We quickly see how women are at the mercy of men鈥檚 decisions. 鈥淗ere you are surrounded by attendants all focused on the babe 鈥 someone must attend to you鈥, says Rhaenyra to her heavily pregnant mother. 鈥淭his discomfort is how we serve the realm鈥, Aemma replies; 鈥淭he childbed is our battlefield鈥.
The king calls a tournament to celebrate the impending birth of what he hopes will be a male heir. Violent, rhythmic scenes showing knights jousting and bludgeoning each other to a bloody pulp are crosscut with upsetting images of Aemma鈥檚 labour.
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Brutality and betrayal
Showrunner Miguel Sapochnik,听, notes that as with Game of Thrones鈥 battles, each birth on this show will explore a theme. This theme was 鈥渢orture鈥.
The baby is breech, and the labour difficult. A male doctor tells the king that fathers must make impossible choices. Viserys quietly approves a plan to cut the baby out, in the hope that it is a boy.
It is a terrible betrayal: he holds Aemma鈥檚 hand while she is restrained and sliced open. She bleeds to death 鈥 and her newborn son only lives a short while. It is a shocking depiction of the world鈥檚 priorities.
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Pregnancy in visual culture
Beyond its brutality, the scene illustrates vividly changes to the visibility of pregnancy in visual culture.
Throughout most of the 20th century, pregnancy and birth were largely invisible in visual media. Pregnancy was deemed private and domestic, even vulgar. Notably, scenes of childbirth were banned and pregnancy deemed taboo in Hollywood films from 1927-68, thanks to various censorship regimes. Later, pregnant actors in television series would be written out, or have their bodies hidden through costuming or editing.
Now, images of pregnancy and childbirth are significantly more visible and varied. A watershed moment came in 1991 when Annie Leibovitz鈥檚 impactful (and controversial) portrait of Demi Moore 鈥 naked, beatific, and 7 months pregnant 鈥 graced the front cover of Vanity Fair. It challenged the notion that pregnant bodies should be hidden.
More recently, British series such as historical drama听听and the docu-drama听, and American film听, have foregrounded female-led emotional and realistic representations of pregnancy and birth.
Pregnancies are more likely to be written in, not out, of television series. We have also seen the slow rise of sexy maternity fashion that shows off one鈥檚 鈥渂aby bump鈥, recently exemplified by singer and entrepreneur Rihanna鈥檚听. The overt images of Aemma鈥檚 pregnant body sit within this cultural shift.
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Monstrous births and bodily autonomy
But this scene鈥檚 graphic nature is unusual in mainstream media. Instead, it resonates with the long history of monstrous births in science fiction and horror.
These genres offer a subversive language with which to explore reproductive anxieties openly. The paranoia and gaslighting in听听(1968), the chest-bursting scene in听, the gruesome forced caesarean in听, and the maternal dread in听听all illustrate fears about embodiment, maternity and personhood.
The content and tone of this scene, and its place as an inciting incident within the series鈥 narrative, also reflects contemporary issues regarding women鈥檚 bodily autonomy. These speak to widespread cultural tensions about the competing rights of the adult and the unborn.
This is an issue everywhere, but currently has particular political resonance in the United States in the wake of the Supreme Court鈥檚 decision to overturn Roe v Wade. This has quickly opened the doors to oppressive bans on abortion in some US states, even in cases where a pregnancy endangers the life of the mother.
At its most conservative and adversarial, this positions female reproductive bodies as little more than vessels. This misogynistic position suggests that an unborn person has more of a right to life than an adult subject, and that a woman does not have the right to make choices about her own life and body. It is dehumanising.
House of the Dragon dramatises this dynamic in the context of a deeply patriarchal system that is in ways not that far removed form our own. A war of succession is prompted because a society can鈥檛 countenance the idea of a woman taking the throne.
In a show that is interested in exploring the dynamics of gender and power through the lens of medieval fantasy, the conflict is not just that of ambitious uncle against powerful niece, but whether a woman has a right to be more than a womb.
This article was originally published on .
