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This isn’t designed as an academic article: I am in no degree intellectual enough for that. I simply hope it spawns a worthwhile debate or interesting chat.
ASOIAF’s widely varied cast includes a large number of interesting and on the whole well-drawn female characters, in a setting that is vastly stacked against women. Focusing on the female POVs, we find the following.
1. Catelyn Stark
Catelyn is a very unusual character to find in high fantasy - a realistically drawn wife and mother in a feudal world. From the very beginning of AGOT I felt that Cat felt like a “real woman”, rather than a construct, in her relations with Ned, her children and the storyverse, and the position of power she had as defined by her role as a powerful lord’s wife.
Cat enjoys sex and, we assume, gets a lot of it. (It’s notable that the only ASOIAF sex scene that doesn’t involve either two first-degree relatives or any element of disparity of power between the two parties is the one between Ned and Cat early in AGOT, which we pick up during the afterglow.) Let’s remember this point.
Part of Cat’s sympathy as a character as well as her success in her wife-and-mother role (until wars, Lannisters, Greyjoys, Westerlings, Red Weddings etc. intervene) is that she is happy with it. This puts her in direct contrast with...
2. Cersei Lannister
Cersei is the other pole of the Mother figure. While being as obsessed with her children’s welfare as Catelyn, she is the only “gender-conscious” feminist in ASOIAF, possibly due to the effect of having a near-physically-identical twin brother and experiencing treatment vastly different from his. The women we see acting in something closer to the non-traditional role that Cersei wanted, Asha, Arya and Brienne, achieved what they wanted to achieve with their fathers’ connivance or, in Brienne’s case, at least his permission. Had Tywin had some of Balon Greyjoy’s nous, Cersei might have been a considerably more formidable part of the Lannister arsenal.
Cersei uses sex to manipulate others, only actually enjoying it with Jaime. It’s arguable that she does this because she dislikes it. But the point remains that the “queen of whores” (J. Lannister, AFFC) never experiences sexual pleasure, except as part of something twisted and wrong.
She is arguably the least likeable leading character. Her obsession with power - masculine-style power, rather than the female power that Cat enjoys and that she would have enjoyed had her relations with Robert been better - and her constantly error-strewn trip through the last three books make her very difficult to sympathise with in any situation.
This leads us to...
3. Daenerys Targaryen
Dany starts the series as an exploited younger sister in a powerless position, sold into marriage to broker a military alliance. By late ASOS, she is queen of everything her khalasar walks across and making a serious attempt to learn to be a good ruler in order to improve her chances of winning back her homeland. Feminist revolution ahoy? Not quite.
At the moment we cannot know how Dany’s accession will progress. There are hints (mummer’s dragon, in both Quaithe’s prophecies and the House of the Undying) that a fake Aegon VI will be produced to attempt to invade Westeros and take the throne instead of Dany. Given that this brouhaha looks likely to take place in book 5 of 7, I believe that this particular attempt to unseat her will not succeed.
However, Rhaenyra Targaryen, her father Viserys I’s chosen heir, was disinherited in favour of her younger half-brother on the grounds of Andal prejudice against female rulers. A decent number of other stories or legends from Westeros’s past look likely to be recreated in ASOIAF:
- Bran = the Last Hero
- Walder Frey = the Rat King
- Jaime = Aemon the Dragonknight (despite initial appearances to the contrary...)
- Rhaegar and Lyanna = Bael the Bard and the daughter/heir to Winterfell
- either Jon or Stannis = Night’s King, with Melisandre = Night’s King’s bride
Given this type of repeated historical foreshadowing, I would bet my last penny that Dany = Rhaenyra. The powerful and wise woman who would have been a great queen for Westeros is not going to become queen. And that will be truly sad.
The question of Dany and sexuality is strongly affected by the position in which she is placed by other people. In AGOT she slowly comes to enjoy her sexual relationship with her husband and to take charge of her own sexual identity. Later, after Drogo’s death, her experiments with lesbianism seem driven by lack of available and appropriate male partners (leading, ultimately, to an unrealistic portrayal: lesbianism as fantasy for and about men, rather than as a desire by one woman for another woman).
4. Arya Stark
ASOIAF in general turns on its backside in round about late ASOS/all of AFFC. At the start, lines are easy to draw. The Starks are good and the Lannisters bad. We have a soft spot for Tyrion, and we might dislike Sansa, but that’s about all. The Starks lose and the Lannisters win. By the end, the Starks are heading for the dark side, and the Lannisters are all dying or revealing themselves as nice or redeemable people (except Cersei). We have a soft spot for Bran, and perhaps for Jon, but that’s all. And the Lannisters are losing, and the Starks are looking likely to win.
Arya is one of three big parts of the growing Stark darkness, the others being UnCatelyn and Sansa as a proto-schemer. Her gradual desensitisation to violence, in the same way as any child survivor of warfare, leads to a generally sympathetic character whose casual attitude to killing is frightening.
It is not true to say that Arya’s character arc has nothing to do with gender because she is a practically sexless child. In fact, Arya’s story is all about gender - about her attempts to bypass it as a child or to hide it while on the road. She thinks all the time about being a girl, but largely in terms of trying not to be a girl. The verbal foreplay with Gendry that from any other writer would mean a massively telegraphed future relationship - similar to Brienne’s with Jaime - is the only real note of femininity in her saga.
One of the few reasons for which I will actually miss the five-year-gap, the others being Rickon’s aging and Jaime’s chance to train a bit harder to use a sword left-handed, is that had it happened Arya would definitely have hit puberty by its end. She’s likely to do so anyway, assuming she lives well into TWOW - she’s eleven at the end of AFFC - but it will be very interesting to see how her character develops or is forced to develop when she becomes old enough for sexuality to become a part of her arc.
5. Sansa Stark
Everybody has met an early-AGOT-era Sansa. This Sansa is the cliquey privileged student, the Pollyanna who lives her life in a romantic novel. For this reason, Sansa rings far truer than the average woman in fantasy fiction, just as Catelyn does. (In my case, Sansa rang far too true for me to like her at all until her last AGOT chapter.) Sansa’s journey into disillusionment is, IMO, one of the best character arcs in ASOIAF, and I can only hope that she doesn’t descend, morally, to Cersei’s level by the end.
As she physically matures her nascent sexuality is exploited by other characters. Cersei tries to tell her how to use sex as a weapon; she is forced into an alliance-marriage; we see late in AFFC that she is beginning to understand Littlefinger’s sexual obsession with her. Sex for her is something to be feared - possibly due to a combination of her youth and her experience with nearly having sex with Tyrion - and something she only considers in the context of her courtly relationship with Sandor Clegane, her non-knightly protector.
But Sansa is happy being female and particularly with being feminine. This, combined with a Cersei-inspired ability to use her femininity, appears to be a potential key to real power for her in the future.
6. Brienne of Tarth
Brienne, the outwardly masculine warrior chick, is notable for being a rare realistic depiction of the physical requirements for being a woman who participates in the style of warfare of a pseudo-mediaeval society. In a classically ironic GRRM character choice, she’s also just about the only personification of knightly virtue in the series (along with her ancestor Duncan).
I am capable of rehashing her verbal foreplay with Jaime to the nth degree, so I won’t. I will, though, mention that the modified/broken courtly love theme that begins with Sansa and Sandor continues in full strength with Brienne and Jaime, in this case with the primary ironic twist being that it occurs in both directions. Both of them, at different times, are each other’s knights in shining armour, and Jaime is the one who trusts his honour to Brienne.
Someone pointed out either here or on Ran’s board, I think the latter, that it would have been incredibly easy for GRRM to make Brienne a lesbian, but instead he gave her a massive schoolgirl crush on one of the prettiest men in Westeros and then made her fall thoroughly in love with another. Much as I want the Kingslayer to get off his golden arse and do something about the latter, I feel it’s unlikely - but ASOIAF has sex scenes with apparently unappealing men. There’s some sort of imbalance here.
7. Asha Greyjoy
Asha is introduced in ACOK pretending to worm her way into her unwitting brother’s pants for a variety of reasons none of which are related to sexual desire. She is later showed to have a healthy appreciation for sex, but no desire for marriage and motherhood, preferring her warship and her sword. She’s promptly disinherited by her uncle.
8. Arianne Martell
The first time we encounter Princess Arianne, she’s on set for about half a page. The second time we do so, she’s nude and about to engage in a manipulative sexual liaison with poor put-upon Arys Oakheart. This is an introduction about as prejudicial as staging Jaime and Cersei’s third appearance in the same bed, giving the immediate impression that Arianne is all and solely about sexuality.
Arianne uses sex as dramatically as Cersei, though she at least is capable of enjoying it, and is a similarly inept politician, though perhaps one who is more willing to learn. That the defining event in her life - her father’s putative plot to disinherit her in place of her brother - never actually happened will likely go some way towards increasing her significance in Dorne’s later political support of Daenerys, though it also diminishes her significance (to me) as a character - that her central struggle wasn’t actually about anything.
Random Not-Quite Conclusions
ASOIAF’s women present, severally and combined, a robust challenge to the general male-dominated fantasy series with the odd female mage, priest or side-kick. They show the saga as a rare example of female strength in action in a feudalistic world, with women shown in a variety of roles rather than entirely the oppressed or, in converse, entirely the oppressors.
But there are thorns on the roses - notably the sexualities of the women involved. Sex as part of a mutual loving relationship with no overtones of the forbidden comes only for Catelyn, the perfect wife and mother. Feminists and warrior women don’t get to have regular love lives, and perfect little ladies need to be protected, à la Red-Riding-Hood, from the Big Bad Dog Wolf. That to me is the biggest flaw in their portrayal, and is one that continues in the portrayal of non-POV women including Pia, Lysa and Amerei, for whom sex is degradation or the sole role in life: c.f. redcandle17's discussion here.
In addition, Cersei’s position as the only conscious feminist has the unfortunate side effect of implying that conscious feminists can’t assume power in their own right (or their children’s) without making a mess of it.
(Cross-posted to personal journal.)