Where Sleeping Girls Lie

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, death, racism, death by suicide, abuse, substance use, mental illness, rape, sexual harassment, and sexual violence.

Where Sleeping Girls Lie is a story about how often people in power have almost unchecked ability to control and abuse those beneath them. Alfred Nobel Academy is rife with patriarchal ideals, rape culture, and sexual harassment hidden under tight layers of silence, secrets, and the perceived need to adhere to tradition. This abuse is born from and sustained by a long legacy of misogyny and patriarchy that has shaped the school as well as Western culture more broadly. It has become so normalized over the years that it is almost invisible.

ANA is an elite boarding school that remains covered in signs of the patriarchal masculinity that shaped it. The school, for example, is named after “an old white guy” who “was not that fond of women or people of color” (10), and his statue still graces the campus. Likewise, many of the school’s rooms and houses are also named “after dead white men” (59), suggesting ANA has made no effort to reckon with or understand the consequences of this legacy. Slowly, some students are beginning to challenge the school’s tendency to glorify problematic figures, such as members of Franklin House vandalizing Benjamin Franklin’s portrait and “rejecting” the house being named after a known “misogynist.” Despite isolated incidents of rebellion, the institution itself is committed to maintaining the status quo, willfully turning a blind eye to the incidents of sexual harassment and abuse that are commonplace.

This legacy of misogynistic dominance persists with an unbridled sense of entitlement among ANA’s male student body and the institution’s special treatment of their “golden boys”: wealthy, handsome, athletic boys from well-connected families that all but rule the school. They are “boys with everything,” dangerous “because even the moon, the skies, and the earth could not sate them” (372). They have always been given special treatment and believe they deserve it. This sense of entitlement often manifests as blatant sexism and the mistreatment and abuse of their female classmates. Jude Ripley’s reputation as a rapist is an open secret at ANA. He has abused and threatened countless girls, yet he remains protected by the institutional privilege appointed to him by his race, gender, and socioeconomic position. Even when girls try to report him, the school not only sides with Jude but threatens girls like Elizabeth with retribution.

Sade and Persephone’s first attempt to expose the harmful and sexist Fishermen chat is largely a failure. The school is more concerned with punishing the students responsible for exposing “the private lives of the boys at [ANA]” rather than punishing the boys themselves (379). However, Sade and Persephone refuse to concede and admit to being powerless. They turn NotSoNoble into a place where survivors can share their stories, taking control of their own narrative and seeing that they are not alone. While many of the boys still don’t face significant consequences, the girls feel they have at least broken through the silence and secrecy that allows sexual violence and harassment to proliferate unchecked.