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 (25 page)

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.

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.

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.

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 own, 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 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.

Daenerys’s journey from child bride to first female ruler of a
khalasar
is one of the more dramatic examples in the Ice and Fire series of a woman taking power. However, hers is not a journey without problems—both for the character and for readers. The most obvious of these is the fact that she falls in love with Khal Drogo. For a modern reader, this is inevitably problematic—being a mere thirteen, she can hardly be said to have consented to her marriage, much less to the sexual acts that take place within it. However, in Westerosi society, she’s considered of marriageable age once she has physically matured to a point where she can bear children. Her emotional maturity and personal desire for the union are irrelevant in a culture where the woman’s role is to bear a man’s children and to submit to him.

Daenerys is sold to Khal Drogo by her brother, whose goal is to use the khal’s men to invade Westeros and regain the throne he believes is his birthright. And Daenerys understands that being bartered off to a powerful savage, to cement a political and military alliance, is simply part of the role women must play in her culture.