Sex and Dragons: How Dany’s “Tasteful Nudity” and Dragon Children Symbolize Her Role as White Imperialist

         Daenerys has been known to proclaim “I am the mother of dragons.”  Anyone with Internet access and a mediocre sense of humor knows this.  But what do these dragons mean in a world where everybody is associated with a symbol or identity of sorts, including the bastardy of Jon Snow as incongruent with his genuine goodness and Tyrion’s malformed façade as a means of shaping him as a Richard III figure? Dany has her dragons.  The majority of her segment of the first book builds up to the moment at which she claims her matriarchal role and it lingers throughout the rest of the series, television and novel.  These dragons are symbolic of Dany’s imperial power.

            First, the dragons emerge in suspicious timing with the death of Khal Drogo and Rhago’s ill-fated monstrous birth.  They emerge at a time when Dany, at least in the show’s depiction, has begun to adorn herself in her original attire.   The dragons were the emblem of her family, her ancestors, really.  In this sense, they represent Dany reclaiming her heritage and seizing that power, that identity.  Normally, this gesture would be seen as empowering, however, Dany’s Targaryen roots present the much more problematic action of Dany demeaning the Dothraki people, ultimately. Upon the death of her husband, she rises from the pyre along with her dragons and she takes the role of white imperialist in place of indigenous warrior and utilizes those people to reclaim her prize.  Fire cannot burn the dragon, as she says.  Instead, it bolsters her and gives rise to the birth of her dragons.  The dragons rise and so does Dany. 

Both mythological reptile and white-haired princess are unclothed, in a high fantasy recreation of “The Birth of Venus,” a repetition of one of Dany’s first scenes in which she, naked, steps into the scalding bath.  While nudity could draw Dany closer to the carnal and atavistic depictions of the Dothraki people, we, the viewers, do not see her extremities.  The assets both the camera and the male characters draw attention to are now covered by dragons.  Dany’s armor is now her small dragon family.  Assuming dragons equate to white imperialism, Dany’s reptilian fig leaves seem to better her in juxtaposition to the nude Dothraki women.  She is still nude, she is still somewhat vulnerable, but the parts of her body both representative of her role as prize and potentially role as Dothraki Khaleesi, are shrouded by civilized imperialism.

Perhaps the dragons in their roles as Dany’s “children” as opposed to her “pets” further this imperialistic nature.  Even though mythological and ancient in appearance and nature, these dragons represent a new future.  Somehow they are a more civilized generation than the Dothraki people.  Even Dany exclaims that dragons eat horses.  Dragons, essentially the symbol of the white imperial Dany, conquer the symbols of the Dothraki.  In this sense, Dany takes over the Dothraki with her “seed,” her lineage.  It just so happens to be super convenient that her half—Dothraki son didn’t quite make it past the lump child stage.

Dany as both sexualized being and mother of dragons serves an interesting purpose.  Dany uses her dragons not quite as an armor but as a distraction from what the male characters had been determining her worth by.  Through using her dragons as form of empowerment, she proves she is more than her sexuality.  She reclaims a new identity as woman, as matriarch and not sex thing, and, further, heightens her role as an imperialist force that cannot be stopped.

image source:fanpop

             

A Wicked Twist On the Lump Child

With diving into stories like The King Of Tars, race and religion are two distinctly important topics that are brought up. In The King of Tars, a formless child is born to a couple of different race and different religion. The mother is a white Christian, while the father is a colored Muslim. When this story was written, race and religion were so closely associated with each other that it was believed you had to be white in order to be a true Christian. Marrying someone of a different faith is sinful, and because of that sin, any resulting child could not be completely healthy or normal. Of course, today we know that this reasoning is complete nonsense, but people believed it was true for a long time. Since this crazy logic appears several times in medieval stories and texts, the sins of the family, along with mixed race and culture, bringing a curse on the child is also employed into modern day storytelling.

The story is a bit too close to fan fiction, but it does have great music!

The best example I could think of, other than Game of Thrones, is Stephen Schwartz’s musical Wicked, which is based off the book by Gregory Maguire. The story is basically a retelling of The Wizard of Oz; however, the protagonist is the Wicked Witch, named Elphaba, and it shows her descent into wickedness amongst other elements of her life. Elphaba, unknown to her but known to the audience, is born out of wedlock. Her mother committed adultery with a man from Kansas who arrived to Oz by balloon (three guesses who that is), and, as a result, Elphaba was born - with green skin and other abnormalities. Similar to The King of Tars, the parents of Elphaba are both from different cultures, her mother being native to Oz and the wizard being native to our world. Seeing that Elphaba’s mother is married, their union is also adulterous and considered sinful. Throughout the rest of her life, Elphaba causes commotion by simply being present. She is the only character in the story that can perform magic properly, she has crazy ideas about protecting animals, and, of course, everyone freaks out over her green skin tone. No matter what her good intentions are, everything she does backfires and makes her appear villainous. Elphaba carries the weight and the consequences of the sins committed by her mother and father. She is the definition of abnormal; therefore, she ends up isolating herself and losing everything.

Not exactly a lump child, but it does the trick. This story of mixed culture combined with sinful nature producing unnatural results is still used today, and in a smash hit musical for families no less. However, whatever progress we have made as a society definitely shows through. In Wicked, there is no battle of whose religion is the right one and no one’s skin tone changes based on the chosen religion. Ultimately, the wizard is seen as the fraud he is and goes to prison, and Elphaba’s mother dies after giving birth to another daughter. Neither one really wins in the end.

Khal Drogo the Barbarian

Mongol General: Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

I will take my khalasar west to where the world ends, and ride the wooden horses across the black salt water as no khal has done before. I will kill the men in the iron suits and tear down their stone houses. I will rape their women, take their children as slaves, and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak to bow down beneath the Mother of Mountains. This I vow, I, Drogo son of Bharbo.

A Game of Thrones (pg 594)

Khal Drogo is a power fantasy wrapped up in a million “barbarian” clichés. I will never stop being disappointed that he doesn’t get to speak more or have more of a personality in A Game of Thrones before he dies in order to provoke Dany’s character growth, because like most other characters who play the “game,” he’s a complicated and morally ambiguous figure. Also, he’s a badass.

His physical appearance, which is most of what we get to know about him, mixes images of strength and virility with images of strangeness and foreignness. When Dany first meets him, he describes him as a head taller than the tallest men around him. He spends the entire show bare-chested to show off his muscles. What’s interesting is how Dany’s perception of his physical size shifts: at first, she is almost more afraid of Drogo than of Viserys (which is impressive), but over time her reaction shifts from “that’s scary” to “that’s sexy.” There’s an uncomfortable way in which his physical strength and his capacity for violence may be tied to his race, like the sultan in The King of Tars is implicitly compared to a huge black hound attacking the princess, but although Martin shows us Dany’s fear, he spends more time showing Khal Drogo as a more heroic figure.

The braid that Khal Drogo wears is perhaps the most perfect mix of strength and foreignness he has. The symbolism of the braid recalls a variety of different cultures, but isn’t particularly Western. During the rule of the Qing dynasty in China, all men were required to wear their hair in a long queue, or braided tail. The penalty for refusing was death, and it is sometimes said that if a man emigrated away from China, he could not return if he had cut his queue off. American Indian children who were forced to go to government-run boarding schools to be “acculturated” had their long hair forcibly cut. Certain religious traditions, including Sikh traditions, require their adherents to grow their hair naturally and not cut it. A man’s hair is also important to his masculinity in a variety of cultures, just as a woman’s hair is important to her femininity. Samson, a character in the Old Testament, famously lost his divine power when his hair was cut. More bizarrely, the Dothraki custom of taking another khal’s bells when you defeat him recalls the giant Arthur fought in HKB who wore a “fur clock [made] from the beards of the kings whom he had slain” (240).

Previously in this class, we’ve discussed the idea of giants as over-sexed, representing some sort of monstrous, uncontrollable sexuality. Unfortunately, Khal Drogo seems to resemble a giant in this respect, too. All the Dothraki men, in fact, are characterized by excessive sexuality. In some ways, Martin portrays this as an exaggerated stereotype: it’s not actually true, from what we see, that they sleep with their horses, and men in Westeros rape captured women as much as Dothraki men do. But the Dothraki are constantly having sex in public, including during Dany’s wedding; Khal Drogo has sex with Dany pretty much every time they’re in the same space; and a lot of their rhetoric blends violence together with sex, as when Dany’s child is described as the “stallion who mounts the world.” The portrayal of all this public sex, both in the book and the show, I argue, always has a tinge of the exotic and the barbaric. At worst, it’s used to portray the Dothraki as a dangerous and animalistic people, driven by their worst instincts and devoid of civilization or restraint. At best, it’s an excuse for Martin and the show writers to titillate the reader/viewer with more women’s breasts and more sex scenes. The fact that these people are darker-skinned apparently means you don’t even have to bother with giving some context for the sex or showing the woman’s face. This goes back to the idea of Drogo as a power fantasy. Partly, he's a fantasy just in that he gets to have a ton of sex. In addition, his strength and manliness are inherently intertwined with virility--there's some sort of evolutionarily-programmed feeling of, "this guy can kill people really well, if we had kids he'd be able to protect our kids really well." 

For Narnia! A Comparison of Worlds and Races Between J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit And C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series

Personally, it is hard for me to read from Tolkien and not think about C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series. After all, the two worlds, and the two men themselves, have a lot in common. Their stories both contain multitudes of different races in a fantastical medieval setting, as well as mythological references and a bit of the British lifestyle sprinkled in. Both men spent a lot of time at Oxford, were Christians of some denomination, and environmentalists. While these two agreed on many things, their stories are unique to them. It is obvious Tolkien took more interest in medieval history than Lewis, but Lewis delved into mythology more deeply than Tolkien did. One aspect of Tolkien and Lewis’s fantasy worlds that differ is their portrayal of the race of Dwarves.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is filled to the brim with multiple different races, including Hobbits, Men, Elves, Wizards, Orcs, Goblins, giant spiders, eagles, and many more in his continuing saga. These Middle Earth races are notably likened to races of people throughout real world history. In The Hobbit specifically, the race of Dwarves in Middle Earth is incredibly similar to the caricature view of the Jewish race. Their short stature, multi-colored hoods, bearded men and women, and their obsession with gold fall under the Jewish stereotypes, but Tolkien is not portraying all of these traits as antagonistic. Dwarves are actually part of the more heroic races in Middle Earth. The only difference the Dwarves have from the other protagonist races is that they are more flawed, more susceptible to greed.

One of the original illustrations from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Lewis’s take on Dwarfs (that’s how he spells it) and other races is similar to Tolkien’s but with some alterations. Narnia is filled with a broad variety of races. Many of these are talking animals; others are mythical in nature, like centaurs, fauns, Minotaurs, and even a Pegasus. There are also several races of humans in the world of Narnia, including the Telmarines and the Calormen. The Dwarf race in Narnia is interesting because, unlike Tolkien’s Dwarves, the race is split down the middle when it comes to heroics. Their description is similar to the Dwarves in Middle Earth, short, bearded, and with some type of head covering. At the beginning of the series there are two varieties of Dwarfs, Black and Red. Black Dwarfs have black, thick beards and tend to associate more with the villains of Narnia, while the Red Dwarfs ally themselves with Aslan, the ultimate source of good in Narnia. One other aspect of the Dwarfs that is unique to Lewis’s tale is the matter of Dwarf women. There is no evidence of any Dwarf women at all throughout the Narnia series; however, there are several part Dwarf characters roaming around (e.g. Cornelius, Prince Caspian’s tutor, is half Dwarf). There does not seem to be any division between Dwarfs and regular humans in Narnia as far as mating is concerned.

Both Lewis and Tolkien’s portrayal of Dwarves in their fictional worlds are blatantly similar to the stereotype of the Jewish people, short with more rugged features and some evil tendencies. This representation of Jews is inaccurate and would normally lean toward insulting; however, Lewis and Tolkien both depict their Dwarf characters as capable of both good and evil. While the stereotype is heavily present, the two authors show respect towards those characters by making the race more complex than the others.

Low Key Racial Biases

In the year 2015, it’s fair to say that the human race has become much more progressive on many social issues. However, it is important not to let ourselves believe that our progress is complete. While we have made great strides for human rights and equality, there is still more to be done. One such issue that has improved but has yet to become ideal is race. We have certainly come a long way from atrocities such as the Holocaust, slavery, and segregation, but race is still an issue that is still prominent today, albeit more subtle.

               For example, in his novel, The Hobbit, J.R.R Tolkien has admitted that he modeled the fantasy dwarf race after the Jewish race. At first glance this doesn’t seem to be much of an issue when reading about the dwarves. The dwarves are not depicted in a particularly negative way; they are portrayed as one of the heroic, good races. They also share the same historical misfortune of the Jewish race in that they are forced to wander and are lacking a true home. However, some of the other similarities they share are perhaps due to Tolkien’s racial biases and subconscious stereotyping. The dwarf race, despite being heroic, are also portrayed as being very greedy and overly fond of treasure, the same avarice that the Jewish race is stereotyped as having in modern times. Additionally, the dwarf race is depicted as small in stature with rugged, rough features. On the other hand, the Elven race, modeled after Aryans, are of normal height and depicted as being quite fair. It also says something that while the novel already had a race of men, the Jewish race was projected to the dwarf race rather than the standard race of man.

               While these are certainly not egregious issues, they serve to show that despite being the progress we have made on issues, there are still biases, assumptions, and stereotypes that are ingrained into people. It’s not always easy to recognize these issues, as they have become increasingly subtle, but it is important to try to realize that they are present so that we can continue to make progress for human rights and equality.