The Conditions of Will

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of rape, sexual violence, emotional abuse, anti-gay bias, cursing, and child abandonment.

Georgia Carter’s return to her hometown compels her to finally confront her past and begin to heal from her trauma. Ten years before the narrative present, Georgia’s parents Margaret and Will send her away to London, England, because they believe she had sex with her sister’s boyfriend, Beckett. In reality, Beckett sexually assaulted Georgia repeatedly for a year—abuse Maryanne knew about and did nothing. This past trauma establishes the stakes for Georgia’s return to Okatie, South Carolina, for her father’s funeral. Just driving up to her childhood home forces her to face the pain she’s been compartmentalizing throughout her life in London. Through Georgia’s first-person perspective, Hastings emphasizes that when she ignores her past trauma it “lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive [or] hides under the pews in the back row of the church” (17), explicitly tying Georgia’s psychological and emotional pain to the physical spaces of her childhood. Because she hasn’t confronted the past, she can’t fully move beyond her trauma.

Hastings shifts between the narrative present and Georgia’s childhood flashbacks to illustrate the ways the trauma of Georgia’s past informs her perspectives and relationships in the present. These temporal shifts demonstrate the ways that returning to Okatie and interacting with her estranged family bring Georgia’s traumatic memories to the fore of her mind. While remembering the abuse she suffered remains painful for Georgia, the act of remembering gradually leads her to understanding, reconciliation, and renewal over the course of her arc. Surrounded by the sights, sounds, and faces that defined her past life, Georgia finds herself revisiting her trauma and making sense of it in a concerted manner. Her reflections on Beckett’s sexual abuse capture her attempts to process her trauma:

This all of course took place during that horrible age where expressed and/or obvious consent was really emphasized, and I think what happened to me dwelled in neither the black nor the white. There wasn’t language for that at the time—but I believe now ‘gray rape’ is the umbrella term—to help us wade through nuances and conversationally facilitate the complexities of what Ashley C. Ford so aptly refers to as the ‘spectrum of harm’ (154).

In this passage, Georgia exhibits her interrogative and reflective tendencies, characterizing her as thoughtful and self-aware. She considers the circumstances of her past, incorporates its social context, and applies what she’s learned since to her trauma to actively understand her experiences. Georgia’s journey from avoidance to healing requires her to first acknowledge the abuse she suffered and then own the truth of her experience to her family. By telling her siblings and mother what happened to her, she takes a step toward reclaiming control of her narrative even though doing so forces her to own her pain as well.

Hastings frames the trauma of Georgia’s abuse as inherently entangled with her complicated grief over her father’s death. As Georgia internally processes her past rape, she’s also on an external mission to uncover the secrets her father kept. As a result, she experiences “a curious form of grief […] emerging within [her]” as she mourns the father she didn’t have, the father she didn’t know, and the relationship they might have had under different circumstances (451). Mourning her father in the present becomes inextricably connected to mourning the family and childhood she was forced to leave behind all those years prior. This grief is vital to Georgia’s healing process. Once she fully confronts her pain she can let go of her past and create a new future for herself.