I just realized what the death of Lady (Sansa’s direwolf) represents in Game of Thrones.
In Women Who Run With the Wolves by Jungian psychoanalyst and folklore expert Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the author discusses how wolves in stories are often metaphors for our id; our instinctive drives that reflect our intuitions below the conscious level. They’re a Jungian archetype of roving, of knowing-below-consciousness:
“A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving. Yet separation from the wildish nature causes a woman’s personality to become meager, thin, ghosty, spectral. When women’s lives are in stasis, ennui, it is always time for the wildish woman to emerge; it is time for the creating function of the psyche to flood the delta…It means to establish territory, to find one’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as we can.”
There is a popular misconception that the Id is always unhealthy, but this is not the case. Without instinctive drives - without intuition - we falter, we doubt ourselves. Our superegos tell us to trust those who don’t deserve it, and to give second chances and benefits-of-the-doubt to those who make us unwary, without quite knowing why. This is a deadly mistake!
In Game of Thrones, wolves are metaphorically - and arguably literally - the avatars of the Stark children. But Lady dies. This is no chance.
On the fateful walk with Joffrey that leads to discovering Arya - and Lady’s soon death - Lady does not accompany Sansa. She explicitly tells Lady to stay behind. We watch as she then sides with Joffrey over her sister, despite knowing in her heart of hearts that Joffrey’s actions are cruel. We watch as, like the victim in the Bluebeard myth, she convinces herself that he’s not so bad, his beard not so blue. This is so much like how women often compel themselves to turn against other women - because men like Joffrey reward it. But this is no real power, as Sansa soon learns.
A lot of people like to hate Sansa, but “leaving behind” her intuition - in the form of her wolf, so-aptly named - is not necessarily a mortal sin. It is what a young girl sees as one of the only options available to her. Marrying Joffrey represents power, it represents the apotheosis of femininity that Ned, Catelyn, and all the rest have told her is the most important thing she can be. And the fact that it’s Joffrey who ends up killing “Lady” - well, that says it all, doesn’t it.
