Is It Fair to Call Catelyn Stark a Wicked Stepmother to Jon Snow Or Have We Misunderstood Her All Along?
PRE POINT: There are many people in the ASOIAF fandom accepted that Catelyn Stark somehow occupies the role of the classic fairytale wicked stepmother to Jon Snow. This particular point of view is a bit perplexing, though both because the textual support around this idea largely isn’t strong enough to treat it like irrefutable fact, and more importantly, because the idea that Cat is Jon’s abusive step-parent seemingly takes a very modern idea of what blended families should look like and ascribes it to a situation where it doesn’t even remotely apply.
To get it out of the way: Cat telling Jon that it should have been you, after Bran’s fall, is an utterly horrific and inappropriate thing to say. It was an unusual circumstance. Cat is clearly not coping with what has happened to Bran very well. And based on her behavior towards Maester Luwin a bit later, she seems to be cruelly lashing out at everyone. But as an adult, it was undeniably Catelyn’s responsibility not to take her pain and frustration out on a completely innocent child. Her behavior in this situation is utterly unforgivable.
But aside from this instance, their relationship seems to be almost entirely nonexistent. And the dynamic between Catelyn and Jon was incredibly complex complex in a way that a child like Jon would be incapable of fully understanding. And in a way that Ned went out of his way to completely ignore, to the detriment of everyone. Ultimately, many fans seem to entirely blame Catelyn for a situation that she didn’t want to be in and was objectively in danger as a result of despite the fact that Cat had absolutely no power or even any other options when she was put in this position.
One of the most informative and interesting passages regarding Jon and Catelyn’s relationship that hints at all of the endless influencing factors comes relatively early on in A Game of Thrones
In Catelyn II, Ned and Cat have this exchange (It’s a long passage, but it explains everything important about Catelyn and her feelings towards Jon.)
“Many men fathered bastards. Catelyn had grown up with that knowledge. It came as no surprise to her in the first year of her marriage to learn that Ned had fathered a child on some girl chance-met on campaign. He had a man’s needs, after all, and they had spent that year apart. Ned off at war in the south, while she remained safe in her father’s castle at Riverrun. Her thoughts were more of Robb, the infant at her breast, than of the husband she scarcely knew. Robb welcomed him to whatever solace he might find between battles. And if his seed quickened, she expected he would see to the child’s needs.
He did more than that. The Starks were not like other men. Ned brought his bastard home with him and called him son for all the North to see. When the wars were over at last and Catelyn rode to Winterfell, Jon and his wet nurse had already taken up residence. That cut deep.
Ned would not speak of the mother, not so much as a word. But a castle has no secrets, and Catelyn heard her maids repeating tales they heard from the lips of her husband’s soldiers. They whispered of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, deadliest of the Seven Knights of Aerys’s Kingsguard, and of how their young lord had slain him in single combat. And they told how afterward, Ned had carried Ser Arthur’s sword back to the beautiful young sister who awaited him in a castle called Starfall, on the shores of the Summer Sea. The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair, with haunting violet eyes.
It had taken her a fortnight to marshal her courage, but finally, in bed one night, Catelyn had asked her husband the truth of it — asked him to his face. That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever frightened her.
‘Never ask me about Jon,’ he said, cold as ice. ‘He is my blood, and that is all you need to know. And now, I will learn where you heard that name, my lady.’
She had pledged to obey, she told him. And from that day on, the whispering had stopped, and Ashara Dayne’s name was never heard in Winterfell again. Whoever Jon’s mother had been, Ned must have loved her fiercely, for nothing Catelyn said would persuade him to send the boy away.
It was the one thing she could never forgive him. She had come to love her husband with all her heart, but she had never found it in her to love Jon. She might have overlooked a dozen bastards for Ned’s sake, so long as they were out of sight. Jon was never out of sight, and as he grew, he looked more like Ned than any of the trueborn sons she bore him. Somehow, that made it worse.
‘Jon must go,’ she said now.
‘He and Robb are close,’ Ned said. ‘I had hoped—’
‘He cannot stay here,’ Catelyn said, cutting him off. ‘He is your son, not mine. I will not have him.’
It was hard, she knew, but no less the truth. Ned would do the boy no kindness by leaving him here at Winterfell.
The look Ned gave her was anguished.
‘You know I cannot take him south. There will be no place for him at court. A boy with a bastard’s name… you know what they will say of him. He will be shunned.’
Catelyn armored her heart against the mute appeal in her husband’s eyes.
‘They say your friend Robert has fathered a dozen bastards himself.’
‘And none of them has ever been seen at court,’ Ned blazed. ‘The Lannister woman has seen to that. How can you be so damnably cruel, Catelyn? He is only a boy.’
His fury was on him. He might have said more, and worse, but Maester Luwin cut in.
‘Another solution presents itself,’ he said, his voice quiet. ‘Your brother Benjen came to me about Jon a few days ago.’
‘It seems the boy aspires to take the black.’
Ned looked shocked. ‘He asked to join the Night’s Watch?’
Catelyn said nothing. Let Ned work it out in his own mind. Her voice would not be welcome now.
Yet gladly would she have kissed the maester just then. His was the perfect solution. Benjen Stark was a sworn brother. Jon would be a son to him, the child he would never have. And in time, the boy would take the oath as well. He would father no sons who might someday contest with Catelyn’s own grandchildren for Winterfell.
She outright states that, although being with another woman is an objective betrayal and although Catelyn could clearly never be with another man (despite the fact that she owed Ned no loyalty either) that Ned cheating on her in the early days of their marriage was to be expected. And she’s not even angry about it. She also directly states that she would have expected Ned to care for any illegitimate children, and she seems to have no negative feelings toward that either.
What upsets her is that Ned brings Jon to Winterfell before Catelyn and Robb have even arrived, and acknowledges Jon as his son for the entire world to see. In a normal contemporary society, Catelyn being upset about her husband’s illegitimate son is far less reasonable and it seems like a great deal of fans seem to look at her behavior and decisions through this lens. But she very directly explains why this is a problem. And frankly, she’s right. Ned treating Jon as an equal to all of his children puts all of them in an extremely dangerous and precarious position. And it puts Catelyn in potentially mortal danger at some point in her life as well.
However, because Catelyn is a woman and Ned is her husband, she has to go along with whatever he wants, and she can’t do anything about it. In the real world, if a woman didn’t want to be with someone who already had a child, they would be able to decide not to marry that person. And if a woman was put in a position that was uncomfortable or even dangerous for them after being married, they would have the option to leave. But Catelyn doesn’t have those choices. And Ned takes complete advantage of the fact that he can simply tell Cat what to do, and she has to do it regardless of whether or not she wants to.
And that really leads into another interesting aspect of this notion that Cat was Jon’s wicked stepmother. Because very early on in Ned and Cat’s marriage, she inquires about Jon’s parentage and the rumors surrounding it. It’s the only time in their relationship that Ned ever truly frightened her, and Ned commands her to never ask about Jon’s mother again, and tell him who started the rumors about Ashara Dayne.
But one particularly vital aspect of this whole exchange is that Cat does what Ned tells her to do when it comes to Jon. So, if Cat is supposed to be abusive to Jon, then that would logically mean that Ned was aware that Cat was abusing Jon and never told her not to which makes absolutely no sense.
Interestingly, Ned also says that he can’t take Jon from Winterfell to King’s Landing because he would be shunned. And although he’s angry at Catelyn for being what he characterizes as cruel, he’s also blatantly acknowledging that regardless of Cat’s lack of relationship with Jon he is literally more comfortable leaving Jon in Cat’s hands alone at Winterfell than he is taking him among the other lords and ladies, who will apparently treat him much more poorly than he thinks Cat will.
The notion that Catelyn was abusive to him and even the notion that she didn’t treat him considerably better than Westerosi society would expect him to be treated doesn’t seem to be backed up from Ned’s own point of view.
Ned acknowledges that Robb and Jon have a good relationship, but Jon’s relationship with all of his siblings seems to be pretty great or rather, he at least doesn’t seem to be treated much differently than any of the other Stark children. At different points they all acknowledge that Jon is a bastard, but that doesn’t seemingly affect the way that he is treated among his siblings. Which, again, hints that Catelyn isn’t particularly hateful of him, at least outwardly, because she very easily could have poisoned the well against him with all of her kids, and she clearly hasn’t done that.
But one of the most interesting and telling thoughts that Catelyn ever has in relation to Jon is this: He would father no sons who might someday contest with Catelyn’s own grandchildren for Winterfell. This is the very obvious problem that everyone likes to ignore or blame Catelyn for outright because Catelyn’s rejection of Jon isn’t just an emotional reaction; it’s a political necessity. Ned isn’t a particularly politically savvy individual, and given that he is one of the most powerful and autonomous people in Westeros, he really doesn’t have to be. He is the person who is in complete control of his own world, so in his mind, he can treat Jon just like he’d treat a trueborn son and it’s fine, because what Ned wants is what happens.
However, he is very willfully ignoring the societal structure that he lives in, to the detriment of Catelyn, all of their children, and even Jon. The expectation that a woman should perform a maternal role for any child aside from their own, regardless of circumstance, is a pretty sexist point of view to begin with. But when it comes to Catelyn specifically, asking her to accept Jon is basically directly asking her to put herself and all of her own children in danger. Clearly, the rules of Westeros are incredibly unfavorable to all but a few of the people who live within their society. However, the highborn women who are essentially property that is transferred from their fathers to their husbands have very few silver linings in this system that keeps them almost completely disempowered. But one of those silver linings is supposed to be that their children’s future is secured purely through the rules of legitimacy and primogeniture. And Jon’s very presence in Winterfell is a massive threat to that insurance.
Based on the fact that Catelyn is specifically worried that Jon’s sons might contest her own grandchildren’s claim to Winterfell, it seems obvious that Cat doesn’t question Jon’s integrity as a person and doesn’t believe that he’d attempt to take her children’s inheritance for himself. However, something that a politically savvy person like Cat would likely be aware of is that Jon doesn’t even necessarily have to be a manipulative traitor in order to pose a danger to the future of House Stark or to Catelyn’s children specifically. Cat is an intelligent person who understands and more importantly, accepts the political complications of Westeros… that Ned simply does not. That should come as no great surprise, though, as she spent a significant amount of time being raised as Hoster Tully’s potential heir. And she’s a daughter of the Riverlands, a region that has been particularly affected by rebellious bastards. She undoubtedly grew up hearing tales of her Uncle Brynden’s exploits during the War of the Ninepenny Kings, so she’d be keenly aware of what a dangerous illegitimate child or that child’s future bloodline can do.
And that’s largely only looking at the Blackfyre rebels, illegitimate Targaryens who largely had no connection to Westeros or the Iron Throne. If the Blackfyres could cause that much war and chaos in the Seven Kingdoms, imagine what kind of effect a northern-looking bastard who is believed to be the son of a highborn woman, and has been raised with a lord’s education in Winterfell, could have on the political situation in the North. Ned legitimized Jon’s position in the North as much as he possibly could have, and Catelyn embracing him or raising him as her own would only have further endangered everyone.
Jon was always going to be Ned’s alone a Stark in everything but the name and to Catelyn, that made him competition for her own kids when it came to their father’s love. It didn’t matter if Jon himself acted polite and tried to do everything right. Just by existing, he was proof of everything she’d been taught to fear and despise about bastards. From the Faith of the Seven to the attitudes of noble society, the message was the same: bastards were born out of lust and moral failing, and you couldn’t ever fully trust them. They were “treacherous by nature,” “thieves or worse,” and fundamentally suspect. And honestly, Westerosi culture has reasons for that suspicion practical, political reasons. When your entire system of inheritance depends on bloodlines, a bastard is a built-in threat to the line of succession. History in Westeros is packed with examples of bastards with too much ambition, none more notorious than the Blackfyres. Catelyn literally warned Robb about that herself:
“Precedent,” she said, her voice bitter. “Yes, Aegon the Fourth legitimized all his bastards on his deathbed. And look at all the misery, war, and death that followed. You may trust Jon now. But will you trust his sons? Or their sons after them? The Blackfyre pretenders kept coming back for five generations, until Barristan the Bold finally killed the last of them. If you make Jon legitimate, you can never unmake it. If he marries and has children, any sons you have by Jeyne will never be safe.”
Jon wasn’t power-hungry Blackfyre waiting to betray them. But how could Catelyn or anyone promise that Jon’s descendants/children wouldn’t turn on the trueborn Starks someday? As long as Jon was alive and her pleas to send him away were ignored, there was always a risk that Ned would convince Robert Baratheon to legitimize Jon. That Robb himself would go and make it official was genuinely shocking to her. To Catelyn, a bastard line was always a ticking time bomb sooner or later, it would lead to treachery.
Ned obviously has a strong desire to have a happy and united family, but what he refuses to recognize is that ultimately, Jon’s character or his love for his family might not even matter all that much in the end. Those fears have already been proven to be founded. Although they were likely planning on getting rid of her once she had given Tyrion children anyway, Stannis’ offer of legitimizing Jon could have posed a mortal threat to Sansa, despite the fact that, as far as the world knew, she was the legal heir to Winterfell.
Obviously, Catelyn’s behavior towards Jon hasn’t been unimpeachable, and it understandably had an effect on Jon himself. But she had no control over the situation whatsoever, so castigating her for being put in an entirely unfair position and then not standing up to volunteer as a surrogate mother to a child that not only wasn’t hers, but could pose a serious threat to the future of her entire family is ridiculous.
According to the actual text, it seems like the fan perception of Cat’s hatred towards Jon is massively overstated as well. And although Cersei Lannister should obviously never be the standard-bearer for anything, it’s worth acknowledging that if Ned had married Cersei instead, Jon would have been dead within a fortnight. Frankly, if he had been wed to any politically motivated and particularly cold woman, then Ned openly claiming Jon as his own bastard son probably would have gotten Jon killed very early on anyway.
Ned’s desire to do what he believes is honorable can be admirable. But realistically speaking, he is often willfully ignorant of the realities of the world, to the point where it endangers everyone around him. Ultimately, his commitment to honour even when it so clearly conflicts with common sense is what literally got him killed.
However, blaming Cat for not 100% committing to Ned’s delusional fantasies of what he wanted the world to look like is absurd, and does not take into account that in the end, Ned had absolute power over Catelyn to the point that he could force her into a life-threatening situation, and she had no other choice but to follow his commands.
Cat didn’t play the part of mother to Jon, but she didn’t have to, because he’s not her child. It’s not abuse for a woman to not parent a child that isn’t hers, and the notion that she’s a terrible person because she didn’t enthusiastically embrace Jon as her own and instead simply tolerated the position that Ned forced her into is a completely unfair characterization.
Ultimately, neither Jon nor Cat bears any responsibility for what happened to them. They both suffered as a result of Ned’s desire to publicly self-flagellate as some sort of roundabout punishment for failing Lyanna. Although unfortunately, by making the choices that he does, Ned seemingly makes the same mistake that he made with Lyanna all over again.
Lyanna wasn’t comfortable with marrying a man who fathered bastards or wasn’t loyal to her, making her standards surrounding illegitimate children considerably stricter than Catelyn’s. However, Ned didn’t want to face the reality of that problem, and that resulted in an absolute catastrophe for Ned, the North, and the Starks.
Ironically, hardly anyone in the ASOIAF fandom drags Lyanna for literally fleeing her home in secret because she didn’t want to marry a man who had already been disloyal to her and fathered bastard children. But for some reason, Catelyn isn’t offered that same inherent agency as a person in the eyes of many readers, who apparently believe that instead of being able to have some actual input in a life-altering choice for her, she should have just devoted herself to her husband’s desires and ignored her own feelings and self-interests.
In terms of the fictional world of Westeros, Ned is obviously just about as good as a man can be. But he’s certainly not without flaw. He’s in a position of near-absolute power over his entire family, and he often makes decisions that are what he wants personally, rather than what’s in their actual best interest.
Cat had NO RIGHT to lash out at Jon after Bran’s fall, but frankly, Ned should have never put her in the position she was in to begin with. And the notion that she is a wicked stepmother because she lashed out once, after suffering indignity and insult in front of the entire world for a decade and a half, is ridiculously unfair.
