goodqueenaly:

In Defense of Alyssa Velaryon

I have been trying for the past day to write a post about Alyssa Velaryon’s death in F&B, and I have been struggling to not delve completely into a profanity-laced rant in doing so. I have tried to craft a logical, reasoned response that adequately conveys my disappointment and criticism of GRRM’s writing with respect to Alyssa’s death, but every time I find myself getting as angry at this choice as I did the first time I read it, nearly three weeks ago. As I see it, Alyssa’s death is the culmination of the profoundly problematic re-characterization of her that we see in F&B; this is not simply the typical misogyny of the Westerosi universe, but a deliberate choice by the author to drive this woman out of the narrative. The author himself undermined Alyssa Velaryon as a character, breaking her down from the figure we had previously known and manipulating her (specifically gendered) death to further the characterization of a male figure instead. (Long; more under the cut)

Consider the change in Alyssa from the information we had in “Sons of the Dragon” to the new information presented by Gyldayn in F&B. In “Sons”, Alyssa was brave, determined, capable, and clever. We saw her mocking Maegor in open court, declaring for her son Aegon when Maegor seized power, reaching out to Westerosi lords to seek out support for her son, and successfully finding asylum and executing her and her two youngest children’s escape from captivity during Maegor’s rule. Suddenly, then, we get to “A Surfeit of Rulers”, and per Septon Barth (a man who in every other respect the story clearly wants us to see as intelligent, sympathetic, and even progressive), Alyssa was an Aenys-like figure who only wanted to be “loved, admired, and praised”. She does almost nothing not related to splitting up Jaehaerys and Alysanne for the entirety of the regency between their marriage and Jaehaerys assuming power; when she does try to act, she is consistently bullied and humiliated by Rogar Baratheon. She becomes, in short, no more than a secondary figure to Lord Rogar, and one which the story wants to portray as weak, uncertain, and failing.

So where the hell did this new Alyssa come from? I have a strong suspicion – though it’s only a suspicion – that GRRM decided, while writing all the new material he had to create for Jaehaerys I (having largely skipped over him in making notes for TWOIAF), to mirror Jaehaerys’ regency period on the regency of King Edward III of England. Indeed, the parallels are in some ways striking: the 14-year-old prince, son of a weak and ill-remembered father (and grandson of a well-remembered warrior-king), claiming the throne after a period of misrule, with his mother and his mother’s political/romantic ally (a very powerful lord in his own right) initially serving as his regents until the prince seizes power for himself (and then going on to have a long and very fruitful marriage with the bride he had taken in his teens). (Is it any coincidence, after all, that “Rogar”, Lord Baratheon’s new first name for F&B, sounds suspiciously like “Roger”, as in Roger Mortimer?) GRRM loves to lift from real-world history, changing and adapting to make an interesting, pseudo-historical (and I use the prefix deliberately) story; with the influence of The Accursed Kings series  (which in part addresses young Edward III’s accession) clear in both the main novels and F&B, there is no reason to doubt that GRRM likely had Edward III’s regency in mind when crafting Jaehaerys’ early years as king.

In choosing to make this adaptation, however, GRRM appears to have ignored the historical context of this source of inspiration, having the narrative punish Alyssa for misdeeds she did not commit and then silencing her in a way Queen Isabella herself was not following her loss of power. The popular understanding of Isabella of France, mother and sometime regent of Edward III, is that she and Roger Mortimer poorly handled the state, depleting England’s coffers by granting themselves huge incomes and estates, and that Edward III justly drove the wicked Mortimer from office and executed him. While there is some debate as to Isabella’s actual responsibilities during her son’s regency, it’s unquestionable that Isabella personally profited from the regency period (as did Mortimer, of course). At Edward III’s coronation in 1327, Isabella awarded herself an income of 20,000 marks, or roughly 13,000 pounds; for comparison, her income as queen to Edward II had been 4,500 pounds, while the king’s cousin Thomas of Lancaster, the richest man in England, earned 11,000 pounds a year from his five estates. In addition to this income, Isabella allocated herself 31,843 pounds, supposedly to pay her foreign debts (though these were already paid). Over the course of the four years of the regency, Isabella and Mortimer managed to reduce the treasury from 80,000 pounds to a mere 46. (There was a level of personal pettiness to Isabella as well: the coronation of Philippa of Hainault, the bride of Edward III, was delayed for two years, as Isabella did not want to surrender precedence to her daughter-in-law; only when Philippa became pregnant with her first child, the future Edward “the Black Prince”, was she finally crowned.)         

Contrast Isabella’s behavior to that of Alyssa Velaryon. Gyldayn underlines the fact that Alyssa’s concerns over the marriage of Jaehaerys and Alyssa were legitimate rather than selfish, based on her experience with the violent reaction to Rhaena and Aegon’s marriage (even if the story itself can’t seem to decide whether the possibility of a mass uprising against another incestuous Targaryen marriage was a credible threat or not). There is no personal animosity in Alyssa’s actions in trying to separate Jaehaerys and Alysanne, and her somewhat restrained (and ultimately unsuccessful) method of doing so is deliberately contrasted with Lord Rogar’s disturbing (and also unsuccessful) means of doing the same. On top of that, we see no evidence that Alyssa was attempting to profit personally from being Jaehaerys’ co-regent. By Gyldayn’s own admission, the crown’s treasury was already in a perilous state at the beginning of the regency, as “King Maegor’s wars had been ruinously expensive”. Of the great expenses thereafter – the coronation of Jaehaerys, the Golden Wedding, and the work on the Dragonpit – Alyssa personally profited on none of them; it might be argued that less could have been spent on the coronation and the wedding (though Gyldayn himself presents a counterargument to this idea, that these public spectacles “had done much to win him the love of lords and smallfolk alike”), but surely the construction on the Dragonpit did nothing to help the personal fortunes of either Alyssa or Rogar. Where with Alyssa Velaryon, in other words, was the bad government of which Queen Isabella was in the popular understanding so guilty during her regency?

The flip side of this choice, moreover, is that we actually know more about Queen Isabella’s years of retirement from power than we do about Alyssa Velaryon’s despite the fact that Edward III had far more reason to blame his mother than Jaehaerys ever did to blame his (Edward did, at least, execute Roger Mortimer, which is more than Jaehaerys did to the man who had tried to stage a clumsy coup against him). We know that Isabella moved between several royal residences in the nearly three decades between her fall from power and her death (for a sense of comparison, Isabella was about 35 at the end of the regency and died around the age of 63). We know that she made pilgrimages to Canterbury, where the shrine of St. Thomas Becket enjoyed great medieval popularity. We know that when King John II of France (a cousin to Isabella) and other Frenchmen were captured by Isabella’s grandson Edward at the Battle of Poitiers, Isabella entertained members of his household (including another French kinsman, Jacques de Bourbon). We know that she visited with her daughter Joan (sometime Queen of Scots) and her son King Edward, and gave them rich presents (including a black palfrey for Joan). We even know that she paid for a servant in her household to receive music lessons at a “school of minstrelsy” in London.

By contrast, Alyssa receives laughably little attention in the narrative following the end of her regency power, especially compared to Rogar. While Rogar’s reconciliation with Jaehaerys merits personal thoughts by Rogar beforehand and a whole transcript of their meeting, Alyssa’s reconciliation with Jaehaerys lasts one paragraph, in which Alyssa does not speak and only Grand Maester Benifer gives any thoughts as to her internal feelings. When Alyssa’s first Baratheon pregnancy is announced, Alyssa is given no opportunity to voice an opinion on whether she wanted to become pregnant at a very late maternal age, or what passed as reconciliation between her and her husband. Her second Baratheon pregnancy does not merit even the single thought Alyssa was allowed to give in the first; only Benifer and Rogar are allowed by the narrative to rejoice, and only Barth is allowed to voice any concerns.

GRRM gives the worst of both worlds to Alyssa Velaryon in her regency and post-regency life, yet he saves the very worst decision for last. I will not pretend to be the first to criticize GRRM’s overuse of deaths in childbirth; many meta writers before me have tackled the same subject (my dear friend @joannalannister among them). That he should return to this all-too-fertile ground for yet another character (not to mention the five other women F&B mentions died in the same manner) is disheartening, of course, but with Alyssa Velaryon there is a special cruelty to it. This is a woman who had been, from almost the start of the regency, sidelined and silenced by the narrative, in favor of Rogar Baratheon. In these last moments of her life, Alyssa Velaryon is manipulated the narrative to further the (negative) characterization of Rogar, with no thought to her own character.

Thus we see a death scene that in addition to being luridly depicted (Alyssa is presented “in a bed that stank of urine, drenched in sweat and gaunt as a crone” – a shameful last image for this woman who had helped save the Targaryen monarchy from collapse during the reign of Maegor) is focused largely on Rogar, instead of Alyssa herself. It’s Rogar with whom Jaehaerys speaks upon his and Alysanne’s arrival to Storm’s End; it’s Rogar who makes the crucial decision to sacrifice Alyssa that the babe might be saved; it’s Rogar whom Rhaena so roundly (and fairly) criticizes upon her own arrival (and if there is anything resembling a silver lining to this sordid affair, it’s that for once there is canon criticism of the power men in Westeros have over women’s bodies), and Rogar who attempts to laugh off Rhaena’s fury and warning (with the important footnote that he never did wed again, just as Rhaena insisted). Rogar is the one made to look callous and villainous (as though there had been any doubt to that beforehand), the male-obsessed Westerosi lord who cared more about his “son” (which fate fittingly denied him) than the wife whose death he had hastened. The one statement from Alyssa on the birth of her daughter – piously wishing to save her child, that she might be reunited with her dead sons – is immediately undercut by Gyldayn as likely not happening at all, with Alyssa Velaryon dying in narratively forded silence.

I am severely disappointed in GRRM about this. He had the opportunity with Alyssa to create a strong, intelligent, caring Queen Mother – a welcome presence at the court of her Targaryen son and daughter, a guiding light for the Baratheon son and daughter who would be so closely associated with their half-siblings’ dynasty. Not only did he sideline her, wasting her obvious talents during the regency on an ultimately failed attempt to separate her son and daughter; not only did he silence her, forgoing her post-regency perspective for that of her husband; not only did he force her into a needless, needlessly gendered death to ensure that she would never have influence or position again at Jaehaerys’ court; but he did all of that to further the characterization of Rogar Baratheon. The important takeaway of Alyssa’s regency and post-regency years, from the information Gyldayn provides, is not to understand who Alyssa was, but to understand who Rogar was. In the pursuit of making Rogar Baratheon into a villain, Gyldayn turns Alyssa into just another tool; she is there to be bullied, used, and ultimately killed just so we can hate Rogar even more. That is grossly unfair to this woman whose determination, courage, and shrewdness helped ensure the still-new Targaryen dynasty would survive when it was at its first crisis point under Maegor.

You could have done better, GRRM. Alyssa Velaryon deserved better.