Bitches Be Crazy: Patriarchal Weaponization of Mental Distress in Game of Thrones

Summary

Critics’ and fans’ reaction to the final two episodes of Season Eight of HBO's Game of Thrones (GoT) was marked by outrage and revisionist writing. A Change.org petition demanding the rewriting of Season 8 garnered more than 1 million signatures, particularly after the infamous “The Bells” episode, where Daenerys torches King's Landing, killing civilians even after the surrender bells have been rung. And in the fanfiction site Fanfiction.net, in the GoT subcategory with thousands upon thousands of submissions, around one-fifth of the submissions are stories that attempt to rescue Daenerys from the showrunners.

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have been accused of cramming what should have been another eight seasons into the final two in an attempt to finish the series, and these accusations are valid. What is more insidious, however, is that part of this quick wrap-up relies on the misogynistic trope of female madness and produces another text that illustrates and endorses patriarchy's centuries-old weaponization of mental health/illness to police boundaries and punish transgressors, a practice common in the Middle Ages and continuing in medievalist texts. Margery Kempe's emotional outbursts of weeping, her visions that bypassed clerical authority to connect directly with Christ, and her direct chastisement of figures of the clergy were seen as madness. Stephen Harper notes: “On a sociological level, Kempe's madness constitutes an individual's struggle for autonomy and her rejection of her social role.” The 1381 uprising, an attempt to overturn a patriarchal hierarchy of authority, was described by official discourse as “as an outbreak of diabolical madness which threated to overturn the supposedly natural and divinely ordained feudal hierarchy.” The inability to conform to normative gender roles actually determined legal diagnoses of mental distress. In her exploration of medieval English legal investigations, Wendy J. Turner notes that: “Representatives of the crown […] based their judgements of an individual's mental state on his emotional one” and the emotions termed inappropriate were those that violated gendered expectations of behavior. William de Percy of Kildale was labeled as being “not of sound mind” for weeping during an investigation, while Elizabeth Polglas's quick marriage after her father's death and subsequent remarriage two days after her first husband's death were grounds for a diagnosis of mental illness, since she did not display the required emotional loyalty to father and husband.