The Innkeeper's Daughter: Rape and Sexual Violence in Game of Thrones

To say that Game of Thrones catches a lot of flak for its treatment of rape would be an historic understatement. Every year, fans and critics produce countless thinkpieces, tweets, and blog posts detailing the manifold ways in which HBO’s fantasy juggernaut degrades and objectifies women with its depictions of sexual violence. The show’s investigation of rape’s ugliness is routinely classified as a prurient preoccupation, sometimes of the show as a work of art and sometimes of the showrunners themselves, David Benioff and Dan Weiss.

What’s crushing about the culture of stern disapproval built up around Game of Thrones is that it’s one of the only shows on television making a meaningful inquiry into rape as both a traumatic experience and as a weapon deployed by society against women (and men). What looks like a parade of horrors at a cursory glance is in fact a rare depiction of the frequency with which rape occurs both in historical records of the Medieval period and in our own modern world. In fact, I’d argue that more depictions of rape would enrich the show as a work of art—that despite how far and how brutally it pushes the envelope, the show ultimately falls short of looking at sexual violence with the clarity, depth, horror, and sobriety of Martin’s books.

What’s there, though, is searing. From Joffrey telling Sansa to kiss his sword in season two’s “Blackwater,” a display of tacitly violent sexual domination, to the hellish reign of the Night’s Watch mutineers in season four’s “Oathkeeper” and “The First of His Name,” the show has made a broad study of the many forms sexual violence takes. It also, almost uniquely in television history, depicts society’s terrifying complicity in keeping rapists safe from punishment and in positions of power.

Consider Craster (Robert Pugh), a man who rapes his daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters (to say nothing of sacrificing his sons to the White Walkers) but whose utility to the Night’s Watch ensures that he’s respected, protected, and even bribed by nominally better men. His impunity puts the lie to the Watch’s vows of honor and service, and to the vows sworn up and down the length of Westeros by knights, priests, lords, and all their households.

Rape and the Marriage Bed

Far and away the show’s most controversial and divisive instance of rape, Sansa’s assault at Ramsay’s hands in season five’s “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” provoked an online firestorm as fans expressed disgust, outrage, and outright hatred for both the show and its showrunners and writers. That the scene diverged decisively from events in the books added fuel to the fire, as did sourceless rumors that Martin was furious with the changes and detested Benioff and Weiss’s handling of the show. While it may not hew to the books’ plot, though, it is in rigorous keeping with their themes. In Martin’s Westeros, marriage consists in no small part of institutionalized rape on a grand scale.

The war which occupies the majority of both the novels and the television show is sparked in large part because King Robert (Mark Addy) beats and rapes his wife Cersei (Lena Headey), a definitive statement on the inextricability of rape from every life and household in the Seven Kingdoms. Many Westerosi noblewomen don’t meet their husbands until their wedding nights, where it is traditional to strip the bride and groom and carry them aloft to their bed to watch them consummate the union. Commoners, or “smallfolk,” are hardly better off, living impoverished and imperiled lives at the sexual mercy of soldiers, knights, and one another. Sansa’s rape is part of a larger system, sanctioned and held sacred by her culture.

Her wedding night is a reworking of much more graphic events in A Dance with Dragons centered on a character not present in the show—Sansa’s servant and playmate Jeyne Poole. That changes occur during the process of adaptation is inevitable, but Sansa—beloved by many and particularly embraced by a contingent of fans intent on “protecting” her and discussing the good life they assert that she deserves and which the showrunners must thus render to her—resonated emotionally with viewers in a way Jeyne didn’t with readers. It’s understandable. We’ve spent more time with Sansa, we know more of her inner life, and we’ve seen her grow and change as a person.

Still, even accounting for the show’s broader viewership, it seems strange to act as though the rape of a woman we know is more meaningful or has a different meaning than that of one we don’t. Treating Sansa as a real person who’s been wronged by her creators rather than a fictional one in a story explicitly about the different forms of violence people go through is also a disturbing misapprehension of art’s nature. The returns on picking apart fiction to determine the degree to which it encourages or discourages correct and upright action are slim at best.

Nor do changes the show makes to give us more time in the inner lives of its women—as when it dealt with the fate of Craster’s wives—drum up much in the way of commentary. Watching those women—many of them not just his wives but his daughters too—reject the guilty charity of the Night’s Watch, reject the home in which they were raised and raped, and walk alone into the merciless cold is a deeply affecting sight. Death is more palatable to them than the cruel, changeable safety men offer. From queens to peasants, all the Seven Kingdom’s women know that marriage is a hunting ground.

Male Suffering and Victimhood

Game of Thrones’ sympathetic and even-handed treatment of male rape victims is one of its strongest points. Tyrion, whose father forced him to participate in gang-raping the woman he loved. Theon, stripped of his penis, his name, and his place in the world as a man. Gendry, enticed into arousal by Melisandre and then covered in leeches. That the show never depicts victorious soldiers raping their defeated foes feels like a glaring oversight, but its take on the confusion and powerlessness of men who’ve been raped rings distressingly true.

To return to ‘Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken’ for a moment, its final shot was a particular hotspot of discussion. It lingered on Theon’s trembling, terrified face, Sansa’s rape occurring offscreen. Fans and critics alike felt that this choice cut into Sansa’s agency and deprived her of the central role in her own story. In this analysis, several important points are overlooked. First, the preceding wedding sequence and the beginning of the rape scene are a visual culmination of Sansa’s journey into adulthood, stripping away the last remnants of her childish fantasies of noble knights and timeless unions of love with a coldly beautiful marriage ceremony and the violation first of her elaborate wedding dress, a proxy for her carefully poised feminine facade, and then of her body.

Second, while showing Sansa’s rape on screen could certainly be managed in a terrifying and sympathetic way, I would argue that choosing to end on Theon’s distress is both emotionally richer and less liable to slide into titillating trashiness. Theon, after all, is a survivor of a physical, emotional, and sexual gauntlet every bit as harrowing as the one Sansa has grown to maturity within. Once a swaggering womanizer with scant regard for anyone but himself, he has become keenly aware of the constant threat of violation. As he watches Sansa’s rape he’s reliving his own sexual breaking, recoiling from an assault on his surrogate family, and withdrawing into himself as the knowledge of his helplessness to intercede becomes incontrovertible. It’s an ugly and complex moment and a reminder that Sansa isn’t alone as a victim of Ramsay’s cruelty, or Westerosi society’s for that matter.

The Traumatized Self

That after her time as Ramsay’s wife Sansa goes on to develop a penchant for secrecy and a taste for grotesque punishments speaks to something not often discussed in fiction: the rapist’s lingering influence on their victims. “I’ll always be a part of you,” Ramsay sneers to Sansa just before his own dogs rip him apart, and it’s hard to shake his words when we see her smile at the grisly sounds of his dismemberment. Some fans lauded Sansa’s victory over her rapist as a corrective to the misstep they considered her rape, a feminist triumph over the forces of evil, but in reality it’s an example of a disturbing truth known to many victims of sexual assault and violent trauma. Going through monstrous things doesn’t make you better. It doesn’t instill in you a will to survive, or a secret core of virtuous purity. It breaks you, and it teaches you to behave like your tormentor.

Cersei’s rape at her husband’s hands, Daenerys’s on her wedding night, Gilly’s entire life up until her departure from Craster’s Keep, Sansa’s long and terrible road through various forms of sexual violence and humiliation, Shae’s tragic death at her lover’s hands, ser Meryn Trant’s (Ian Beattie) sadistic predilection for young girls. It makes up a mosaic of misery and pain which holds true to one of the most painful lessons life has for rape victims: closure is a myth. You’ll carry scars to your grave and live as a different person than the one you might have been. Even bloody revenge, which a few of the show’s women obtain, only hardens and embitters.

This piece takes its title from the story of Layna, an innkeeper’s daughter mentioned in passing in the book A Clash of Kings by one of ser Gregor Clegane’s men at arms. Riding in force to Layna’s father’s inn, ser Gregor and his men set about drinking, terrorizing the family, and otherwise behaving as soldiers do when given license to maraud. It isn’t long before Gregor, as the punchline to a cruel joke, seizes Layna and rapes her before passing her around to his men. The episode is delivered as a humorous anecdote by its teller and the men listening laugh extra hard when he reveals that Layna was only thirteen. It’s unclear whether or not she dies, or is thrown out by her family, or will ever function normally again.

The swift and horrible arbitrariness of Gregor’s crime, and of the easygoing participation of his men, is Martin’s Westeros in a nutshell. In a world where noblewomen are stripped, carried aloft, and raped on their wedding nights and peasant girls are little more than wineskins to be sucked dry and discarded, ser Gregor’s irresistible stature and life-crushing whims are a perfect metaphor for the vast edifice protecting and enshrining rape as a tool used by men against their wives, their children, and their enemies. In another book it might ring hollow, a woman’s life discarded to heighten the stakes, but in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones the relentless focus on life after violation textures Layna’s story with a deeper meaning. The laughing men, the flippant transformation of an entire life into a joke; that violence is the foundation on which all else is built.