67 pages • 2 hours read
The Ritual: A Dark College Romance
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Symbols & Motifs
Songs
Periodically, Ryat or Blakely note the specific song that is playing in the background of a scene, referencing both the song’s title and the artist. This musical motif accomplishes several things. First, the references orient the text in a specific time. Including songs that were released in the late 2010s pinpoints the timeline of the novel more concretely than its other modern references (such as cell phones). It also locates Barrington firmly within the real world: Though the students of Barrington have a college experience that does not resemble that of students at other colleges, it is merely the students’ elite place within the world (as wealthy, powerful young adults) that is unusual.
Song references also offer insight into the characters’ feelings, sometimes even before the characters themselves recognize those feelings. When Ryat, in Chapter 23, “[turns] up ‘If You Want Love’ by NF to drown out [his] thoughts” (212), the act implies that while Ryat does not believe himself to want love, he subconsciously does desire it. This foreshadows the movement of his relationship with Blakely from exclusively sexual to romantic. Other references to songs offer tongue-in-cheek commentary. Blakely, for example, notes in Chapter 46 that the lyrics to “Oh Lord” by American Rock band In This Moment seem “even sexier” knowing she is “about to give [her] Lord whatever he wants” (438). This reflects a broader motif of inverted religious iconography, as the lyrics of the song discuss personal relationships to religion.
Barrington University
Though The Ritual’s subtitle bills it as a college romance, its characters spend very little time in class or engaged in campus activities that don’t include the Lords. After Blakely flees from Ryat, moreover, she ceases attending her classes at all. Instead, Ryat hires someone to finish out the semester for them, leaving them entirely detached from any realities of college life. Barrington is thus less a school or a setting than a plot device; it offers a reason for so many wealthy students to come together and creates a clear.99* end point for the relationships between Lords and their “chosen ones,” which end at graduation. The novel quickly overcomes any obstacles that the school creates for the plot, however; its function is primarily to aggregate all the Lords candidates in one place and to serve as a symbol of the elite world in which the characters operate.
The Cathedral
The cathedral is the main site for all Lords rituals, including the one after which the novel is named. One of its functions is atmospheric; when Blakely first arrives at the cathedral, she remarks that the cathedral “reminds [her] of something you’d see in a scary movie” (92). Her expectation that any who enter such a building will end up killed is both foreshadowing and genre subversion. Several people do die in the cathedral before the novel’s end, but as Blakely is the heroine of a romance novel and not a horror story, she will not be one of them.
Blakely’s further expectations about the cathedral play with the novel’s use of religious iconography to show the Lords as disconnected from Christian religious ideals (and recognizable morality more broadly). Blakely comments that she “always expected places like this to be the color of gold—shiny and expensive—to give you an overwhelming feeling of calmness” (95). This identification of inner peace with wealth highlights that the Lords value money and power over all else—part of Blakely’s upbringing even if she did not know of her family’s connection to the Lords. Ultimately, the cathedral symbolizes the quasi-religious values of the Lords, who worship power, wealth, and violence.
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