#roe mallory

Sent by @novemberdecemberao3

‘It really pisses me off that Violet in RoE forgave her mother Mallory. I've had an abusive mother my entire life whose constantly tried to make it up to me, stuff like that, but the truth is, people like that don't change. It just seems really out of character for her mostly. Honestly, I just think RoE is terrible. Sorry.’

I’d like to rant about RoE’s Nana for a bit.

This isn’t the first time I’ve found her actions problematic. The entire idea of the will - including the way it attempted to push the two eldest into settling down - seemed really sketchy. Like she was forcing them into her idea of what a perfect life should be like. But Nana’s thought process was nothing new to me. As a desi (South Asian) woman, I’ve met a dozen relatives who would never fail to ask me or my friends about marriage and children from the time we turned 22. I may not agree with that mentality but I understand where it comes from. And I know how difficult it is to change.

But what she did (and didn’t do) to Violet is on another level altogether. Think about it for a sec. The deathbed scene was probably the first time Violet was seeing family in a long time. Within that time she’s had to put up with tremendous emotional abuse, bullying and belittling from Mallory. From the beginning her mother basically made it crystal clear that her own vendetta meant more to her than her daughter’s mental health. This is a child that was abruptly torn from the only people she considered family (her own cousins) - who now hate her. What’s the first thing you should be saying to that child? “I’m sorry you had to go through this, darling, you deserved better. I love you.”

What does Nana give this wounded child instead? A lecture on forgiveness and grace and being the better person. I have faced emotional abuse, from the people closest to me, and I cannot begin to explain how much damage talk of this sort does to you. I’ve heard many, many people tell me to let go, to “not be bitter”, to “forgive for your own sake, not anyone else’s”. If they really, genuinely cared about my well-being though, they would have let me forgive on MY terms, at MY pace, when *I* felt ready. You don’t rush that. That’s the way healing works.

When someone prefers to concentrate on your responses, or what you might become, rather than what you went through, it hurts. Like you wouldn’t believe. There is no acknowledgement of your trauma. There is no validation of your feelings. Just a dismissal of what it took for you to get to this point. Like it doesn’t matter. Like you don’t matter.

If this is the send off she got, why wouldn’t she be bitter??

To top it off, Nana gives Violet the equivalent of a begging bowl in her will. By forcing her into a reconciliation with her cousins before she is truly ready. This may heal the cracks in the relationship, but in Violet’s mind those cracks developed both ways. And in this task Violet seems to have to do most of the work.

If this was Violet’s task, and Nana truly wanted reconciliation, why didn’t Nana work on softening her other grandchildren towards Violet, just to make it a little easier on her? Why didn’t she leave behind a clue, a sign, SOMETHING…to make them understand where their wayward cousin was coming from? She gave them total power over Violet without any effort to change their negative view of her.

Had Dean not convinced the MC that there was more to Violet than it seemed, what was the guarantee that they would change their attitude towards her? (Yes, Violet’s attempts to sabotage their tasks didn’t help matters, but by this point she had already lost hope). Had Dean not seen her pain, her frustration, her helplessness - had he not listened to her - the cousins wouldn’t have found a way to break through her walls.

Notice how the littlest things seem so monumental to Violet? Being invited for the cousins’ parties, being made bridesmaid, being told she looks nice, an invitation to dance on the table at the club, a say in what kind of dress she would like on the MC’s wedding day. She feels flustered everytime someone so much as says a kind word to her. No one should have to scrape around this much for kindness. The only thing Violet seems to have going for her anymore is pride. For Nana to force such a person to crawl towards the cousins she distrusts and almost beg for her inheritance, is a pretty low blow, no matter how good her intentions were. Even Alex, who starts off hating Violet’s guts in Book 1, and who seems to relate to her the least, recognizes how cold this is.

I know Nana is essentially the moral compass of this book. But at this point I’d probably be happier if all the cousins said “fuck this shit Nana” and tossed that darn will into the ocean.

Throughout RoE, all of us have been allowed the space to hate Violet. Loathe her. See her as the enemy. Because her attempts to sabotage are set in the mould of “this is the cousin who hates you and could probably gain an advantage by screwing with your plans to get the inheritance”. The story gives us the space to acknowledge that her actions are bad, that their impact is negative - not slap us with a sob story so we are forced to rush to her aid.

It isn’t until the second book that Violet’s history becomes clear to us, and by then we have already spent a significant amount of time seeing her as the enemy. Having Jess walk in on Violet’s conversation with Mallory gives us no more than a tiny glimpse of their dynamic, establish that they don’t entirely see eye-to-eye and provides hints that Mallory does bully her. It doesn’t make us entirely pity her. We are eased into Violet’s situation bit by bit, hint by hint. Dean the bartender doesn’t force us to like her (take a hint from this guy, Nana), he suggests to the MC that being more inclusive will slowly get her to their side. The choice is still up to the siblings, and their side of the story is still dominant.

By the finale, when Violet and Mallory’s machinations are given a lot of space, we’re finally exposed in full to the abuse Violet has undergone in Mallory’s hands. We’re finally given a glimpse of why she does some of the things she does, how low her self esteem is, how completely under her mother’s control she is. To the extent that even if she HAS the wherewithal to defy Mallory, she can’t do it.

Mind you, we’re gently eased into the nature of this relationship before the grand reveal. This is why when Violet chooses not to stand up for Jess, and instead gives her mother the information needed for Jess to lose her job, we understand even if we can’t agree.

We can’t say the same for Mallory. We meet her only at the tail end of Book 1, and she becomes more of a force to be reckoned with towards the end of Book 2 and most of Book 3. We know she has a strained relationship with her mother and sister, that she always felt like the less favoured one. We know that her resentment for that side of the family is what drives her to do most of the things she does.

But we ALSO know that for a significant portion of her life, Mallory has been a manipulative, abusive person who devalued, belittled and lied to her only daughter, isolating her from the only family she had and whittling away any self-esteem she could have had. These are the actions of a full-grown adult who knows her actions impact her child. No matter what her issues with Nana and her sister were, she made Violet an unfortunate victim in her personal vendetta. Even when she has the opportunity to apologize, she gives Violet a half-assed apology and then returns to what really matters to her: that Violet’s child is taken out of her hands and given to someone else.

No matter how sorry Mallory may feel towards the end of the book, the fact remains that she has caused significant damage to Violet’s psyche. The fact remains that she has repeatedly put many people in danger sans remorse (giving Jiro and Camilla real swords just to screw up Jess’ chances for a promotion, drilling a hole in MC’s boat). The fact also remains that Nana, who insisted on correcting what one could consider minor flaws in her grandchildren if they were to claim her inheritance, doesn’t seem to stop Mallory from manipulating things to suit her ends.

We’re probably a few chapters into the Finale of Book 3. Within that teeny-tiny time frame, the book seems to be attempting to “redeem” Mallory, by having her jump forward in the water and introducing a sudden romance with Bartholomew Pierce. By having Violet tell us that “if she had known about the storm, she would have not gone forward” with the plan to tamper with the MC’s wedding boat. The book, with its focus on family and familial bonds, seems to impress on us that togetherness is necessary, and that the cousins together should forgive Mallory and all of them should be One Big Happy Family.

This is a dangerous message to send. No one should have to accept, forgive or make place for abusive family members in the name of togetherness and family. No one should have to be the bigger person for someone who has put them through that kind of hell, no matter how much they claim to have changed. Violet, especially, shouldn’t have to be making excuses for her mother and trying to convince us that she is not as bad as she seems. Not after everything Mallory has put her through.