Thursday, July 08, 2004
Harriet Potter?
I recently read a little article on women and girls in the Harry Potter books. A lot of it struck me as wrongheaded just on basic character-analysis grounds--why characters did what they did--but there was one really interesting wrong turn the piece made that I thought might be worth discussing in more depth. (I'm not linking to the piece because I forgot where I found it. Sorry....)
The article's author figured that there were two ways of writing sexism into one's characters: stereotypical femininity and its mirror opposite, stereotypical tomboyishness. She cashed this out to mean that female characters should always be presented in the same way that a male character would be presented.
But this misses the point of writing characters in the first place. You write a role for a woman because it's a woman's role; to change your character to a man ought to significantly change the character, not only how he acts but how he's perceived. If your character's sex could be replaced with dark, sparkling Folger's XY chromosomes, I can't imagine your characters will feel real, because for real people, sex matters. Whether you're a man or a woman shapes your life. It shapes the way people see you, and that in turn also shapes your life: your actions, your instincts and intuitions, your sense of self.
And the HP article's insistence on gender-neutrality makes it all but impossible for the author to sympathize with any of the books' female characters. Everything they do is either stereotypically girly or stereotypically tomboyish or stereotypically something else--Fleur is a breathy sexpot, Hermione is a tomboy-nerd, McGonagall (yay!) is the old spinster schoolmarm stereotype, etc. Nothing they do is ever good (=gender-neutral) enough, because there really aren't that many gender-neutral behaviors! I mean, practically the only thing a female character can do that is impossible to slot into some reductive stereotype is brush her teeth. Bookish boys act and are treated differently from bookish girls, athletic boys from athletic girls, flighty men (Quirrell) from flighty women (Trelawney). And so, since none of the characters could be replaced by someone of the opposite sex without seriously shifting the feel of the story, none of them are feministically appropriate.
This especially came out in the article's description of Cho Chang. Cho is this athletically talented girl who undergoes a serious personal loss and reacts by getting very, very, very weepy. To the point where it becomes self-indulgent. Cho wallows. And the article's author hated her for it--was upset with JK Rowling for writing this weepy chick character, but hated Cho for being that character.
If you've read the books I hope the problem has already leapt out at you: None of the characters ever handle unhappiness well. Harry Potter gets angsty and ranty and pushes his friends away; Snape (wonderful Snape) wallows like a hog in slop and develops a thoroughly vicious personality; Cho cries too much. But Cho gets blamed, because her reaction is more common for girls than for boys.
Seems to me that if one's understanding of feminism is hostile not only to accurate characterization but to, you know, women, then one might want to spin again, Pat.
The article's author figured that there were two ways of writing sexism into one's characters: stereotypical femininity and its mirror opposite, stereotypical tomboyishness. She cashed this out to mean that female characters should always be presented in the same way that a male character would be presented.
But this misses the point of writing characters in the first place. You write a role for a woman because it's a woman's role; to change your character to a man ought to significantly change the character, not only how he acts but how he's perceived. If your character's sex could be replaced with dark, sparkling Folger's XY chromosomes, I can't imagine your characters will feel real, because for real people, sex matters. Whether you're a man or a woman shapes your life. It shapes the way people see you, and that in turn also shapes your life: your actions, your instincts and intuitions, your sense of self.
And the HP article's insistence on gender-neutrality makes it all but impossible for the author to sympathize with any of the books' female characters. Everything they do is either stereotypically girly or stereotypically tomboyish or stereotypically something else--Fleur is a breathy sexpot, Hermione is a tomboy-nerd, McGonagall (yay!) is the old spinster schoolmarm stereotype, etc. Nothing they do is ever good (=gender-neutral) enough, because there really aren't that many gender-neutral behaviors! I mean, practically the only thing a female character can do that is impossible to slot into some reductive stereotype is brush her teeth. Bookish boys act and are treated differently from bookish girls, athletic boys from athletic girls, flighty men (Quirrell) from flighty women (Trelawney). And so, since none of the characters could be replaced by someone of the opposite sex without seriously shifting the feel of the story, none of them are feministically appropriate.
This especially came out in the article's description of Cho Chang. Cho is this athletically talented girl who undergoes a serious personal loss and reacts by getting very, very, very weepy. To the point where it becomes self-indulgent. Cho wallows. And the article's author hated her for it--was upset with JK Rowling for writing this weepy chick character, but hated Cho for being that character.
If you've read the books I hope the problem has already leapt out at you: None of the characters ever handle unhappiness well. Harry Potter gets angsty and ranty and pushes his friends away; Snape (wonderful Snape) wallows like a hog in slop and develops a thoroughly vicious personality; Cho cries too much. But Cho gets blamed, because her reaction is more common for girls than for boys.
Seems to me that if one's understanding of feminism is hostile not only to accurate characterization but to, you know, women, then one might want to spin again, Pat.
