OoP: Women in OoP (spoilers, of course)

[Jennifer Boggess Ramon]

No: HPFGUIDX 65129

*sacrificial spoiler-free line*

I'm not caught up, so I may inadvertently cover some territory 
already mused upon.  If so, I apologize.

Well, Bellatrix Lestrange was Dead Sexy after all!  We even got Dead 
Sexy vs. Dead Sexy, even if one of them ended up, well, dead at the 
end of it.

Umbridge, on the other hand, isn't sexy at all.  Still, though, 
previously the worst female character we've had to plot against has 
been Rita Skeeter, who, true to her name, is a whining irritant, not 
a true enemy.

An awful lot of Harry's self-discovery has been through 
father-searching - trying to find out who James was, many of the 
older wizards seeing him primarily as James's son, finally the 
breathlessness of the description of waiting for James to emerge from 
the wand in the original versions of GoF.

Well, now he got to meet him in the Pensieve, and it wasn't pretty. 
Moreover, he's lost his substitute father-figure, Sirius.

Now, I think, Harry is ready to do some mother-searching.

Up until now, most of Harry's interactions with adult wizards have 
been with male ones.  Yes, he's had classes with Sprout and 
McGonnigal, but he didn't ever really have even a substitute 
mother-figure until Molly Weasley began rather deliberately acting 
the role - and while she started that in CoS, she didn't really kick 
into full Mom-mode until GoF.  His Muggle mother-figure, Petunia, 
clearly rejected the role with respect to him - most of his 
interactions there are also with the bad-dad-substitute, Vernon. 
(Madam Pomfrey has played the role a couple of times, but never in a 
very emotionally connecting way, so I don't think she needs to be 
discussed specifically.)

Now, he has to deal with his father-substitutes disappearing on him. 
Mrs. Figg rescues him in the beginning, both physically and as a 
witness, rather than Dumbledore, even if we see how much he's 
propping her up.  Hagrid isn't around for his CoMC class, and he gets 
the (rather butch, but still) Professor Grubbly-Plank instead - who 
heals his owl for him, something I suspect is beyond Hagrid's skills. 
We see a lot more of McGonnigal in this book than we have previously. 
The main bad guy is a female - Umbridge is a picture perfect Evil 
Grandma - and it's beginning to look like Bellatrix is the de facto 
head Death Eater, the Dark Mother herself, and poised to play the 
role both to Harry and to Neville.

The face-off between McGonnigal and Umbridge during the career 
counseling session, where they very clearly play the roles of Good 
Crone and Bad Crone over Harry, I found to be very telling.

And in the same memory in which Harry loses his idealized image of 
his father forever, he finds out how much of an upstanding woman his 
mother was - and how much he seems to resemble her, rather than 
James, in temperament.

It's his mother's love that saved him, and it's his mother's blood in 
Petunia that still protects him.  Intriguingly, we have also just 
discovered that Petunia may know more than she has appeared, and seen 
her defy Vernon for what I beleive is the first time in the series. 
(Not that she let it look like defying him, but that's what she did.)

Fleur, the Temptress, has waltzed out of the series (though I suspect 
she'll be back) and been replaced by Tonks, who can play any of the 
female roles - Maiden, Mother, Crone, or other.

Ginny has graduated from damsel-in-distress to a proper 
shield-maiden.  She's been joined by Luna, who seems to be a 
keeper-of-mysteries.  (If anyone's familiar with the Tarot, I'm 
seeing them as sort of junior versions of the Empress and High 
Priestess with respect to Harry right now.)

Even Trelawny got to be sympathetic this time.

We haven't seen too many strong female characters, or at least known 
their strengths in the same way we have most of the male characters. 
I think, now that Harry is beginning to mature, that this has changed 
for good (in both senses of the phrase).

Paging Lily Evans - Book 6 is waiting . . .
-- 

  - Boggles, aka J. C. B. Ramon			boggles(at)earthlink.net
"It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the 
act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. "
	- Gauss, in a Letter to Bolyai, 1808.