Wanted! Complex Female Adult Character: (was:Re: ESE!McGonagall...

[Jen Reese]

No: HPFGUIDX 164686

> Caspen:  
> I'm just curious whether it bothers Alla at all that, although JKR 
> doesn't "owe" us "a strong female [adult] character," she has in 
> fact, claimed to have provided one, and gone on to promise to develop 
> Lilly and Petunia further on several occasions, and even, implicitly, 
> Minerva, and yet, she has not done so. Nor, given the amount of 
> territory she seems to have left to cover, does it seem at all likely 
> that she ever will, if as she also says, her HP books will be limited 
> to seven. In short, she seems to have lied, something she claims she 
> doesn't do.

Jen: I honestly think JKR is doing something a little deeper with her 
characters than going for a male/female thing.  For instance, take 
Lily.  The sacrificial mother, right?  Stereotype.  But consider what 
actually happened there:  James 'played the hero' and attempted to 
defend against Voldemort by fighting him outright, hopelessly 
outmatched and leading to his death, leaving his wife and child behind 
to fight Voldemort alone.  Lily does what people might consider the 
sterotypical woman thing, begging, pleading, appealing to Voldemort's 
humanity and she dies as well for her trouble.  But what she did in 
dying was acutally *protect* Harry in a way that the male valiant hero 
could never have hoped to do and her act was the catalyst for the 
entire story.

I think it genuinely perplexes JKR to be accused of not having strong 
female characters when I really believe she's saying that women's 
strengths, long denigrated by society, are actually THE most important 
part of the story:  'What do they mean? Lily? Luna? Molly? Hermione? 
Trelawney?  All have contributed to the cause by using skills society 
has traditionally deemed inferior simply because they are traditonally 
tied to women's roles, and I'm saying in some cases their strengths 
have actually done *more* than what the males at the MOM or guys like 
Harry, Sirius, James or even Dumbledore have been able to accomplish at 
certain critical junctures. 

I'm leaving McGongall out of this because she's the *most* 
stereotypical strong woman in my view--more like a man in other words!! 
And I won't even go into Hagrid, or Lupin and Slughorn for that matter, 
men with very well-developed traditionally female charactersitics as 
their strengths that have kept them alive and making important 
contributions long after some of the men's men in the story are dead 
and gone.

I think 'strong women' today doesn't mean what it used to, i.e., being 
more male-like, but realizing how important female characteristics can 
be to changing societies which have operated as patriarchies for far 
too long.

Jen R.