[HPforGrownups] Re: JKR's sex bias

[Peg Kerr]

No: HPFGUIDX 3641

voicelady wrote:

> We know that JKR wrote these stories for herself, but OF COURSE her main objective was in getting them published so that other people could enjoy them, too.  And I wonder if subconsciously she made the story more geared to boys than girls.  Statistically speaking, girls are bigger readers than boys,  and there is less of a social stigma for a girl to read a "boy" book.  I think it's quite possible that she wrote it from a boy's POV simply to appeal to more readers.

Hmm.  Well, I've listened to her discuss this very point in an interview; can't remember which one.  She had the vision of Harry while stuck on a train, and I'm sure you've heard that story before.  She said that she very quickly fleshed out the basic bones of the story--she had a lot of it before she even left the train.  Speaking from personal experience, intuitive flashes can be like that.  She wrote for about six months, she said, and then it occurred to her for
the first time that hey, why not write the central protagonist as a girl?  And, she says, she tried to, but she couldn't because Harry as Harry had become too real to her for her to arbitrarily change his gender.  The story, as it had welled up inside of herself, wouldn't let her.

She also says that she was perplexed by the publisher's request that she be named "J.K. Rowling," and that the reason they gave her was that "girls read boys' books, but not vice versa, and the boys are more likely to ignore it if they think it's written by a woman, so let's just use your initials.  That was the publisher's idea, not hers; the idea hadn't even occurred to her.

So, based on J.K. Rowling's account, she wasn't thinking about "what the market wants" vis a vis gender issues when she wrote it.  She was thinking about, as she puts it, "writing for myself."  And, based on my own experience with intuitive flashes, and the way subsequent writing works (see, e.g., the author's afterward to my second novel), I would tend to believe her.

Of course, no one can tell what she was doing subconsciously; that's the job of future generations of biographers and graduate students in literature analyzing her work.

Peg