Why Sansa Really Kneeled: how sexism shaped Sansa Stark’s arc long ago
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I’ve been struggling with how to make sense of the scene at the end of the most recent Game of Thrones episode. This scene, where we were made to watch the violation of Sansa Stark, is something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and something I’ve found immensely upsetting. It is also something that does not happen in the books this show is supposedly adapting.
Yes, in George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, there is a tertiary character who suffers great horrors at the hands of Ramsay Bolton—a character who is supposed to be posing as a Stark of Winterfell, even though almost everyone around her knows she is a fraud. This character, Jeyne Poole, exists mostly in Theon’s storyline, but her story also serves as a remarkable foil to Sansa, her old childhood friend. I have touched on it here, but both girls were made victims at the hands of Littlefinger. And the different ways they respond to that victimization is meant to be paralleled. Jeyne’s mode of survival is to try and always acquiesce to the will of her tormentors to make her life easier; Sansa, on the other hand, continually demonstrates subtle acts of resistance and assertions of her own desires. This difference in approach serves as a commentary on the experience of a girl with the right family name vs. one without, and it is also done with respect to their individual personalities.
In addition to that narrative significance, Jeyne doesn’t disappear from the narrative once Ramsay is done with her. Her existence stands on its own: everyone within Winterfell (great Northern Lords), know exactly what torment she is suffering, but no one so much as lifts a finger to help her because she doesn’t matter to anyone. She is of lower birth and not deemed worthy of help. Theon’s empathy and aid towards her, therefore, is marked and this very much matters in his own arc. Jeyne Poole is a thousand other girls in Westeros who are exploited and harmed because they don’t matter; yet now she has a face. The author won’t let us forget her. That matters, and as “minor” as she is, Jeyne matters to the overarching themes of the story.
This is why I firmly talk about how depiction is not equatable to endorsement. Martin does depict violence against women, but the way in which he does so is with an aim of higher critique; it is quite clear he doesn’t endorse it. In short, it is not to titillate or to shock, but to service his narrative. And the uncomfortable familiarity of this brutality against women--a familiarity that we still have in today’s society--is what makes it so simultaneously affecting and effective.
Therefore, the rape of Jeyne in the books cannot be compared to Sunday’s rape of Sansa. Jeyne’s suffering was the point. Further, the argument that it’s unfair to have Jeyne’s rape exist solely through Theon’s eyes is mitigated by the fact that Theon was raped during the wedding night as well. The entire scene was meant to horrify us. But it was included to a much larger purpose, with a clear logic and awareness on the part of the author. It came to pass and unfolded in a way that was consistent with the characterizations of the players involved. In other words, it was not, in any respect, “gratuitous.”
Sansa, however, is her own character and a series protagonist. She has her own arc within the larger narrative, and it most certainly does not involve her being raped. Blithely placing Sansa into Jeyne’s role utterly destroys the significance of both stories, and it relegates Sansa to become a silent sufferer...a role intended to be filled by someone who “doesn’t matter.”