It’s just so strange to me how some fans can hate Sansa just because of a few mistaken she made as a CHILD. But you see so much of her character development in the books as well as the show and yet for some bizarre reason, people tend to forget that and still hate her. I don’t understand how they don’t notice how much she’s changed. Do their brains not work right? Can they not read or watch the show properly? Lol
This is actually really interesting!
There’s been a long standing tradition of distrusting women and femininity. In literature, we have plays like Arden of Faversham and The Duchess of Malfi which depict powerful women who ruin lives with their deceit. This likely stems from the fear that women lie about their chastity (or their innocence) in order to secure a marriage. Later, we have novels about deceptive women such as Lady Audley’s Secret which punish women for lying in order to gain means.
When film noire came about, there was a continuation of this trope with the Femme Fatale. In films like Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, these women are able to use their feminine wiles (their beauty and perceived helplessness) to manipulate men. There are usually women in these films who are not the Femme Fatale, “good women” who do not lie and do not try to overpower their male superiors. This ties back to that ancient dichotomy between Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, the virgin and the whore. In these stories, there are only these two kinds of women—those who submit, and those who do not.
More recently we have films like Dangerous Liaisons and Gone Girl which still depict women using their femininity to gain influence while they lie about their innocence and their motives.
This brings us to Sansa. She is decidedly feminine, and she survives her tormentors by embracing this tradition of feminine deceit—“courtesy is a lady’s armor”. This confuses some audiences because the little bird refuses to be pigeonholed. Sansa is both an innocent girl and a manipulative woman. Her deceit doesn’t make her a bad person, it’s simply her means for survival. She’s shown time and again being compassionate rather than self-serving.
Some people are blind to the good, however. They only see a pretty girl with her own motive. They distrust her completely because of this archetype of the deceptive woman—they had an expectation of Sansa ultimately showing her “true colors” as a power hungry character, all the while ignoring every clue that Sansa was just the opposite. People who hate Sansa are confused because they expected a trope, but were given a well rounded character instead. I guess some are unaccustomed to female characters having more than two dimensions.
...yes I’m writing my dissertation on the deceptive woman trope.
