Retributive and Restorative Justice in Kristin Cashore's Graceling Trilogy

Kristin Cashore's young adult fantasy Graceling trilogy (2008–2012) explores issues of agency, consent, and sexual assault both in the personal lives of its main characters and in the fantastic powers of its villains. Cansrel and Leck, the two main villains, are frightening not just because of what they do, but also because of what they can make others do. In a post from her blog, Cashore describes their particular brand of malice as "a kind of evil, embodied in powerful men, that allows them to magically manipulate innocent people into believing lies. The innocent people, stuck in their mental fog of lies, are then convinced to perform acts of selfdamage and damage to others. The mental fog makes it impossible for the victims to see the truth of who the bad people actually are and what is actually going on."¹ Though Cashore's trilogy predates the widespread rise of the #MeToo moment,² these villains are particularly resonant in a world in which men assault and violate women, lie about it, and almost always escape unscathed because no one believes their victims. As Cashore reveals in "Brother Cansrel, Father Leck," that resonance is not coincidental: her "experience of a Catholic upbringing and education" in which she "spent [her] entire adolescence trying to get the adults in [her] life to see that some of the religious leaders around [her] were bad people, and that the Catholic institution—misogynistic, homophobic, sexually repressed, and tyrannical in its power structure—supported their abuse"³ inspired Cansrel and Leck's creation.⁴

Cashore's Graceling trilogy is not just about defeating the evil that Cansrel and Leck represent. At the start of Fire⁵ (2009) and Bitterblue⁶ (2012)—the second and third installments in the trilogy—Cansrel and Leck, the most menacing threats of each novel, respectively, have already been killed.⁷ Thus, Fire and Bitterblue deal less with overcoming evil than with surviving its aftermath. In other words, Cashore's trilogy concerns itself just as much with the possibilities for healing and justice once its villains are dead as with the injustice they embody and enact. By basing the powers of her villains on the violation and elimination of consent, Cashore goes straight to the question that ideologies of restorative justice have the most trouble answering: what do we do with those who harm others? How do we create systemic change that helps a society recover from that kind of large-scale harm? In the United States and around the world, although the #MeToo movement has brought similar large-scale harm to light, the question of how to create systemic change that holds those guilty of sexual assault accountable, helps survivors heal, and prevents the perpetuation of harm remains unanswered. Cashore's characters tackle similar questions as the events of Fire and Bitterblue illustrate the possibilities and limitations of retributive and restorative justice, respectively, in the personal lives of the main characters, the political arenas of their kingdoms, and in their prisons.

Justice in Young Adult Literature

Sexual assault is the subject of a number of young adult novels, perhaps most (in)famously Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak,⁸ and as such, has been addressed by a number of critics. In particular, Roberta Seelinger Trites⁹ and Lydia Kokkola¹⁰ have both addressed young adult sexuality and sexual assault in their recent works. However, though these critics often connect sexual assault to patriarchy, rape culture, and the boundary between childhood and adulthood, they otherwise don't often examine how one might find justice on a systemic scale once that kind of harm has occurred. In addition, critics tend to focus on realist novels, overlooking depictions of sexual assault in young adult fantasy. Because many young adult texts about sexual violence go so far as to exclude the rapist from the narrative, they "lack an appropriate outlet for blame and therefore create rape spaces of female bodies."¹¹ That focus on the female body of the victim prevents larger engagement with the culture that makes sexual assault possible on...