Bowed, Bent, and Broken: Building Men Upon the Backs of Women in Game of Thrones

This week, everyone is talking about the final scene of the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, the meaningfully titled “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” from those who would define it in generous terms to those who would denounce it and go so far as to declare they’re done with the show. As with some other controversial moves from the HBO adaptation, debate about the scene itself, its purpose, creator intent, and the future of events stemming from those moments has been fierce, but the discussion itself is scattered, with commentary focusing on different aspects of the scene and what it means for characters, story, and show. In this piece, I hope to tie some of those threads together, exploring the different elements that feed into the controversy. Thus (obviously), not only will there be spoilers for everything in this post, from the show to the books to even the early chapters of The Winds of Winter George R. R. Martin has released, but here, too, there will be very frank descriptions of the events in question, as I find it difficult to engage with precisely what I think happened here, and why, without describing the way the scene unfolded.

In “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” Sansa and Ramsay are married, and he rapes her in front of Theon in a scene many are calling troubling at best, and I find I must agree that I found the scene sad and unnecessary. Not because it was a rape, or even another rape. It’s not even that Game of Thrones continually uses sexual violence, or the threat of it, as the primary mode for plotlines devoted to its female characters (or sometimes just as something that happens as set dressing with random women in the background), though this is a serious problem; for a show often praised for its strong female characters, it also boasts a high number of female characters who have suffered at least the threat of sexual violence: Arya (threatened with rape), Cersei (raped, possibly by both lover and husband), Daenerys (raped), Brienne (threatened with rape), Yara (aggressively fondled; that she allowed it as a “test” is a separate issue), Talisa (murdered via knife-abortion), Ros (brutally killed while working as a prostitute), Meera (nearly raped), Gilly (born into a twisted cycle of sexual abuse) and her family (same, also raped repeatedly as set dressing), Mirri Maaz Duur (raped), Doreah (sold into sexual slavery at nine), Lollys Stokeworth (raped), Marei (dragged away from her brothel work forcibly by the Faith Militant), Shae, Tansy, and Lysa (all murdered by lovers), and now Sansa, who after having been saved from one near-rape, stripped and beaten in the throne room and abused in other ways by her ex-fiancé, was finally actually raped. If you don’t remember some of these characters or recognize names, it’s because some are minor, their assaults and abuses mere bumps in service to larger plots. Even women who never appear in the show, who are only discussed, are not safe, like Lyanna Stark (rumored to have been kidnapped and raped, though the truth may be different) and Elia Targaryen (née Martell), raped and murdered during the rebellion, number among the already-dead victims of sexual violence.

There are more cases, too, threats and groping and ill treatment of sex workers, possible cases of suspected but unconfirmed marital rape, and on and on. It’s the tool the show uses to bring women low, to cut them down when they lift their heads. Some emerge from the fires of abuse stronger and better equipped to survive; others are killed. Lest someone argue at this point that all or most of this happens in the books, let me say up front that yes, all of this and much more goes down in the books. Sometimes, sexual assault is even used to develop cultures, as when Daenerys stops Dothraki from raping women they’ve conquered, and with discussions of the wildlings. Wildling women may be tough, and may kill abusive husbands, but are still part of a system that requires men to forcibly “steal” the women they want. Women are chattel in most parts of Martin’s world, sold into marriage, traded between houses, bought in brothels, killed when convenient, and in a world based in parts on historical societies and events, and as designed, it makes sad sense. In parts of the contemporary world, women are still objectified to these extremes. I’m not here to quibble with facts, but rather to discuss the way these moments have been adapted for presentation on screen, for what can often be a more visceral experience. Beyond that, the show has, in several cases, taken questionable or more complicated plotlines and encounters in the book and simplified them into pure moments of rape, assault, and even death. Whether this is done to simplify Martin’s story or for other reasons, I could not say. As a critic and viewer, I will say that in my opinion the show has beaten rape-as-trope like a horse so dead it’s withered away to dust.

But even that isn’t necessarily a problem, in and of itself, though HBO’s handling, as a network, of some moments on the show may be considered exploitive; the treatment of women, generally, in this work makes sense for this world-as-created, and the notion that we should probably consider creating some different worlds is a discussion for another day. The problem is that the hammer of sexual violence here is, more often than not, used to develop the male characters around it. Mutineers of the Night’s Watch cavalierly rape women in endless cycles onscreen so we know just how wretchedly evil they are; The Hound saves Sansa from sexual assault so we know he has layers; Jaime saves Brienne; Jaime rapes his sister; Joffrey is a terrible human who brutalizes and murders prostitutes; Tyrion participates in the gang rape of his wife at his father’s urging and later murders his lover;  Theon pushes himself on every woman in his vicinity until he is broken; and now again he is the central figure in the moment of Sansa’s rape, a moment of horror in which we watch Sansa’s newfound power and confidence stripped away. As she crumbles, the camera cuts away to Theon, and in that moment, he is Theon, not Reek; we see him change before our eyes just as we’ve watched Sansa realize what she’s in for a moment before. He’s been waking, slowly, struggling, but he is there in that scene, horrified by what is happening before him, and struggling again to find his sense of self, or a new sense, since the old Theon was frankly kind of a shit (though not without reason).

It’s a testament to the actors that we see these changes so clearly; it’s a failing of the showrunners that, once again, a woman’s agency and strength were seemingly sacrificed to the altar of male character development. I say seemingly here for a number of reasons: while we don’t yet know what will happen in the aftermath of this scene, we have some clues based on the books, the scene, the staging, and more.

From Book to Show: Sansa, Jeyne Poole, Ramsay’s Sadism and Theon’s Rebirth

To begin to explore what happened here, and why this scene was particularly troubling, we must look at differences between the source material of the books and the HBO adaptation. Though the two run parallel, converging and diverging at various points, particularly now that the show is outpacing the books, they are clearly different properties — as all parties involved have said. Granting that, however, there are few points at which the show seriously swings away from the books. Sure, plotlines are condensed, as are characters; many are cut, while some others are added in order to pull double or triple duty. Some gray areas are cut away, without the internal monologue that marks Martin’s multiple-POV approach, and there’s plenty of sex and even some buddy comedy, but all in all, the general spirit remains intact from one set of stories to the other, even with large scale removal (so far) of some plot elements (the Iron Islands subplots, the machinations of the Martells, along with many members of that family, several revenge-based plots centering on the Freys, etc.).

In this season, however, we see some larger deviations. Gone is an entire contingent of people with Tyrion, gone are the rest of the Sand Snakes and the Princess of Dorne, and gone is the plotline in which “Arya Stark” marries Ramsay Bolton. The pretender, Sansa’s childhood friend Jeyne Pool, used in a farce of a marriage to help the Boltons cement their claim on the North. In the show, of course, Littlefinger delivers Sansa instead, whereas in the books, Sansa is still with Littlefinger, learning to manipulate her way through the Vale and even, in a teaser chapter from The Winds of Winter, reclaiming a little of her girlish innocence while navigating a troubled relationship with the Vale’s young and damaged lord Robert Arryn while growing into a young woman aware of her beauty and charm (sidenote: in that plotline, there is another Myranda who lusts, at least, after someone Sansa may end up with, someone also not known for sensitivity toward women, but at least not sadism that we’ve seen).

What happens with Jeyne, as fake Arya, is beyond brutal. She’s raped, harmed, threatened with more and worse; she is thoroughly destroyed, and many people, as the discussion around Sansa’s rape developed, have countered that because Jeyne suffers such a terrible fate in the book, we should be somewhat relieved that Sansa was only raped. This is a common thread in comments sections after the episode aired, and one brushed up against in an interview with Bryan Cogman, who issues horrified assurances we won’t see Sansa suffer the deep humiliation of torture of Jeyne Poole. But I struggle with seeing this shift as particularly better, or even less gratuitous. Gratuitous in a different way, certainly, by far. But perhaps only different.

It may sound mercenary to say that the sacrifice of Jeyne Poole, fake Arya in the books, is less troubling on some levels than the potential sacrifice of Sansa in this plotline, but I’ll say it all the same: depending on how this develops, Sansa’s story may be even worse in some ways. What happens to Jeyne is inarguably horrific; her family is killed and she’s delivered into a brothel, where she was apparently whipped at least once, and “trained” in the arts of love. We don’t get details of that in the books, but the show has made clear what that training looks like, and considering Jeyne is a pre-to-young teen at this time, the idea is even worse. From there she’s stripped of her very identity and sent North to marry a monster who knows she’s a fake.

Throughout, Jeyne is a blank, a pawn in the game who is nothing but a tertiary character from the series’ beginning, and who here simply becomes a plaything for Ramsay, whose abuse a horrified Theon must take part in, and we never get her story. She has no story. She’s already been destroyed, again and again, and even when the books leave her, after she’s been rescued, she’s suffered not only mental, emotional, and physical trauma, she gets frostbite that irrevocably damages her face (why not!), and as a final blow, as though that isn’t all enough, she’s reminded that she must keep the Arya farce alive if she’s to be seen as anything more than just some whore. Jeyne’s story is among the most tragic in all the books, and the books are tragedy upon tragedy… but it is utterly in keeping with the logic of the world built by Martin, terrible as that is. Jeyne Poole, steward’s daughter, might have married well, a merchant or a knight, but once deflowered and used a pawn in someone else’s game, she’s nothing but a discard in a world that offers women little worth.

Here’s Jeyne Poole’s “agency,” the whole of it:

“‘Help me.’ She clutched at [Theon]. ‘Please. I used to watch you in the yard, playing with your swords. You were so handsome.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘If we ran away, I could be your wife, or your…your whore…whatever you wanted. You could be my man'” (A Dance With Dragons, “The Prince of Winterfell”).

She has no choices, no currency. The best she can hope for is to offer her body, legitimately (as wife) or not, to any better taker.

But that’s the thing; the mere fact of sexual violence in the world of ice and fire isn’t a problem in and of itself; this is a world built on violence at every stage, as power is violently wrested from one faction by another, and the little people (and women) are continually sacrificed at the whims of the more powerful. After all, this world sees women left to chew off their own fingers and babies murdered for kicks (and power struggles). It’s a terrible, ugly world, and in it, Jeyne never had a chance. Serving as the impetus for Theon’s redemption is frankly the best use of her. It’s difficult for me to say that, to dismantle a character in that fashion, but that is the world Martin created.

The world of the show, however, is different — this is one of those divergences. Despite the abundant presentation of sexual violence, many of the women of the show are allowed to display power in ways the women in the books are not. Margaery Tyrell isn’t hiding in the background with her giggling cousins; she’s out in the streets, actively gaining support and openly, if slyly, working the court. Dany isn’t forced to talk about herself, again and again, as “only a young girl” while arguing with her advisors, she rules openly, wielding her strength more clearly, nakedly, than in the books. And it isn’t a blank pawn of a girl who goes reluctantly to Winterfell to marry Ramsay; it’s Sansa Stark, this new dark Sansa, a woman who isn’t reduced to hiding as in the books behind an alias, but a Sansa who, despite struggling with hard choices, owns the choices she must make, and does so behind the power of her own identity.

Until, that is, she comes face to face with exactly how sadistic Ramsay is when he requires Theon, as Reek, to stay and watch what was already going to be an uncomfortable, but necessary — and accepted — marital encounter. Yes, as Cogman said in the linked interview above, there is a moment of connection there between Sansa and Theon, but it comes from Sansa’s realization that this is far, far worse than she could have ever anticipated. This is not just coercion in the marital bed. This will be abuse and debasement, even if not to the level Jeyne suffers in the text.

Much has been made of cuts and changes for the sake of simplifying Martin’s sprawling plotlines and enormous cast of characters, changes necessary in bringing thousands of pages of text to the screen. This trade of Sansa, a character we know, with visceral ties to Winterfell and the Boltons, for Jeyne Poole, a character who appeared only in the pilot, not only simplifies that thread but adds weight. We know Sansa. We are invested. It makes sense for the showrunners to perform this substitution, as hard as it is to watch and experience.

It’s the choices made after that substitution that I find myself struggling with, because there are other choices, other changes, that were possible. As with controversial scenes involving Daenerys and Cersei, in seasons one and four respectively, the questions of how and why the showrunners bring sexual violence to the center stage linger. We’ve watched Littlefinger grooming a hardened Sansa in the last several episodes, molding her into not just a political tool, but a cunning figure in her own right — with the emphasis on right; this Sansa is no longer a naive and hopeful girl who lies for a prince, but a woman of iron who sails into her old home with nothing but disdain for its new inhabitants, a woman who rejects assistance from all quarters.

As Sonia Soraiya so beautifully put it in Salon:

But the scene in “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” undercuts Sansa’s agency in what is happening to her. She is a player in this game of thrones, as evidenced by her icy grace as she walks to the godswood, accompanied by no one except the foster-brother who betrayed her family; to her regal put-down of the besotted servant girl who tries to scare her out of marrying Ramsay. She’s had a devil’s choice, between one kind of hell and another, but she did choose. When Ramsay orders her to undress, she begins to do so. Her fear gets the best of her for a minute. But then when Ramsay rips open her dress, though she’s terrified, she doesn’t resist. She is maintaining her own composure; she is owning her own dreadful choice, insofar as anything she can do in this terrible situation is a choice. But then the scene stops depicting her. Her sobs become the score for someone else’s story. The episode loses sight, literally, of who she is; furthermore, and more damning, it seems to take from her, in this most vulnerable moment, the only thing that she truly has. [emphasis mine]

The problem, you see, isn’t necessarily the rape. Anyone who married Ramsay was going to be raped; Sansa was probably always going to be raped, and that’s awful in ways I cannot begin to enumerate, but it’s also the compact we entered into with this show that cripples children and tortures everyone.

The problem is that as much as Sansa tried to hold on to her own power in that scene, the showrunners snatched it from her when they decided to use her trauma to highlight Theon’s suffering.

Soraiya continues, as so many have in the last few days, to say that the showrunners probably cut away to try to preserve some of Sansa’s dignity, and, she continues, their own, as they’ve faced so much criticism already over the treatment of women in the show — rightful criticism, too, after the brutal murder of Ros, and after the insertion of rapes and assaults handled with at least a hairsbreadth more depth in the source material. I suspect as well they wanted to save the viewers (and themselves) from witnessing the assault of a character who’s grown up onscreen, whom we first met as a child; watching her assaulted would seem even more horrible, perhaps.

And I could buy that, almost… except we do see it, really, don’t we? We see her horror, and we see the act reflected in Theon. And I could buy it if that cutaway to Theon didn’t seem to cement that the show here may well converge again with the books, offering this as the beginning of Theon’s redemptive journey.

The showrunners have the unenviable job of adapting an enormous volume of material, and while I want to hope here that the choices will be be delicate and well considered, I keep returning to a few fundamental questions:

• Do we, the audience, know Ramsey is a godawful sadistic horror?
• Was Theon already seeming to struggle with his Reek persona in Sansa’s presence?
• Is it possible for whatever is happening to Sansa to have continued happening without us watching the creeping resurgence of terror as her newfound strength cracked and slid away?
• Was there another way to stage this scene that allowed Sansa to preserve her choice and strength?
• Was there another way for Ramsay to try to cut Sansa down? (Because certainly he would; she has been too strong in his presence already)

I would argue the answer to all of these questions is a resounding yes.

And so we circle around to the real question: what was the purpose of this scene? Everyone expected something terrible to happen to Sansa here, because Ramsey is no Tyrion. Of course she wouldn’t be enthusiastic in bedding him. Of course Ramsey would be sadistic. But Sansa, unlike Jeyne Poole, walked on her own to the wedding itself, refusing to take proffered support from Theon (Jeyne did), and if she trembled and hesitated a bit at saying, “I take this man,” it’s not because she’s weak but because she knew exactly what she was saying and what it meant, and she walked willingly, if unhappily, into that chamber (and that, too, is a change from the books, when husbands and wives are “bedded” by the guests, carried off as part of the celebrations; a small point, but a fascinating one in terms of marriage customs and how they’re handled in the different presentations of the story). She was not meek. She was not merely resigned. Yes, she trembled and yes, she was slow to move and answer in the bedroom, but let us not forget that Sansa, for all she’s been through, is still so heartbreakingly young. Ramsey knows what he’s saying when he tells her they should be honest with one another, as they’re “man and wife” now, but she is just a girl trying so hard to accept her choice, to go willingly…

…but Theon is still there, ducking in the doorway. And it’s his horror we see first when Ramsey insists he watches the consummation, his confusion. At that moment, Sansa becomes secondary to her own assault, a moment meant to strip her of all her burgeoning power. Nearly expressionless, she moves to the bed and begins to undo her dress. Again the focus shifts to the byplay between Ramsey and Theon. This moment isn’t about Sansa. It could be Sansa. It could be Arya. It could be Jeyne Poole or anyone else so long as it’s someone who meant something, anything to Theon or represented his old life and all he’s lost, and when the camera shifts back to Sansa, in the moment before Ramsey tears her dress open and pushes her facedown on the bed, she realizes that this, all of it, will be worse than she even imagined.

And then it’s back to Theon, Theon struggling with tears, Theon struggling with horror as we listen to the sounds of Sansa being violated. Perhaps not so violently as poor Jeyne Poole, who was debased and chewed and bruised and threatened, but Sansa, of course, is a more valuable property both in story and without. That… lack of extremity (I hesitated so long before typing those words) has led some to say well, that just wasn’t so bad after all. Just standard ol’ marital rape in Westeros! Geez, what’s even the problem? Game of Thrones has always been about rape. Game of Thrones will always be about rape. That’s the show we’ve all been watching for years.

What Will Become of Sansa Now?

Perhaps with this moment, the showrunners mean to demonstrate that Sansa had grown too hard, too fast, that while she thought she knew what she was doing, Ramsey’s sadistic depths surprised even her. Perhaps they mean to use this assault to forge her into something stronger. Perhaps this will tie her to Theon and they will together mount their own joined redemption. Perhaps she will emerge from this and become the embodiment of revenge that another (cut) character became in the books; perhaps she will enact the particular revenge Lord Manderley of White Harbor exacted in the books, another item not likely to make it to the screen as it was (what a shame), not least because the precise moment of occurrence has already passed. But the special features attached to this episode don’t lead me to those conclusions. In the “Anatomy of a Scene” feature that explores Sansa’s return to Winterfell, the crew first discusses  the notion that everyone but Littlefinger has underestimated Sansa and that this arc will see Sansa shedding her victimhood and “becoming a Stark in her own right,” controlling her own destiny and fighting for herself. We saw that, I think, in her behavior around the Boltons and through the wedding, with her refusal to be intimidated or diminished. But then the narrative of the feature changes. Everyone begins to drop sinister hints. Ramsey’s very good at “impersonating” regular (“normal”) people, but Sansa will soon learn just exactly what he is. What that leads to, they say, is “ultimately terrifying.”

There’s nothing in that feature that hints at Sansa’s strength returning to her after this moment. I wish there was even a single glimmer, but to my mind, there’s nothing. What is worth noting, however, is that they make clear Theon is dressed in Robb’s old clothing, as part of his role in giving away the bride, one supposes, but it’s also another step in casting Theon in a very particular role here of the older brother, the protector. Theon was never any good, you know. He was a smug and troubled peacock of a lordling before, and he’s a broken thing now, thanks to Ramsey’s tender ministrations. But cleaned up, wearing Robb’s clothes, facing a new horror at Ramsay’s insistence, he’s able to stand and look and we see so many emotions on his face. We see the forging of a new Theon, a Theon who may yet break the shackles of his own debasement.

After all, that’s what happens in the books. A man would save her, he thinks, after Jeyne pleads with him in “The Prince of Winterfell,” and after being party to Jeyne’s abuse, with the help of some outsiders (mostly women!), Theon manages to break from his Reek-fugue and become that man, leaping with Jeyne off Winterfell’s walls into the snow below. And then he is Theon again, reforged from the fires of Jeyne’s abuse.

While the show may differ, and certainly will in the details if nothing else, my guess is this is the direction the show will take as well. Likely Myranda will play some part, and perhaps the women who helped book-Theon will be replaced by Brienne and Pod, who are lurking nearby, waiting to help save Sansa, but my guess it will be Theon’s moment of action that delivers the woman whose assault he was party to, so that he can have his redemptive moment. Perhaps it will be a moment of ultimate sacrifice, or perhaps he’ll be passed along to Stannis. I could be wrong — I hope I’m wrong; maybe Sansa will yet save herself — but the signs, for now, seem to be pointing elsewhere. There are too many people poised around her, ready to save her.

And what of Sansa herself, that new Sansa? Oh, who knows; we’ll leave her there on the bed, crying out in pain, “ultimately terrified,” literally bent and possibly broken, though that too remains to be seen. Unlike some critics, I won’t say I’ll stop watching here. I’ll simply say I’m tuning in each week with less and less urgency, and say I’m tired of seeing women beaten down as they try to stand, sacrificed at the altar of plot or development of someone else’s character, as has happened so many times in this show.

Two TV Guide writers, Hanh Nguyen and Sadie Gennis, offered a fascinating look at the other side of interpretation in a back-and-forth on the episode, with Nguyen saying:

I did not feel that the camera cutting away to Reek was to presage a turning point in him. I actually felt his soul was getting killed more. I feel that instead, Sansa will be Reek’s savior. The strength that she’s earned will light the way for him.

I love this notion, that Sansa might instead deliver Theon from his mental and emotional imprisonment, but in a season that seems messier than those before it, it feels more like hope than interpretation, but perhaps I’m a cynic. But with the stripping of everything interesting in terms of political machination from the Dorne storyline, the loss of Arianne Martell and her struggles to hold onto her power, the bumbling adventures of Jaime and Bronn (alas, poor Bronn, almost certainly poisoned), the hamfisted handling of the Faith Militant, the loss of the devastating parallels between increasingly drunken Cersei and the husband she hated, it’s hard to muster the energy Nguyen must have for such hope.

So yes, I will watch, but without that hope that this will be handled with the care required to restore Sansa to her feet. Game of Thrones, after all, doesn’t handle emotional aftermath well, skipping often over grief, trauma, and misery, except to allow some characters, like Tyrion, a good wallow, and there’s still hefty debate about what happened between Cersei and Jaime and the disconnect between what the showrunners intended and what most of us saw. At the end of the day, this is just Game of Thrones. It’s just what happens here, in that place where complex scenes of sexual discovery in arranged marriages become rape in the very first episode, and other arranged marriages become dramatic teenage fantasies. In that place, my hopes for Sansa are low indeed.