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 (5 page)

ALYSSA ROSENBERG

Rape, Myth-Making, and the Rise and Fall of Nations in A Song of Ice and Fire

THERE’S NO QUESTION THAT
the world George R.R. Martin has created in his Song of Ice and Fire novels is a brutal one, often novelly so. Whether his characters are being flayed, turned into zombies in dungeons or ice demons in northern forests, or burned to death by mad kings and visionary priestesses, there’s no question that life in Westeros and across the narrow sea can be nasty, brutal, and short. And if you’re a woman—and occasionally a man—the threat of sexual assault is omnipresent.

The series’ sexual politics have been one of the most-discussed—and most-misunderstood—aspects of Martin’s books and HBO’s adaptation of them. The
New York Times
’ Ginia Bellafante, in her review of the series, wrote that its “costume-drama sexual hopscotch” suggested that “all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise.” In an (admittedly snarky) discussion of Martin’s writing in
A Game of Thrones
, the feminist blogger Sady Doyle wrote that “George R.R. Martin is creepy [. . .]. He is creepy, primarily, because of his TWENTY THOUSAND MILLION GRATUITOUS RAPE AND/OR MOLESTATION AND/OR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SCENES.”

When writer Rachael Brown asked Martin in a 2011 interview how he decides when to include depictions of sexual violence in his novels, he gave an answer that didn’t exactly debunk his critics’ arguments:

       
I have gotten letters over the years from readers who don’t like the sex, they say it’s “gratuitous.” I think that word gets thrown around and what it seems to mean is “I didn’t like it.” This person didn’t want to read it, so it’s gratuitous to that person. And if I’m guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I’m also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot.

Martin isn’t kidding about the volume of sex scenes and sexual assaults, which show up almost as often as the introduction of a new house crest, if not with the frequency of new dishes at feasts. Despite their frequency, the depictions of sexual assault are often fairly muted, viewed through the lens of painful memory rather than happening in the present tense. For readers who are sensitive to depictions of rape and domestic violence, the number of those assaults or discussions of assault may be an insurmountable barrier to enjoying the books or the show. Everyone has an individual threshhold for violence in art, but it would be a mistake to suggest that depictions of sexual and domestic violence in A Song of Ice and Fire are merely lurid exploitation.

While not all of the sexual assaults that occur in the novels advance the plot, rape is an act that sparks wars and assassinations that reshape continents and the rule of law. And those specific acts that don’t impact the larger plot still serve a critically important purpose: attitudes toward sex and consent are one of the ways that citizens of Westeros, the Ironborn, the Free Folk, and members of the societies across the narrow sea distinguish themselves from each other. In Westeros in particular, where the ability to kill is a sign of manhood and even of honor, it’s sexual misconduct that signifies monstrosity.

When we’re first introduced to the characters whose adventures begin our trek through Martin’s expansive world, it’s on the occasion of King Robert Baratheon’s visit to Winterfell, the holdfast of his old comrade in arms, Ned Stark. Robert justified the war in which he and Ned fought together, and during which he usurped the dynasty that preceded his own, in part because he believes that the heir to that dynasty kidnapped, raped, and killed Lyanna Stark, Ned’s sister and the woman Robert was pledged to marry. As he and Ned discuss the war in
A Game of Thrones
, that alleged atrocity is meant to seal Robert’s argument that their campaign was just: “What Aerys did to your brother Brandon was unspeakable. The way your lord father died, that was unspeakable. And Rhaegar . . . how many times do you think he raped your sister? How many
hundreds
of times?”

The defeat of Rhaegar is a personal story for Robert, but it’s a fairy tale for the generations to come—they will transmit this tale of sexual violence and revenge to their own children as a way of explaining why Westeros is what, and how, it is. As Bran Stark, Ned’s son, tells the other children: “Robert was betrothed to marry her, but Prince Rhaegar carried her off and raped her [. . .]. Robert fought a war to win her back. He killed Rhaegar on the Trident with his hammer, but Lyanna died and he never got her back at all” (
A Game of Thrones
). It’s telling that, in this fairy tale, Robert hasn’t actually won the world he wanted by staving the prince’s chest in. As long as men can carry off the women that other men love, there will be wars of honor—not to mention generation upon generation of women raging under the burden of thwarted sexual and romantic desires. But that sexual violence will be cast as the actions of the monsters, such as Rhaegar.

As the characters fan out from Winterfell, attitudes toward sexual assault become one of the key markers they use to evaluate the new societies they encounter—and to define themselves in relation to those societies. When Jon Snow, Ned Stark’s bastard son, joins the Night’s Watch—the force of celibate warriors who devote their lives to guarding the massive wall that divides the area of Westeros under the king’s control from the wild territories in the land beyond—he’s disappointed to learn that his comrades are more criminal than they are willing and noble volunteers. In a vicious cycle, Westeros has come to rely on criminals to populate the Night’s Watch, particularly on “rapers,” but then discourages young men of merit from joining the force by pointing out who they’d be serving alongside. Rapers, because they can’t restrain their sexual impulses, must promise not to be sexually active again, even as they are physically removed from greater Westeros as means of holding them to that promise.

Even if the Night’s Watch has become a prison colony, a means of protecting Westeros as much from its own worst citizens as from its external enemies, when the men of the Watch venture out, rape again becomes a way that they distinguish themselves from some of the Free Folk—even their allies. Their first contact with the Free Folk and last point of refuge is a man called Craster who has built himself a little holdfast in the woods. When they first visit his hall, Jon Snow reflects that “Dywen said Craster was a kinslayer, liar, raper, and craven, and hinted that he trafficked with slavers and demons” (
A Clash of Kings
). To preserve their relationship with him, and to distinguish themselves from Craster, Lord Mormont orders the Night’s Watch not to touch his wives (who also happen to be his daughters). On their return trip, when the order’s discipline breaks down, one of the first things the chaos spawns is the rape of those women, who previously had been considered sacrosanct. These actions mark the men as traitors and apt targets for the mysterious Coldhands.

Similarly, when Theon Greyjoy, Ned Stark’s ward, returns to his father’s court on the Iron Islands, he’s ensconced in a society where rape is a weapon of war. Theon’s relatives consider that which is claimed in battle the only legitimate wealth, so much so that Theon’s father chides him for wearing gold that was given to him rather than taken forcibly in battle. They regularly separate their female captives into two classes: women who are appealing enough to serve as long-term sex slaves, or salt wives, and those unattractive enough to be fit only for physical labor. That attitude toward women—the fact that women are property in the Iron Islands in a way that makes Westeros look like a feminist paradise—is one of the markers set for the reader to show that Theon is in a corrupt and dangerous country.

By contrast, Daenerys Targaryen, a surviving member of the dynasty whose throne Robert Baratheon usurped, lives in exile across the narrow sea from Westeros in Pentos, a continent populated by scattered city-states and nomadic tribes. She attempts to define her rule and distinguish herself from the other petty tyrants she encounters by outlawing rape. Her first attempt to establish these new cultural mores comes when she is still married to Khal Drogo, a powerful warlord among the Dothraki. Daenerys intervenes to restrain Drogo’s bodyguards in the aftermath of a successful raid they undertake, in part, to fund her plans to mount an invasion of Westeros and restore the Targaryen dynasty. That intervention earns Daenerys no favors—the woman she saves from assault views her actions as naive paternalism, and it convinces many of Drogo’s followers that Daenerys is alienating him from their common values.

After Drogo’s death, when Daenerys emerges as a military leader in her own right, her proscriptions against rape may be principled, but they don’t eradicate sexual assault in the territories, known as Slaver’s Bay, that she conquers. In fact, her efforts to rule compassionately, of which her focus on sexual assault is one aspect, mark Daenerys as a vulnerable ruler, someone who is unable to practice the kind of total war favored by other successful warlords on the continent. It’s a tragic testament to the limited power of good intentions in the face of deeply ingrained and intractable cultural practices.

While Daenerys’s attempts to reform the sexual culture of Slaver’s Bay show her as a civilizing force, one of the clearest signs that Baratheon rule in Westeros is breaking down is the erosion of sexual norms, particularly those that protect noblewomen from assault beyond the court. The Lannisters begin to recognize that their position with the common people in King’s Landing may truly be untenable after the riot in which Lollys Stokeworth, a minor and not particularly popular member of the court, is gang raped by more than fifty men. Her assault is a sign of how deep the public contempt for the regime runs.

Sexual violence also plays a role in court politics and is often used in the narrative to show just how deeply the nobility is separated from its ideals. King Robert dies, poisoned by his queen, Cersei Lannister, who is seeking retaliation for the marital rape and domestic violence to which Robert regularly subjected her in violation of chivalric ideals. His son Joffrey succeeds him, and promptly intensifies that dynamic of abuse and makes it public. Sansa Stark, Ned’s daughter, who is engaged to Joffrey, was once excited by the prospects of the match. But after Ned’s death, Joffrey reveals himself to be a sexual sadist. Sansa is stripped and beaten by Joffrey’s bodyguards. Having his men perpetrate the abuse technically absolves him from direct blame for hitting her, but it also makes the knights complicit in the assault and forces them to choose between obeying his orders and beating a woman. Though he never makes good on his promise, Joffrey repeatedly threatens to rape Sansa, even after he marries her off to his uncle Tyrion.

Tyrion himself is a victim and perpetrator of sexual abuse: his own father orders his commoner wife gang raped to punish Tyrion, even forcing Tyrion to participate. It’s not the first time rape is utilized as a weapon in the poisonous Lannister family dynamic. After Cersei believes she’s discovered Tyrion’s mistress and taken her captive, Tyrion threatens to hold her son hostage against Cersei’s promise of the woman’s safety. “Whatever happens to her happens to Tommen as well, and that includes the beatings and rapes,” he tells his sister, thinking,
“If she thinks me such a monster, I’ll play the part for her” (A Clash of Kings
).