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.
(1) The Importance of Leda’s Pregnancy Trap in the Cormoran Strike Series
The Harry Potter novels’ central plot line — the Dark Lord vs The Boy Who Lived — has its point of origin in the Pregnancy Trap conception of Thomas Marvolo Riddle, a trap sprung by Merope Gaunt on the clueless Thomas Riddle, Muggle, with a healthy helping of love potion. Rowling has said that this “coercive love” is what created the psychopathology of Voldemort in conjunction with Merope’s death in child-birth. Merope had been abused by her father Marvolo and brother Morfin psychologically and physically, perhaps sexually (about which, more in the ‘Incest’ golden thread series). The villain at the series’ plot’s heart is the product of a Pregnancy Trap. Readers only learn about this in detail via Pensieve trips Harry takes with the Headmaster in the sixth book of the seven book series or roughly 85% of the books to be published.
The Cormoran Strike over-arching plot line that continues above and largely outside the individual murder mysteries solved in each of the novels is the conception of Cormoran Strike and the death of his mother, Leda, nineteen years later. The details of Leda’s motivation and possible machination regarding Strike’s conception have not yet been revealed, no surprise if the 85% principle is in play (that would mean we learn these details halfway through Strike 9). Whether the trap was intentionally laid by Leda or she was passionately laid, even raped, by Rokeby a la Zeus, however, the father certainly felt trapped into parentage by the “super groupie” and never did more paternal duties than to write court ordered child support checks.
We learn a little more about Strike’s relationship with his mother and the absence of a relationship with Rokeby in every book. Rather than chart that progression through the series, let’s review those passages from the books that suggest paternity was “coercive” in the Strike-Rokeby public conjunction-coitus and consequent Cormoran conception.
(2) Textual Allusion to the Strike-Rokeby Pregnancy Trap
I want to note first that, while we do not know with certainty that Leda Strike set out to trap Jonny Rokeby into a relationship, even marriage, by becoming the mother of his child, we have been told that she was the target of a successful pregnancy trap, one sprung by the evil Jeff Whittaker:
Leda had fallen pregnant in Strike’s eighteenth year, while he was applying for university. He had been horrified, but even then he had not expected her to marry Whittaker. She had always told her son that she had hated being a wife. Her first teenage essay into matrimony had lasted two weeks before she had fled. Nor did marriage seem at all Whittaker’s style.
Yet it had happened, undoubtedly because Whittaker thought it would be the only sure way to get his hands on those mysteriously hidden millions. The ceremony took place at the Marylebone registry office, where two Beatles had previously married. Perhaps Whittaker had imagined that he would be photographed in the doorway like Paul McCartney, but nobody had been interested. It would take the death of his beaming bride to bring the photographers swarming to the court steps. Career of Evil, ch 10
The first time the thing everyone assumes is the case, that Leda trapped rich bloke Rokeby into paying her bills for eighteen years, is “said out loud” is in Strike 5, Troubled Blood. The report is from the mouths of jeering schoolmates of Cormoran, who torment him about his father and mother’s relationship:
Quite suddenly, and with a force that shocked Strike, he found himself full of rage, rage on behalf of the small boy who would once have sold his soul to receive a birthday card from his father. He’d grown well beyond any desire to have contact with Jonny Rokeby, but he could still recall the acute pain his father’s continual and implacable absence had so often caused him as a child: while the primary class was making Father’s Day cards, for instance, or when strange adults questioned him about why he never saw Rokeby, or other children jeered at him, singing Deadbeats songs or telling him his mother had got pregnant with him purely to get Rokeby’s money. He remembered the longing that was almost an ache, always most acute around birthdays and Christmas, for his father to send something, or phone: anything, to show that he knew Strike was alive. Strike hated the memory of these fantasies more than he hated remembering the pain caused by their eternal unfulfillment, but most of all he hated remembering the hopeful lies he’d told himself when, as a very young boy, he’d made excuses for his father, who probably didn’t know that the family had moved yet again, who’d sent things to the wrong address, who wanted to know him but simply couldn’t find him.
Where had Rokeby been when his son was a nobody? Where had Rokeby been every time Leda’s life came off the rails, and Ted and Joan rode, again, to the rescue? Where had he been on any of the thousands of occasions when his presence might have meant something real, and genuine, rather than an attempt to look good to the papers?
Rokeby knew literally nothing about his son except that he was a detective, and that explained the fucking bloodhound. Fuck you and fuck your fucking card. Strike tore the card in half, then into quarters, and threw the pieces into the bin. But for a disinclination to trigger the fire alarm, he might have put a match to them. Troubled Blood, Part Three, ch 19
Troubled Blood had already spelled out that Rokeby’s relationship with his oldest boy was only financial and that this was something he embraced only by legal injunction and intervention:
Rokeby had demanded Leda take a paternity test before he’d accept that Strike was his son. When the test came back positive, a financial settlement had been reached which ought to have ensured that his young son would never again have to sleep on a dirty mattress in a room shared with near-strangers. However, a combination of his mother’s profligacy and her regular disputes with Rokeby’s representatives had merely ensured that Strike’s life became a series of confusing bouts of affluence that usually ended in abrupt descents back into chaos and squalor. Leda was prone to giving her children wildly extravagant treats, which they enjoyed while wearing too-small shoes, and to taking off on trips to the Continent or to America to see her favorite bands in concert, leaving her children with Ted and Joan while she rode around in chauffeured cars and stayed in the best hotels.
He could still remember lying in the spare room in Cornwall, Lucy asleep in the twin bed beside him, listening to his mother and Joan arguing downstairs, because the children had arrived back at their aunt and uncle’s in the middle of winter, without coats. Strike had twice been enrolled in private schools, but Leda had both times pulled him out again before he’d completed more than a couple of terms, because she’d decided that her son was being taught the wrong values. Every month, Rokeby’s money melted away on handouts to friends and boyfriends, and in reckless ventures—Strike remembered a jewelry business, an arts magazine and a vegetarian restaurant, all of which failed, not to mention the commune in Norfolk that had been the worst experience of his young life.
Finally, Rokeby’s lawyers (to whom the rock star had delegated all matters concerning the well-being of his son) tied up the paternity payments in such a way that Leda could no longer fritter the money away. The only difference this made to the teenage Strike’s day-to-day life had been that the treats had stopped, because Leda wasn’t prepared to have her spending scrutinized in the manner demanded by the new arrangement. From that point onwards, the paternity payments had sat accumulating quietly in an account, and the family had survived on the smaller financial contributions made by Lucy’s father.
Strike had only met his father twice and had unhappy memories of both encounters. For his part, Rokeby had never asked why Strike’s money remained unspent. A tax exile of long standing, he had a band to front, several homes to maintain, two exes and a current wife to keep happy, five legitimate and two illegitimate children. Strike, whose conception had been an accident, whose positive paternity test had broken up Rokeby’s second marriage and whose whereabouts were usually uncertain, came low on his list of priorities. Troubled Blood, Part 3, ch 17
We see the mythological ur-story of the Strike-Rokeby ‘meeting’ that resulted in Cormoran depicted in the Ritz at the start of Ink Black Heart but more graphically in Paul Satchwell’s Troubled Blood exhibit of paintings:
Robin walked slowly around, looking at canvases and sketches. Five local artists had been given space for the temporary exhibition, but she identified Paul Satchwell’s work without difficulty: it had been given a prominent position and stood out boldly among the studies of local landmarks, portraits of pallid Britons standing at bus stops, and still lifes.
Naked figures twisted and cavorted in scenes from Greek mythology. Persephone struggled in the arms of Hades as he carried her down into the underworld; Andromeda strained against chains binding her to rock as a dragonish creature rose from the waves to devour her; Leda lay supine in bulrushes as Zeus, in the form of a swan, impregnated her.
Two lines of Joni Mitchell floated back to Robin as she looked at the paintings: “When I first saw your gallery, I liked the ones of ladies…” Troubled Blood, Part Four, ch 46
Rather than a trap, as the school children on the playground believed, it seems most thought Rokeby had simply “fumbled” in applying the necessary prophylactic device and been forced to pay a very high price for it (though Strike seems to have missed out on this waterfall of riches due the rock star’s son).
There had been a little girl in his primary school class who had a port-wine stain across her face and Strike had always felt a secret kinship with her, because both of them had carried something indelibly different with them since birth, something that was not their fault. They couldn’t see it, but everybody else could, and had the bad manners to keep mentioning it. The occasional fascination of total strangers, which at five years old he had thought had something to do with his own uniqueness, he eventually realised was because they saw him as no more than a famous singer’s zygote, the incidental evidence of a celebrity’s unfaithful fumble. Strike had only met his biological father twice. It had taken a DNA test to make Jonny Rokeby accept paternity.
Dominic Culpepper was a walking distillation of the prurience and presumptions that Strike met on the very rare occasions these days that anybody connected the surly-looking ex-soldier with the ageing rock star. Their thoughts leapt at once to trust funds and handsome hand-outs, to private flights and VIP lounges, to a multi-millionaire’s largesse on tap. Agog at the modesty of Strike’s existence and the punishing hours he worked, they asked themselves: what must Strike have done to alienate his father? Was he faking penury to wheedle more money out of Rokeby? What had he done with the millions his mother had surely squeezed out of her rich paramour? The Silkworm, ch 2
The few details we have of the actual conception scene, a description without information about what either of the two were thinking or planning if anything, comes from the Hermes figure of Troubled Blood, the joker and truth-teller Carl Oakden:
“You think I’m scared of your fucking agency? Some fucking detective you are!” he said, and now most of the heads in their vicinity turned. Glancing back, Robin saw that Oakden had got up, too: he’d come out from behind the table and was planted in the middle of the bar, clearly set on making a scene.
“Strike, please, let’s just go,” said Robin, who now had a presentiment of real trouble. Oakden was clearly determined to come out of the encounter with something sellable, or at the very least, a narrative in which he’d come out on top. But Strike had already turned back toward their interviewee.
“You didn’t even know your own fucking father’s having a party round the corner,” said Oakden loudly, pointing in the direction of Spencer House. “Not going to pop in, thank him for fucking your mother on a pile of beanbags while fifty people watched?”
Robin watched what she had dreaded unfold in apparent slow motion: Strike lunged for Oakden. She made a grab for the arm Strike had drawn back for a punch, but too late: his elbow slammed into Robin’s forehead, breaking her glasses in two. Dark spots popped in front of Robin’s eyes and the next thing she knew, she’d fallen backward onto the floor. Troubled Blood, Part Five, ch 57
First, note that Oakden’s confronting Strike with his illegitimate conception history leads to the great Agency office break-through in the Robin-Cormoran relationship. I’m suspicious — and hopeful! — that the final big reveal of the NYC Bar seduction of or rape by Rokeby will catalyze the final steps to the marriage of our two detectives.
Second, not the importance of the Troubled Blood passages above. I think the near centrality of Strike5 in the ten book series may mean that the meaning-is-in-the-middle — and that we will only grasp that meaning in Strike9 or Strike10. It’s a Ring-Thing.
Third and last, again, there is no statement by Strike or by Leda in his memories that she intentionally trapped Rokeby. The surface facts of the story, though, most importantly, Rokeby’s resistance to Leda’s “coercive” pregnancy have Serious Strikers leaning hard into the Pregnancy Trap motivation on Leda’s part.
(3) Compare and Contrast with Previous Rowling Pregnancy Traps
I hope in this series of Pregnancy Trap posts to catalog the common qualities and differences between the various traps sprung by women to capture husbands in the works of J. K. Rowling. How does the Strike-Rokeby trap compare with the ones we have seen already? Let’s review those we’ve discussed previously in Potter, Cursed Child, and Casual Vacancy:
Merope-Riddle trap qualities: abused woman, clueless, disinterested, and self-important man, dishonest conception of child (Love Potion), coercive marriage, ‘divorce’ after father learns about trap, figurative and literal death of mother consequent to that break, love-less and consequently psychopathic child reflecting union of parents
Krystall Weedon trap qualities: abused woman, clueless, disinterested, and self-important adolescent, dishonest conception-attempt (no birth control), transformation of father-target ex post facto (a psychological death and rebirth), figurative and literal death of mother consequent to trap-event, death (and community apotheosis) of child associated with trap-event
Kay Bawden trap qualities (Brendan/Gaia): no information on state of mother beyond being a university girlfriend, father leaves mother and child, no transformation of mother it seems ex post facto as she works to entrap Gavin Hughes, daughter seems fairly well adjusted at least until her mother “uprooted” her to Padford
Tessa Wall trap qualities: chronically ill woman, mentally ill man, already married but childless, forced creation of family that ‘father’ does not want or welcome, figurative death of father (ultimate rebirth at child’s psychological death, being the target of a woman’s Pregnancy Trap), revelation of mother’s coercive maternity, psychological death and rebirth of child
Lestrange-Riddle trap qualities: deranged and murderous mother, psychopathic father, both killed during Battle of Hogwarts in duels to the death with reverse-image doppelgangers, (presumed) calculated conception of child for the advantage of each parent individually, love-less and consequently psychopathic child reflecting non-union of parents and consequent raising in a foster home
Strike-Rokeby ‘Pregnancy Trap’ qualities: “super groupie” mother with no visible means of support (who paid for her flight to NYC from the UK?), self-important, drug abusing father of great wealth, (presumed, not definitive) calculated conception of Cormoran for the fiduciary advantage of the mother, conceived son grows up with a loving itinerant mother and a doting Uncle and Aunt in Cornwall but without relationship with Father and not wanting to start one…
Coming up next, all the other Strike series Pregnancy Traps and coercive conceptions, book by book; stay tuned!
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