Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece
by jzgong
Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece by Alyssa Rosenberg
A much more level-headed response to criticism of GRRM’s approach to women that asks us to take a more objective view of storytelling, and refuses to equate the story with the writer or the reader.
My friends and I have remarked how GRRM’s mothers (those without grown children: Cersei Lannister, Catelyn Stark, Tanda Stokeworth, Lysa Arryn, etc.) are characterized as having “mother’s madness”. Their attempts to protect their children seem ill-advised, and at times harm their other offspring (Rickon, Myrcella). We had a hard time naming sane mothers who behaved rationally, other than the Queen of Thorns (Olenna Redwyne). Daenerys, the ultimate Mother, also fears the madness of her house’s blood, and my friends and I have yet to decide what this exception might mean for the series’ future and GRRM’s stance on mothers. All the same, it would do our minds a disservice if we reacted to this question with nothing but all-caps outrage and exceptionalism. I’m not saying Sady Doyle doesn’t make some good points about orientalism, etc., but Alyssa Rosenberg points out some telling flaws in her arguments that, I feel, often characterize the more embarassing portions of New Wave Feminism.
I haven’t read the piece yet but I had also noticed that GRRM tends to characterize mothers as “#1 priority: Protect children AT ALL COSTS” in a way that is a little silly and extreme. I think Gilly, though, is another example of a sane mother character. She is motivated to protect her son but not to the point of irrationality.
Dany is a really interesting example. I don’t think she acts irrationally, but she’s another example of a mother whose top motivation is PROTECT CHILDREN even when she doesn’t have any literal children! The fact that her people become her “children” on the one hand suggests that her maternal instincts can help her rule, but does it also suggest that a woman with literal children can’t be a good ruler because she’d be too invested in them (sort of like how priests can’t have families)? It also gets interesting when she encounters conflict between her two metaphorical sets of children (her dragons and her subjects).
Spoilers for books 4 and 5 of Song of Ice and Fire.
I think it’s interesting that Dany is very firm about herself and the risks she takes, and often she’ll ignore her own desires (Daario) and wed someone (Hizdahr) who disgusts her, because, to paraphrase her words, a queen does not belong to herself, but to her people. Yet when she agonizes over her dragons and her subjects alike, the guilt and desire to be the mother she wants to be for them directly conflict with the priorities of the queen she wants to be for them. In Westeros, only when Catelyn the Mother has died and becomes a zombie figure of vengeance does she lead the Brotherhood. That’s an obvious statement, and I don’t want to imply anything without thinking about it further, but I’m just putting the question out there. Are leadership and motherhood incompatible?
In case you’re interested, Alyssa Rosenberg put up a sort of follow-up questionnaire about gender and fiction, and it would be great if you participated.
The questions and my thoughts are here:
http://theoncominghope.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-gender-and-fiction.html
I generally agree with the answers she expressed to those questions, but I’ll have to find her Google+ post as well. I also really like the photos you used in your post; you didn’t directly caption or reference them, but someone who recognized which movies/shows they were from would immediately recognize the pertinence of the reference (like Irreversible).