Weakness and strength

Weakness and strength are not stable qualities in Victoria Bergman’s story but judgments whose meaning shifts with circumstance and point of view. At Sigtuna boarding school, Victoria uses weakness to rank other girls and decide whether they can threaten her. Later, Sofia Zetterlund turns the same word into a question about vulnerability, abuse, and guilt: was the person subjected to abuse the weak one? The contrast exposes how easily a label can make vulnerability look like a personal failing rather than a condition imposed by others.

Childhood and the Conditions of Vulnerability

Victoria’s history gives the question a concrete setting. She grew up in Grisslinge, on Värmdö outside Stockholm, and spent summers at a cottage in Dala-Floda. Highly intelligent, she began school a year early and was moved up from year eight to year nine; she attended private school from the age of nine. Yet academic advancement did not mean that she was socially or emotionally equipped for the situations she faced. Her teenage years are associated with risk-taking, suicidal thoughts, and recurrent self-destructive behavior, while her memories of that period remain fragmentary.

When Victoria entered high school at Sigtuna boarding school, she was two years younger than her classmates and considerably less physically and emotionally developed. The difference placed her in a vulnerable position among peers, even though her intelligence and early academic progress might suggest precocity or advantage. Sofia recognizes the cruelty that can occur among teenage girls in changing rooms after gym class and understands that Victoria had largely been left at the mercy of her peers for her upbringing. These circumstances complicate any simple equation of weakness with incapacity: Victoria could be intellectually advanced and still be exposed, isolated, and ill-prepared to protect herself.

Victoria’s Judgment of Her Classmates

At the boarding school, Victoria meets Hannah and Jessica, the girls who will share her room. They come from the Stockholm region and describe their parents’ senior positions in the Stockholm court system, along with the expectation that they will become lawyers. Victoria studies their blue eyes and decides that they cannot be a threat to her. Her conclusion is blunt: they are too weak.

She sees them as passive dolls who allow others to think and plan for them, as shadows of people with little apparent interest of their own. This perception makes weakness more than a description of physical or emotional vulnerability. In Victoria’s judgment, it also means passivity, dependence, and a failure to assert an independent self. The image of the doll reduces the girls to objects acted upon, but Victoria’s own certainty depends on treating them as legible and harmless. Her appraisal reveals how she organizes relationships through a distinction between those who might pose a threat and those she believes cannot.

That confidence develops alongside her suspicion of older pupils. During her first week, she notices amused glances across dinner tables, exaggerated politeness, and a repeated effort to stay close to her and the other new students. The signs make her wary, and the narrative confirms that her suspicion is justified without, in this passage, specifying what the older girls are planning. The scene places her weakness judgment beside an active capacity for observation: she can identify a threat even while her age and relative lack of development leave her exposed to it.

Sofia’s Reframing of the Question

Later, Sofia reviews Victoria’s school years as part of a broader effort to understand her trauma. Her notes focus on what Victoria has experienced, her relationship with her father, her fragmented memories, and the possibility of a dissociative disorder. The book does not resolve these questions in this discussion. Instead, Sofia realizes that another central issue needs attention and writes down a new one: what does weakness mean?

The question alters the direction of interpretation. Victoria’s use of the term at school presents weakness as a quality belonging to other people, especially those she regards as passive. Sofia asks whether it might instead be attached to the person who suffered abuse. That possibility refuses to accept the victim’s vulnerability as evidence of personal deficiency. It also leaves open the difference between being harmed, feeling powerless, and being morally or emotionally weak; the evidence does not make those conditions interchangeable.

Sofia sees profound anguish and guilt in Victoria. She considers a dissociative disorder plausible because Victoria can speak about terrible abuse on some occasions and appear to have no memory of it on others. Sofia understands this inconsistency as a possible protective response: the psyche may suppress disturbing events and form alternative recollections so that ordinary life can continue. This is Sofia’s interpretation, not a final answer to the question of weakness. The fragments and shifts in memory make it harder to judge Victoria by a single account of herself or to treat what she can recall as a complete measure of what she has endured.

An Unresolved Measure of Strength

The contrast between Victoria’s schoolyard judgments and Sofia’s clinical questions gives weakness and strength their central tension. Victoria regards Hannah and Jessica as weak because they seem passive and unthreatening; Sofia considers whether vulnerability may belong to the person subjected to abuse rather than to the person who failed to prevent it. One perspective sorts people by their apparent ability to act. The other asks what pressures, histories, and missing memories shape that ability.

Neither perspective produces a simple definition of strength. Victoria’s alertness to the older pupils does not cancel her exposure to them, and her intellectual gifts do not erase the developmental disadvantage Sofia identifies. Likewise, Sofia’s suspicion of trauma and dissociation helps frame the fragmented record but does not establish every cause or recover every missing memory. She hopes that, over time, she and Victoria may be able to dig deeper and untangle some of the knots. The concept therefore remains deliberately open: weakness is both a label Victoria applies to others and a question Sofia uses to examine guilt, vulnerability, and the meaning of surviving what one could not control.