Hey, asoiaf fandom, quick question here but am I the only one who gets deeply uncomfortable by the tone of the discussions surrounding Arya and her relationship with traditional gender roles/feminity? Not only because of the wrong assumptions a lot of people have about Arya looking down on traditional feminine activities like sewing, which she most definitely doesn’t, but also because there’s very glaring inherent classism in those claims.
Not only has Arya (that is, book Arya) never looked down on other women or the work that historically has been associated with them, but she has also partaked in said work herself.
Several times, in fact, and across numerous of her POV chapters:
Whatever names Harren the Black had meant to give his towers were long forgotten. (...) Arya slept in a shallow niche in the cavernous vaults beneath the Wailing Tower, on a bed of straw. She had water to wash in whenever she liked, a chunk of soap. The work was hard, but no harder than walking miles every day. Weasel did not need to find worms and bugs to eat, as Arry had; there was bread every day, and barley stews with bits of carrot and turnip, and once a fortnight even a bite of meat.—aCoK, Arya VII.
Weese used Arya to run messages, draw water, and fetch food, and sometimes to serve at table in the Barracks Hall above the armory, where the men-at-arms took their meals. But most of her work was cleaning. The ground floor of the Wailing Tower was given over to storerooms and granaries, and two floors above housed part of the garrison, but the upper stories had not been occupied for eighty years. Now Lord Tywin had commanded that they be made fit for habitation again. There were floors to be scrubbed, grime to be washed off windows, broken chairs and rotted beds to be carried off. The topmost story was infested with nests of the huge black bats that House Whent had used for its sigil, and there were rats in the cellars as well . . . and ghosts, some said, the spirits of Harren the Black and his sons.—aCoK, Arya VII.
"I saw you looking at me." Weese wiped his fingers on the front of her shift. Then he grabbed her throat with one hand and slapped her with the other. "What did I tell you?" He slapped her again, backhand. "Keep those eyes to yourself, or next time I'll spoon one out and feed it to my bitch." A shove sent her stumbling to the floor. Her hem caught on a loose nail in the splintered wooden bench and ripped as she fell. "You'll mend that before you sleep," Weese announced as he pulled the last bit of meat off the capon. When he was finished he sucked his fingers noisily, and threw the bones to his ugly spotted dog.
"Weese," Arya whispered that night as she bent over the tear in her shift. "Dunsen, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling," she said, calling a name every time she pushed the bone needle through the undyed wool. "The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei."—aCoK, Arya VII.
This last quote is interesting, because given Arya’s circumstances in which she has to hide her own identity, she’s not warranted the protection a high-born lady would usually receive, and her punishments are often not only related to physical abuse, but through forced labor as well.
She spent the next few hours tending to the lord's chambers. She swept out the old rushes and scattered fresh sweet-smelling ones, laid a fresh fire in the hearth, changed the linens and fluffed the featherbed, emptied the chamber pots down the privy shaft and scrubbed them out, carried an armload of soiled clothing to the washerwomen, and brought up a bowl of crisp autumn pears from the kitchen. When she was done with the bedchamber, she went down half a flight of stairs to do the same in the great solar, a spare drafty room as large as the halls of many a smaller castle. The candles were down to stubs, so Arya changed them out.
The afternoon was still young by the time she was done, so Arya took herself off to the godswood.—aCoK, Arya VX.
She got along well enough with the cook. Umma would slap a knife into her hand and point at an onion, and Arya would chop it. Umma would shove her toward a mound of dough, and Arya would knead it until the cook said stop (stop was the first Braavosi word she learned). Umma would hand her a fish, and Arya would bone it and fillet it and roll it in the nuts the cook was crushing. (..) Some nights Umma spiced the fish with sea salt and cracked peppercorns, or cooked the eels with chopped garlic. Once in a great while the cook would even use some saffron. Hot Pie would have liked it here, Arya thought.—aFoC, Arya II.
She had other tasks besides helping Umma. She swept the temple floors; she served and poured at meals; she sorted piles of dead men's clothing, emptied their purses, and counted out stacks of queer coins.—aFoC, Arya II.
And the reason this—hugely important, imo—part of her narrative is so often ignored by fandom discourse is very obvious to me. It is because unlike the activities traditionally performed by upper-class, rich women, which are very frequently glorified by fans (alongside other aspects of the feudalist system that honestly would take way too much time and effort to unpack, but I digress), lower class feminity is simply not as pretty, the hard labor these women would be subjected to is not aesthetically pleasing. Don’t get me wrong, they were abused by the patriarchy the same way upper-class women were, but their suffering was never romanticized or immortalized in a song, their victimhood wouldn’t be cause for outrage, and more often than not, their work and existence would be completely erased.
Arya’s feminity doesn’t cease to exist just because she has to do hard work associated with lower-class women, or because she expresses interests that differ from what is usually expected of rich women. Her experiences as a girl, being exposed to all kinds of abuse perpetrated by men can’t be simply swept under the rug. A great deal of her journey is related to how much the plight of the lower classes matters, that children like Mycah, like Layna, like Gendry and Lommy and Hot Pie and Jeyne Poole, they all matter. And yes, sometimes Arya’s Stark name has given her protection, but other times, the majority of the time, she’s not been in a position in which she can use it as shield, and she’s had to work with her hands and fight for her life and has seen and done horrible things, or else the only other option for her was to end dead on a ditch, like countless other women and children the world has deemed too unimportant to mourn.
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