73 pages • 2 hours read
Sarah J. MaasA Court of Thorns and Roses
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Sacrifice and Moral Compromise as the Duty of Love
Nearly all of the characters in A Court of Thorns and Roses must make significant sacrifices to protect those they love. The opening scene of the novel models Maas’s portrayal of sacrifice throughout: Feyre risks her own life to feed her family, killing the faerie wolf despite the unknown consequences. Maas emphasizes the selfless nature of Feyre’s actions through the ingratitude of her father and sisters. Feyre is not motivated by reward or thanks, only by her drive to provide for her family and fulfill her promise to her mother. As Feyre explains to Tamlin, “When you’re responsible for lives other than your own […] You do what you have to do” (106). Maas portrays self-sacrifice as the highest form of love, as Feyre shows the same willing engagement with difficult decisions in her quest to save Tamlin at the end of the novel. Though Feyre is motivated by her love for Tamlin and her desire for a real relationship with him, she is willing to sacrifice herself and their future together for his own good and for the freedom of the Spring Court. Feyre even sees the security of those she loves as justification for moral transgressions and is willing to kill innocents twice in the novel. She murders Andras to save her family, and she murders the two High Fae Under the Mountain to save Tamlin and the Spring Court—and, by extension, all of Prythian. Maas portrays morality as relative to each situation in A Court of Thorns and Roses, suggesting that evil actions carried out under the motive of love are justifiable, even if tragic. As Feyre admits while being tortured by Amarantha, “loving Tamlin was the only thing I had left, the only thing I couldn’t sacrifice” (401). Feyre sacrifices her human life and her sense of right and wrong to ensure the survival of others. The only boundary Feyre cannot cross is the denial of her primary motivation: love.
Feyre’s and Tamlin’s romance is predicated on their shared understanding of difficult choices made in service to others. Tamlin understands the burdens of leadership and, like Feyre, is forced to make counter-intuitive sacrifices that challenge his moral sensibilities. Tamlin is loyal and fiercely protective of his court, yet he must send his courtiers to their deaths in order to win a chance at saving them all from the curse. When Feyre is discovered by Rhysand, however, Tamlin is willing to risk his court to protect her, sacrificing the safety of his people and his own freedom in the name of love. Tamlin and Feyre also express their love through self-sacrifice in the act of giving: Tamlin gives Feyre roses and paints, Feyre gives Tamlin her paintings in turn, and they each offer the other comfort and acknowledgment for the sacrifices they’ve made. For two characters who feel compelled to give and do anything to help others, generosity becomes the highest expression of love.
Maas’s secondary characters also model dutiful sacrifice. Lucien was willing to give up his title and status in the Autumn Court to marry his lesser faerie love, and, by serving Amarantha, Rhysand sacrificed his own freedom to protect the interests of his people. Even Alis, Feyre’s lady-in-waiting at the Spring Court, sacrificed her home in the Summer Court for the good of her nephews. Still, Maas does not portray sacrifice as an unambiguous good; Feyre is left emotionally and spiritually damaged by the extreme sacrifices and moral compromises required of her Under the Mountain, and her selflessness on behalf of her family leaves her without hope and distanced from her own dreams and desires. Maas suggests that too much sacrifice of the self can damage self-confidence and prevent self-actualization; Feyre tells Tamlin in the rose garden, “I don’t know why […] it feels so selfish and horrible to paint. […] All those years, what I did for them…And they didn’t try to stop you from taking me” (171). Feyre’s one-sided sacrifices have left her resentful and unable to take joy in her own dreams, which prevents her from recognizing Tamlin’s romantic overtures at first. Through Tamlin’s and Feyre’s romance, Maas posits that love is best served by mutual sacrifice.
Consent and Power Dynamics in Sexual Intimacy
The novel portrays trust and consent as essential to romantic relationships and sexual intimacy. When Feyre first arrives at the Spring Court, she is uncertain of Tamlin’s motives for allowing her to live, and she is therefore unwilling to develop even emotional intimacy with him. Secretly frustrated by his failure to make progress in winning Feyre’s love, Tamlin conversely blames his failure on Feyre’s obvious hatred for faeries; he doesn’t trust her, either. After Feyre rejects Tamlin’s good-faith offer to write to her family for her, she adds, “how can I trust a faerie? Don’t you delight in killing and tricking us?” (118). It is only after Tamlin saves Feyre from the naga and proves that he means her no harm that their love story begins to unfold.
Though Feyre’s physical attraction to Tamlin is apparent from her first description of him (“golden-haired” and “young” with a “strong jaw” (50) ), Feyre’s emotional attachment begins shortly after the naga encounter, when Tamlin further earns her trust by detailing exactly how he has taken care of her family. Immediately following this scene, Tamlin and Feyre reveal their most caring and vulnerable selves to each other while they comfort the dying Summer Court faerie. Maas accumulates these intimate friendship-establishing moments to create a meaningful foundation for their romance; Tamlin’s aggressive sexual overtures after Calanmai are more understandable than if they were the first indication of developing feelings between the two lovers. Feyre maintains her resistance despite Tamlin’s attempts at seduction, and the fight for control between them becomes a kind of sexual tension. Though Feyre is sexually aroused by Tamlin’s bite, she insists that he apologize for kissing her without her consent. Crucially, Feyre clearly and vocally consents to all other moments of sexual intimacy with Tamlin in the novel, and Maas implies that this mutual trust indicates their profound emotional connection and the depth of their love. “But I could trust him,” Feyre declares, moments before she asks Tamlin to “Give [her] everything” (247). Any violation of consent would undermine the trust at the core of the relationship.
Rhysand complicates Maas’s insistence on consent. He sexually humiliates Feyre twice in the novel, first by revealing her explicit thoughts about Tamlin when he appears at the Spring Court, and later when he drugs Feyre and forces her to dance Under the Mountain. Feyre herself uses the word “violation” to describe Rhysand’s disregard for her consent. Unlike with Tamlin, Feyre has no power in her dynamic with Rhysand because Rhysand has no moral qualms about overriding Feyre’s agency to serve his own purposes. However, Maas resists condemning Rhysand for this violation, forging an unlikely emotional intimacy between Feyre and Rhysand as he helps her fight Amarantha. Maas prioritizes the possibility of redemption for Rhysand over her earlier insistence on consent, portraying Rhysand’s repeated violations of Feyre as part of a larger plan to achieve their shared goal. Feyre considers, “Regardless of his motives or methods, Rhysand was keeping me alive” (384), evincing Maas’s ambiguous treatment of Rhysand’s moral nature and Feyre’s acceptance of moral compromise. Though Feyre is reluctant to share emotional intimacy with Rhysand, Rhysand reveals his inner self to Feyre unprompted; the revelation is simultaneously manipulative and vulnerable, and it is consistent with his ambivalent characterization.
Hidden Truths and Subverted Expectations
Maas fills her novel with instances of hidden truths and subverted expectations, both in the faerie world of Prythian and among the humans. The first several chapters quickly establish many given circumstances that Mass will later interrogate or dispel completely. Among these circumstances is that Feyre believes all faeries are evil, and Tamlin believes Feyre is ignorant and spiteful. Their subverted expectations of each other’s nature create dramatic tension and increase the stakes of their romance. Tamlin needs Feyre to fall in love with him to save the Spring Court, but he never expects to fall in love with her in return. Likewise, Feyre never imagines that the faerie world could be comfortable and beautiful or that Tamlin could be as kindhearted as he is lethal. Maas suggests that it is only by overcoming their initial biases that the couple comes together and that the adage that actions speak louder than words—or myths—is true.
Maas incorporates elements of the mystery genre in her handling of Tamlin’s curse. From Feyre’s limited perspective, the reader is given little context for the “blight” on Prythian or what Lucien’s and Tamlin’s plan may refer to. Later, when Alis explains everything to Feyre, the hidden truth of Lucien’s and Tamlin’s efforts to clue Feyre in about the curse are revealed. The masks and glamours worn by the Spring Court are thematically resonant; Feyre is always at some remove from the truth. The uncanny or misleading nature of much of the faerie world serves both to highlight the danger Feyre is in and also to emphasize the tension between the novel’s natural and supernatural worlds. Softened by love and reconnected to her emotions, Feyre sees how the cruelty of her sisters toward her was the result of their own methods of survival and not intentional hatred. She reconsiders her naïve sister Elain: “She had looked at that cottage with hope […] I knew which one of us had been the stronger” (260). Though Feyre believes the human world to be more clear-cut and legible, when she returns to the village after her time in Prythian, her new perspective reveals the hidden truths within her own human family.
Feyre also begins the novel certain “that there was nothing to be done against the faeries” (27), yet, by the end, she has beaten the ancient Amarantha at her own game. Furthermore, Feyre is able to beat Amarantha though her ability to understand the tricky nature of the faeries by determining that Tamlin’s heart is literally made of stone and solving Amarantha’s riddle. Feyre’s character arc is itself a subversion of expectations, both her own and those set by Maas for the reader.
Related Titles
By Sarah J. Maas
