A Song of Ice and Fire has a rape problem.
George R. R. Martin uses nameless women’s bodies as character development for male antagonists in A Song of Ice and Fire. Rape victims serve as props and set decoration to illustrate a man’s depravity. Social class does not protect them. The only raped women who tell us their tales, either directly through inner monologue or by telling their story to another character, are villains. Despite numerous claims, Martin’s portrayal of rape is not supported by history.
There are, at a conservative estimate, 214 acts of rape and 117 rape victims in ASOIAF to date, not including the chapters from The Winds of Winter that George R.R. Martin has posted.
Some have argued that Martin uses Jeyne Poole as a statement to show that nobles are protected from rape while common people are not – i.e. if she were actually Arya the lords of the North would protect her. The text directly contradicts this. Noblewomen raped over the course of the story include Queen Cersei Lannister (by Robert), Queen Rhaella Targaryen (by her husband/brother), Lady Elia Martell, Lady Lollys Stokeworth, Lady Donella Hornwood, Lady Taena Merryweather, Lord Jonos Bracken’s daughter and Lord Hewett’s daughter. In addition, Vargo Hoat and his men attempt to rape Lady Brienne of Tarth. All of the rapes are known and none of the rapists are punished for their crimes. (Bad things may happen to the rapists, but it’s not a punishment for these specific crimes.) In fact, Ramsay Snow gains a castle and territory from raping Lady Donella and starving her to death. Rank does not protect a woman from rape; the only thing that protects a woman from rape is being one of Martin’s POV characters.
While POV characters may be protected from rape, the reader experiences rape through the perpetrator’s point of view. An example, though not the only one, is Tyrion’s rape of the slave girl in A Dance With Dragons. We know nothing about the slave girl besides the fact that she’s a slave and has been whipped; she is there and then she is gone, serving only to let us know that Tyrion is now Dark Tyrion. It is not the only incident in which we see a man having sex with a slave powerless to protest. Victarion and the “dusky woman,” a slave whose tongue has been cut out, is another example but not the only one.
When rape is told from the perpetrator’s point of view, the reader is left with the question of whether Martin actually intended those scenes to be rape scenes, There’s been a great deal of online argument as to whether Tyrion’s sex with the slave girl actually qualifies as rape. An even more ambiguous scene is Cersei’s sex with Taena Merryweather in A Feast for Crows Chapter 33. Taena says that Cersei is hurting her; however given Cersei’s history and the fact that she just turned Falyse Stokeworth over to Qyburn to be used for medical experiments which will assuredly end in Falyse’s death, Taena is in no position to refuse and must instead play along. Cersei is reenacting Robert’s rape of her, but the reader is left wondering whether it is a rape at all, since Cersei perceives Taena’s enthusiasm as genuine, while it’s entirely possible the fact that she is showing signs of arousal may be due to fear; it is not uncommon for actual rape victims to exhibit physical signs of sexual arousal. Martin’s presentation of the scene is as erotic if not more so than his few unambiguously consensual sex scenes; certainly many readers consider it erotic.
Several rapists in ASOIAF are point of view characters. They are given voice to tell their stories. They usually don’t consider themselves rapists and the scenes are written so that there’s an element of plausible deniability to the rapes. The rape victims are not POV characters; they are not given the agency to tell us their stories, their feelings about the rape, through inner monologue or even through telling their own stories during the narrative.
That’s not quite true. There are two examples in which rape victims tell us their stories through the narrative. The victims in question are both villains.
Mirri Maz Duur is raped by several members of Khal Drogo’s khalasar; Daenerys puts a stop to the rape and brings Maz Duur into the khalasar. The men who raped her are told to stop, but their only punishment is that they are not allowed to rape further. One of the men is forced to fight Drogo, but this is for disobedience, not for rape. Soon thereafter, Duur puts Drogo into a vegetative state and causes Daenerys to lose her child, Rhaego. When asked why she did it, Maz Duur says “Three riders had taken me, not as a man takes a woman but from behind, as a dog takes a bitch. The fourth was in me when you rode past.” She then details how Dany’s adopted people, the khalasar, murdered her neighbors, burned her home and whipped the children of the village. When Dany protests that she saved Maz Duur’s life:
Mirri Maz Duur laughed cruelly. “Look to your khal and see what life is worth, when all the rest is gone.”
Maz Duur suffered absolute, unalloyed horrors at the hands of Khal Drogo’s men. However, we don’t see this through her own eyes. We see her through Danaerys’s eyes. Daenerys views Maz Duur as the cruel one, the villain, and thus the reader does too. For Maz Duur’s crimes, Daenerys has her burned alive on Drogo’s pyre. Maz Duur is a villain because she took revenge for her own rape and the rape of those she cared for.
Daenerys was raped by Drogo repeatedly early on in their relationship (through her inner monologue, she describes crying into a pillow in agony every night); eventually she finds ways to have sex with him that are pleasing to them both, and she grows to love the man who raped her. The way that it’s written has caused many readers to think of this as a love story rather than a Stockholm Syndrome story. Daenerys, who fell in love with her rapist, is a hero. Maz Duur, who avenged herself on her rapists, is a villain.
We also hear about Robert Baratheon’s rape of Cersei Lannister through Cersei’s inner monologue, but we hear about it sandwiched in between some of Cersei’s most villainous acts, and at the end of the chapter she rapes Taena. In the chapter, Cersei refuses to defend the people of the Reach from rape and murder by the Ironborn, creates a situation that will likely lead to the death of Loras Tyrell, decides to arrange the death of Pycelle, and then while celebrating her victory thinks of what it would be like to have sex with a woman. This leads her to remember Robert repeatedly raping her during their marriage and blaming it on drunkenness. (While the term rape is not used, that’s clearly what is depicted.) When Falyse Stokeworth comes to her for help, interrupting her thoughts, Cersei has Qyburn take Falyse away for torturous medical experimentation that will end in Falyse’s death. Then Cersei forces herself on Taena, who says Cersei is hurting her but then (perhaps due to the deadly fate that has awaited others) goes along with the act.
Cersei, arguably, is the other female character who got revenge on her rapist, by ensuring that he was gored by the boar he hunted. She’s also a villain.
Theon Greyjoy, who was responsible for the murder of a number of residents of his former home Winterfell and murdered two boys that some speculate were his own children by the miller’s wife (and possibly raped her as well at the time of the murder, though that is ambiguous), is also tortured and forced to participate in the rape of Jeyne Poole. It’s been argued that Theon is being simultaneously raped during this act, but it’s not clear the author feels the same way. (In general it seems that Martin does not feel that a man can be raped by sex with a woman; both And, as many people have written in relation to the show’s transference of Jeyne’s story to Sansa Stark, Jeyne’s rape is used for Theon’s character growth and advancement, not Jeyne’s.
Every other woman who is raped – every other woman who is raped – has her story told by a man. Gregor Clegane’s men tell in detail the story of how they raped 13-year-old Layna, a tavern keeper’s daughter. We are told explicitly which orifices they used to rape her, how the men offhandedly killed her brother who tried to defend her. One of her rapists says that, since she’d stopped fighting by the time he got to her, “maybe she liked it after all.” We never find out what happened to Layna or her father afterwards. They were never important except to paint these male characters as evil.
Pia, Palla, the women of Tumbler’s Falls, the women that Ramsay Snow chases with dogs, rapes, flays alive and murders, the twelve year old girl that Rorge raped with a stick, Lollys Stokeworth, Donella Hornwood, so many more women, all of their stories are told to us by men. Aside from Pia, who has the joy of seeing her most recent (but only her most recent) rapist executed on Jaime Lannister’s order, they don’t get revenge, much less justice. They don’t get a point of view. Many of them don’t even get names.
The stories of rapists are important to George R. R. Martin. Those are the stories he tells. Our point of view characters are the rapists, not the victims. Victims of rape are not important enough in George R.R. Martin’s eyes to deserve to have their story told, not unless they’ve committed heinous villainous acts. If victims of rape aren’t important enough to be point of view characters, if women who take vengeance for their rapes into their own hands are villains, then what is a reader who has been raped supposed to feel about her own situation, her own search for justice?
There are also many people that argue that George R.R. Martin is only showing us what history was really like. However, the story is not directly reflective of history. While it is true that most of the horrific events took place in history at one time or another, Martin is using horrific events from over the course of a thousand years – but squeezing them into a story with about a 2-year span (so far). In addition to cherry-picking his horrors, he’s also cherry-picking the social elements of society in a way that doesn’t stand up to a historical analysis.
Several women in the story (for example, Cersei and Daenerys) are the victims of marital rape. It is never explicitly stated that they were raped, but they didn’t want it and it caused them pain; that’s rape. George R.R. Martin says that there was no concept of marital rape in the Medieval era, therefore it doesn’t make sense to have it here. However, the reason there was no concept of marital rape was due to the teachings of the Christian church, in which a woman’s body was the property of her husband.
Religion in Westeros is nothing like religion in Europe. As opposed to one incredibly dominant faith, there are multiple competing faiths. While the Faith of the Seven is preeminent, unlike in medieval Europe it is not required that people adhere to the faith in order to rise in rank, live in certain areas, and so forth. Ned Stark is committed to the Old Gods and becomes the second most powerful man in Westeros; his faith is no part of his downfall. While religion was a part of everyday life in Europe, it’s merely background in Westeros, and we’re never shown any liturgy from the Faith of the Seven (or other faiths) that establishes why women are pushed to so subservient a position.
I’ve seen the argument that, in the medieval era, women didn’t write about rape and therefore it makes sense that we’d never hear about rape from women in the books. Medieval women who wrote about rape include but are not limited to: Hrotsvit of Ganderheim, Christine de Pizan and the remarkable Hildegard von Bingen. There are plenty of medieval examples that Martin could draw from; he does not.
George R.R. Martin has gone on record as saying he would never write a rape scene from the point of view of the victim. He is, based on the examples above, perfectly comfortable writing from the point of view of the rapist and comfortable with explicitly detailing the rapes. Martin is content to use rape to develop male characters, to titillate the reader, and to paint rape victims seeking justice as villains. No other raped women have a voice. This calls into question his empathy as a human being and his imagination as a writer.
The women’s stories above end when you turn the page or turn off the TV. Real women who have been raped don’t have that luxury. Please join the Sansa Stark project and help real women who’ve been raped.
