55 pages • 1 hour read
Rebecca RossRuthless Vows
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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How Trauma Shapes Identity
In Ruthless Vows, memories and wounds are heavily intertwined, suggesting the life-altering and sometimes identity-forming stories that scars represent. When Iris wonders about Roman’s survival, Forest draws on his personal experience of Dacre to conclude that the god is likely “healing [Roman’s] wounds, stripping away all the connections he once had. Connections like Roman’s family, his life in Oath, the things he once dreamed of” (25). In other words, as Dacre heals Roman’s wounds, he steals his memories. This epitomizes the broader relationship between selfhood and remembered pain in Ruthless Vows: To erase one is to erase the other.
Moreover, the novel suggests that such erasure is not truly possible, as even after Roman is healed by Dacre, his scars remain. Upon waking in the under realm, Roman studies the scars on his right leg and traces them “as if they were routes on a map” (33). This metaphorical map in his scars ultimately provides the path back to Iris. This is evidenced in the article that Roman begins to write and scraps:
I don’t know what else fuels me to keep rising at dawn and continuing forward other than this: there is […] a story hiding in my scars. One that whispers to me, even though I have yet to fully capture the words.
‘You should be buried in a grave,’ the world says, so loudly it drowns out all other sound.
And yet I press my fingers to the scars in my skin—soft, tender, warm as the blood beneath—and I hear, […] ‘There is someone who has kept you here, breathing, moving, living’ (48).
Though Roman has been told that Dacre saved him from death at Avalon Bluff, Roman’s scars urge him to remember (or write) a different story—a story in which his love for Iris saves him from a lifetime in oblivious servitude of Dacre. The passage also highlights scars’ significance as symbols of survival, providing another angle on their relationship to identity. The dead do not form scars, so their presence implies a literal and figurative continuity of existence: The person who received the scars is still there.
Forest’s experience with his scars evidences the same theme. In a letter to Iris that is found after his death, Forest admits to seeing the doctor like she asked him to. Though he previously refused to do so because he was ashamed of his scars, he came to realize that there was “no need for [him] to be afraid to tell the doctor the true story of what happened to [him]” (408). In overcoming this shame, Forest accepts the stories behind his scars, which helped create the person he is—the man Sarah Prindle falls in love with.
Pain’s Necessity to Healing
In tandem with its exploration of how trauma influences identity, the novel suggests that healing cannot occur without the presence of pain. When Dacre heals soldiers, he takes away both their pain and their memories. Roman intuitively understands this; when he first studies his scars, he “presse[s] hard against their soft marks, hoping pain [will] help him remember” (33). No pain or memories come, and without understanding what has been fundamentally broken in his life, Roman cannot begin the process of mending it. Dacre’s obsession with asking Roman about his wounds underscores the necessity of pain as a signal that something is amiss. When Dacre repeatedly asks Roman if the pain in his wounds has returned, Roman wonders why they would hurt when Dacre has claimed to heal him—the answer being that the underlying problem remains unaddressed, which Dacre hopes Roman will not realize.
What is true of Roman’s physical wounding and pain is also true of less tangible forms of suffering and trauma. When Iris steals the last Alouette typewriter from the museum, she reads a letter that Alouette wrote that states, “The magic still gathers, and the past is gilded; I see the beauty in what has been but only because I have tasted both sorrow and joy in equal measures” (63). The quote references how facing the pain as well as the pleasure of one’s past can allow an individual to experience the full beauty of the present. Roman experiences this when he sees Iris and “the pain and discomfort of Roman’s wounds […] fully return[] with his memories” (187). Though the pain of his old wounds comes flooding back alongside his memories, Roman feels as though he’s “being set loose from a gilded cage” (215). Though he has new pain to withstand, he now has the freedom to do something about it.
In the days after Roman retrieves his memories, he finds himself turning to his typewriter to exorcise his thoughts. One letter contains an illuminating passage in which Roman says, “Dacre claims he healed me that day in the Bluff. He claims that I could live forever at his side, if only I remain faithful to him. And yet my memories suggest otherwise, and what I’m feeling in my body is a testament that I’m not fully mended” (187). Roman goes on to say that Dacre deceived him and so many others by “making [them] believe [they] are whole and mended when he has intentionally left pieces of [them] broken so [they] remain close to his side. Submissive and obedient to what he wants” (188). The imprisonment and servitude that Roman and many others face following Dacre’s “healing” underscore that simply ignoring one’s suffering is not a long-term solution but a Band-Aid over a gaping wound.
What Is Versus What Could Have Been
Many characters voice “what ifs” or “what could have beens” due to unease or unhappiness with the current state of their personal lives and the wider world. While Dacre is the antagonist of the novel, he does voice the novel’s basic stance on this theme: “Do we live by our past, or do we live by what is to come? Do we choose to waste time looking behind to things that have already happened and cannot be changed, or do we keep our sight forward on what we can see?” (55). Many characters fall victim to living by their past rather than looking forward. More often than not, however, these characters decide that accepting and improving reality is more productive than focusing on what might have been.
Iris’s character arc centers heavily on this realization. Initially, Iris obsesses over what she could have done differently in Avalon Bluff rather than accepting her current separation from Roman and actively working to remedy it. In the letters to Roman that she never sends, she says that she’s “becoming a girl made of regrets” and remarks, “I wish that I had never let go of your hand that day. I should have stayed at your side when we were trying to help the soldiers on the hill. I should have refused to let the gas come between us. I should have known my brother wasn’t you” (21). Preoccupied with second-guessing her past decisions, she fails to live in the moment and accept the current reality. At the start of the novel, Iris “[sleeps] but she [doesn’t] dream […] as if she [doesn’t] know how to move forward” (13). The passage suggests a distinction between different kinds of “dreaming” or fantasizing: a backward-looking kind that is futile and a forward-looking kind that can actually change reality for the better. For all that she wishes her circumstances were otherwise, Iris has yet to “dream” in a way that might actually lead to change.
In the latter half of the novel, however, her viewpoint changes. Rather than play the game of what if, Roman claims not to want to change a thing “because if he could, would the two of them still be here, bound together by vow and trial and love that had crept up on him like ivy on stone?” (235). Similarly, Iris decides never to think of what could have been after Dacre offers her a position as his correspondent. Dacre implies that not working for him will be a “what could have been” that will haunt Iris for the rest of her life, but Iris does not agree, and her relative happiness as the novel ends implies that she was correct.
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By Rebecca Ross
