by James Lowder
But Westeros, and the lands surrounding it, are anything but idyllic. Martin constantly throws a harsh light on the cracks in his world’s culture, the moral failings of its leaders, and the deceptions at the heart of its most cherished institutions. The supposedly noble Night’s Watch is populated by rapists. The heirs to the throne are the children of adulterous incest. The legends of heroic men protecting helpless women turn out to be lies and, worse, propaganda intended to encourage women to embrace their helplessness.
In fact, the tribulations of the female characters in particular play a central role in illustrating the disconnect between the society’s illusions about itself and the harrowing reality.
Sansa Stark: The Good Girl
As A Game of Thrones opens, Sansa seems an exemplar of womanly virtues, as the Westerosi elite defines them. She’s docile, pretty, excels at needlepoint, and revels in the privileges afforded her by her position as Lord Eddard Stark’s daughter. In short, she’s royalty—and insufferable. Priggish and superior, she annoys, and is annoyed by, her tomboy sister, Arya.
Though it may appear at first that Sansa Stark is in love with the young prince Joffrey, what she is actually in love with is the central myth of her culture—that the king is kind and wise, that princes are noble and good, that ladies must be beautiful and behave in a ladylike manner. She continues to believe these myths even as events unfold that put the lie to them.
One of the first incidents that reveal the cracks in the façade of Sansa’s world occurs when Joffrey, heir to the throne and Sansa’s betrothed, assaults a peasant boy, Mycah, who had been engaged in a mock duel with Arya Stark. During the course of this encounter, it becomes clear to the reader, if not to Sansa, that Joffrey is a bully and a coward, not the model of princely perfection starry-eyed Sansa assumes him to be. Joffrey tries to goad Mycah into fighting with him, and Arya steps in to protect her friend, who then runs off; as a peasant, Mycah knows that any encounter with nobility can result in death. Enraged, Joffrey turns on Arya, at which point Arya’s pet direwolf, Nymeria, protects her.
Despite seeing Joffrey behave horribly toward a person of lesser status and try to hurt her own sister, Sansa clings to her belief that he’s kind and good. So invested is she in her worldview that she does not question her beliefs even after she bears the brunt of Joffrey’s anger herself. Later, when questioned by King Robert, Sansa lies and claims not to remember what happened. Sansa has been completely co-opted by Westeros’s patriarchal culture, and it is only later, with her father’s unjust execution and the ripping away of all her royal privileges, that she begins to see the truth behind the myth.
In the meantime, though, she is completely supportive of the culture and power structure of Westeros, the workings of which are on full display during the incident with Mycah. The children involved are between nine and thirteen years old, and yet they are already perfectly aware of the draconian rules of this society. When Arya defends Mycah against Joffrey, she steps outside the bounds of acceptable behavior (as she will for most of the series), and in doing so, takes a piece of traditionally male power for herself. This act is in and of itself transgressive, and both Arya and Mycah know they are in profound physical danger, though Mycah realizes this before Arya does. When Arya finally comprehends the danger she and Nymeria are in, she drives the direwolf off to keep her from being killed. In a bit of stunning injustice, Sansa’s wolf, Lady, is killed in Nymeria’s place. In a way, the loss of the wolf represents a loss of connection to, and protection from, House Stark, whose symbol is the direwolf.
More importantly, the mock duel incident and its aftermath not only foreshadow events that will occur in King’s Landing but also serve as examples of how those in positions of authority wield almost absolute power over everyone in Westeros. (And though the men are also constrained by this system, they have far more agency than the women and indeed exercise near-total control over the women around them.) A simple argument between children turns into a political incident, and terrible punishments are meted out the same for the young as they are for the adults—with no allowances made for their age.
Many readers find Sansa’s travails during book one and the rest of the series to be extreme. She spends a great deal of time as a captive in Cersei’s and Joffrey’s court after her father is murdered. During this period she learns the true nature of the Lannisters and how precarious her own place is in the world, with her father dead and branded a traitor. Thereafter, she falls under the dubious protections of several men and is used as a pawn in other people’s machinations. She survives all this by using the only tools she’s developed within Westerosi culture: being submissive and hiding her true feelings.
To a large extent, Sansa’s inability to recognize the gap between myth and reality cripples her. She truly believes in the rules she has been taught about her society and her place in it. And why shouldn’t she embrace the culture of Westeros? She’s the eldest daughter of a powerful family. She’s been raised knowing she will one day wed into another powerful family. In fact, once she is engaged to Joffrey, she has every reason to believe she will be queen. And the world around her constantly reinforces the notion that her own “virtues” have given rise to her privileged situation. Yet those same traits make her incapable of functioning effectively, once those dreams are crushed and reality intrudes.
Sansa is ill equipped for the chaotic time in which she finds herself. She’s passive, fearful, and often blinds herself to the reality before her. Of the women discussed here, she’s the only one who fails to stand up for herself and take what personal power she can. Eventually, she even appears to lose control of her own identity, when she is cast as Alayne Stone, Lord Baelish’s illegitimate daughter. He tells her this is intended to protect her, but he has other plans, intending to use her to make a claim on Winterfell. To her credit, Sansa, who up until this point has been surprised by the plots going on around her, appears to grasp what Baelish is up to. Being exposed to the continual corruption around her, Sansa is slowly learning to trust no one and to divine the power play in their every action.
These small, seemingly positive steps cannot fully convince the reader that Sansa is free of her illusions, however. In fact, it is because of her passivity that Sansa assumes these different roles so easily. She dreamily floats along, allowing Baelish to set a course for her life; she never takes the initiative. In situations where she might begin to gain some personal power by refusing to participate in Littlefinger’s plans—or, like her sister Arya, concocting plans of her own—Sansa remains the passive pawn.
In this, she fills the role of the traditional princess of medieval fantasy. But in assigning her that role, Martin is making a powerful point about the dangers inherent in fantasy: how fanciful myths hide—and perpetuate—a fundamentally oppressive social structure. At every turn, Sansa’s reality is unmoored. She experiences no pure and completely selfless knights, because they do not really exist. Her prince turns out to be a bully and a sociopath. After her father’s death, every man who tries to help her is either weak or intent on using her for his own ends. And inasmuch as she cannot accept the world as it is, and not as the comforting stories have told her it should be, she remains powerless.
Arya Stark: The Rebel
If Sansa is the Good Girl, then Arya is in many ways her polar opposite: the Rebel. Arya is bored by all things considered “womanly.” She doesn’t give a fig for sewing, music, or being pretty; she’d rather shoot arrows, learn how to fight with a sword, and play-fight with the peasant boy Mycah.
Thanks to Arya’s rebellious streak, she has the tools to survive after her father is murdered. But Arya’s survival comes at a terrible price. She’s stripped of her emotional innocence. Rage and bitterness at what has been done to her and her family will consume Arya throughout the books.
Like Sansa, Arya changes her identity over the course of the series. While their father was alive, Sansa and Arya were Starks, Westerosi royalty. Once Ned is killed, their identities
become murky. Because they are female, their identities are largely dependent on designations of male power—the rank, land holdings, and wealth of their fathers or husbands. Take those away and they become, in essence, no one, non-people. Disguises are a necessity for a young woman constantly in danger of being imprisoned, raped, or killed—particularly one who is of use as a political pawn. But a disguise can also be a tool with which a character can remake herself.
At first, it seems that Arya’s disguises—her new identities—are molded by others. She is never as passive as Sansa; she proves herself quite capable of defending herself with Needle or just her fists. Yet Yoren shaves her head and dubs her Arry, and for a time she follows his lead—a choice that places her in peril. Even so, her willingness to throw off her gender demonstrates her understanding of the workings of power in her world. She can do things as a boy that would be denied her as a girl. And by the end of A Clash of Kings she has begun to fully take control of her identity and her fate, first by tricking Jaqen into helping her stage an uprising at Harrenhal to rescue the Northmen who had fought for her brother Robb, and then by recasting herself as Nymeria and fighting her way to freedom.
Arya is one of the most resilient characters in A Song of Ice and Fire. She survives through her wits, courage, and, perhaps more troubling, her rage. Unlike Sansa, who floats passively through the perils of her life, Arya insists on taking control. In a series where most of the likable characters die or are transformed in terrible ways, Arya grants the reader a slim hope for justice—even if it is of a rough variety.
Yet Arya’s story is also a cautionary tale. Like all of the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, Arya finds herself challenged and scarred by power. Though she proves masterful in exploiting power when given the opportunity, the emotional toll that fighting for every scrap of power takes on her is quite high. By the time she’s ten, she’s become inured to murder. When she ends up in Braavos in the House of Black and White, she is required to sacrifice all remaining vestiges of Arya Stark in order to gain abilities that will help her get revenge. She gives up her name, her family, and her possessions, only cheating a bit to keep her beloved sword, Needle—though that act apparently costs Arya her sight at the end of A Feast for Crows.
Her story provides a cautionary tale, yet the portrayal of Arya is predominantly positive. Arya bends but does not break, and illustrates the notion that those denied power can, out of necessity, develop ways to survive.
Brienne Tarth: The Outlier
If Arya and Sansa are the polar opposites, then Brienne is something altogether different and more rare in Westeros. She is a woman who moves through the world, having taken for herself most of the attributes of male power.
Brienne wears armor, carries a sword, is better at combat than most men, and wants nothing less than to be a knight—though, like Sansa, her notion of what being a knight means is based on a romanticized view of chivalry. Also like Sansa, she holds on to her romantic notions in the face of endless contradictory evidence.
Brienne suffers much abuse in the books at the hands of “courtly” knights. In A Feast for Crows, Brienne opens up to the Elder Brother while on her quest to find Sansa Stark. It’s a poignant scene where she lays bare the difficulties of her life:
“I am the only child the gods let him keep. The freakish one, one not fit to be son or daughter.” All of it came pouring out of Brienne then, like black blood from a wound; the betrayals and betrothals, Red Ronnet and his rose, Lord Renly dancing with her, the wager for her maidenhead, the bitter tears she shed the night her king wed Margaery Tyrell, the mêlée at Bitterbridge, the rainbow cloak that she had been so proud of, the shadow in the king’s pavilion, Renly dying in her arms, Riverrun and Lady Catelyn, the voyage down the Trident, dueling Jaime in the woods.
All of these parts of Brienne’s life show the burden she endures for defying cultural expectations. How dare she not be born beautiful, failing to conform to what a woman “should” look like? How dare she wear male armor rather than attire more befitting a woman? And how dare she display her abilities as a fighter, abilities that are most certainly not in line with the Westerosi feminine ideal?
Brienne refuses to conform, even though she desires some of the things that would result from being a more compliant woman. She’s a romantic, not unlike Sansa, though her expectations of being rewarded by her society are much lower than Sansa’s as a result of her unconventional behavior. She seeks romance and is deeply in love with Renly Baratheon, one of the five kings with a claim to the Iron Throne. So great is her love for him that she offers the only thing she has that he might value: her life. She joins with him for his march on King’s Landing and is later made part of his Rainbow Guard. Despite proving herself at Bitterbridge, she is viewed with contempt in Renly’s camp and is made the butt of jokes about her appearance, as well as the object of crude jests about which knight will take her virginity.
The assumption by her fellow warriors that Brienne’s sexuality is something to be coerced or taken, not something over which she has control, is telling of the wider perception of women in Westeros. So, too, the consistent rejection Brienne endures for failing to offer the men around her a pleasing countenance. No matter her skill as a knight, she is reminded time and again that a woman’s primary function is to present herself in a manner appealing to men.
When Renly is murdered, Brienne is accused of the crime. She and Lady Catelyn flee together and eventually Brienne pledges loyalty to Catelyn, taking up the task of exchanging Jaime Lannister for Arya and Sansa Stark. Her devotion to this task remains unswerving, no matter the personal cost. In that, she remains a shining example of honor and dedication in a world where those things are more spoken of than practiced.
Because her actions fall consistently and fully outside the social norms, Brienne provides a stark lesson on how women who dare to take male power for their own are judged and treated not only in Westeros but in all conventionally patriarchal societies. She also remains a study in heartbreaking contradictions. She embraces the romantic ideals of her culture, both emotionally and through her actions, but is continually betrayed by the real world, simply because she cannot turn herself into the woman the Westerosi legends tell her she should be.
Cersei Lannister: The Evil Queen
There’s no doubt that Cersei Lannister is one of the most appalling, wicked, and morally bankrupt characters in A Song of Ice and Fire—and that’s saying a lot. While she conforms to most of the external conventions of womanhood in Westeros—she’s pretty, has good manners, and is obedient . . . or appears to be—by the time the series opens, she has had her fill of her male-controlled universe.
In A Game of Thrones, Cersei commits a series of dark deeds. In a sadistic act of petty revenge, she has Sansa’s direwolf, Lady, killed. She murders her husband, setting in motion many of the horrors that ensue. She has Ned Stark imprisoned and branded as a traitor. She sets her sociopathic son, Joffrey—who is a result of her affair with her brother, Jaime—on the throne, hoping to rule Westeros through him. All the while, she’s manipulating everyone she can to achieve her own ends.
Cersei is a mass of female rage, much of it justified. Her arranged marriage, a pairing that she actually wanted (making her one of the luckier women in Westeros), was spoiled on her wedding night when Robert came to their marriage bed drunk and with the name of another woman on his lips. She never forgets this slight, and her marriage becomes a vehicle for humiliating Robert in every way possible. Like Sansa, she is privileged and enjoys all the benefits this implies, but wounded by Robert’s many betrayals, she throws off the societal rules that constrain her behavior.
Cersei strives to gain power any way she can. She sleeps with her twin brother and passes their children off as the heirs to the throne. In Westeros, as with many male-dominated societies, a man’s power lies not just in himself but also in the line of sons he leaves behind. Cersei usurps the line of succession, substituting another man’s child for Robert’s o
wn, an act that is both treason and the ultimate emasculation. The only sons who will sit on the Iron Throne after Robert dies are those of the queen’s Lannister bloodline alone. That they are children by her twin implies a mirroring of herself in their creation, a startling statement of control and self-defined identity.
Cersei takes action to address her frustrations in ways that are abhorrent. However, nothing she does is terribly different from the behavior of any of the kings who’ve sat on the Iron Throne. For example, one of Robert Baratheon’s most noteworthy decisions in the series is to send an assassin to kill Daenerys Targaryen. Murder as a tool of politics is fair game for queens as well as kings. The Targaryen kings routinely married their siblings, making Cersei’s incest less aberrant than it might appear. The history of the Iron Throne is one of brutality, murder, and manipulation, and Cersei is merely utilizing the standard toolset to achieve her aspirations of power.
Like Arya and Brienne, Cersei wields power by adopting the strategies and behaviors of the patriarchy more often than the ones more routinely available to women. It’s telling that she’s judged negatively while the men who use similar tactics are celebrated as legends. In this, she reveals the hypocrisy at the heart of Westerosi culture just as surely as poor, deluded Sansa.
Daenerys Targaryen: The New Woman
Daenerys Targaryen is the most powerful woman in the known world. She is introduced in A Game of Thrones as a terrorized, weak-willed little girl who wants nothing more than to appease her violent brother and help him win back the Iron Throne. (In choosing appeasement she isn’t so very different from Sansa, though her path through life ends up being very different.) By the end of the book, she has immolated herself on her husband’s pyre and magically risen from the ashes in possession of three baby dragons. There haven’t been dragons in Westeros for hundreds of years, and as she awakens the dragons, she also awakens in herself a mystical knowledge that she—not her brother, Viserys—may be the true inheritor of the Iron Throne.