Winter is Coming: Symbols and Hidden Meanings in A Game of Thrones (9 page)

T
hroughout history, women have been part of the “oldest profession” as it’s known (though not with full Brazilian waxes). Just about every episode shows bare breasts, and nudity is explicitly tied with subjugation: women strip to manipulate men, as if sex is all they have to offer. Non-prostitute characters, like Melisandre the priestess and Osha the wildling, likewise strip and have sex with the men to control them. Even Daenerys, the amazing conqueror and chosen one, starts as a raped, fully nude child-bride who asks her maid for sex lessons to better deal with her husband.

The very few characters who keep their clothes on at all times (Catelyn, Brienne, Yara, Arya, and Sansa) try to find a different way to manage in a patriarchal world. And in many cases, they do. Martin notes:

I wanted to present my female characters in great diversity, even in a society as sexist and patriarchal as the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Women would find different roles and different personalities, so women with different talents would find ways to work with it in a society according to who they are.
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Indeed, all the show’s women, from Queen Cersei to Yara Greyjoy, make different points about what it’s like to be a woman in their society. In medieval England, women were bartered as marriage pawns and expected to care for their husbands and families as their only profession. A few, especially widows like Lysa, Cersei, and Catelyn, found a road to a different kind of power, claiming regencies and inciting wars. While the medieval world saw isolated female pirates, mercenary captains, and brave peasant girls seeking individual glory, the highborn ladies who led armies in war could and did change the face of history as they played the Game of Thrones. In context, how accurate are the women of Westeros?

Of course, political marriages were typical for young women—very young women in some cases. They often married at the onset of puberty, at 12-13, and normally before 20; the average age was between 15 and 16. In the first book, Sansa is 11 (13 on the show) and she’s already betrothed to Joffrey. As Daenerys, thirteen and quickly pregnant in the first book, discovers, there are no adolescents or teenagers in medieval times—only children and women. When a woman was able to have children herself, a match was made for her. As Cersei, Sansa, and the Tyrell ladies intrigue in King’s Landing, they parallel many European queens wed for their lands but eager to do more than bear children.

With her constant insistence on “courtesy as a lady’s armor,” Sansa demonstrates her love for medieval “courtesy books”—primers on proper behavior written mainly between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. While many were written by men, one famous set was penned by the early feminist Christine de Pizan. She writes:

It seems to me that it is the duty of every princess and high-born lady, excelling in honour and status above all others, to excel in goodness, wisdom, manners, temperament and conduct, so that she can serve as an example on which other ladies and all other women can model their behaviour. Thus it is fitting that she should be devoted to God and have a calm, gentle and tranquil manner, restrained in her amusements and never intemperate.
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By acting such, the queen could provide a comforting role model, as Sansa does while leading the women in prayer during Stannis’s siege. Further, she could provide a civilizing influence on her husband. This is how first-season Sansa sees herself, as Joffrey’s lady and gentling influence. De Pizan advises ladies with husbands who “conduct themselves abominably” to “bear all this and to dissemble” for responding harshly will gain them nothing.
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It’s clear as the series unfolds that Sansa means to take this advice.

Traditional queen consorts took the role of intercessor, publicly pleading with the king to show mercy on behalf of a particular petitioner “to soften his heart toward his subjects and improve his rule.”
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Of course, in “The Pointy End,” Sansa kneels before the court, beautifully dressed and graceful. She words a pretty plea, allowing Joffrey to excuse her father for love of her. In fact, traditional intercession was generally arranged in advance, allowing the king to seem merciful but not weak, yielding only to his lady’s pleas. As the queen’s role declined through the 9th to 12th centuries, the intercession remained her greatest, possibly only path to public and private power.

Joffrey, of course, ignores what’s expected of a merciful and politically astute king to execute Ned Stark in front of a shocked Sansa’s eyes. Even the small influence accorded her by medieval tradition and courtesy books has been denied to her, publicly hurled in her face. It’s no wonder she faints in horror.

In the following season, she learns courtly craftiness, manipulating Joffrey into sparing a drunken knight. (In the books, she and Ser Dontos subsequently engage in a courtly love drama, in which he swears to be “her knight” and protect her.) As Joffrey rides off to the Battle of Blackwater, Sansa slyly adds that her brother would be in the vanguard of the fighting and she knows Joffrey will do the same. Her place at court is finally usurped by Margaery Tyrell, who proves Sansa’s superior at manipulating Joffrey. This subtle kind of power was expected of court ladies, just as the intercession was.

“Margaery has her claws in Joffrey. She knows how to manipulate him,” Cersei complains jealously.

“Good, I wish you knew how to manipulate him,” Lord Tywin responds, clearly eager to have his grandson rule in name only while a strong woman guides him from behind the throne (2.4). Though the king might rule, his people knew whose voice made the final decisions.

Lady knights like Brienne are one of the more atypical archetypes, though a few existed in European history: Louise Labé, a ropemaker’s daughter born in 1520 Lyon, France, jousted in tournaments, naming herself “La Belle Amazon” and “Capitaine Louise.” In her poetry, she cried for women to “raise their minds slightly, above their falstaffs and bobbins.”
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Some (possibly exaggerated) tales of the time even see her fighting the Spanish in battle. Joan of Arc of course is famous for dressing in a knight’s garb and crowning the King of France. In battle she led the charges, sword raised. As a result, however, she was accused of being a witch, a prostitute, and a cross-dresser, and finally burned at the stake.

Men of their time weren’t encouraging of women fighting beside them. Martin notes, “The women in fantasy tend to be very atypical women…They tend to be the woman warrior or the spunky princess who wouldn’t accept what her father lays down, and I have those archetypes in my books as well [as more historical ones].”
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“I’m-no-Lady” Brienne is such an atypical figure.

When historical women did go to battle, especially peasant women, they generally disguised themselves as men. Tales of these disguised women are spread throughout the world, from the Ballad of Mulan to tales of Sarah Bishop and other Revolutionary War soldiers. They were celebrated for their bravery, but their gender was usually only revealed after their triumph. On the show of course, Brienne wins her tournament against Ser Loras, is named the victor, and only then removes her helmet. Perhaps she’s noticed that if she declares herself a woman, she’s less likely to be acclaimed for her skills.

Actual knighthood (offered to neither Louise Labé nor Joan of Arc) only occurred for women in a few particular orders, including the Catalonian Order of the Hatchet or the Italian Order of the Glorious Saint Mary. The Order of the Hatchet was established to honor the women who defended the town of Tortosa in a battle. The men considered surrendering, “which the Women hearing of, to prevent the disaster threatening their City, themselves, and Children, put on men’s Clothes, and by a resolute sally, forced the Moors to raise the Siege.”
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The dames admitted to the order received many privileges, including inheritance of their husbands’ wealth in their own right, exemption from all taxes, and precedence over men in public assemblies. In England, 68 ladies were appointed to the Order of the Garter between 1358 and 1488, while the Low Countries had a few orders exclusively open to noble women.
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It’s been made clear that brothers inherit before sisters; however, Westerosi law goes further than that. In Westeros, women have been prohibited from ruling the Seven Kingdoms in their own right since the Dance of the Dragons, a disastrous civil war that killed many of the Targaryens and their mythic mounts. In fact, the conflict began as a Targaryen princess, her father’s firstborn, and his son by his second marriage both claimed the crown. Certainly, Daenerys is in denial about this law, though if she invades with enough troops and near-legendary dragons, the people of Westeros may crown her in any case.

The Dance of the Dragons mirrors an English war fought two generations after the Norman Conquest. King Henry I had all his nobles swear fealty to his daughter Mathilda. However, the widowed and childless Empress Mathilda had been sent off as a child bride to King Heinrich V of Germany and was a German-speaking stranger to her birth country and its customs. Likewise, Daenerys may consider herself a child of Westeros, but in fact, she’s never lived there, only imagined it distantly. She may be in for a great surprise.

A few generations prior, the son of the English king had not inherited, but rather, the Saxon nobles voted for the most able male leader. With this recent history in place, and Mathilda far from the seat of power, King Henry’s nephew Stephen rode hard for Winchester, where he seized the treasury, gathered support, and persuaded his brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester, to crown him King of England. Once he had been crowned, in the people’s eyes he was king. Like charming, popular Renly, this king had an older brother, but ignored him, determined to claim the crown for himself.

Mathilda fought Stephen in a series of battles and won over the bishop’s support at last. However, upon her triumph, her people began calling her “haughty” and “willful,” complaining that she was acting like a female king—something her subjects weren’t prepared to accept. As Helen Castor notes in her history book,
She-Wolves:
The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth
, “The risk these queens ran was that their power would be perceived as a perversion of ‘good’ womanhood, a distillation of all that was to be feared in the unstable depths of female nature.”
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In historical England, the first reigning queens, Mary and Elizabeth, only appeared in the renaissance. Just before them, Henry VIII and Edward VI were respectively too incapacitated and too young to fight in battle, paving the way for “the humanist prince, entering the fray on the intellectual rather than the military front line” and thus preparing the country for female sovereigns.
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Joffrey is expected to lead his battles himself, as Robb Stark and Stannis Baratheon do. Daenerys, of course, has proved equal to the challenge, riding her Silver across the sea. But will that be enough?

Empress Mathilda was finally forced to give the throne over to her teenage son Henry, who as Henry II always appreciated her council, even going so far as to call himself “Henry FitzEmpress.”
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Though she won her war, the English people were unwilling to give her the crown. Will this be Daenerys’s fate, winning the throne but losing the popular vote due to her gender? Will she wed and give the throne to her husband and son? Or will she demand the rule in her own right?

I wanted to make a strong mother character. The portrayal of women in epic fantasy have been problematical for a long time. These books are largely written by men but women also read them in great, great numbers. […] Nobody wants to hear about King Arthur’s mother and what she thought or what she was doing, so they get her off the stage and I wanted it too. And that’s Catelyn.
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Thus Martin describes his desire to create Catelyn, the fighting mother of the saga. Martin adds:

With Catelyn there is something reset for the Eleanor of Aquitaine, the figure of the woman who accepted her role and functions with a narrow society and, nonetheless, achieves considerable influence and power and authority despite accepting the risks and limitations of this society. She is also a mother.
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After her last child was born, and her mother-in-law Empress Mathilda had died, Eleanor of Aquitaine entered politics. At age forty-four, she introduced her teenage son Richard (one day to be Richard the Lionheart, King of England) to her home duchy of Aquitaine and crowned him as heir to her lands (Richard’s older brother was her husband’s heir). There she issued decrees, technically in Richard’s name. Likewise, Catelyn Stark forges alliances for Robb in the Riverlands, where she grew up, trading on the people’s personal loyalty to her.

Eventually, Queen Eleanor grew sick of her husband King Henry II’s decrees and raised three of her sons in rebellion against him. When she failed, her husband locked her away for fifteen years. Upon the king’s death in 1189, Richard the Lionheart took the throne and released his mother, issuing the unprecedented decree that she might have “the power of doing whatever she wished in the kingdom” and making her a co-regent to himself.
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When Richard went on crusade, he was held for ransom in Austria, a capture instigated by his rebellious brother Prince John and King Philippe of France. The latter was the offended half-brother of Richard’s former betrothed, Princess Alys. When, like Robb Stark, Richard broke his word while on campaign and married another, Philippe swore revenge. (Robb had better watch for the angered Freys.) Queen Eleanor delivered the ransom, amidst “anxious and difficult” negotiations.
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As she had many adventures, riding to Jerusalem and leading her own troops in the Crusades, she made it clear that she was no traditional lady.