Beauty, Love, and Honor - Jaime, Brienne and Cersei

In A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin frequently gives us twisted versions of different tropes: tropes that are common in fantasy (the hidden "commoner" who turns out to be a prince in reality which seems to be where Jon's story is headed), in romance (he definitely loves Beauty and the Beast because he's telling it at least twice in ASOIAF), as well as older tropes of courtly love and chivalry. And nowhere are those tropes, and their subversions, more apparent than in the story of Jaime Lannister, the soiled knight, who looks like a "king" according to Jon Snow, who is the most beautiful and most vile man Catelyn Stark has ever known, and whose white cloak "becomes him" as Brienne of Tarth says. In keeping with Jaime's complex inner life and storyline, his romantic relationships are equally complex and equally subvert our expectations.





Jaime is part of two relationships that have their genesis in romantic tropes: with Cersei he subverts a tale that we that we know from Guinevere and Lancelot, from Tristan and Isolde, etc., because she is his twin sister. (Take that element out and you have the classic tale of a queen married to an King for political reasons who loves the gallant young knight who fights for her husband. In this case, our sympathies are usually with the queen and her knight. Westeros even apparently has its own version of this mythos with Aemon the Dragonknight who joined the Kingsguard to be with his sister, the Queen, exactly what Jaime does (although Naerys was married to her own and Aemon's brother, so that was an extra layer of incest added in.) Because Cersei is Jaime’s twin sister and because their bond is not treated with this mythical reverence that we give to Tristan and Isolde and their ilk, we see the ugliness of what they do to hide their love and eventually we also see how the bonds that hold them together don’t survive their physical separation. (And unlike Wagner’s Siegmund and Sieglinde, who were twins, their children are not Siegfrieds born to save the world, but a Joffrey born to destroy it, and Myrcella and Tommen, who, to be fair, are decent, good children, but certainly not mythically prophesied saviors.)

If Martin had never shown Brienne to be totally in love with Jaime (and deeply attracted to him physically as we learn from her POV in A Feast for Crows, where she remembers Jaime's naked body in the baths at Harrenhal) I would have been fine with their friendship-love being the endgame. But she is in love with him and although I can’t say in the books whether he’s in love with her yet, there is certainly an incredibly deep bond of love from him to her. 

If we don’t listen Jaime’s inner monologue to convince us (and more importantly himself) that he’s just paying his debts like a good Lannister, and focus on his actions, he does things that would be considered extremely romantic in any context: he tells a lie to Vargo Hoat about sapphires to save Brienne from immediate rape; then (in the books) after his hand is cut off and Brienne has talked him out of his death wish, he risks an incredible amount of pain to save her from another rape attempt by Hoat’s vile henchmen (they kick his infected stump again and again after he shouts “sapphires” and he faints from the pain); he bares his soul to her, telling her something he has told no one else ever, not his father, not his beloved Cersei, not even his brother Tyrion to whom he’s told many other things; and finally, he jumps into the bear pit for her with nothing but his body to defend her from death (a more thoughtful man might have thrown her a sword, but … on some level, I think Jaime knew a) the only way Steelshanks Walton was going to intervene was if Jaime’s life was in danger and b) he’s clearly either going to save Brienne or die beside her. I don’t know about you, but however much I like my friends, the only people for whom I’d play human shield in the presence of an angry bear are my husband and my son. (And even my husband is iffy :P))

With Brienne and Jaime, Martin comes back to a romantic theme he uses with quite often in the series (most notably with regards to Sansa): that of Beauty and the Beast, only everything is tangled up so both Jaime (physically) and Brienne (morally) are beauty and reversed, they are both the beast. But I think romantic elements of the bond between Brienne and Jaime are very much intended by Martin: Beauty and the Beast don’t become best friends; they do learn to know each other as friends but they fall in love and they end as lovers. (The story of Cupid and Psyche, which has elements of Beauty and the Beast, is an allegory for the soul’s search for love, and you can tell me until you’re blue in the face that friendship is also a kind of love - and I agree! - but Psyche is actually sleeping with Cupid and is even pregnant when her family convinces her she’s married to a monster so she goes to kill him. So you know, it is about sexytimes too!)

I think Brienne having a physical attraction to Jaime and then being “friend-zoned” by him would be a kind of redundant repetition of her arc with Renly, and given how much Martin has emphasized her physical ugliness (complete with giving her a hideous facial scar) and how he seems very determined to show that beauty is skin-deep etc. (so Dany’s attraction to the handsome Daario is kind of laughable, but Gilly’s attraction to Sam is sweet and wholesome), I think it would be the culmination of that to have (beautiful) Jaime fall in love with (beastly) Brienne after he has become more beautiful (on the inside) thanks in part to her inner beauty.

I also keep coming back to Jaime’s dream: In a dream in which he is rejected by Cersei, his ideal of love, and accused by Ser Arthur Dayne, his ideal of Knighthood, the person who stands by him and defends him (as they are both naked) is Brienne, and this is how he sees her: “in this light she could be a beauty, in this light she could be a knight.” If we are meant to infer that Jaime and Brienne will be nothing more than friends, then there is no reason for this dream to note that Brienne is both a woman AND a knight or to juxtapose her with both Cersei AND Arthur Dayne. If we were simply to infer that Brienne is a someone Jaime considers a friend, then we might have gotten at most his juxtaposition of Brienne and Arthur Dayne, the example of the true meaning of chivalry that Jaime returns to over and over again. Instead, we also have Cersei, the only woman Jaime has loved until now and had a sexual relationship with, turn away from Jaime just before Brienne appears in Jaime's dream naked and "with more of woman's shape."

I’ve also been thinking about honor and how in patriarchal societies like most of Westeros (exceptions for Dorne and the Wildlings) a woman’s honor involved her sexual activities (a woman “dishonors” her husband by having an affair; a woman is “dishonored” by rape) and her sexual choices reflect on the man who “owns” her (husband, brother, father). Whereas a knight’s honor is separate from sexuality (mostly, unless he’s in the Night’s Watch or Kingsguard) and concerned with protecting the weak, defending the realm etc.

Brienne is one of the few (maybe the only?) characters who has both kinds of honor because she is a woman as well as a knight and both kinds of honor tie her to Jaime, who is one of the few people who readily accepts the dual nature of Brienne’s honor. In contrast to the cruel knights in Renly’s camp who bet on who will deflower her (and whose focus is on her “honor” as a woman) and to Randyll Tarly who literally tells her that if she’s raped it’s her own fault for not adhering to her prescribed role, Jaime saves Brienne from “dishonor” as a woman by his lie regarding sapphires because he understands how that will scar her on the inside. Later, he vouchsafes her honor as a knight to Loras and then goes even further in giving his own “last chance for honor” into her keeping. It’s such a gorgeous progression and it tells me that as much as Brienne knows Jaime’s sins and loves him anyway, he knows who she is on this level that no one else does. And I think a romance between them wouldn’t cheapen that knowledge and love but enhance it.