71 pages • 2 hours read
Kim LiggettThe Grace Year
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A 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
The Use of Religion as a Weapon Against Women
The Grace Year is a story of sexism, brutality, and the dehumanization of young women in a fictional society. Garner County may not be real, but the issues Liggett tackles have very heavy real-world implications. As the world evolves, discussions around misogyny, gender roles, and sexual manipulation are ever-changing. While religion can be fulfilling to those who choose to practice it, it is often brought into these discussions as a trump card meant to shut down ideas of progress and equality. In The Grace Year, Liggett demonstrates how religion is weaponized to keep women of all ages in a position of subservience and enforce inequality in a society.
In Garner County, women are valued for one thing only: their ability to bear sons. Tierney remembers the day she had her first bleed and how it was a “heavy reminder of [her] place in this world” (271). The men use the Bible to remind women that their bodies have a divine purpose: to grow babies for their husbands. In church on Sundays, the preacher calls women “the weaker sex,” and this idea is “pounded into [the women]” along with a regular reminder that “everything’s Eve’s fault” (14). By repeating this idea that women are responsible for the fall of mankind, the men in Garner County believe they have successfully indoctrinated the women to believe that they must make themselves small, quiet, and submissive to make up for their supposed sins.
With indoctrination comes a heavy degree of control. The men in Garner County dictate every detail of the women’s lives: how they wear their hair, how they pray, and even how they sleep. The women are forbidden from praying in silence because the men think they will hide their magic. The control is so severe that the women aren’t even allowed to dream, which hints that the men are not only attempting to control the women’s actions: They also want to control their subconscious thoughts. The girls have no say in who they will marry, and Tierney refers to the idea of marriage as wearing “padded shackles [...] but shackles nonetheless” (10). Tierney longs to be single and live a life unattached to a man, but after the Veiling ceremony, she is forced to face the fact that her entire future just changed “because a boy claimed it so” (49).
The men of Garner County view women and girls as objects to be used, collected, and claimed rather than as actual humans with thoughts and feelings. This unnerving degree of sexualization can be seen when Tierney walks through the market at the beginning of the novel. Men like Tommy Pearson, Father Edmonds, and even some of the older men like Mr. Fallow stare at her and make comments about her young body. The men will gather in the barn that day to “trade and barter [the girls’] fates like cattle” (8). This comparison to livestock continues when Tierney adds that all girls are “branded at birth on the bottom of [their] foot with [their] father’s sigil” (8). Even the term “poachers” emphasizes the idea that the girls are treated like animals—prey to be captured. They are dehumanized because of their “magic,” which the men also blame for their wandering eyes and lustful thoughts. Ryker explains that things are no better for the women in the outskirts because while the women of Garner County are “vessels for sons,” the women of the outskirts are “vessels for [the men’s] desire. Their rage” (243). No matter where the women live in Liggett’s fictional world, they cannot escape the will of the men in their lives, who lord over them with an Old Testament view on shame and punishment.
The indoctrination of the people of Garner County occurs at varying levels among the characters. Some, like Tierney and Ryker, are skeptical; they have been raised on these ideas, but as soon as they discover evidence that disproves them—like the hemlock silt in the camp well—they stand by the truth. Other characters, like Kiersten, Hans, and Anders, are fully convinced of everything they have been taught. They genuinely believe that the women possess magic and that they deserve to suffer in order to be purged of their innate evil. Kiersten weaponizes religion during the grace year in order to assert herself as an authority figure and exert control, while Hans and Anders use their beliefs as reason to attack and kill the girls.
Tierney comes to realize that it is actually safer for those who oppose the system to use it to their advantage. The poachers’ fear of the girls’ magic prevents them from breaking into the camp and slaughtering them all, Michael’s status as a powerful man allows him to save her life and to burn the cabinet of grace year girl body parts, and her own mother’s apparent subservience enables her to lead a secret resistance movement. These small efforts build up, and though religion is still weaponized and the women of Garner County are still oppressed by the end of the book, Tierney’s dreams of her daughter imply that change, and freedom, are coming.
Rebellion and Resistance to Tradition
Within the realm of dystopian fiction, rebellion and resistance against the powers that be are to be expected. When a society is actively harming its citizens with tyrannical rules, a hero will rise up to challenge the status quo. However, as Liggett demonstrates in The Grace Year, rebellion is not always a one-time defiance of the rules. Sometimes rebellions are a series of slow, small adjustments, gradually changing a society’s way of thinking over years or even generations.
Tierney compares herself to a river clam pearl. She calls herself a “tiny bit of irritant that worked its way into the soft tissue of the county” (62). Pearls can take years to form, and Tierney, who is strongly opposed to being trapped in marriage, has spent her own years establishing herself as a rebel. Still, Tierney’s love for her family prevents her from acting too wild before she leaves for her grace year. The longer Tierney is away from the county, the more she finds herself engaging in small acts of defiance that go against what she has been taught.
In the encampment, Kiersten serves as the prophetic voice upholding the traditions of the grace year and the county way of life, but Tierney is the voice of logic, reason, and, indirectly, revolution. When Tierney tries to change things too fast, Kiersten turns the other girls against her, and Tierney is chased out of the camp. When Tierney returns to the camp months later, she tries a different approach. Slowly, she plays along with the girls’ delusions of ghosts and magic, and over time, she works change in slowly and safely until the girls start to align with her way of thinking instead of Kiersten’s. By the end of the grace year, the encampment looks completely different from when the girls arrived, and Tierney hopes that “[w]hen [the people of the county] see [the girls] marching home, they’ll know change is in the air” (364).
Ryker and Michael are also symbols of rebellion. As Tierney’s love interests, they share similarities: Both men love her free spirit and respect her defiance of tradition. At first, Tierney believes that Michael is just like the other men in town; despite his insistence of good intentions, she fears that he will expect her to become a typical bride. It is only after the grace year that she learns Michael is the same man he always was: honest, respectful, and just as devoted to change as she is. Ryker is similarly different from his peers; he admits that he has never killed a grace year girl, even though doing so would net him enough money to free his mother and sisters from their hard lives on the outskirts. Ryker’s death is a symbol of the risks that come with resistance; though the incident is orchestrated by Anders and meant to target Tierney, Ryker would not have lost his life had he and Tierney not chosen to break tradition and run away.
Over the course of the book, Tierney is surprised to learn that small acts of rebellion have been happening all around her. June sews seeds into Tierney’s cloak, secretly providing her with extra food. Her father, who she assumed was visiting sex workers, treats the people in the outskirts and talks to poachers. Tierney’s mother, who Tierney always judged for her compliance, holds secret gatherings with the county women in the woods. Tierney admits that it’s “not the rebellion of [her] dreams,” but “maybe it’s the start of something… something bigger than [them]selves” (379). Change is happening quietly in Garner County, but it will take more than one determined girl with an impassioned speech to end the grace year.
Inner Evil and Going Wild
In William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, a group of young British schoolboys are trapped on a tropical island after a plane crash, and they slowly descend into chaos and violence as their attempt at civilization collapses. For years, scholars and readers have discussed The Lord of the Flies and the idea of girls being trapped on the island instead of boys. In The Grace Year, Liggett shows that the evil and darkness within the girls is mostly a product of misogyny: In a world where women are pitted against one another by the whims of men, they turn on each other with wild intensity when given a chance to give in to their basest instincts and hurt one another without repercussions.
As the guards take the grace year girls deeper into the woods, the forest becomes denser, thicker, and wilder. The woods are more untamed than Garner County, and this change of scenery signals a shift in the girls as well. Tierney worries that the girls will “rip each other to shreds, like a pack of outskirt dogs” away from the influence of the county (47), and this fear is confirmed when the girls immediately start fighting over bags of food upon their arrival. When the girls’ menstrual cycles sync up in the midst of an increase in “dizzy spells, loss of appetite” and “double vision” (134), she compares them to “a pack of wolves” (134). Any semblance of civilization quickly begins to break down in the camp. Spurred on by Kiersten’s promises of magic and power and poisoned by hemlock silt in the well, the girls grow violent and feral, turning on each other without hesitation. Tierney is quickly driven out of the camp for her refusal to take part, but before she flees past the gate, she spots the girls “dancing wildly” and “covering themselves in mud and snow” during a storm (193).
When Tierney returns from her banishment months later, she finds the camp overwhelmed with “[u]rine, disease, rot, and filth” (280), signifying that no attempt at civility has been made in her absence. The girls, of course, do not know that there is hemlock silt in the water, and Tierney’s improvement after spending time away from camp seems to imply that they, too, will improve with treatment. However, even after she spends months trying to help the girls purge the hallucinogenic water from their systems, little changes; Tierney cannot understand why they are “still behaving like wild animals” (321).
Even more alarming than the girls’ animalistic tendencies is their deep propensity for violence against one another. Tierney sees hints of this sadistic behavior emerging in the church: “women comparing the length of their braids, reveling in another woman’s punishment, scheming and clawing for every inch of position” (47). In the encampment, Kiersten becomes the epicenter of violence and sadism, and under her leadership, the punishment tree becomes “bloated with new trinkets” (280). When Tierney asks Ryker how the poachers manage to lure the girls out, Ryker replies that the poachers don’t have to do anything at all: The girls turn on each other, and the poachers simply wait to finish the job. Tierney realizes that the girls hurt each other “because it’s the only way [they’re] permitted to show [their] anger” after years of being conditioned to be submissive and compliant (344). The girls’ anger and darkness come from having no control over their own lives, and they are scrambling to take back power in whatever form they can find.
