This is the fourth in a series of posts that detail the various Pregnancy Trap plot points that run through the work of J. K. Rowling from Harry Potter to Cormoran Strike. For the ‘Fourth Generation Rowling Studies’ context of this series, see the introduction to the first post in it, ‘Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Merope Gaunt.‘

In brief, each post in this series will explain the importance of the specific Pregnancy Trap being explored to the specific title in which it appears or to the series in question, will detail its textual appearance and what if anything Rowling has said about it in her interviews, and will compare and contrast the Trap with others Rowling has used, i.e., what makes it a typical one and what makes it unique. At the conclusion of the series, I will be sending my summary and conclusions from it to HogwartsProfessor Substack subscribers.

I have chosen to start this series with those four Pregnancy Traps that are foundational plot points in the book or series in which they appear. Merope Gaunt’s nightmare relationship, for example, with her abusive father and brother and her decision to trap Muggle charmster Thomas Riddle were the foundation crime and point of origin respectively for defining conflict of the Harry Potter novels. Similarly, the conception of Delphini, Voldemort’s daughter via Bellatrix Lestrange, is the timeline beginning for the Cursed Child conflict. I discuss that Merope parallel in Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Bellatrix Lestrange and the Cursed Child Delphini.

Rowling’s first post Potter piece was the stand-alone novel Casual Vacancy in which two women characters try to win a man by sexual favors, one of whom deploys a Pregnancy Trap intentionally in the story climax with tragic results. A third woman in Vacancy traps her husband with a child he does not want albeit through adoption not pregnancy and the trap is post nuptials not prior. See Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Krystal Weedon, Kay Bawden for the Casual Vacancy details.

In today’s entry for this series, I want to begin to discuss the Pregnancy Traps and destructive and coercive love relationships in the Cormoran Strike series and its individual novels. The importance and the number of the Traps in the first seven Strike and Ellacott mysteries are so significant, qualitatively and quantitatively, that I doubt the idea of exploring this plot point as a Golden Thread running through all her work would have occurred to me. Serious Strikers, though, are compelled by the frequency of its recurrence to think of it as being akin to orphaned and neglected children in the novels of Charles Dickens.

Join me after the jump for the principal Pregnancy Trap of Cormoran Strike, Leda Strike and Jonny Rokeby, the defining plot point of Strike’s life, not to mention the ‘Leda and the Swan’ background mythological template.  Today’s trap will serve as an introduction to a separate post about all the other coercive sexual relationships resulting in children in almost every novel in this series that will soon follow. [Read more…]