Harry Potter By J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter By J. K. Rowling

Respected Sir,

Here is my review about Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling.

1)                  Feminist reading of Harmione’s character in Harry Potter: How do the character portrayal of Harmione and other female characters support feminist discourse?

       Feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies and social movements that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. A feminist advocates or supports the rights and equality of women.

Character of Harmione :

= She is intelligent more than others.

= Ron says that they can't survive without Harmione.

= When Harry says that I saw my parents at that time also Hermione says that it's not possible and gives logical arguments.

= Things given by Dombuledore, Why he give book to her so there are two points 1) generally practical things given to boys. 2) she is intelligent and able to read it.

= We can see that in class when any professor asks something at that time her hand is always raised while others not.

= Generally the idea is that women are sensitive or men are worrier but here we can say that Hermione is more worrier not sensitive compared to Harry.

= In some pieces of pop culture, males are represented as braver, wiser and more powerful than the women. Among many movies and books, this can primarily be seen in the Spiderman trilogy, where Spiderman’s enemies capture his girlfriends to force Spiderman to fight, and in every movie the male is always the one who has to defeat evil to save the female. However, Harry Potter is different in the sense that you can find a ton of important women in the series, as well as men, and there is no difference in the genders.

= Fry argues that Hermione can be seen as another main character in the series, and this is an interesting point that she brings up. Many strong female characters appear throughout the series, and they play many differing parts, including a friend, mother, sister, student, etc.

= The psychologist Gail Grynbaum states “Hermione is repeatedly the truth-sleuth, comfortable in the library, who finds the clue that makes sense of the mystery at hand. She is always the one standing at a crossroads pointing the way.” The fact that Hermione is there at the fork in the road showing the right way to go breaks the gender stereotype of women. Grynbaum points out the fact that Hermione is that character that is smart, and she is able to figure out most of the secrets that no one else can. Her knowledge and brains save her and her friends throughout the series multiple times, showing her strength every time she uses her intellect to defeat a problem.

       So after all we can say that Hermione has beauty with brain.

   

Some Other Points :-

= Harry's mother Lily is also intelligent rather than his father.

= If we can say about evil characters like Voldemore who is in the power not other witches.

= Male rules over language that's why difference between "wizard" "witch".

       The series may be titled for the boy who lived, but he never could’ve accomplished everything without the girl who was the cleverest witch of her age, or without the sacrifice of his selfless mother.

    But problem is that why the writer not put Hermione as a main character.

= Idea that women have to be giver why not man? It symbolise through purse which is Hermione's.

= why only man on power position like Harry, Voldermert, etc.

= Why some intellectual arguments done between only Harry and Dombuldor, why not with Hermione?

= woman is an object it also we can see while Ron doubt on relations between Harry and Hermione.

Strangers to Ourselves?

(Page No. 63, 64, 65)

Facing exile, Thomas Mowbray in Shakespeare’s Richard 2 complains that in a foreign country his tongue will become like a musical instrument that has lost its strings.

Julia Kristeva’s book Strangers to Ourselves is about foreignness. It begins with a moving, poetic account of what it’s like to be an immigrant, cherishing ‘that language of the past that withers without ever leaving you’. You improve your skills in the new language, but it’s never quite yours, and you lack the authority that goes with unthinking fluency. You are easy to ignore, and thus easily humiliated. Increasingly foreign to those you have left behind as well, you become a kind of cultural orphan, never at one with anyone anywhere.

At the same time, immigrants may suddenly find the prohibitions they have grown up with suspended as the power of the symbolic order is lifted. They become ‘liberated’, other than they are. But are they freer? Or just more solitary?

Why do we fear foreigners, people from other cultures, asylum seekers? Well, for one thing, they demonstrate that there are alternative ways to be, that our own ways are not inevitable, and therefore not necessarily ‘natural’. Disparaging the others seems to make some people feel better. Besides, the encounter with foreigners calls into question the ‘we’ that is so easily taken for granted.

This badly needs to be called into question. Kristeva concludes, Psychoanalysis indicates that we are all foreign to ourselves. In the first place, there is something everyone has left behind:

A child confides in his analyst that the finest day in his life is that of his birth: ‘Because that day it was me – I like being me, I don’t like being an other’.  Now he feels other when he has poor grades – when he is bad, alien to the parents’ and teachers desire. Likewise, the unnatural ‘foreign’ languages, such as writing or mathematics, arouse an uncanny in the child.

And in the second place we are all inhabited by a stranger, whose ways are unknown to us and contest the values we (think we) take for granted:

The foreigner is within us. And when we flee from or struggle against the foreigner we are fighting our unconscious – that ‘improper’ facet of our impossible ‘own and proper’.

In this circumstances, one object of desire, especially familiar in a colonial and postcolonial world, is identity itself.  Many people especially those subject to a history of imperial oppression, experience a longing to belong. And who, in a globalized world, is not at the mercy of institutions, corporations, a language defined or controlled elsewhere? Since the 19th century, nationalism has offered to restore a true identity that has been all but erased.

Jacques Derrida considers this issue in Monolingualism of the Other, first published in French in 1996. His own special case is French Algria, where he grew up as a Jewish child in the 1930s. Ironically, Arabic was taught in the schools there as if it were a foreign languages. 

Hebrew, meanwhile, was not taught at all. French was the young Derrida’s first language although this too was the property of others: it belonged in the faraway country of France.

And yet, in a sense, Derrida argues, his own case was exemplary for all of us. Culture is always ‘colonial’, in that it imposes itself by its power to name the world and to instil rules of conduct. No one inhabits a culture by nature. As a matter of definition, no culture comes naturally. We are all exiles. Moreover, the culture we belong to is never beyond improvement, never quite what it should be.

Don’t nationalists identify with the nation as it once was, or as it one day might be? Isn’t perfect identity always the property of others?

At the same time, in the current world order we do well to remember that not all exiles are politically equivalent. Some people are more exiled than others ...

Ideological State Apparatuses

by Louis Althusser

Those of us who were involved in teaching in the 1970s, when Louis Althusser’s essay on the Ideological State Apparatuses (IASs) first appeared in translation, were thrilled to learn that the education system was the main ideological apparatus. This meant that as radicals, we had work to do on our own doorstep, instead of looking slightly out of place on other people’s picket lines. The argument was that schools and universities not only eject a proportion of the young prepared to take up occupations at every level of the economic structure but in the process of teaching reading, writing and arithmetic they also provide instruction in obedience, deference, elementary psychology (the character – types of the 19th – century novel, for instance), the virtues of liberal democracy, how to give orders, and how to serve the community. In short, educational institutions inculcate discipline, and the self – discipline that encourages their pupils to go out into society and ‘work by themselves’ to maintain the status quo.

But Some Negative points about Feminism is also there like,

·      Observation of Elizabeth Heilman is very helpful in proving this points.

·      In all parts of narrative all Horcruxes are destroyed by only male characters not by female characters, only one Horcrux is destroyed by female character.

·      All important conversations are happening between Professor Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter, Hermione Granger is not present there.

·      Hermione Granger has only educational knowledge apart from that she don’t have real knowledge of real life.

“Questions Are Always Devoted To Neutrality”

·      All female characters are weaker then male characters in both the sides, Evil side also and at the Good side also.

·      Objectifications of females body is happened through characters of Patil Sisters.

·      Rivalry is shown between Ron Weasley and Harry Potter through the character of Hermione Granger.

·      J. K. Rowling cannot allow more then this to Hermione Granger’s character.

2)                  Discourse on the purity of Blood and Harry Potter: How do the novels play with the thesis of pure blood (Master Race) giving an anti-thesis by belonging protagonists to half-blood / Mud-blood? What sort of synthesis is sought in this discourse in Harry Potter series?

·      In this novel superiority of White race is shown by J. K. Rowling because all three main characters are white, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.

·      Ron Weasley is shown as pure blood but though he is inferior to characters like Harry Potter and Hermione Granger.

·      Harry Potter is shown as Half Blood.

·      Hermione Granger is shown as Muggle blood.

·      Lord Voldemort is also half-blood but he has desire for pure blood. With the help of this we can say that desire for pure blood is not good at all.

·      This idea of Race takes us back into the idea of Master Race.

5)      The discourse of Power and Politics in Harry Potter: How does Ministry of Magic control the resistance? How do they prosecute the ‘Other’?

·      In this novel Ministry of Magic plays very vital role as Power and Politics.

·      This Ministry is hidden from Muggle world.

“Power is Everywhere”

·      Discipline and Punishment.

·      Prohibitions

·      Single Gaze

·      Ideal Prison

·      Power and knowledge

·      See – Seeable

·      Surveillance

·      Hierarchy of Power Structure

·      Defying rules to gain knowledge

·      Education as  Ideological State Apparatuses

“Power is always in quest of controlling Education”

                                              Thank You ……..