![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Bran had been left behind with Jon and the girls and Rickon. But Rickon was only a baby and the girls were only girls ...- Bran, AGOT
As ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.- Brienne, ACOK
Do you think GRRM is interested in telling a story about women?
I've heard (er, read) him muse on telling the story of Robert and Ned and such from pre-AGOT times, and of course the Hedge Knight revolves around male characters. I think he realizes that literary tradition marginalizes women, but ... does he really care? Undoubtedly he loves Aryas, but can an Arya grow up and maintain his interest?
And I mean as a person, not as an object. Because that's no substitute.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
I interpreted them actually as the contrary: that he illustrates that already a small boy like Bran has the medieval attitude towards women (which later will lead to nothing, since he will depend on the hunting skills of a girl to survive) and in Brienne it's also the irony of the womens role in Asoiaf.
I do think he's interested. He had most of his interesting chapters from Cat's PoV who is not an Arya, or of Cersei's PoV who is also rather traditional. Or Sansa.
Of course, then again he's a guy who might be interested in guy stuff like in Hedge Knight. But the Hedge Knight are not very deep stories, more like an entertainment, like there's more action involved with two guys having fun in medieval Westeros.
And I rather liked the Webber woman in Sworn Sword.
From:
no subject
Of course, what he's done with the women within the ASOIAF series tells me that he does care about women's stories. Characters like Cat, Cersei, and Sansa could easily have been shoved to the sidelines and been nothing more than nagging mother, a bitch queen, and an innocent spoil of war. But they're not. They are developed and real with emotions and genuine grievances. Each of them feels in different ways the boundaries placed around them by society. If he didn't care at all, we wouldn't be, say, pressured to see that Robert is a really crappy husband.
From:
no subject
Hahah, how's that for an insightful response :P Yeah you summed it up. The reason I ask how much he cares is, well you (and I) love stories about psychology, stories that can do more than just rely on external physical conflicts. But I love an adventure story also (I love a lot of different kinds of stories), and I definitely think the Hedge Knight writing side of GRRM, the inner Bran of GRRM (and myself), does too. And that does translate into this asymmetry.
It just stirs up depths of resentment in me, hahah. I'm guessing that's the inner Arya. It's the kind of thing that makes me really annoyed when Tyrion looks at Sansa and thinks how beautiful she is for being saddened by grief after the Red Wedding, while we get no emotional reaction from her own POV.
I do think he cares. It's just a matter of how much. I'm not necessarily saying he as an individual has to care more than he does. But my question was a way of framing the general issue I guess.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Bran's a little boy and ... well, my cousins were little boys too and they definitely had their moments of not wanting to be stuck with the girls (I kicked their asses during the brief period when I was bigger than they were.) I think that quote is totally undermined by Bran's dependence on Meera later on and it's meant that way. (I mean, if you'll recall, Arya despises Sansa's girliness too, but that doesn't mean Arya is right, just that this is how someone with her interests might react to someone with Sansa's interests.)
As for what Brienne says, I read it as the opposite of being uninterested in women's stories - Brienne is lamenting the fate of most women (and I think ironically, she is also commenting on Lyanna who has had songs sung about her - sorta. Battles fought over her, anyway - and I think DID die in childbed.) Again, this is a fact of medieval life that childbirth was one of the riskiest things a woman could do. (And for that matter, no one sings songs about all the anonymous peasants who die in the wars of their overlords, but GRRM is CLEARLY very interested in telling those stories too.)
ANYWAY ... that's all to say that one of the reasons I love these books so much is that there are so many individualized and interesting female characters and they're not all dragon princesses and female Vikings either!
From:
no subject
I'd actually even say that depicting Sansa only from the outside at that time kind of worked for me. She was so determined to keep her grief private that it works for me on a narrative matching the characters level. I did feel a bit deprived of some insight into the relationship between the Starklings, though. It says something that the boys tend to talk about the other boys and the girls tend talk about each other, and they rarely say anything about siblings of the opposite sex. We lost something in not hearing more about Sansa's relationship with Robb. Even Genna got to say her bit about Tywin being her big brother, and she's so minor she's almost not there.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
-Thirding (??) much of
-I WANT A YOUNG!CATELYN STORY. Bad read bad.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I might be remembering this wrong, but I think I read that as Tyrion's not terribly healthy/realistic perception of women, rather than GRRM's. (Although, yes, I suppose it could be argued that Tyrion's the closest to GRRM in the books.)
From:
no subject
I think he wants real women characters, as opposed to just objects, in his stories... but the stories belong to the men; the women are players.
I disagree with your other commenters; I don't think it can be explained away by worldbuilding. So what if the vast majority of women stay home and don't have adventures? Presumably most eight-year-old boys in Westeros don't have adventures, and yet Bran's doing it. Things happen because the plot demands that they happen, and constraints of the realistic world be damned.
Plus, I agree with you that Cat's pre-AGOT story would be interesting in its own right. It may not be an epic adventure, but this is low fantasy we're talking about here. "Literary fantasy," if you want to be wanky, which I do at the moment!
I don't think the quotes you gave are necessarily indicative of any of this, though. That's just realistic in-story sexism.
From:
no subject
I do think the quotes from Bran and Brienne are meant much more to underline the problems in the kind of society he is writing about than to, well, espouse them. And I think the focus on Sansa and her growth, even more than having Catelyn or Dany (or, OK, Cersei) as POV characters, shows that GRRM does care about the women's stories.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I think he cares enough to create a Catelyn, which is definitely something. But, well, she died and became a zombie--after she started chafing at her loss of agency. And Catelyn is unique in the story. So I'd say he cares to an extent, but not beyond that, because he *is* very much in love with the classic heroic knight's tale.
From:
no subject
Also I might not actually be coherent right now.
From:
no subject
But yes, I wish we'd gotten more besides Arya-Jon and Sansa-Arya among the Stark sibs.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I really don't get why people think Cat is a homebody. How often does she think that she went everywhere with her notedly restless dad? But we've been over this ;)
Yeah I'm debating whether to respond to all these comments as one big follow-up post or not ...
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
This happened way more often than people think it did. Everybody knows about Joan of Arc, but have you heard of Joanna of Flanders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_of_Flanders)?
Of course if you wrote something like that, people would be all "Women never led armies! This book is totally unrealistic!" People have trouble accepting things that actually happened in real life, but they'll readily suspend disbelief for all kinds of physics-breaking magic systems.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Robb isn't just manly in front of his men, though. It doesn't seem to bug him much in private, even with Catelyn. We're not shown that it bothers him at all.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Sansa, though, I think was kind of attached to the more romantic idea that her brother would successfully take the war to King's Landing and save her that way. I totally don't have any hard textual evidence towards this point, so if you can think of anything that indicates what her thoughts are, that'd be awesome. But she doesn't understand politics at this point and she is a rather romantic kid, so.
From:
no subject
I hate this so incredibly absolutely amazingly outrageously much. And relatedly or not, it reminds me a lot of the westeros.org board :P
But not only that, unfortunately. Even well intentioned people sometimes seem to me to need women's awesomeness proven to them instead of just assuming it's true. Why aren't you assuming it's true!
From:
no subject
But what I think GRRM is doing with Sansa and Bran is kind of relating them to kids who intake stories today, and are desensitized to the actualities of the horrors in the stories, but are rather more concerned with the sensationalism in them.
There is a scene where Bran asks a story from Old Nan:
I think it's about that too. And judging by fandom's reactions to many of the greater losses and atrocities in the series, I can't say it's an entirely inappropriate message, if you'll pardon the preachy overtones of such a statement.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
That's pretty sobering.
This seems to be the critical factor, the literary vs epic fantasy nature of ASOIAF, and I don't think I have anything to add since we last spoke about it, especially since the series isn't over. But for example, I really loved Sansa's ACOK storyline, not despite the captivity but because of it, there are very interesting experiences besides just overt action. I don't think that's wanky, it shouldn't be! I know it's a fine line between elitism and ... I don't know, I just lost my train of thought.
Yeah I don't think those lines are straightforwardly indicative of sexism, I agree.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject