Children’s books are often taken very lightly. They are often filled with magic and wonder. This is probably why I’ve never really thought of the implications that the word usage and composition of Harry Potter could have on children. In Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series, Sally Hunt uses methods of text analysis to observe instances of gender inequality in the novels. In her studies she explores the imbalance in the use of words representing boys, which occured much more frequently, than the use of words referring to girls. Even more interesting, her exploration discovered that the novel routinely equated more action words with boys and less with girls by a very large amount. This is something that, as a reader, I have never considered. Through text analysis, the novel was broken down and analyzed in a new way, exposing some curious truths about gender in children’s books. This gender imbalance could affect young reader’s perceptions of women’s importance in society as well as enforce stereotypes of women being physically inferior. The uses of text analysis to take a closer look at what an author’s word choices mean is an incredible way to re-evaluate and re-consider the things we present to children.

I would be incredibly interested in a study analyzing a wider ranfe of children’s books, and seeing what it could uncover. This study could span back a few decades, and could be compared to the ideals and beliefs of the generation that grew up reading it. Potentially,text analysis could be used by authors to survey and take a closer look at their work before it is published to determine if it truly is telling the story that they intend it to.

Sources

Hunt, Sally. 2015. “Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series.” In Corpora and Discourse Studies, edited by Paul Baker and Tony McEnery, 266–84. Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan UK. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137431738_13.