‘She Don’t Speak, But She Remembers’: Shakespeare’s Silent Specters in A Song of Ice and Fire

Abstract

This article reads the resurrected Catelyn Stark, also known as Lady Stoneheart, in George R. R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire, as a spectral adaptation of female silence in the works of William Shakespeare, especially of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. Like Hermione, Catelyn experiences the loss of her son, dies herself shortly thereafter, and miraculously returns from the dead as a stone-like, voiceless figure. Yet, unlike Hermione, resurrection transforms Catelyn into a merciless embodiment of vengeance, whose grotesque appearance and persona shed a provocative new light on the representation of maternal grief and misogynist violence in Shakespearean drama. Hermione’s ambivalent silence at the end of The Winter’s Tale thus takes on an unequivocal tone of rage in her contemporary specter. Lady Stoneheart also exemplifies the adaptational tension between Martin’s series and the TV show Game of Thrones, in the latter of which Lady Stoneheart—while being absent—still maintains a haunting discursive presence.