67 pages • 2-hour read
The Ritual: A Dark College Romance
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Themes
The Price of Power
Content Warning: This guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of sexual offenses and sexual violence, sexism and sexist slurs, stalking, graphic gun violence and torture, and drug and alcohol use disorders. This guide also refers to the novel’s explicit depictions of sexual practices, including ones that mimic acts of sexual violence. Examples include consenting nonconsent or prearranged “rape” fantasies (the text uses the term “forced sex” fantasy, which is replicated in this guide), breath play/erotic asphyxiation, and degradation during sex. In addition, The Ritual features scenarios that it frames as “dubious consent” or “dubcon,” which are controversial terms developed in fanfiction communities to refer to supposed instances of questionable consent.
In The Ritual, power is seductive. The Lords will pay any cost to have it: Initiates kill and torture for the right to be included among the Lords, a position that guarantees professional and financial success. Yet the novel’s presentation of whether these acts are a true cost of power or a contrived one is ambiguous. Frequently, the novel suggests that the so-called “price” of power is just a way to keep its members in line, making power the purview of the Lords in a manner that is distinct from the power of its individual members.
The novel presents the Lords as so powerful that nobody, not even their members, can control them. This raises the question of what exactly “the Lords” is, if not an amalgamation of its members. The novel does not provide an answer, which implies that part of the group’s power lies in this mystery. If neither rebels against the Lords’ rules (like Matt) nor those who obey those rules diligently (like Ryat and his friends) understand who constitutes this nexus of power, they have no recourse in the face of the Lords’ demands: They obey or die. “The Lords” thus occupies a godlike position, holding inexhaustible power and demanding continual payment from its followers. This payment (of loyalty, service, etc.) ultimately reinforces the power of the group, as members are susceptible both to the potential vengeance of other Lords (who will act against individual members to reassert their loyalty to the group) and to blackmail (for the illegal and immoral deeds those members did in service to the Lords). The cycle repeats: The members forfeit their own power and autonomy to feed the group.
Lords members, however, also gain some power from their membership in this shadowy organization. If they survive the payments they must make to the group, they enjoy professional success and financial rewards. However, the novel isn’t clear that the price the individual members pay is worth what they gain in return. All the members who are tapped to join the Lords are already rich. They already have every opportunity to find financial and professional success and may lead productive, comfortable lives even if they do not go to Barrington—as Blakely longed to do and as two of her children consider doing in the E3pilogues. The novel thus suggests that the price that the Lords members pay for power is not a fair exchange and is a trade that may only exist in their minds. While individual members may see their loyalty as payment for the rewards of Lords’ membership, they disregard the novel’s framing that they sacrifice far more power (in terms of their own freedom) than they gain.
Desire to Feel Desired
During the years she spends dating Matt, Blakely agonizes over the thought that he does not desire her. Her assumption that Matt’s preference for abstinence is about her desirability rather than Matt’s private feelings about sex and sexuality stems partly from the plot. Blakely does not know what Matt is thinking because he hasn’t told her; he remains secretive about the Lords and their order that initiates remain abstinent, and the effects of his reticence introduce the novel’s moral stance against secrecy in romantic relationships.
However, Blakely’s belief also reflects the novel’s unspoken assumptions—specifically, its gender essentialist position on sex. Blakely implicitly rejects the notion that Matt might prefer abstinence in general (rather than with her specifically), presumably because she buys into the widespread belief that boys and men are driven by sex and therefore have no reason to refuse intercourse except for the undesirability of potential partners. The novel upholds this idea, presenting three years of abstinence as a more painful dictate than the murder or torture that the Lords demands. This framing reveals the intensely heterosexist world of the Lords. In the novel’s world, men are encouraged to equate possession of women with masculinity and power, while women are taught to see their sexual desirability to men as their primary source of value.
For Blakely to feel that she lacks desirability therefore does more than grate against her own sexuality, though this is the only consequence that the novel explicitly explores. It also damages the way she has been taught to see herself; as her recollections of Valerie’s mothering indicate, she has long been encouraged to look happy and beautiful even when she is unhappy, lest someone look at her and not find her visually pleasing. For her, experiencing the desire to be desired is equivalent to experiencing the desire to matter in the only way she has been taught a woman can matter, which is why her sense that her family does not value her feeds her need to be appreciated sexually.
That Blakely feels pushed by this stinging rejection into reckless action is not a side effect of her upbringing, but the entire point. The Lords’ manipulation reaches every corner of life for those affiliated with the group. For girls and women who are identified as future “chosen ones” or Ladies, this means being taught to embrace self-worth as exclusively sexual. However, the Lords initiates’ abstinence vow takes away the women’s ability to explore that sexuality (at least with a male partner of similar socioeconomic standing—the only kind of partner their families and the novel itself would tolerate). This manipulates them into feeling unimportant—which, the novel suggests, induces them to accept the brutal pact of the “chosen ones.” Desire in the novel is therefore a fraught concept that relies upon long manipulation, sexist and gender essentialist ideology, and an antifeminist framework of women’s “value,” and while the novel itself recognizes these dynamics, it does not quite go so far as to critique them, instead encouraging readers to identify with Blakely when she finds herself sufficiently wanted by Ryat.
Familial Expectations and Individual Autonomy
Blakely’s attendance of Barrington University is not her own choice; though she wished to attend Stanford University, her parents (particularly Valerie) insisted she enroll at Barrington instead. Valerie further controls her daughter by arranging a marriage to Matt without Blakely’s consent and growing angry and violent when Blakley does not follow the path set forth for her without argument. The novel ultimately shows Valerie to be an antagonist whose control over her daughter goes too far. However, the text does not argue that familial expectations can or should be totally evaded, instead framing individual autonomy as something that must always navigate the needs of one’s family and community.
Valerie’s revelation as an antagonist is coupled with the revelation that she is not Blakely’s birth mother, effectively equating “true” parenthood with biological parenthood—the implication being that Blakely’s “real” mother would not treat her so poorly. This reflects a broader pattern: While the novel does not explicitly equate “family” with biological lineage, it nevertheless implies that the arranged connections between the Lords serve to reinforce genetic ties. This implication increases the connection between the Lords’ name and the notion of an aristocracy, in which power and authority are heritable. It is notable that Phil, Blakely’s biological father and the man who raised her, shows only limited capacity to mitigate Valerie’s machinations. While he works behind the scenes to free Blakely from the arranged marriage to Matt, he does so without ever consulting Blakely on what she wants from her life. Instead, he arranges for her to be “chosen” by Ryat, a relationship that means she will have her autonomy further undermined. The novel thus argues that while a “bad” parent manipulates and controls their child excessively, a “good” parent manipulates and controls their child “enough” but not too much.
Blakely rebels against these constraints throughout the novel but ultimately gives in to roles that have been prescribed to her. Though she cites remaining with Ryat as a choice, Ryat sees it differently, musing that he would have ignored her desire to leave him. Even the epilogues, in which Blakely looks to a future for her children separate from the Lords, are hazy on the question of how to balance individual versus familial agendas. She is opposed to one of her children wanting to join the Lords, though she does noncommittally agree to discuss the topic. Her efforts to forbid her son from joining the group suggests, however, that no matter the direction of a parent’s wants, they end up foisting those wants onto a child—something that the text wavers between framing as positive or negative.
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