Deep Dive: Val’s Agency in Sawkill Girls

I’m posting a short review of claire Legrand's Sawkill Girls on my GoodReads, so make sure to check that out if you’re looking for a more comprehensive outlook on the plot! For this post, though, I’m looking more in-depth at one specific element of the story, one that I couldn’t stop thinking about the entire time I was reading: Val's agency.

(Important to note before we dive in - this post is gonna be pretty spoiler-y, so read at your own risk if you haven’t finished the book!)

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of agency in a literary sense, it essentially is defined as a character’s ability to make choices and live freely. In other words, a character with agency has control over their own life. It is a term that was discussed frequently in one of my literature courses last spring, in which we tried to answer the question, “What makes a ‘strong female character’ strong?” While we never came up with a definitive, conclusive answer, we did agree that the typical “strong” female character had some degree of agency.

While I was reading Sawkill Girls, I kept characterizing Val as a strong female character in my brain, mainly due to the fact that she had to have a great amount of resilience to be able to live the life she did. To have to watch people you know and potentially like be eaten alive by an ancient monster would surely take a toll on even the best of us. Val’s role in the Mortimer family’s relationship with the monster was extremely personal, as she was the one who most recently lured the girls to their deaths.

Still, she was able to appear unaffected in front of her peers. Beyond that, she was able to maintain her mini socialite status among her peers. This is what ultimately caused me to mark her as strong. However, Val had absolutely no agency, at least in the beginning, and that was not enough to make me change my mind. So, perhaps a “strong” female character doesn’t necessarily have to have lots of agency. Maybe she just needs to persist in the face of a controlling manipulator.

But this isn’t where we leave Val. Throughout the story, we watch as she makes little decisions (and some big ones) for herself, which ultimately paves the way for her release from the monster’s clutches and into a life where she has the most agency she’s ever experienced. Her journey from anti-heroine to heroine is a harrowing one, but she makes it.

Sawkill Girls is a rec from me, not only because of its detailed world-building and complex characters, but also because it is a book that really made me think about how we categorize female characters and the criteria we use to do so.