Good essay! It's got my mind going in all sorts of directions! Hopefully, I'll be able to compartmentalize, but if I babble and go off on tangents, you're forewarned.
The happiest family in the Potterverse appears to be the Potters--and it's no shock that this is because they're dead. Harry almost seems to get his strength from the way he was given a gift of that pure familial love of the mother for her child--a love that all of these mothers also have--and then the woman obligingly died before she could fuck it up by having to deal with her kid as he grows up as a human.
Oh, my, yes! My mother was an orphan. Her mother died when she was two, and she remembers the morning that she and her sister couldn't wake her up. My mother is 84, so that's a long time to hold a memory so vividly. Her father died when she was nine, and he had taken her and her sister to an orphanage when their mother died, simply because he couldn't take care of them at home and work at the same time. He visited at least twice a month.
My grandparents were perfect. My mother 'would have been grateful to have had a mother' to tell her what to wear, talk about the facts of life with her, coach her in things they both enjoyed like basketball, and so on. Reading Harry Potter always reminds me of my mother because Harry sees his mother in much the same way. If only, if only, if only, and he would have been happy. There would have been no fights about hair or clothes or friends. No sainted parent would. Even seeing friends in the RW, or its fictional equivalent, having trouble with their parents, doesn't stop the overwhelming fantasy of the perfect family. My mother thought she wasn't as good as her mother would have been, because we fought. She had to work. Yadda, yadda. She completely missed that her friends and peers were going through the same thing with their kids, and Harry doesn't seem to absorb the troubles in the Weasley family, he's just happy to have a family. I can imagine that our perceptions of Percy are colored by Harry's shock, and his orphan filter which says that Percy should have been grateful to have a mother and a father, OMG! and he's throwing that away!
I mentioned a family I know similar to the Blacks, in another post here. But, this: ...and a mad cousin who knocks him through a curtain makes me wonder about the inter-family relations with the Blacks. They're all as fucked-up as the Malfoys seem - blindly following a Dark Lord who 'leads them by the nose' into crimes and hell. And, we know that Bellatrix refers to her cousin Sirius in a very impersonal way - the animagus Black. Yet, there does seem to be an undercurrent tying the two Black families together on a subterranean stream. They *notice* each other, they care at some level, in a way that isn't selfishly concerned with how Cuz makes them look. There wouldn't be that intensity if it wasn't family.
And, same with Petunia. Her hatred for the WW is visceral. Jealousy, sure, as we saw in the hut on the rock in PS/SS. But, it eats at her. She's conveyed this hate to her family because it's easier to give this sort of thing since it attacks on such a primitive level. She's too interested in Lily's 'horrible boy', in her turning teapots to gerbils or whatever animal it was, in her irrational fear of Harry becoming the same thing so strongly that she tries to crush it out of him. Why does she care so much? Was it the crushing of her own natural feelings when Lily suddenly became 'different'?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-17 01:13 pm (UTC)The happiest family in the Potterverse appears to be the Potters--and it's no shock that this is because they're dead. Harry almost seems to get his strength from the way he was given a gift of that pure familial love of the mother for her child--a love that all of these mothers also have--and then the woman obligingly died before she could fuck it up by having to deal with her kid as he grows up as a human.
Oh, my, yes! My mother was an orphan. Her mother died when she was two, and she remembers the morning that she and her sister couldn't wake her up. My mother is 84, so that's a long time to hold a memory so vividly. Her father died when she was nine, and he had taken her and her sister to an orphanage when their mother died, simply because he couldn't take care of them at home and work at the same time. He visited at least twice a month.
My grandparents were perfect. My mother 'would have been grateful to have had a mother' to tell her what to wear, talk about the facts of life with her, coach her in things they both enjoyed like basketball, and so on. Reading Harry Potter always reminds me of my mother because Harry sees his mother in much the same way. If only, if only, if only, and he would have been happy. There would have been no fights about hair or clothes or friends. No sainted parent would. Even seeing friends in the RW, or its fictional equivalent, having trouble with their parents, doesn't stop the overwhelming fantasy of the perfect family. My mother thought she wasn't as good as her mother would have been, because we fought. She had to work. Yadda, yadda. She completely missed that her friends and peers were going through the same thing with their kids, and Harry doesn't seem to absorb the troubles in the Weasley family, he's just happy to have a family. I can imagine that our perceptions of Percy are colored by Harry's shock, and his orphan filter which says that Percy should have been grateful to have a mother and a father, OMG! and he's throwing that away!
I mentioned a family I know similar to the Blacks, in another post here. But, this: ...and a mad cousin who knocks him through a curtain makes me wonder about the inter-family relations with the Blacks. They're all as fucked-up as the Malfoys seem - blindly following a Dark Lord who 'leads them by the nose' into crimes and hell. And, we know that Bellatrix refers to her cousin Sirius in a very impersonal way - the animagus Black. Yet, there does seem to be an undercurrent tying the two Black families together on a subterranean stream. They *notice* each other, they care at some level, in a way that isn't selfishly concerned with how Cuz makes them look. There wouldn't be that intensity if it wasn't family.
And, same with Petunia. Her hatred for the WW is visceral. Jealousy, sure, as we saw in the hut on the rock in PS/SS. But, it eats at her. She's conveyed this hate to her family because it's easier to give this sort of thing since it attacks on such a primitive level. She's too interested in Lily's 'horrible boy', in her turning teapots to gerbils or whatever animal it was, in her irrational fear of Harry becoming the same thing so strongly that she tries to crush it out of him. Why does she care so much? Was it the crushing of her own natural feelings when Lily suddenly became 'different'?
to be continued...