It’s
not something I’ve ever really thought about before, to be perfectly honest.
The travelers sit around the campfire in the night and tell the tales of the
Old Kings, of the kings who reigned seemingly forever. Whether their rule was
kind and beautiful, or twisted and held with an iron fist, there’s always tales
of the kings who held their titles for generations. And yet in many of the
tales we’ve read so far, and many of the ones I’ve read throughout my life,
queens apparently aren’t as good at holding onto their “power” as kings. More
often than not, they become disgraced and fall from power especially if it’s after the death of the king, made into a villain
where only months or years before they were kind and beautiful.
First
example: Custance from The Man of Law’s Tale, who can never quite seem to catch
a break. Her whole life’s story seems to resonate with the truth of just how
much this sort of cycle is unfair and downright cruel. Granted, the hagiographical
style of her tale almost necessitates that her life be nothing short of painful
and unfair, but it does seem to fit into the literary trope that only through
suffering can we understand a female character. While Custance’s trials seem to
come to an end upon the death of Alla, she is also effectively removed from
bearing any title. Sure she carries on her days doing good work and being
saint-like, but it almost seems to be a result of her no longer being close to
power and not attempting to claim it as her own.
Moving
on to the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, an example to immediately comes to
mind would be the case of Cersei Lannister. After marrying Robert Baratheon at
16, she spent the next 16 years working her way into having some legitimate
power by manipulating Robert as well as the members of the small council
advising the King. Upon Robert’s death, coordinated by Cersei after realizing
her attempts to further manipulate him were in vain, Cersei became Queen Regent,
overall the closest she’s come to truly having power. This seems to work as
well as anything in Westeros seems to work, until details of her crimes come to
light and she is imprisoned and publicly shamed. Do we call her time working
behind the scenes ruling Westeros true power? It’s hard to say. Nevertheless,
if we counted her time as Queen Regent as the only time she truly had power, it
was very short lived. In the eye of the public, she is an incestuous whore and
a murderer and likely any other term used to insult a woman.
Even
queens in the background of the series, such as the might warrior queen Nymeria,
are written in as if they only had one short “Hurrah” before never being
mentioned again. Nymeria, as we hear from many characters, was nothing short of
a bad ass, leading a fleet of ten thousand ships to the land of Dorne and
conquered the country with an alliance with House Martell. Sounds fantastic and
phenomenal! However, we hear nothing more of her reign as
the Queen of Dorne.
So
where do we go from here? Honestly, I can’t say. It’s a trend in literature
that kind of sucks, denying us thousands of tales of the epic lives of queens,
ruling for generations as kind/terrible queens.
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