71 pages • 2 hours read
Tamsyn MuirHarrow the Ninth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Coping With Grief
Harrow’s inability to work through her grief causes her problems within the novel. Her grief also allows for a purposefully confusing second-person narration and an atemporal ordering of the chapters. The framework of the novel is a vehicle for conveying Harrow’s inability to cope with Gideon’s loss. While Harrow takes place within a sweeping, epic space opera series spanning empires, solar systems, and the afterlife, Harrow is ultimately a classic representation of the literary conflict “human versus self.”
An inability to cope with grief is presented as a common trait among Lyctors. Although the other Lyctors have consumed their cavaliers’ souls, their lack of healthy coping mechanisms shows in their behaviors and words. Mercy and Augustine are incapable of coming to terms with the atrocities they’ve committed, especially upon discovering that John lied to them about the necessity of their cavaliers’ deaths. They conspire to overthrow him and put an end to the entirety of the Nine Houses because of it. Additionally, their grief shows through their attitudes regarding their late cavaliers; Mercy is extremely touchy when Cristabel is brought up, though she repeatedly weaponizes Cristabel’s memory herself. Ianthe similarly fails to cope with Coronabeth’s loss; she rejects the idea that Coronabeth is dead.
Harrow’s refusal to accept Gideon’s loss goes beyond denial as Harrow takes extreme actions to protect Gideon’s soul from herself. When Harrow recovers her memories of Gideon, Magnus tells her plainly: “This whole thing happened because you wouldn’t face up to Gideon dying. […] She died. She can’t come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can’t look at” (439). Harrow’s entire convoluted plan was concocted to avoid the very facts that Magnus lays out for her. He tells her that she is holding on to her grief like he held on to a “ripped-up corner of card” from when Abigail first broke up with him as teenagers (440). He urges her to let go so that she can begin to accept reality. Magnus’s adult wisdom is vital to Harrow, who is a teenager who has never been taught how to cope with loss. This has been true since she was a child: Harrow’s parents were cold and distant from her, and their deaths came as a result of her actions. Harrow, a brilliant necromancer deeply entrenched in ideas of responsibility due to her role as Reverend Daughter, controlled their corpses to hide their deaths from the rest of the Ninth House. Gideon’s death marks the first time Harrow must deal with grief, as she lacks the power to save and resurrect Gideon, the only person who has ever truly been close to her.
Harrow’s grief is brought to readers through Gideon’s point of view. Before the reveal of Gideon as the narrator in Chapter 44, Gideon’s presence shows through her word choice and diction. At the beginning of Chapter 20, Gideon poses the rhetorical question: “What fitting epigraph for your [Harrow’s] bones?” (182). She answers herself: “Here lies the world’s most insufferable witch,” reflecting Gideon’s sense of humor, irreverence, and complicated feelings about Harrow (182). Gideon is present within the most minute details of the narration, including the adjectives used to describe Harrow. Gideon’s narration represents the divide between her and Harrow: While Gideon witnesses the trauma that her death has caused, she is permanently separated from Harrow and unable to help her. This narrative structure symbolizes the chasm that grief often opens in a grieving individual.
When Harrow finally reconciles with her grief and decides to return to her body, Gideon no longer narrates her actions. The novel returns to the third-person limited narration established in Gideon the Ninth while Gideon narrates her own actions in Harrow’s body aboard the Mithraeum. Gideon’s loss of access to Harrow’s thoughts is symbolic of what should have occurred when Harrow first became a Lyctor; Harrow has reconciled with her grief and has let go of the “ripped-up corner of card” of Gideon (440).
Lost Childhood
The foundational force of Harrow’s grief intensifies the lack of childhood that both she and Gideon experienced. Harrow often mistakes her acute intelligence and prodigious expertise in bone necromancy for maturity. Harrow believes she is cunning and a master manipulator, ergo she is an adult. Gideon’s death reveals her inadequacies and inability to deal with adult stressors in a healthy, productive way.
Since childhood, Harrow was responsible for an entire aristocratic house. She also believes that she is the cause of her parents’ deaths, as they died by suicide because of the rule she broke despite her being a child at the time. Harrow takes a great deal of responsibility onto herself because she is taught from a young age that she must, and as a result, she tries to exert rigid control over everything in life. In Harrow, that control is taken from her, which is paired with a forced confrontation of her lost childhood.
Harrow first faces her lost childhood with John when she tells him about the mass infanticide that led to her birth. For the first time, she confesses the truth of her perceived identity, and she receives forgiveness and absolution for it. John shifts from her untouchable deity to a father figure to Harrow. This binds her to him in a personal way, removed from the trappings of religion. However, Harrow does not truly begin to contemplate and accept her lost innocence until she speaks to Ortus after regaining her memories.
Ortus is Harrow’s last connection to the Ninth House and her childhood; everybody else is either dead or inaccessible to her. Ortus’s apology absolves Harrow of the weight she has placed on her own shoulders over the years. When Harrow and Ortus reconcile within the River pocket dimension, Ortus tells her:
I am so sorry, Harrowhark. I am sorry for everything […] I am sorry for what they did […] I am sorry that I was no kind of cavalier to you. I was so much older, and too selfish to take responsibility […]. I should have offered help. I should have died for you. Gideon should still be alive. I was, and am, a grown man, and you both were neglected children (383).
Ortus’s age and his identity as her “failed” cavalier place him in the role of a surrogate parent for Harrow, one who failed her. Harrow’s catharsis comes when she rejects old-Harrow’s first instinct of pushing Ortus away and loathing his show of vulnerability. Harrow’s acceptance of his comfort and his hug is a watershed moment in her journey to reconcile with her grief. By placing Harrow’s turning point in her grief-acceptance journey in a conversation that revolves around her childhood, Muir suggests that Harrow’s dysfunctional reaction to her grief is deeply rooted in her upbringing and lack thereof.
Harrow’s lost childhood, further amplified by the loss of Gideon, leaves her unable to understand the reminiscence of the other people aboard the Mithraeum. John, Augustine, Duty, Mercy, and even Ianthe often talk about people they have loved and lost and memories from before their time as Lyctors. John, Augustine, Duty, and Mercy often talk about their cavaliers, reference life in the 21st century, and needle one another with inside jokes and old wounds. Ianthe often talks about Coronabeth and Naberius in circuitous ways. Harrow, out of the entire crew, has nothing to reference or talk about outside of confessing her sins to John. Harrow’s experience of neglect as a child shows through her inability to reminisce about, think about, or share her past with others aboard the ship. Harrow mistakes this as a virtue and part of her secrecy and paranoia, while Gideon calls it “blood-minded composure” (51). Harrow’s inability to join in banter or connect to her past like the other Lyctors symbolizes the loss of her childhood through neglect.
Part of Gideon and Harrow’s complicated bond comes from the fact that they only had each other for company as children. Like Harrow, Gideon lost her childhood—however, she had the opposite experience of heavy responsibility, as she didn’t embody any of the qualities of an obedient Ninth House disciple. Gideon’s childhood was filled with abuse, punishment, and scorn from Harrow and almost every adult around them. Gideon was raised as an orphan and an outsider and was repeatedly robbed of her autonomy, even throughout her time as Harrow’s cavalier. In Harrow, Gideon is very abruptly confronted with the truth of her parentage—only to immediately lose her mother again, learn unpleasant truths about her father (who is God), and face almost inevitable death.
Where Harrow gets parental guidance from John, Ortus, and Magnus, Gideon only gets a brief exchange with Pyrrha, who had initially believed she was Gideon’s biological parent. Pyrrha exhibits parental care when she guides Gideon toward their possible choices, even though those choices are, essentially, just different forms of death. Gideon’s fate is left unclear, as is whether or not she will embark on her own journey to acknowledge and heal from her lost childhood.
Religion and Cycles of Violence
While the first two themes are about Harrow’s personal journey, Religion and Cycles of Violence is part of a broader web of themes woven throughout the Locked Tomb series. Muir, who grew up as a closeted lesbian in a conservative and religious community, explores religion and devotion vis a vis human conflict and cycles of violence throughout the Locked Tomb. Religion, violence, and devotion are interwoven and inseparable within the Locked Tomb series: John destroys the entire world in order to remake it and found a new religion, while the gruesome events of Gideon and Harrow occur precisely because of the devotion given to the Nine Houses religion. The act of becoming a Lyctor is itself religious devotion that demands great sacrifice and violence in the consumption of another person’s soul. Gideon explored the consequences of religious devotion for Cytherea the First, one of the religion’s exalted disciples. Harrow turns to the purpose of religious devotion in less grandiose people: Newly minted Lyctors reeling from the grief caused in Canaan House. Harrow, who has devoted her life to the Nine Houses and her House out of a sense of religious duty, must confront the banality of God and the meaning of sacredness in her newfound position as a Saint.
Religious devotion allows Harrow to lose her ego in something larger than herself. Gideon comments that “Your love for God was like those moments of reprieve, immediately after waking, when you were not sure who you were” (285). Harrow’s faith allows her to lose herself while she is committing mass ecocide and killing a planet to starve the Resurrection Beast that is hunting John and the Lyctors. Muir juxtaposes the literal world-ending violence of Harrow’s devotion against the ego-effacing effects of her devotion in order to highlight the extreme ends of religious devotion. The mass ecocide required by the religion of the Nine Houses partly fuels the unending war between the Nine Houses and the other remnants of humanity, like the Blood of Eden.
The Houses display an imperialistic attitude toward the rest of humanity that reflects their ecocidal-religious relationship with planets and their resources. If devotion to the Emperor excuses ecocide, then devotion to the Emperor also excuses the imperialist takeover of planets not originally under the Nine Houses. Religious devotion is both a harbor for the individual and a carte blanche for terrible crimes in Harrow the Ninth.
Individual people are not exempt from the bloody requirements of necromantic religion. In addition to Lyctorhood requiring the death and consumption of a necromancer’s cavalier, Harrow and Gideon are both evidence of the extreme violence tied to their religion. Hundreds of children were sacrificed for Harrow to be born powerful, a fact that haunts Harrow and dictates much of her actions and self-perception. Gideon herself was repeatedly intended to be a sacrifice: She was also meant to die for Harrow’s creation, but did not, likely because she is John’s biological child. Gideon was specifically born to be the catalyst for the conspiracy against John; however, the conspiracy would have required her death. Ironically, the only thing that saves her is more violence: the death of her mother.
The overarching conspiracy plot also exists within the context of this theme. Augustine and Mercy’s conspiracy is born from their grief over the atrocities they have committed. However, they feel that the only solution is John’s death and the total extermination of the Nine Houses. Although they are attempting to put an end to the war and atone—in a way—for their unforgivable actions, they believe they can only do so through further violence, which perpetuates the cycle.
