Where are ANY of the female characters' women friends? Who are Molly's kids' godmothers, or Petunia's maid of honor, or Ginny's girlfriend, or Tonks's bff? Who's Cissy's or Bella's or Minerva's confidante? Hermione's? Dolores's? Luna's? Alecto's?
Jo has female characters, but they all orbit around men: Tom, Albus, Cornelius, Harry, James.... If several orbit around the same man, they're considered friends. Or at least allies, where they are not rivals.
Luna's golden ropes illustrated that pathetically--if she bound herself in loyalty to Harry, those others bound closest to Harry might let her in, like they let her come along on the Ministry raid.
The only canon females I can think of who are friends with each other are the Human Hosepipe, Cho, vilified by Harry for her loyalty to Marietta, and those worthless girly-girls Lav-Lav and Parvati.
And, of course, briefly, Lily and Mary McDonald and those other girls at the lake, before Lily wised up and cast her lot in with the (male) Marauders. And was seen no more among the girls. No godmother, no maid of honor, no female visitors except James's elderly neighbor instructing James's ignorant bride on ancient history and Pureblood etiquette.....
There was a misogynist myth current in my youth (Jo's youth), that women were incapable of true loyalty to one another. We could form temporary alliances, but our lives were defined by our relationships to MEN, and we'd always sacrifice other women. Fighting like cats over A MAN, or in defense of OUR MAN'S interests, or of OUR MANCHILD.
Very weird to see a world in which that's all TRUE, that any woman, however bright or powerful or "spunky," can best be defined by her loyalty to a man. Just as racist ideas are ACCURATE in the Potterverse: there exists a biological superiority which justifies the possessors' mistreatment of their inferiors.
Actually, this is a phenomenon I first observed when I was 13, reading Ayn Rand: that she was writing S/F UNINTENTIONALLY. I don't mean ignorant of genre conventions, fulfilling/transgressing them without understanding--I mean that, reading Ayn Rand, her characters sometimes acted so differently to how the people I saw daily acted, I could only account for it by assuming AR was wrtiting in some AU of her own creation where human nature was different than it is in RL.
And so is Jo.
In RL, women have friends. At least, in my experience we do.
Okay, we can cut Hermione some slack: if Forugh Farrokzhad could write "I'm as much alone as a schoolgirl crazy about geometry" and expect that image to resonate, we can accept that an overly-intellectual schoolgirl at Hogwarts (surely more benighted than mid-20th-century Tehran) might feel isolated. And after all, Hogwarts is a MUCH smaller school than any I ever attended. Maybe there actually weren't any kindred spirits among ANY of the girls. Or rather, given the structure of Hogwarts, among any of the Gryffindor girls. You whittle a group down to 3-4, and yes, you might achieve isolation.
But the other characters? No excuse. There should have been some scene, somewhere, of Harry barging in on a tea-party at the Burrow of alarming veterans of the Maternal Wars, or of Minerva conferring with Pomona or conspiring with Amelia, or of Tonks telling Ginny and Hermione about Girls' Night Out with the younger members of the DMLE....
Where are Petunia's loathsome cronies, her spiritual sisters, those narrow-minded, cold-hearted, irredeemably shallow bitches who put irrelevant markers of status and respectability before considerations of decency, kindness, and indeed self-preservation? (I'm imagining, here, the Landscaping Covenants Committee of Little Whinging's Garden Estates Properties. Chastising the Death Eaters for defacing property.)
I want them!
Nah. What's going on instead was, Jo was writing some weird AU universe in which true commonality between women simply doesn't occur. That sixties fantasy lampooned (among other places) in Russ's The Female Man.
But... here's the true question, finally--why on earth did Jo want to? Of all the weird, unaccountable, bizarre twists to bend the Potterverse Diagonally away from the real one, why pick THAT?
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-08-18 07:10 am (UTC)But actually, it's worse than just Lily.
Where are ANY of the female characters' women friends? Who are Molly's kids' godmothers, or Petunia's maid of honor, or Ginny's girlfriend, or Tonks's bff? Who's Cissy's or Bella's or Minerva's confidante? Hermione's? Dolores's? Luna's? Alecto's?
Jo has female characters, but they all orbit around men: Tom, Albus, Cornelius, Harry, James.... If several orbit around the same man, they're considered friends. Or at least allies, where they are not rivals.
Luna's golden ropes illustrated that pathetically--if she bound herself in loyalty to Harry, those others bound closest to Harry might let her in, like they let her come along on the Ministry raid.
The only canon females I can think of who are friends with each other are the Human Hosepipe, Cho, vilified by Harry for her loyalty to Marietta, and those worthless girly-girls Lav-Lav and Parvati.
And, of course, briefly, Lily and Mary McDonald and those other girls at the lake, before Lily wised up and cast her lot in with the (male) Marauders. And was seen no more among the girls. No godmother, no maid of honor, no female visitors except James's elderly neighbor instructing James's ignorant bride on ancient history and Pureblood etiquette.....
There was a misogynist myth current in my youth (Jo's youth), that women were incapable of true loyalty to one another. We could form temporary alliances, but our lives were defined by our relationships to MEN, and we'd always sacrifice other women. Fighting like cats over A MAN, or in defense of OUR MAN'S interests, or of OUR MANCHILD.
Very weird to see a world in which that's all TRUE, that any woman, however bright or powerful or "spunky," can best be defined by her loyalty to a man. Just as racist ideas are ACCURATE in the Potterverse: there exists a biological superiority which justifies the possessors' mistreatment of their inferiors.
Actually, this is a phenomenon I first observed when I was 13, reading Ayn Rand: that she was writing S/F UNINTENTIONALLY. I don't mean ignorant of genre conventions, fulfilling/transgressing them without understanding--I mean that, reading Ayn Rand, her characters sometimes acted so differently to how the people I saw daily acted, I could only account for it by assuming AR was wrtiting in some AU of her own creation where human nature was different than it is in RL.
And so is Jo.
In RL, women have friends. At least, in my experience we do.
Okay, we can cut Hermione some slack: if Forugh Farrokzhad could write "I'm as much alone as a schoolgirl crazy about geometry" and expect that image to resonate, we can accept that an overly-intellectual schoolgirl at Hogwarts (surely more benighted than mid-20th-century Tehran) might feel isolated. And after all, Hogwarts is a MUCH smaller school than any I ever attended. Maybe there actually weren't any kindred spirits among ANY of the girls. Or rather, given the structure of Hogwarts, among any of the Gryffindor girls. You whittle a group down to 3-4, and yes, you might achieve isolation.
But the other characters? No excuse. There should have been some scene, somewhere, of Harry barging in on a tea-party at the Burrow of alarming veterans of the Maternal Wars, or of Minerva conferring with Pomona or conspiring with Amelia, or of Tonks telling Ginny and Hermione about Girls' Night Out with the younger members of the DMLE....
Where are Petunia's loathsome cronies, her spiritual sisters, those narrow-minded, cold-hearted, irredeemably shallow bitches who put irrelevant markers of status and respectability before considerations of decency, kindness, and indeed self-preservation? (I'm imagining, here, the Landscaping Covenants Committee of Little Whinging's Garden Estates Properties. Chastising the Death Eaters for defacing property.)
I want them!
Nah. What's going on instead was, Jo was writing some weird AU universe in which true commonality between women simply doesn't occur. That sixties fantasy lampooned (among other places) in Russ's The Female Man.
But... here's the true question, finally--why on earth did Jo want to? Of all the weird, unaccountable, bizarre twists to bend the Potterverse Diagonally away from the real one, why pick THAT?