Ginny & Molly: Mother-Daughter Thoughts

[Rosmerta]

No: HPFGUIDX 21317

<snip> Penny's insightful post on Ginny and her 

Great post, Penny! See what a little motherhood does for your POV? 
<jk>. I'm afraid all your excellent observations point to one thing: 
IMO Ginny's just not a real, fully developed character, despite her 
brief starring role in CoS. I don't fault the author--we couldn't 
*read* a book in which every person who walked on stage was given a 
full rounded history--but Ginny's particularly anemic, and a little 
curiously so, given her prior prominence to the plot. 

I just don't think it's physically possible for a child of either sex 
who's last in a line of 7 not to be way *way* more street-smart than 
Ginny is. It's a struggle to keep the younger of just two kids from 
becoming too hip, and by time you reach the last of seven, well, it's 
impossible not to have exposed her to way more than she appears to 
have absorbed, even if we're just talking gross bodily humor. She's a 
very strangely depicted character, actually, given that the rest of 
the Weasleys are rather with-it and happening. 

Having said all that, I do think that Ginny and Molly probably have a 
well-balanced relationship. Sometimes having all those boys in the 
family neutralizes some of the very intense female-female vibes that 
can over-electify the mother-daughter relationship. I would take the 
fact that she *didn't* tell her parents about Tom Riddle's diary as a 
sign (however disastrously misguided it was) that she was trying to 
grow up and pull away. 

And even though Ginny does, as Penny said, act very very young, I 
don't think Molly smothers her; she (Molly) seems in every other 
aspect far too practical for that. And while she is certainly aware 
of Ginny's feelings, she doesn't commit that cardinal Mom sin and 
make overly familiar comments (as when Harry first visits the Burrow 
and Ginny is peeking out behind doors, Molly doesn't make those "oh I 
see your boyfriend's here" jokes that can start a lifetime of M-D 
strife.) And Molly seemed sufficiently shocked and clueless at the 
end of Cos to indicate that she wasn't talking to Ginny on a what'd-
you-have-for-lunch-today basis. 

~Rosmerta
who has three brothers and could burp the alphabet by the time she 
was Ginny's age