A Study Of Female Images In Harry Potter Series

Now the Harry Potter story has become a cultural phenomenon all over the world. The first book of Harry Potter Series written by J. K. Rowling came off the press in 1997. The Last book of Harry Potter Series was published in 2007. Rowling has written seven books of Harry Potter at a speed of about one book per year within ten years. The Harry Potter Series makes unprecedented success in book-selling markets. The book has been sold over a billion in over 200 countries, and has been translated into more than fifty different languages.Whether someone likes or dislikes the story, it is a fact that it has been the most-welcomed books among children and some of the adults. The writer of Harry Potter Series, J. K. Rowling was awarded the British Book Awards, Children's Book of the Year, and the Smarties Prize. She turns from an ordinary single mother into the most influential and richest writer in the world. The great success of J. K. Rowling's books can be taken as the first reason for me to choose it as my research topic. And another reason is that there are less researches on female images in Harry Potter Series.Being a female writer, Rowling created many significant female characters in the Harry Potter Series. Although the main character is Harry Potter, females play an important role in the whole story. Rowling lives in Edinburgh, the Celtic cultural center. She makes Harry Potter Series a median to host ancient Celtic culture, creating a unique magic world dramatically different from the rest of the world. Feminine principles in the magic world are the original feminine principles in Celtic culture. This world created by Rowling is a material world, different from the patriarchal society, everything in it abiding by feminine principles. The magic world pictures a harmonious world, which offers a warm harbor for rest for the main character and for readers.Celtic culture worships witches as their goddess. The positive witch in magic world is the avatar of a goddess in feminine world of Celtic culture. Females in the magic world also demonstrate these feminine principles and play a dominant role in the magic world. Among many female figures, Harry's mother Lily and his best friend Hermione are the typical representation of the goddess in Harry Potter Series. They possess many virtues like uprightness, brilliance, love.These female images are built up under the influence of Celtic culture, originating in nature and coexisting with nature. For all the female images are filled with brilliance, uprightness, and maternal love, they build a harmonious association between human and nature, human and other species, man and woman, person and person. Such attributes dominate and guide the magic world as this ideal world, which, if transplanted into our modern world, could also shape and help to build our modern society into a harmonious world.This thesis explores the female images in Harry Potter Series from a fresh perspective of Celtic culture, offering a referable angle for other literature researches in terms of ethnic cultural values.