Harry Potter's Girl Trouble

Schoefer identifies several positive aspects in her piece Harry Potter’s Girl Trouble. For instance, she begins her essay stating that the books are engaging and that she felt compelled to continue reading the first three books. She writes of the positive traits of the female characters: Hermoine’s intelligence, McGonagall’s steadfast ability to enforce the rules, and also goes into detail about Harry’s bravery and how he is “brilliantly heroic.” Additionally, she goes into detail that J.K. Rowling predominately describes male characters more positively. She mostly describes Harry’s attributes, but does briefly describe the guests at the Leaky Cauldron and Dumbledore. At the time this article was written, only three of the books had been written. I feel that many female characters were more strongly developed in the later books. That aside, Schoefer could have brought up Harry’s mother or perhaps Mrs. Weasley as additional characters with positive aspects. In fairness, there aren’t too many female characters for her to bring up in the first few books. As she has covered most of the major female characters (Hermoine, Trelawney, McGonagall and Ginny), I don’t feel that the omission of the more minor characters slants her evidence. I feel that she is justified to only go over the more central characters given the limited selection.