Question About JKR's Male Characters...

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

Some comments I've seen about JKR's writing have led me to the thought that possibly, one reason why certain characters in the story have to keep insisting on their manliness and not doing anything "girly" like crying, etc. might have to do with the fact that Rowling just isn't good with writing men, and so resorts to stereotypes to do the job, except when writing "evil" feminine men like Snape. You know, kind-of like how Rowling wants Harry to be not-gay, but probably can't imagine being attracted to a woman, and so he ends up seeming gay by discussing the beauty of various men.

Any men in this community care to weigh in here? Part of the reason why I ask is because I sometimes doubt my own abilities to portray men convincingly in the stories I write :P

Comments

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

... might have to do with the fact that Rowling just isn't good with writing men ...

Fixed that for you. :-)

(Well, I guess that is being too harsh. When she's mired in the straight 'childrens books' genre, wherein which she isn't held to account for things like actual plot or logic or stories making sense, I guess she's okay.)

Like zellieh I don't have a clue how one can discern Snape as 'feminine'. Certainly that wasn't my impression/interpretation on reading the books.

I never got any homosexual vibes from Harry, nor did he ever act 'feminine' as far as I could pick up. I think the main problem is a simple lack of the typical male antics that would normally be the case for an adolescent heterosexual boy, this deficit causing one to over-compensate and consider him as homosexual? Missing boy stuff like talking about the girls, their bodies, ranking them in the Hogwarts top ten list, and so forth. And Rowling did touch on that at least once - "they make them okay at Hogwarts". For a childrens series where Rowling didn't dare to offend the adults or alienate the kids I think things were written okay. It was clear that Harry had a heterosexual attraction to Cho - with all the attendant mysterious urges of an adolescent - and the 'chest monster' was probably a good way to write his lust for the suddenly awesome Ginny Sue. Rowling just didn't bother turning on Harry's girl radar for any other girls.

Reading mmmarcusz's comment ... I quite agree with what is said there about Harry's indifference to ALL OTHER GIRLS other than the ones Rowling uses to bolster her plot, Cho and Ginny. It's along the lines of what I said is missing - talking about girls in general. Harry should/would have been 'noticing' other girls as well, all their shapes and sizes, as part of the narrative in addition to 'boy talk'. Since that's missing you're thinking he's going the other way. But it's just a gap/void in Rowling's writing.

Which just shifts the series away from 'gritty male stuff' to 'safe and sanitised story with a male narrator'. Given as how the Cho/Ginny attraction was written acceptably - and over 4 books! - I think Harry was portrayed as a normal straight boy. Rowling just (a) turned off the testosterone (by design or because she's a woman, as you say) when she wasn't focused on the Cho/Ginny romances and having Harry's burgeoning hormones in mind. And (b) chose not to go all the way on depicting a growing lad in a co-educational facility (such as the regular manoeuvring of textbooks for strategic camouflage on leaving class, etc. Ah, those school days ... :-))

[oryx_leucoryx]

I think Slytherins in general are perceived as feminized - with the association with water/emotion/guile. As far as I remember Severus and Draco are the only male characters who cry in canon. Also the emphasis on the cauldron and dislike of wand-waving.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay, I can see some of that. I think you're getting down to the 'personal interpretation' setting on the microscope though. Maybe I'm new-fashioned, but I didn't think it was thought unmanly these days for blokes to cry (if under sufficient stress). And the phallic wand imagery has never factored into how I see the HP books (I personally think readers have to go looking for it, with that imagery in mind).

Still, I see now how readers could hang the 'feminine' thing on various hooks that are in HP, so thanks for helping me out!

[oryx_leucoryx]

I remember a fan - a pro-Rowling guy with much love for literary analysis - summarizing Severus' first year speech as 'size doesn't matter'.

While early on it isn't immediately obvious how much Rowling *intended* wands to be phallic symbols and cauldrons as womb symbols we have the very Freudian 'Weighing of the Wands' in GOF, the Celestina Warbeck song about how she wants her cauldron of hot love stirred in HBP and the endless wand jokes in DH (with Hermione's commentary about wizards boasting about having bigger wands).

You may be 'new fashioned' but Rowling's world is somewhere between Dickens and Agatha Christie.

[mmmarcusz.livejournal.com]

Don't forget LV stripping Lucius of his wand, or Umbridge's "unusually small" wand.

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

Or Ron's wand being broken for most of Book 2. Or Harry feeling all impotent and emasculated after Hermione (a girl, no less!) accidentally broke his wand. (Though given that he was on the run from Voldemort and his wand was his only means of defence, I suppose he can be forgiven for this.)