Hi! I love your metas and your understanding of the characters & I wondered: We know for Cat fulfilling her role in society is important, but she's also an emotional person deep down. How long do you think did it took her to adjust to the situation of Ned bringing Jon home, do you think she would (be able to) internalise her hurt completely, or be passive aggressive about it, or show it openly? how long do you think did it affect her marriage before they started to really care for each other?
Catelyn never adjusted to Jon’s presence, it was always an open wound. These are her thoughts, 14 years (that’s fourteen years) after:
“What of Jon Snow, my lord?” Maester Luwin asked.Catelyn tensed at the mention of the name. Ned felt the anger in her, and pulled away.Many men fathered bastards. Catelyn had grown up with that knowledge. It came as no surprise to her, in the first year of her marriage, to learn that Ned had fathered a child on some girl chance met on campaign. He had a man’s needs, after all, and they had spent that year apart, Ned off at war in the south while she remained safe in her father’s castle at Riverrun. Her thoughts were more of Robb, the infant at her breast, than of the husband she scarcely knew. He was welcome to whatever solace he might find between battles. And if his seed quickened, she expected he would see to the child’s needs.He did more than that. The Starks were not like other men. Ned brought his bastard home with him, and called him “son” for all the north to see. When the wars were over at last, and Catelyn rode to Winterfell, Jon and his wet nurse had already taken up residence.That cut deep. Ned would not speak of the mother, not so much as a word, but a castle has no secrets, and Catelyn heard her maids repeating tales they heard from the lips of her husband’s soldiers. They whispered of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, deadliest of the seven knights of Aerys’s Kingsguard, and of how their young lord had slain him in single combat. And they told how afterward Ned had carried Ser Arthur’s sword back to the beautiful young sister who awaited him in a castle called Starfall on the shores of the Summer Sea. The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair, with haunting violet eyes. It had taken her a fortnight to marshal her courage, but finally, in bed one night, Catelyn had asked her husband the truth of it, asked him to his face.That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever frightened her. “Never ask me about Jon,” he said, cold as ice. “He is my blood, and that is all you need to know. And now I will learn where you heard that name, my lady.” She had pledged to obey; she told him; and from that day on, the whispering had stopped, and Ashara Dayne’s name was never heard in Winterfell again.Whoever Jon’s mother had been, Ned must have loved her fiercely, for nothing Catelyn said would persuade him to send the boy away. It was the one thing she could never forgive him. She had come to love her husband with all her heart, but she had never found it in her to love Jon. She might have overlooked a dozen bastards for Ned’s sake, so long as they were out of sight. Jon was never out of sight, and as he grew, he looked more like Ned than any of the trueborn sons she bore him. Somehow that made it worse. “Jon must go,” she said now.
The fact that Jon was raised in Winterfell with Ned’s trueborn children, the fact that he wasn’t sent away (to White Harbor, to Greywater Watch, to anywhere else – see for example Larence (Hornwood) Snow, raised at Deepwood Motte), the fact that he looked like a Stark where Catelyn’s sons looked like Tullys, the fact that Ned literally banned Catelyn from ever asking him about Jon’s origins or getting any kind of closure… this is an open, bleeding wound that was never allowed to close. (Ned had his reasons why, and they’re very probably extremely good ones, and his reasons meant he couldn’t even explain to Cat what they were; but nevertheless, he made the cut, and he kept it open.)
Cat internalized her discomfort with the situation when she could (but Ned learned to read her tension anyway), and showed it openly when she felt it necessary for proprieties or when under great stress. If you read the rest of Catelyn II you can see she’s not passive-aggressive, she’s straightforward (and “armored her heart” to be so), so I don’t think she was often passive-aggressive about Jon with Ned. (Note there are many fics where Cat only calls Jon “the bastard” when talking to Ned, but that, uh, has no textual basis. She calls him Jon, in her internal narrative and in dialogue to Ned and Robb.) On the other hand, ISFJs are sometimes known for passive-aggressiveness because of their dislike for interpersonal conflict, and Catelyn’s about as ISFJ as you can get, so I can’t rule it out entirely.
Despite this open wound, Cat came to love Ned for other reasons. Her narrative says, “I had love enough for any woman, once I found the good sweet heart beneath Ned’s solemn face” (ASOS, Catelyn V). Exactly how long it took for her to find that good sweet heart, how long it took her to love him, how long it might have taken if not for Jon being there… there’s nothing in the book that says, alas. Many people headcanon that it was around Sansa’s conception or birth (there’s plenty of fics on the matter), though it could have been later, and without canon to tell us all we can really do is guess. (Even the triangular theory of love doesn’t give us any timing for when passion and intimacy can be added to commitment to create consummate love, just that it happens.) All we know for sure is that it was truly love for them, for both Ned and Cat, by the time of AGOT.
BTW, thank you very much regarding my understanding of the characters, but if you want to understand Catelyn, personally I think all you need to do is read her chapters, read her narrative, truly read all the words, with compassion and empathy. (This goes for everybody in the books, really.) I hope that helps!
