To Kill A Mockingbird Hermione Quotes

The boys help to illustrate Hermione as the typical feminine and useless character by allowing her to simply sit in the corner, rather than encouraging her to get up and help them fight. Mayes-Elma furthers this idea by stating that “society encourages girls to study and receive “good” grades, but at the same time they are supposed to be inferior to boys and downplay their intelligence if situation calls for it” (82). This demonstrates how gender binaries work in the society, where girls like Hermione can be intelligent, but only to a certain point. In minor scenes, Hermione is able to show off her magic skills to Ron and Harry, however, in major scenes like when the Troll is about to attack her, her character is reduced and the boys are put

She makes the connection and “reaching Snape, she crouche[s] down, pull[s] out her wand and whisper[s] a few chosen words” (Rowling 205), setting his robe on fire. Instead of being thanked or rewarded for her discovery and courageous actions, Harry quickly moves past the moment and concentrates on why Snape is trying to hurt him. Hermione is thus, never seen as an equal to Harry, but rather a side character that is always there to help him in his time of need. Elizabeth Heilman and Trevor Donaldson’s argue in their article, “From Sexist to (sort-of) Feminist: Representations of Gender in the Harry Potter Series” that Harry “is the hero; she is but an assistant” (Heilman 145). Evidently, Hermione’s hard work and advanced knowledge of magic surpasses most of her peers. However, rather than doing something with her gift, she chooses

Susana Rodriguez argues in her article, “Boy-Girls and Girl-Beasts” that the story is potentially “a girl’s adventure transformed into a boy’s story” (188). From the beginning of the story, Lucy is the one that discovers the secret passage to Narnia, yet Edmund easily steals the spotlight from her because adventure stories are typically for men and not for women. Since Peter is the oldest male figure out of the four of them, he is responsible for leading the group. The story follows the hierarchal tradition of giving the oldest male son in the family the power to lead, while the women simply follow behind. When the siblings realize that Tumnus is gone, they encounter “Mr. Beaver [who] leads them in a single file right out to the middle where they could look at the long way up the river” (Lewis 71). This demonstrates that like Hermione, the women are merely side characters and followers to Peter and the other male characters. They are only in the story to serve and help aid the men, but never participate in the actual fight. Moreover, Father Christmas even states that “battles are ugly when women fight” and gives Susan “a bow and a quiver full of arrows and a little ivory horn” (Lewis 108) and Lucy “a little bottle of what looked like glass […] and a small dagger (Lewis 109). Father Christmas clearly states that women are not made to fight. They are only needed in