[HPforGrownups] male/female role models

[Jesta Hijinx]

No: HPFGUIDX 85366


>  Dennis wrote:
> > I think they happens when an author begins their book with the wrong
>goal in
> > mind.  Instead of, "I'm going to come up with the best possible book
>I can,"
> > they think, "I'm going to come up with a book with a female lead."
> >
>
>Thank you, Dennis, for this very perceptive comment.  I do indeed
>think that this is the problem with many books written nowadays.  Not
>just about girls either.  You could switch that to "I'm going to come
>with a black lead" (I am black) etc. etc.  My kids who all love to
>read have had trouble in school with being intensely bored with the
>required reading (which is indeed dull, I have to say; I tried some of
>the books myself and hate them too).
>
Dennis, as someone who writes, I fully appreciate the initial comment; 
Mirror, I appreciate the follow-on.

I do think it can be useful, at times, to hint at a multi-racial 
neighborhood or circle of friends - simply because it either reflects the 
experience of many readers, or shows the ones who live in a mostly one-color 
area what it might be like to live in such an area - but this can be done 
without clubbing somebody over the head with it.  You can hint at it with 
physical descriptions, or even (if well done) given or surnames, or slight 
variations in dialect.  The latter, especially, should be used sparingly if 
at all, because it's tough to do well, and also because some "trendy" 
dialects, like "gangsta", get imitated - often poorly, at that - by admirers 
of other races; and primarily because it can come off as a caricature or an 
indictment of one way of speaking compared with another.

With the HP world, the body of students at Hogwarts is going to be almost 
entirely what you would find at a good British public school - I can't begin 
to imagine the breadth of accents you might find there, but I suspect JKR 
writes it well.  She hints at various ethnic backgrounds by the students' 
names, occasional physical descriptions; and with Fleur and Madame Maxime, 
and the Durmstrang crew, with her rendition of accents.

When you're writing one protagonist, you basically have a gender choice:  
male or female.  (Overt sexual orientation choices for children's literature 
are yet in our future.  'Sides:  in what are essentially children's 
action/adventure books, and not tales of teen angst, I as a reader would 
find it very annoying if the protagonist were constantly woffling about the 
boy or girl they were having their first lustful thoughts about - I speak as 
a long-time connoisseur of children's lit.)  That, in turn, affects some of 
your other choices about the character.  I think you have to make the 
choices, unless your theme is something like coming of age, coming to terms 
with sexuality, etc.  Then these choices *are* the backbone of the plot.

I think it would be possible to write an intelligent female juvenile 
protagonist who was *not* overly girly (as in frilly and silly), not overly 
a rough-edged tomboy, and might just have a select crowd of closest friends 
of both sexes rather than being either popular or a pariah.  I think this 
because I knew some girls like this in high school (it's *fairly* close to 
me at that time, but I wasn't quite as pulled-together with an early classic 
fashion look as the 2-3 girls I'm thinking of).  That would eliminate some 
of the easy outs of "fish out of water" stories, but overall it would leave 
a lot of room for exciting plotting in terms of what *happens* to the 
characters.  Neither Hermione nor Luna are quite there in terms of the 
imaginary yardstick I've created; Ginny Weasley is actually pretty close.  
:-)


>Mirror adds:  There are plenty of other books (including or maybe even
>especially fantasy) with girls as the heroes such as Alice in
>Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, all of Charlotte Bronte, Pride and
>Prejudice (a favorite of Rowlings and not past the understanding of an
>intelligent 12 or 13 year old) plenty of the fairy tales (a favorite
>of mine was East of the Sun and West of the Moon), the Narnia books
>have girls in starring roles (Lucy is certainly the heroine whenever
>she appears and later books usually have pairs, such as Jill and
>Eustace, with Jill being equally important).  What about princess
>Eilonwy in the Chronicles of Prydain? Pippi Longstocking was very
>popular with my sons, if you are talking younger kids.
>
Add in Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series with the various children 
- the only thing that annoyed me was the fact that her choice for a couple 
of the books was a family of three children, with "the girl" being "the 
cautious and conservative one".  In this case, it probably would have worked 
to have switched one of the boys for a girl with the same personality type 
or to have three boys, except that there were a couple of plot points served 
by having a girl in the mix - so she could well have just been writing the 
types she needed.  However, my minor annoyance was, once again, having the 
"female" be the "voice of sanity and caution and reason", basically the 
"hearthkeeper" and having those duties of conscience essentially transferred 
to her to think and to voice.  (I resent being expected to play this role in 
real life, so I tend to be a tiny bit prickly about it appearing in print as 
"the norm".)  On the other hand...a couple of really good villains in the 
series were women.  So I manage to quell my annoyance, figuring that 
probably it's just that one of the kids needed to be a more cautious figure, 
and go with the overall excellence of the characters, good and bad, male and 
female, all basically English but a nod to the number of Commonwealth 
territories toward the end.

>I identify with the girl sometimes in a book and with the boy
>sometimes (or women or man) and feel severely annoyed when people
>suggest that there is something wrong with someone who doesn't take
>only their own sex/race or whatever as their only role models. This is
>a VERY silly modern idea--I thought the idea behind literature was to
>  make you understand others, not to build a little ghetto for
>yourself, reading only about people exactly like you, doing the
>current politically correct thing.
>
>Mirror
>
I agree with you about the suggestion that there's something wrong with 
someone who doesn't take the person of their own race or sex as the 
character they identify with - in _Gone With the Wind_, I identify big time 
with much of what Rhett Butler articulates as an iconoclast who despises 
hypocrisy and mostly manages to live without it, who is a doting father and 
fights best on a losing side - even if I think he played some horrible mind 
games that were literarily necessary for the conflict.  :-)

So far in the HP series, I've identified most with Hermione as a young 
person, and with Lupin, to some extent, as an adult - not because I'm a 
werewolf nor anything that serious, but because I have fibromyalgia, which 
has me tired, looking ill and sleeping whenever I can - but I also try to be 
as fair, rational, smart and wise as Lupin is.

Felinia

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