Abstract

Gender-stereotyped roles of female and male characters are common in literature. Seeing that Harry Potter series has gained much popularity especially among children and teenagers, this qualitative paper attempts to investigate to what extent the author, Rowling (1997), confirms or challenges the gender stereotypes in the portrayal of the main male and female characters through her lexical (words) and grammatical (nouns, verbs, adjective and adverbs) choices. Halliday’s transitivity system is used to examine the lexis and structures that Rowling chose to describe the characters in her novel. Several scenes which contain descriptions about the main male and female characters were analyzed. Analysis of the excerpts from the novel showed that both the male and female main characters are portrayed with either feminine or masculine roles.

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