West Side Story: Why Maria Forgives Tony

Warning: This article contains spoilers for West Side Story.

In a pivotal scene in West Side Story, Tony stabs Maria’s brother, Bernardo, and Maria shockingly decides to forgive him, and here’s why. Steven Spielberg’s version of the classic Broadway musical has been met with critical acclaim, and has brought the story to new audiences. The question that has always, somewhat sourly, lingered though is why Maria would choose to forgive Tony after murdering her brother.

The climactic murder in West Side Story happens as the feud between the anti-immigration Jets and the Puerto-Rican Sharks comes to a head at the rumble. Tony initially tries to apologize to Bernardo, explaining that he is in love with his sister and that he doesn’t want a fight. Bernardo, though, insists on a fight, and so Riff eventually steps in to challenge him. The two draw knives, and in a lapse of concentration Riff is stabbed, which leads the grief-stricken Tony to retaliate by stabbing Bernardo as revenge. Chino tells Maria what happened, and she doesn’t believe him until Tony climbs through her window later that night covered in blood. She repeatedly calls him a killer and collapses to the ground, but then almost immediately forgives him without much direct explanation.

The reason that Maria forgives Tony can actually be found in the musical’s source material, Romeo and Juliet, which provides the groundwork for West Side Story‘s characters and its plot. Juliet, upon hearing the news that her cousin Tybalt has been stabbed by Romeo, goes through feelings of both hate and love for Romeo. Eventually, she comes to, realizing ”My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain;/And Tybalt’s dead, that would have slain my husband“. As Maria’s character is lifted directly from Juliet, it’s reasonable to believe that this was her thought process behind forgiving Tony.

Juliet describes Romeo in oxymorons to show her caught between hating and loving him. She calls Romeo a ”beautiful tyrant” and a ”fiend angelical”, which clearly displays her being on both sides of the fence, before she eventually realizes the reality of the situation; that death was inevitable. Maria (Rachel Zegler), like Juliet, makes it clear that she too understands that ”these violent delights have violent ends,” which would explain why she forgives Tony. Maria makes it clear that she doesn’t like Bernardo’s involvement in boxing, or his activities with the Sharks, presumably because of the danger of both. Because of the violence that was so prevalent in her brother’s life, and how twisted the feud was between the rival gangs, it’s likely she had prepared herself to a degree for something bad to happen to him. Thus, when it transpires that Tony has killed Bernardo, Maria understands both the severity of the situation and also the inevitability of it, as well as knowing that it could have easily been both of them dead. Like Juliet, she had already lost enough, and was grateful for what she still had, hence extending her forgiveness to Tony.

Maria forgiving Tony in West Side Story could be unfairly pinned down to her naivety in young love, but she understands the reality of the situation better than most others in the film. Instead of choosing to hate Tony, she understands that there was always going to be a death, and what happened to Bernardo was a tragic result of a deathly feud. Maria forgives Tony in West Side Story so as not to continue the cycle of pain.

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