clary are not siblings. This partial dissemination of information is another trope of young adult literature—giving just enough to offer the characters something new but not enough to actually answer their questions propelling the plot forward.

Clare uses the familiarity Clary feels when she first meets Sebastian to foreshadow the connection they share as siblings without fully tipping her hand. When it’s later revealed that Sebastian is Clary’s brother, not Jace, Clary’s instinctual familiarity, as well as the hair dye he uses and his erratic personality, help reveal both Sebastian’s demon blood and his complicity in Valentine’s plans. The wrongness Clary feels during her kiss with Sebastian—a wrongness she doesn’t feel when kissing Jace—both foreshadows Sebastian’s true connection to her and also underscores the importance to the narrative of Clary’s own instincts. The wrongness of the kiss also points to Sebastian’s later obsession with Clary—his desire for her will be explored more in the latter half of the Mortal Instruments series. The void Clary feels while kissing him suggests that Sebastian can’t completely hide his demon nature despite the fact that he has fooled the Shadowhunter community in Idris. It may be that anyone he got close to would experience the void, or it may be that Clary’s enhanced angel blood allows her to sense the darkness within Sebastian.

Both Jace’s relationship with Clary and Alec’s relationship with Magnus highlight another classic aspect of a coming-of-age narrative: Learning to love oneself enables one to accept the love of another person.

These chapters bring the Lightwoods into greater prominence in the narrative, as Clare writes scenes from both Isabelle’s and Alec’s perspectives—giving voice to their inner thoughts. Alec identifies as gay but struggles with finding a way to live as his authentic self because of the antiquated and prejudicial views of Shadowhunter culture about gay sexuality. For years, Alec has hidden behind brotherly affection and the parabatai (fighting partners) relationship with Jace, which Jace calls him out on in Chapter 6 in saying that Alec is afraid of telling anyone who he loves. Though Jace says this to push Alec away (ostensibly to punish himself), it ends up being an inadvertent wake-up call for Alec, who realizes that he has to go after what he wants if he wishes to keep it. Later, when he finds Magnus, Alec fights beside the warlock, foreshadowing both the alliance between Shadowhunters and downworlders as well as the romantic love and commitment between Alec and Magnus as a couple. Isabelle prides herself on her fighting capabilities, and her prowess, demonstrated when she rescues Aline from the demon, makes the moment she’s bested by Sebastian, which leads to the death of her little brother, even more devastating and sets up her arc for the subsequent books in the series.