I’m writing up a Substack post on the ‘pregnancy trap’ plot points and characters in the work of J. K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to last year’s Running Grave. It’s part of the Fourth Generation ‘Rowling Studies’ effort at HogwartsProfessor to begin looking at her work from a mountain top or macroscopic view across series and individual novels, screenplays, and the one play script rather than the microscopic examination of the latest work and consequent speculating about the next coming thing.

A key part of that work is to identify plot point ‘golden threads’ in addition to the Shed artistic elements I have labored to draw out through the years (psychomachia, alchemy, chiasmus, mythology, etc.). Perhaps the most curious of these is the ‘pregnancy trap’ in which a man or woman, usually a woman, attempts to force his or her partner into a relationship commitment, usually marriage, by either becoming pregnant (if male, all but insuring that the female partner becomes pregnant) or offering oneself as a sex object.

The first step in identifying and discussing a golden thread,’ a plot point found in many of Rowling’s work and at the heart of the story involved, is to run through the oeuvre or opera omnia to date and check to see if the point is indeed prevalent — and, perhaps as important, that all the instances have been found. My working list for ‘pregnancy traps’ in Rowling’s work include these ten instances — and I ask for your help in critiquing this list and letting me know of others that I in my haste have overlooked:   [Read more…]