Friday, October 12, 2012
DQ Week 8 "Harry Potter's Girl Trouble"
In the article Schoefer identifies several positive qualities about the Harry Potter Book Series. In her writing "Harry Potter's Girl Trouble" she argues the sexist issues of the stories although she admits they are very intersting and hard to put down. She writes about the positive traits of the female characters in the series. For example Hermione, Harry Potter's good friend who is no doubt the smartest student at Hogwarts. Schoefer also talks about McGonagall, professor of transfiguration who has a steadfast ability to enforce rules. The writer argues that J. K. Rowling, the author of the famous Harry Potter series portrays male characters in a more positive light than the females. Therefore giving off a theme that men do and should run the world. But by this article appearing in January of 2000 her views are not justified but she is not unfairly slanting her evidence. By this time only 3 of the 8 books had been published, hence Schoefer had only read three books from the series. Since those 3 books more female characters were being introduced with different characteristics. Schoefer was not able to read the last 5 books of the series so therefore her evidence wasn't slanted she just merely spoke too soon.
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I agree that she probably made the article prematurely but even so in the first three books she still gave no real credit to the women in the series. She never mentioned how Hermione saved Ron and Harry. And this may just be a typo or something like that but there are only seven books not eight.....there are eight movies because the seventh book was split into two parts but still i do agree with you that after only reading three of the books she could not make a good argument that the books are sexist
ReplyDeleteYeah, as Preston pointed out there were in fact only 4 more books afterward, but otherwise your observations are very accurate. I don't believe that the author was really slanting her evidence either. For the most part, the early books only have a small amount of character development for many characters. Even Ron and Hermoine are not *that* developed (J.K. Rowling dedicates most of her time to her main character, rightfully so). Perhaps she could have mentioned a few more details about Hermoine saving Ron and Harry, but I don't really feel that that would have had a significant impact on the article itself.
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