pretenderoftheeast:

nobodysuspectsthebutterfly:

I’m putting my money on author error / not a deliberate point. Just one example, Ned’s mother:

Q: Who was Ned’s mother and what happened to her?

GRRM: Lady Stark. She died.

–June, 1999

racefortheironthrone:

I don’t like trying to read people’s minds with so little evidence to go on.

However, if it was GRRM’s intent to make “a deliberate point about women’s lives and contributions being minimized or outright erased in a deeply sexist society,” it hasn’t really worked, compared to other of his efforts to make such critiques (think Cersei’s walk of shame). 

Q: Speaking about women there’s is a hidden figure: Ned’s mother, you only say “she was Lady Stark and she died”. Nothing more? Nothing important or something too important? (please at least choose one hypothesis).

GRRM: If there is anything important, I will reveal it in due time.

(Did Tolkien ever get letters asking about Aragorn’s mother, I wonder?)

–March, 2002

No, George, people didn’t need to ask Tolkien that because he actually wrote about Gilraen, mother of Aragorn. (Among other places, notably in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, in the ROTK appendixes.) She had a heartbreaking story where she chose to marry Arathorn, heir to the chieftainship of the Dunedain, much younger (at age 22) than their people normally did, because her father foresaw that he would have a short life but her mother foresaw that if she did not then the chance for hope to be born to their people would be lost. They married, and a year later Arathorn became chieftain when his father was killed; then a son was born to them… but only two years later, Arathorn was killed in battle. Aragorn was raised in Rivendell for his protection, and given the name Estel (hope) to help hide him. When he fell in love with Arwen, Gilraen advised him against it (for how high he was aiming, and she feared that Elrond would stop caring for the Dunedain, and she foresaw that Aragorn would spend many years in the wilderness alone). Elrond charged Aragorn to defeat Sauron and his works (and later said he would only grant Arwen to no less than the king of Gondor and Arnor), and Aragorn said farewell to his mother and left to do so. He would return rarely, but once (about 10 years before the War of the Ring) he came to the North to find his mother prematurely aged, and seeing the coming darkness she knew her death would be soon. Aragorn tried to reassure her, hoping that she would live to see the light beyond the darkness, but she only replied, in Elvish, “I gave Estel (Hope) to the Dunedain, I have kept no hope for myself.” Gilraen died before the next spring.

In contrast, Ned Stark’s mother… had those two quotes above. (Starting from 1999, 3 years after the release of AGOT.) Oh, and in 2014, The World of Ice and Fire was released, and the Stark family tree in its appendix revealed that Ned’s mother was named Lyarra Stark, and she was the first cousin once removed of Rickard Stark. And that’s all we know about her. “Lady Stark. She died.”

This idea that the Dead Ladies’ Club is “a deliberate point about women’s lives and contributions being minimized or outright erased in a deeply sexist society,” has always made me a little uncomfortable. Not just because it’s wrong-footed, but because it strikes me as a train of thought that doesn’t differentiate between a sexist society and a sexist narrative.

Because, yes, Westeros is a deeply misogynistic patriarchal society in a lot of ways. It mistreats, minimizes and victimizes women and all that dehumanizing and marginalization of rights towards women is baked into the system, from the way they’re looked at as baby-makers and localizing their responsibilities to the domestic area. It gets real bad as Cersei and Arianne point out.

Now, when GRRM consciously deconstructs or critiques Westerosi patriarchy, more times than not, he does nail it and it comes off effective, in my opinion. Like, Asha being dumped with diminishing misogynistic remarks at the kingsmoot, Cersei with her entire drive to be her father’s true heir in power and Arianne’s abject refusal to be diminished in favor of her younger brother, etc.

These are all examples of women who, yes, are marginalized and constricted by gender boundaries and a sexist society, but the narrative generally isn’t misogynistic towards them. It doesn’t discredit them as people. It explores their interiority, their struggles, their quirks, habits and flaws and triumphs. It validates their pain and difficulties with the patriarchy.

Hell, Brienne’s A Feast for Crows arc makes “a deliberate point about women’s lives and contributions being minimized or outright erased in a deeply sexist society,” given how much Randyll victim-blames her for “encouraging” the men to harass her, shits on her capabilities as a female non-knight, even though the only differences are sexual organs and (lack of) title, and erases her sword skills by snapping that "The sword is quick.“

The problem with assuming there’s an authorial point to these ladies… well, first off, there’s something to be said about the presence of a deliberate point not inherently being good. Because, let’s assume, for a moment, there’s a deliberate point to these women being dead the way the narrative cast them in. Great! They’re still victimized in inherently gendered manners of death/abuse. That doesn’t really tell us anything new about Westeros we didn’t already know and since this isn’t tailored as a critique against patriarchy, it’s still a fundamentally unchecked problematic facet of the narrative, intent or not.

Second off, we don’t get a full sense of their lives and contributions. Narratively speaking, you have to pen a sense of interiority, of personhood, of self and living experience with these ladies before you attempt such a deliberate point. Otherwise, we get the “minimized or outright erased” part (by dint of their usually brutal deaths)… but we don’t get the “women’s lives and contributions.” Like… show, don’t tell? The narrative has to stand up to bat for these women too or else you have one that diminishes the lives and contributions of women by offering little or none of them in the text and only has the victimization of them, which is a sign of a casually misogynistic part of a narrative. We lose the voices of these ladies.

Third off… GRRM makes mistakes. He definitely hits more than he misses, but there’s just stuff like Dany and Drogo’s marriage and a ton of Essosi world-building that I can definitely say where he’s dropped the ball. And, given @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly‘s GRRM interview quotes, it’s more likely he just dropped the ball here rather than made an deliberate point about the Dead Ladies’ Club. It happens. Authors just make mistakes sometimes.