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.