Arya Stark and the role of the Absent Mother in Game of Thrones

From fairy tales to Game of Thrones, the absent mother is a recurring theme. We look at how it factors into Arya Stark’s journey from tomboy to assassin.

From the simplest fairy tales to literary classics, the absent mother is a central and recurring theme that resonates deeply with audiences. Mothers are the quintessential nurturers; they represent home, security, comfort and love. When they are absent, either literally or figuratively, the world is thrown into chaos. Elementary examples exist in children’s stories like Bambi, Cinderella and Babar; more complex representations can be found in Shakespeare—especially the tragedies and romances, in retellings of the Arthurian legend such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, and throughout Game of Thrones.

Absent mother figures prominently in the lives of many Games of Thrones characters, shaping their perceptions, attitudes and responses to the world around them. The Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens, Jon Snow and several supporting characters have all been affected by different iterations of the absent mother. This series explores its impact on individual characters and compares their experiences to those of their paradigmatic literary counterparts.

Let’s see how the absent mother has affected Arya Stark, the younger daughter of Ned and Catelyn Stark.

In the first episode of Game of Thrones, “Winter is Coming,” Arya’s world is intact, if a bit stifling for her. She is ensconced at Winterfell with her parents, brothers and sister, struggling to conform to society’s expectations of a highborn girl and gently rebelling against what—to her—are the tedious lessons of becoming a lady. She resents her older sister Sansa for excelling at ladylike tasks like sewing and looks on enviously as her brothers practice archery and swordplay. These are the activities Arya is interested in—and good at—but, being a girl, she is directed towards mastering conventional feminine pursuits.

This all changes when King Robert Baratheon appoints Arya’s father, Ned Stark, to serve as his Hand of the King, which requires Ned to journey to King’s Landing, the capitol of Westeros. He takes Arya and Sansa with him, leaving their mother Catelyn at Winterfell to care for their brother Bran, who was injured after Jaime Lannister pushed him from a tower window. From the moment of this separation, although she remained alive for some time afterwards, Catelyn became a de facto absent mother to Arya and Sansa.

Initially, the physical absence of her mother was liberating for Arya, and she was suspended between the best of both worlds. A loving mother was present elsewhere in Westeros, but Arya was no longer subjected to her watchful guidance. Along the Kingsroad, she indulged in swordplay and found a companion to spar with: Mycah the butcher’s boy. Although their friendship ended badly when Joffrey ordered the Hound to kill him, at least Arya wasn’t tucked away in a chamber laboring over a piece of needlework.

Once in King’s Landing, Arya was able to convince her father that she was not suited for ladylike endeavors, prompting him to engage the services of “dancing master” Syrio Forel, the first sword of Braavos, to teach her how to fight. During the lull before the political storm that would see her father betrayed, falsely accused of treason and executed, Arya thrived under Syrio’s instruction.

The Miranda Model

Away from her mother’s expectations and in the care of her father, Arya can be compared to Miranda from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Outwardly, Arya and Miranda appear to be very different, but they share certain similarities. Miranda has never known her mother, and has been raised on a magical island by her father Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan. Like Ned Stark, Prospero is a loving but distracted father. He nurtures Miranda at arm’s length while he retreats into his books, leaving Miranda to develop largely on her own. Likewise, in King’s Landing, Ned is so distracted by the treacherous political climate that Arya is left to train with Syrio and explore the capitol by herself.

Arya is more assertive and complex than kind and gentle Miranda (who is saved from blandness by her upbraiding of would-be rapist Caliban and her bold proposal to suitor Ferdinand), but each of them flourished by being allowed to navigate their respective environs without parental scrutiny.

Their paths diverge because of the worlds they inhabit. In the benign lushness of one of Shakespeare’s romances, the threats Miranda encounters are fleeting and summarily dispatched with, allowing her to maintain her sweet disposition throughout the play. In the harsh, war-torn landscape of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, the threats Arya faces are constant, dire and require her to sacrifice softness for survival. While Miranda remains much the same at the end of “The Tempest” as she was at the beginning, Arya has constantly had to adapt to her brutal environment, so the plucky girl from season 1 has been all but subsumed by the proficient assassin of season 7.

The Search for the Absent Mother

Immediately after Ned’s beheading at the end of Season 1, Yoren of the Night’s Watch spirits Arya through the crowds and, disguising her as a boy, hides her among a group of recruits headed for the Wall. The idea was to return her to Winterfell, her mother and safety. Even after her horrific ordeal in King’s Landing, the concept of sanctuary still existed for Arya at this point, and that concept was inextricably linked to her mother’s presence; wherever Catelyn was, she would find safety and a partially restored world order.

Once it becomes known that Winterfell is burned to the ground and Catelyn is with Arya’s oldest brother Robb and his army, Arya’s sanctuary becomes Robb’s camp, and ultimately the Twins. The purpose of Arya’s journey from the end of season 1 through the end of season 3 is reunification with her mother, until that reunion becomes impossible after Catelyn’s dies in “The Rains of Castamere.”

The absent mother throws the world into chaos. That chaos was literally depicted onscreen when Arya and the Hound arrive at the Twins during the hellish aftermath of the Red Wedding. As Arya cowered out of sight, she witnessed the Stark army being slaughtered, heard the whimpers of Robb’s direwolf, Grey Wind, as he was brutally killed, and saw the wolf’s head mounted on her brother’s lifeless body. The world as Arya knew it was turned upside down; her brother was no longer the King in the North, her mother was dead, and any notion of finding a safe place was shattered.

Catelyn became an absent mother in the final sense at the Red Wedding.

According to Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters: A Legacy of Loss, “[w]hen a mother dies too young, something inside her daughter always feels incomplete. There’s a missing piece she continues to look for, an emptiness she keeps trying to fill.” In the bedlam following the Red Wedding, Arya’s worldview changes. Her missing piece becomes the sense of safety she knows was irrevocably altered, and vengeance becomes the way she fills that void. Her need for justice crystallizes into a deadly determination to exact revenge for the atrocities visited upon her family. The hit list Yoren had encouraged her to create in season 2 morphs from a comforting mantra to a tangible goal, and instead of merely becoming a skilled swordswoman, as she otherwise might have, Arya becomes a killer.

The Search for a Surrogate Mother

Along the way, Arya encountered or sought out surrogate sources of safety. Therapist Irene Rubaum-Kelly describes motherless daughters as sharing a sense of being “adrift in the world.” With her surviving family scattered and her mother gone, Arya had truly been cast adrift. The Hound continued to act as her protector on the way to the Eyrie, where the plan was to deposit Arya with Lysa Arryn, Catelyn’s sister and Arya’s aunt. For all his gruffness, the Hound thought delivering Arya to her aunt would not only net him a nice ransom, but return Arya to the safety of her family. Neither he nor Arya knew the extent of Lysa’s madness, and believed Arya would find some semblance of sanctuary with her.

Alas, outside the Bloody Gate on the way to The Eyrie, they learned that Lysa had recently died. When she realized she had once again come so close to seeming safety only to have it ripped away, Arya burst into laughter. Whether her laughter was a product of cynicism, disbelief or low-grade hysteria, it was a sign of her hardening her emotions.

The next person to present Arya with the possibility of a safe landing was Brienne of Tarth. Despite seeming to bond over their swords and mutual affinity for combat, Arya rejects Brienne’s pleas to come with her after learning that Brienne failed to reunite her and Sansa with their mother before Catelyn was killed. Brienne nonetheless thinks she can take Arya “to safety,” but the Hound disabuses her of that notion, rightly pointing out that, in Arya’s motherless world, no where is safe.

After Brienne defeats the Hound in a good old-fashioned brawl, Arya dispassionately leaves him for dead and heads for Braavos. Perhaps Jaqen H’ghar, who had been a trusted companion to her, could offer the safety that has eluded her.

But Arya does not find safety upon arriving at the mysterious House of Black and White in Braavos. Instead, she finds a detached Jaqen, a strict regimen under the tutelage of the Faceless Men, and a malevolent adversary in the loathsome Waif. Near the end of her training, Arya was sent to kill Lady Crane, but while unexpectedly encountering the actress backstage, Arya was moved by Lady Crane’s candor and maternal mien. She decided to abort the kill mission, but by defying the Faceless Men, Arya put herself on the chopping block and Jaqen gave the Waif permission to kill her.

After the Waif chased Arya down and severely wounded her, Arya sought sanctuary with Lady Crane. She was rewarded with some much-needed relief as the actress took her in and tended to her wound; Arya was soothed enough by Lady Crane’s motherly ministrations to drink some milk of the poppy and fall into a healing sleep. The momentary respite was yanked away when she woke the next day to find Lady Crane murdered by the Waif and once again had to flee into the world to fend for herself.

Redefining Sanctuary

After attempting and failing to find safety in numerous places, Arya reasserted her identity and returned to Westeros, vengeance on her mind. After all of her trials, sanctuary seemed to take on a new meaning for Arya. It was no longer associated with her mother or another feminine substitute. If it existed at all, it was an ephemeral concept that only Arya herself could create, and she would create an emotional sanctuary by avenging her family. After proving herself to be a consummate assassin, first by feeding Walder Frey a pie made out of his sons’ remains and then by slitting his throat before murdering the entire Frey family, she set out for King’s Landing and Cersei.

Those plans changed when, at the Inn of the Crossroads, Hot Pie told her Winterfell had been rebuilt and Jon Snow was King in the North. Suddenly, finding sanctuary didn’t seem like such a lost cause, but the maternal security once offered by Catelyn’s presence at Winterfell had been replaced by a paternal version. Where once safety could be found wherever her mother was, it could now be found with Jon Snow. If Arya thought that by returning to Winterfell she would return to a partially intact version of the world as it existed the last time she’d been there, such notions were disabused by her encounter with her direwolf, Nymeria.

The last time Arya saw Nymeria was on the Kingsroad, before her father died and her world was upended. Seeing her direwolf again had to fill Arya with memories of her family as it once was, and of her home as it used to be. When Arya recognized Nymeria, the little girl that still lives somewhere inside her rose to the surface, hope and happiness spreading across her face as she pled with the wolf to come to Winterfell. As Nymeria silently communicated with her former mistress, that hope was slowly replaced by world-weary wisdom when Arya realized that Nymeria had her own life now.

Arya understood that Nymeria was telling her she wouldn’t follow her to Winterfell; the relationship they once had was no more—it wasn’t lost, it was just different. There was no returning to the world as it was the last time they were together. “That’s not you,” Arya whispered, an echo of the words she said to her father so long ago in King’s Landing. It was a letting go, once again, of something that represented home and comfort and love for her, but was now out of her reach. More than anything else, Arya’s exchange with Nymeria was a reminder that although she might be going home, it won’t be the home she remembers.

Indeed, Arya’s homecoming was subdued. She and Sansa were virtual strangers, Bran was the Three-Eyed Raven, and Jon was at Dragonstone. Her low-key return stood in stark contrast—no pun intended—to the bustling, happy castle she remembered from her youth, and soon it would be robbed of any sense of sanctuary as her suspicions about Sansa’s ambitions grew. In the end, she and Sansa found security in each other, but their new sanctuary was built not around their mother’s legacy, but their father’s. Ned Stark’s words are the ones they will live by: “the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”

The absent mother informed Arya’s journey and played a major role in the person she has become, but will probably not continue to shape her character going forward. She has evolved into what she is—a self-sufficient, self-contained survivor—and will be able to draw on her experiences and rely on herself to face the challenges to come. One has to fend for oneself in a motherless world, and thanks to the countless blows fate has dealt her, Arya may prove to be the lone wolf who can survive without the pack.

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