Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago

by James Lowder

  Brienne of Tarth, meanwhile, is an exceptional warrior, capable of matching even the mighty Jamie Lancaster in combat. The Tarly family would be proud to have her—except for the fact that Brienne’s great skills don’t conform to what is considered acceptable for her gender. It doesn’t help that she also has traditionally masculine features. So she too is rejected, considered a freak by her family and treated with scorn and ridicule by almost everyone else, disparagingly called “Brienne the Beauty.”

  Brienne, Samwell, and Bran may all be noble-born, but there is something in their very natures, something they did not choose and cannot control, that makes each of them not quite fit for their status. They’re disappointments, even freaks, to their families and cultures.

  Martin sees them with a much more sympathetic eye. Indeed, their stories are so valid and interesting that he elevates them to point-of-view characters. Becoming disabled, for example, leads Bran to begin experiencing visions. By the time of A Dance with Dragons, Bran has even developed his skills as both a greenseer, or prophet, and a skinchanger, capable of viewing the world through the eyes of animals.

  In other words, his becoming disabled wasn’t the end of his story. On the contrary, it’s the moment when his story just started to get good.

  Much has been made of the shocking realism in A Song of Ice and Fire. People die prematurely and in horrible ways, women are casually raped, and everyone suffers—a lot. Things stink in Westeros, in more ways than one. But the most shocking aspect to Martin’s realism may be this lavish attention he pays to the freaks and outsiders. Throughout the series, these characters matter. Their statuses grant them unique perspectives that are different from the majority, from those who are not excluded, and those perspectives prove important to both the structure of the novels and the workings of the plot.

  Who is it that finally treats Brienne with kindness and is able to see beyond the limitations of his culture, recognizing her for what she is? It’s Renly Baratheon, a closeted gay man secretly in love with the Knight of Flowers. Apparently his own knowledge of being a “freak” has made him more likely to understand and be sympathetic to Brienne’s unjust predicament. Meanwhile, it might be Jon Snow’s outcast past as Ned Stark’s bastard son that helps him feel sympathy for Samwell, who is ridiculed and called “Ser Piggy” by the other members of the Night’s Watch. (Just because the men of the Night’s Watch are all outcasts themselves doesn’t mean they can’t reject others, too. On the contrary, creating social codes that play outsiders against each other has long been an important way those in power have maintained their control.)

  Despite Jon’s faith in him, Samwell mostly remains a hopeless warrior. Yet Sam is smart, and Jon’s loyalty to him pays off when Sam cleverly manipulates the other members of the Watch into supporting his candidacy for Lord Commander.

  Sometimes it pays to be nice to the freaks.

  So the outcasts in A Song of Ice and Fire are all the good guys, right? They’ve learned important lessons from their oppression, and they live lives of quiet, stoic dignity outside the halls of power? When writing about outcast or minority characters, many authors fall into exactly this trap. But the idea of the “noble savage”—the notion that being a despised other always endows you with great dignity and wisdom—is just another stereotype. It’s a well-intentioned one, but it’s almost as limiting as the others. When minority or outcast characters exist in a story solely to teach lessons to members of the majority, it’s just one more way of seeing everything from the majority point of view.

  That said, it’s the rare outsider character in A Song of Ice and Fire whose perspective is not informed in some way by his or her experiences as a social reject.

  Varys is a fat, bald, effeminate eunuch. He’s also a master of information, using his “little birds” to constantly spy on those around him, manipulating everyone, always for his own secretive ends. He’ll do what needs to be done, even if it sometimes means betraying friends and allies.

  But how much of Varys’s paranoia and ruthlessness are the result of his own horrible powerlessness when, as a boy, he was forced to take a drug that paralyzed him—but did not shield him from pain—so he could be involuntarily castrated? Surely his perspective is also colored by the fact that as an adult, most people see him as a freak, and he knows better than anyone exactly what kind of justice a freak usually receives.

  It’s also debatable just how self-centered Varys really is. In the dungeons of the Red Keep, Ned asks the Master of Whisperers outright to declare his real endgame: “Peace,” Varys says, and a good case can be made from his actions to date in the series that he’s telling the truth.

  Still, the outsider characters in Ice and Fire do not always act nobly. Their paths are usually pretty complicated. And that’s exactly the point. Martin grants the freaks and outsiders the dignity of living in three dimensions.

  Like Varys, Tyrion Lannister, “the Imp” even to his family, sometimes seems to have a flexible morality, frequently claiming to care for nothing and no one but himself. It’s mostly just the “honorable” moral and legal codes of Westeros that he rejects—codes that always favor the powerful.

  During his imprisonment in Lysa Arryn’s Eyrie in A Game of Thrones, Tyrion staves off execution by cleverly manipulating the system of rules. He tricks Catelyn into a trial, then demands trial by combat, with the absent Jaime as his champion. This makes such a trial virtually impossible. Then, it’s implied, he advises his eventual champion, Bronn, to fight in such a way that his more accomplished, but heavily armored, opponent will be at a disadvantage.

  Stand and fight fair? That’s the last thing Varys or Tyrion would ever do! Why would they? The rules are rigged: they’re set up by and for kings and princes with well-trained, well-armored champions. Tyrion and Varys might not fight fair, but it wasn’t a fair fight to begin with. If they play the game the way it’s intended to be played, the outcasts always lose.

  “A eunuch has no honor,” Varys tells Ned. It’s a luxury only non-freaks can afford.

  Having suffered dearly under the rules of an unforgiving society, outcasts such as Tyrion and Varys pay keen attention to rules, precisely so they can manipulate them in order to give themselves a fighting chance. They also keep a close eye on other outsiders, as they can often be valuable allies. Despite being noble-born, Tyrion is able to convincingly speak to them as equals. It’s not a coincidence that he’s able to win over both the members of the ostracized hill tribes and the wildings.

  When Tyrion encounters Jon Snow up at the Wall, he gives Ned’s bastard son the classic, but profound, advice of the misfit: “Let [those who mock you] see that their words can cut you, and you’ll never be free of their mockery. If they want to give you [an insulting] name, take it, make it your own. Then they can’t hurt you with it anymore” (A Game of Thrones).

  It seems there’s a band with ties even deeper than those of the Night’s Watch: the brotherhood of the outcast.

  Another outcast, the one-armed Donal Noye, gives Jon a related lesson on the nature of outsiders. “They hate me because I’m better than they are,” Jon complains to the smith, after his fellow recruits in the Watch react badly to his victories over them on the training grounds. Those victories are hardly a triumph worth celebrating; Jon’s life of relative privilege at Winterfell has made him a better fighter than the commoners training with him.

  “No,” Donal responds. “They hate you because you act like you’re better than they are” (A Game of Thrones).

  Which isn’t to say that the brotherhood of the outcast doesn’t have its own blind spots, especially when it comes to sex and gender.

  Tyrion, for example, falls in love at the age of thirteen with Tysha, a girl he and his brother Jamie had rescued from some bandits. She loves him back and they marry in secret. But when his father Tywin discovers the relationship, he cruelly commands Jamie to say that the girl is a whore who had been paid to act like she loved the Imp. Then Tywin directs his entire guard to ra
pe the girl, even forcing Tyrion to go last. After that, Tyrion seems incapable of forging a healthy relationship and employs a long line of prostitutes to service him sexually.

  The details of his sex life are humiliating, at least from Tyrion’s point of view. But the fact that these details are offered up to readers is anything but. The books are granting even this outcast character the dignity of having a sexuality, something that has long been denied fictional dwarf characters, and fictional freaks and outcasts in general—a far greater indignity indeed.

  Later, when Tyrion is made to wed Sansa, he does not force himself on her sexually, despite the clear opportunity to do so. It’s hard not to conclude this decision is linked with his sexual history, not to mention his whole experience as a reviled outsider.

  As bad as Tyrion’s experiences are, we should remember that it is Tysha, after all, who is gang raped. And what of Tyrion’s many prostitutes, who must submit to him and all men for a living? Indeed, what of the sexuality of most of the female characters in the series? Those who aren’t raped outright at some point in the story must live with the knowledge that such sexual degradation always exists as a very real possibility.

  One argument against such brutal content, and it’s a compelling one, is that the sexual humiliation of women in A Song of Ice and Fire is just too cavalier, too omnipresent—that it overwhelms other aspects of the books. How would male readers react to an epic story written by a woman where virtually every chapter features a man being violently assaulted?

  The counterargument posits that, by presenting all the raping and whoring so casually, Martin is commenting on women and powerlessness, perhaps even making an ironic point: women are the ultimate outsiders. Their complete and vicious degradation is so commonplace that almost no one in Westeros notices. For the majority of characters—including Tyrion, who usually has a keen eye for fellow outcasts, and even many of the other women in the cast—the nonstop violence against women is mostly invisible, barely even worth a mention.

  This violence, of course, is true not just in Westeros and Essos: it’s been true for most of real-world human history. Is it any more visible in our history books and museums?

  History, they say, is written by the victors.

  Not every character in the series is an outsider. Those that aren’t tend to be—naturally—the queens and kings and royals who are actually ruling. Alas, most of these insiders tend to be petty, easily manipulated fools such as Lysa Arryn and even King Robert at times, or else outright tyrants such as Aerys, Cersei, Joffrey, and Tywin. And woe to the world if Viserys Targaryen, Daenerys’s brother, was to ever actually become king!

  Other insiders become outsiders over the course of the story—not necessarily as a result of anything in their fundamental natures, but more due to changing circumstances. These are the more traditional fantasy outcast storylines in A Song of Ice and Fire, but they’re still worth examining.

  Daenerys may be a de facto outsider by virtue of her gender, and another kind of outsider as a result of her race and nationality relative to the people she’s trying to lead, but she’s still a person of privilege. In fact, despite her gender, hers may be the books’ most classic fantasy storyline: a royal in exile seeking to reclaim her thrown who is given the benefit of several mentors and a magic item, in the form of three dragon’s eggs. Whether her destiny is real or not, she certainly believes it is, so much so that she is impervious to fire.

  Daenerys begins the Ice and Fire saga as a timid thirteen-year-old girl, totally dependent on her older brother. The experience of their exile to Essos—her becoming an actual outcast—changes her. She rises to the occasion, but Viserys does not. Her entire series-long story arc is that of someone who has seen her world taken away, but then slowly begins to rebuild that world into something far greater than what existed before. In the process, Daenerys is utterly transformed. For her, the experience of being cast out literally builds her character, makes her strong in ways she never could have imagined before. It’s the traditional fantasy outcast’s ultimate triumph.

  Even Jaime Lannister finds himself with a new perspective when he becomes an outcast of sorts after losing a hand to Vargo Hoat. First, he falls into a deep depression and loses the will to live. Eventually Brienne talks him out of his hopelessness; Jaime is so moved by this that he later rescues her from Vargo, and then saves her again from death at the hand of Loras Tyrell. When he is finally reunited with Cersei, he quickly realizes how much he has changed and that their relationship is irrevocably doomed. His perspectives have shifted so much that he even confesses an unforgivable sin to Tyrion: that he was lying when he said the woman Tyrion once loved did not love him back.

  Lose your hand, gain some character. It’s a direct correlation.

  Here’s what we know about the world of A Song of Ice and Fire: the pampered, entitled experience of most of the royals leads to moral disaster. The political system may say otherwise, but we, the reader, know these folks are not fit to rule, no matter their genes, their gold, or their armies.

  Here’s what else we know: those characters who are outcasts as a result of something in their fundamental nature tend to be more sensitive to the plight of others, especially other outsiders. Just as in the real world, it’s never black-and-white, but all things being equal, it’s good to have Jon Snow at your back, and you’ll probably have better luck with Tyrion than the other Lannisters.

  Basically, freaks and outcasts tend to be well worth knowing. Even those noble characters who become outcasts due more to circumstances than their natures tend to gain perspectives on the world that make them stronger. In other words, the woman with the pet dragons just might be worth following, and it’s definitely better to be stuck with Jaime Lannister after he loses a hand than before.

  After five books, it seems pretty clear that no one ever wins the game of thrones, at least not for long. But when it comes to being a better person, it might not be such a bad thing to be cast out of the castle completely.

  BRENT HARTINGER is the author of many books, mostly for teenagers, including the gay teen novel Geography Club (soon to be a motion picture) and its four sequels. His other books include Shadow Walkers, a paranormal romance, and the forthcoming Three Truths and a Lie, a psychological thriller. Visit Brent online at brenthartinger.com.

  CAROLINE SPECTOR

  POWER AND FEMINISM IN WESTEROS

  THE USE AND ABUSE of power is the one constant theme of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Power, large or small, inevitably corrupts in Westeros, no matter who wields it and no matter the righteousness of their cause. Even as the disenfranchised women of Westeros seize the autonomy they need for power, once they begin taking it, they inevitably fall prey to the same potentially corrupting influences the men experience.

  Feminism is, at its heart, about the empowerment of women. This power takes the form of both political power (e.g., suffrage) and personal power. Holding power in the political realm allows women the same influence in society men have. Personal power affords women their own agency to make choices for themselves regarding their lives, whether it’s whom they marry, the ability to consent to sex, the right to choose a profession, or just the right to choose the life they wish to live without being coerced by others.

  Both men and women are oppressed by the existing power structure in Westeros. This is especially true for characters failing to conform to the prevailing gender standards, such as Brienne, a “masculine” woman; Varys, a “feminine” man; Samwell Tarly, a man who confounds his masculine role by being gentle and kind; and Asha Greyjoy, a woman who is a powerful leader of men. But it is the women who are most obviously in need of their own agency. This is not to say that women don’t have power, but by and large, their avenues to power are circumscribed. Asha, for example, commands a remarkable amount of respect for a woman in Westeros, but not enough for the men to rally around her to take the Seastone Chair, though she’s by far the best choice to do so. And outright rule by wo
men is an almost unheard of event. Daenerys Targaryen is remarkable and dangerous in every sense because her very existence is perilous to the current power structure.

  Critics of the series point to examples of sexual assault in the books, the lack of women in positions of power, and the trappings of traditional medieval fantasy as indicative of a lack of feminist perspective in the narrative. This analysis suffers from the notion that an author writing about a thing—for example, rape—somehow suggests he or she condones it or is simply exploiting the subject matter. This makes for a shallow and facile examination of the text, taking examples out of context and failing to look at the broader scope of the work.

  Confounding Expectations

  Throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin establishes conventional medieval fantasy tropes and then destroys them, often by revealing the corrupting influences at their heart. If the usual image of the knight is a man of courage and valor, Martin subverts that image with brutes like Sandor Clegane. If women are supposed to be virtuous, pure, and helpless, then the reader is presented with Cersei Lannister. Indeed, while Cersei functions in some ways as the traditional “Evil Queen,” she is more than that easy trope. As the series progresses, it becomes clear that she is trapped by the expectations of her society, and that she lacks the ability to see how her personal and ethical shortcomings hamstring her quest for power and respect. She’s wicked and pathetic at the same time.

  In epic fantasy, there has to be a monumental struggle of some sort. Usually this consists of a grand, sweeping conflict between forces of good and evil that imperils the entire world, or at least the safe and civilized parts of it. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the threat to civilization is reflected in the Stark motto: “Winter Is Coming.” Winter in Westeros is a multi-year affair that not only blots out the natural progression of seasons, but also brings supernatural menace from beyond the Wall. This phrase hangs over Westeros like a death sentence. It promises a threat that would, were this a traditional fantasy tale, require the courtly knights to rally, rout the obvious agents of evil, and prevent the destruction of the peaceful shire or duchy that serves as the symbolic heart of the idyllic, morally upright kingdom.