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 (26 page)

It’s clear that Viserys has been emotionally abusing Daenerys for years. It’s also clear that she has internalized this abuse, as she often makes excuses for his behavior. She accepts her situation
vis-à-vis
her brother, her status, and her forced marriage, even as she fears the outcome. Like Sansa Stark, Daenerys doesn’t question the world in which she lives.

Because she has been bartered like chattel, coerced into a marriage about which she has no say, Daenerys’s first sexual experience is, unsurprisingly and disturbingly, as a victim of rape at the hands of her new husband. Though she “willingly” goes with Khal Drogo, she cannot be said to have consented. She doesn’t want to have sex with him. Her agreement to the sex act takes place under duress. And, as she has no true agency of her own, she cannot truly agree to her role in the bargain Viserys has made.

By modern standards, if not those of Westeros, age and coercion make every sexual encounter Daenerys has with Khal Drogo amount to ongoing marital rape. Eventually, she does take control of their sexual life, after learning ways to manipulate Drogo sexually. It could be argued that this was her way of regaining power. However, the canard of the woman who falls in love with her rapist is extremely difficult to overcome for many readers.

And it may be that we aren’t meant to overcome it.

There’s an enormous amount of violence against women in A Song of Ice and Fire, and its portrayal is uniformly negative. It is always uncomfortable rather than titillating. Rape and sexual violence, both from “protectors” and from strangers, are persistent threats to all the female characters. Robert Baratheon drunkenly rapes Cersei; when she tells him he’s hurt her, he blames it on alcohol. Sansa, Arya, and Brienne all experience verbal threats of sexual violence from a wide variety of men. This omnipresent threat in these women’s lives creates what amounts to an environment of sexual oppression. That this circumstance is rarely remarked upon by the characters shows just how entrenched it is in the culture.

Given her circumstance, Daenerys has only two real options. She can either resist Khal Drogo—a losing proposition both for her and for Viserys—or she can find a way to live with her situation. She chooses the latter. With this choice, she begins to gain power, first through Khal Drogo, who grants her both his protection and the authority that comes from being his mate, and, later, through her own agency when she emerges unscathed from Khal Drogo’s funeral pyre with the baby dragons. Only with Khal Drogo’s death is she free to make her way in the world, largely unencumbered by male control.

Of course, none of this power comes without a price. As she gathers her army together, Daenerys begins to sacrifice aspects of her personality. She becomes harder and less compassionate, her choices less personal. A sweetness that she had at the beginning of the series is slowly burning away as she becomes more and more powerful.

These female characters, along with many others in the series, are a striking group of powerful women making their way through a patriarchal world where the mere fact of their gender would deny them power.

Sansa, Arya, Cersei, Brienne, and Daenerys are all on journies to create a place in the world for themselves in the face of massive obstacles thrown at them by an oppressive society. Though their paths through this maze toward autonomy are different, most of them seek the same thing: control over their own lives.

Sansa loses her power within the culture after her father is killed. She lives her life buffeted by others, refusing to take any action that would create a more autonomous life for herself. Arya seeks to avenge those who have wronged her by seizing power where and when she can—no matter that the kinds of power available to her drive her further and further from the girl she once was. Cersei takes power through guile, manipulation, and murder. She’s indifferent to how the power affects her because power is the only thing she understands and values. Brienne adopts the trappings of masculine power even though it makes her a pariah and the butt of jokes. Her power is blunted both by her own self-loathing and the approbation of the culture around her. Daenerys is the one woman who holds her life in her own hands. Orphaned, widowed, possessing real power—in the form of the dragons, her own possibly magical nature, and the warriors at her command—there are no men who rule her.

Unfortunately, power comes at a cost to all these women, just as it does to the men who wield it. Such is the nature of power in A Song of Ice and Fire.

In Westeros, George R.R. Martin has created a brutal world where unspeakable acts are commonplace, where the shares of power allotted to men and women are clearly out of balance, where women must struggle, steal, and fight for every ounce of autonomy. The stories of Arya, Cersei, and all the other female characters are harsh, but they shine an even harsher light on their society and the lies that poison its heart. And that’s where Martin does something remarkable. In the midst of what appears to be a traditional male-power fantasy about war and politics, he serves up a grim, realistic, and harrowing depiction of what happens when women aren’t fully empowered in a society. In doing so, by creating such diverse and fully rendered female characters and thrusting them into this grim and bitter world, Martin has created a subversively feminist tale.

       
CAROLINE SPECTOR
has been an editor and writer in the science fiction, fantasy, and gaming fields for the last twenty-five years. Most recently, she has had stories in the Wild Cards collections
Inside Straight, Busted Flush
, and
Suicide Kings
. Before joining the Wild Cards consortium, Caroline authored three novels
—Scars, Little Treasures
, and
Worlds Without End
—editions of which have been published in English, French, German, and Hungarian. She has written and edited several adventure modules and sourcebooks for TSR’s game lines, most notably
Top Secret/S.I
. and
Marvel Super Heroes Roleplaying
, both on her own and co-authored with her husband, gaming legend Warren Spector. In addition to her writing, Caroline spent two years as Associate Editor at the magazine
Amazing Stories
.

JOHN JOS. MILLER

GEORGE R
.
R
.
MARTIN’S EPIC
fantasy A Song of Ice and Fire, currently incomplete at five volumes, is a book world rarity: a genre series that has broken through the walls of the fantasy/science fiction ghetto. It’s immensely popular among mainstream readers and critics and is garnering a lot of attention in academic circles, even before the final book in the series has been published.

Although concrete, reliable data is hard to come by, it seems fair to say that Ice and Fire has sold at least 15 million copies worldwide, though this is without sales from the most recently published volume,
A Dance with Dragons
. It has been widely reported that
Dance
sold more copies on its first day of availability than any other book in 2012, totaling 298,000 copies (170,000 in hardback; 110,000 as an e-book; and 18,000 as an audiobook). Total sales to date are unknown, or at least so far unpublished.

There are several good reasons for its astounding popularity. The world of Ice and Fire is epic in scope, peopled by dozens of carefully delineated characters, and written in wonderfully descriptive prose. A masterfully produced, written, and acted television adaptation of Martin’s universe doesn’t hurt, either, drawing in a multitude of readers who would otherwise have not been aware of the novels.

A Song of Ice and Fire also sits directly astride the e-book/paper book publishing chasm. Although this doesn’t entirely account for its widespread popularity, I suspect that embracing the new publishing technology has something to do with its phenomenal success.
A Game of Thrones
, the first volume in the series, was published in 1996 before there were such things as e-books. The most recent volume,
A Dance with Dragons
, appeared in 2011, a time of booming e-book sales. What does this mean for readers in general and, more germane to this article, book collectors specifically? Obviously, the final words in this debate are yet to be spoken, but we can make some educated guesses.

The first of Martin’s Ice and Fire volumes to have a simultaneous e-book/paper copy release was
A Feast for Crows
in 2005. Around that time earlier volumes were also translated to the e-book format.
A Dance with Dragons
had a simultaneous e-book/paper copy release, as presumably will later volumes in the series. For the first few titles e-book sales lagged behind even audiobooks, but with the publication of
Dance
sales for e-book and hardcover releases are, according to Martin, running neck and neck. Sales patterns are clearly shifting and will likely tilt further in the future. To what ultimate end is currently uncertain, though I doubt that the proliferation of e-books means the end of paper editions.

Several factors contribute to this belief. First, collectible book sales remain unaffected by the advent of e-publishing. More detail is presented below, but publishers, both large and small, continue to eagerly produce various Ice and Fire editions, and once purchased, their owners are quite reluctant to part with them.

Humanity can be sorted into—among other things—collectors and noncollectors. To be up front about my own bias, I’m firmly in the collectors’ camp. I enjoy the process of finding and acquiring objects (including books) that interest me, and I enjoy owning things that have an actual physical existence. To me and many others, collecting is a primal urge equivalent to eating and sleeping. This trait is not going to disappear from human nature anytime soon.

Some changes in the publishing world are coming, though. The rising popularity of e-books probably means the death of the mass market paperback. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as return policies associated with this format—specifically, cover stripping for return and the shredding of the book’s body—are both costly and wasteful. E-readers are a convenient, easy, and increasingly affordable alternative to shipping masses of books that ultimately go unsold and are eventually pulped for little purpose.

Also, many limited editions are produced by small publishers, not the huge ones owned by multinational corporations. (There are exceptions; as an example, see the HarperCollins slipcased editions of the Ice and Fire books.) These small publishers largely have a better sense of aesthetics than the utterly profit-driven multinationals. But even the giants can and do produce superlative volumes when the mood strikes, as with the signed and limited editions of the Robert Silverberg–edited
Legends
.