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I was reading something today that brought up that old HP argument, Weasleys vs. Malfoys and it once again made me ask:
Are there any really happy families in HP canon?
The point of this post is not to judge families for being happy or not, or play them off each other. It’s that JKR seems to see all families as being combinations of love and tragedy, comfort and pain. It's pretty realistic that way. Nobody really seems to escape family fucking them up. Even Amos Diggory, whose love of his son seems so total in GoF, would probably come across as flawed and sometimes hurtful if we saw him interacting with Cedric in canon (the first time we see him he's embarrassing his son, actually, though it's obvious he's just really proud of him). Is Luna's interest in her father's paper due to a genuine shared mind, or is she trying to draw closer to the parent she has left the only way she can—through his newspaper rather than himself—since for all we know he's withdrawn into that and left Luna coping with the loss of her mother on her own. (She herself could have retreated into her fantasy beliefs to cope with pain--maybe he has too.)
This usually seems to come down to the Weasleys vs. the Malfoys, and what often happens is someone will say that the Malfoys are "better" and someone else will say Malfoy-fans are just crazy and the Weasleys are one big happy family. The thing is, though, the Weasleys aren't one big happy anything--and that's not said as a big trash of the Weasleys or a compliment to the Malfoys. They just aren't. They love each other, sure, but they also have a lot of tension simmering under the surface--and that's canon. Percy's exile is not a case of a bunch of shiny happy people betrayed by their suddenly alien son, shaking their heads in bewilderment. That blow up is built up over a few books with lots of antagonism of Percy and from Percy.
A lot of families could have weathered that fight between Arthur and Percy. But part of the problem is that Percy has apparently said what he's not supposed to say--that the family struggles financially and maybe this isn't just because Arthur is too noble to get the promotion he deserves. That’s not just about money—money can stand for a whole lot of other things, and I think it does here. In GoF the twins are, according to Ron, becoming very obsessed with money, and turning to blackmail. This doesn't have to make them DEs or evil, but I think there’s frustration there coming out in a different form. When Percy says what he says everyone has their own resentment ready to throw back at him, including Arthur. He's not just offended on principle that Percy doesn't trust Dumbledore. Basically, you don't have a family where one person is hated and hates without some well of real resentment to draw on there. The Weasley siblings are often described as damaging each other, and among the ones we see there seems to be a clear distinction between the aggressors who are sometimes too aggressive (Ginny and the Twins) and the resentful passive ones (Percy and Ron). This doesn't make the Weasleys a "bad family" as opposed to a "good one." It just says that families can hurt each other more than outsiders can--and that seems to be a pretty big theme of the series.
The Malfoys, by contrast, can sure be held up as sticking together. Draco, at least up until book VI, seems to have no criticisms of his father like Percy has of Arthur. But the Malfoys, to understate the point, have problems of their own. There's the fact that the kid is taught to be bigoted and to value cruelty and to believe in a psychopath, obviously, but also by HBP I can imagine that Draco could also be realizing that even on a personal level his family has fucked him up. He's followed his father blindly for years, just like his father wanted, and Lucius has led him straight into a dark alley and disappeared. He’s also an example of a kid really trying to be his father and simply not having it in him. So on the surface, the Malfoys are a pretty bad family, but they still do manage to also produce some form of the positive side of family: they do actually seem to love each other and want to do right by each other to an extent (at least Draco and Narcissa do, since we don't see Lucius' reaction to the crisis in HBP, but I think he has some basically good impulses towards his family mixed in with all his bad ones). The most important thing Draco really has to draw on is the same thing as the Weasleys do--despite the faults, there's love there. When everything else is breaking down in HBP, that appears to be the only thing that really keeps him going.
Neville is another Pureblood family often contrasted with the Malfoys, but there again you've got these relatives who seem to be at the heart of all of Neville's problems. People cheer when McGonagall tells Neville his grandmother should learn to be proud of the grandson she's got instead of the one she wishes she had, but jeez, to me that line is frankly humiliating! Would you want some teacher to tell you your grandmother is disappointed in you? Not that Neville doesn't know that already. I was recently talking about his boggart scene and I really do think that part of the point of Snape/Neville is that Snape isn't just a mean teacher but also a symbol of the way he's seen by his family. His grandmother seems to constantly be comparing him negatively to his father, not even giving him his own wand to use.
But on the other hand, that doesn't mean she doesn't care about him. Some of her harshness is probably tied to her grief over her son, which she shows in a different way that Neville does. She seems to share some of Snape's ideas about tough love, taking Neville to see his catatonic parents (possibly frightening him by doing that) and pushing him to talk about them because to not do so, for her, is to be ashamed of them (while Neville is not ashamed but finds it painful). He seems to get good presents from his family--thoughtful presents. He and his gran do seem to talk. And more than that, Neville has his mother, who is just sentient enough to show him she loves him (which is why theories that the Droobles Gum Wrapper are a clue to some mystery are so wrong--the gum wrapper is the ultimate example of "it's the thought that count" and its meaninglessness is what makes it so damn meaningful). ::sniffles over Neville::
Barty Crouch Jr., for all the judgments of the main characters, also comes from a family that includes both pain and love. His mother loves him, obviously, but I think his father probably did too. Re-reading the scene where he's stumbling around in the woods, saying it's his fault and introducing his son who’s gotten "12 OWLS," I can't help but think that yes, he too loved his son just as he hurt him. I think when he says it's "his fault" he is speaking about Barty's being a DE as well as Barty escaping. As a control freak, I think Crouch would see this as the case even at the time--and perhaps see Barty in Azkaban as some attempt to fix things. That's why this man, whom most of the Weasleys consider to be a complete failure as a family man, manages to inspire such devotion in their own black sheep, Percy. Ron often darkly suggests Percy would "pull a Crouch" and not protect his family even if they've committed a crime. Ironically, while Percy rejects the family, he has not turned them in for anything and distances himself from Scrimgeor's attempt to use the family on Christmas (I’m not saying Percy does nothing bad to his family, just saying that it’s not this, exactly). Meanwhile those who claim to think family should stick together offer no such universal acceptance of Percy. It's the "good" side of the Crouch family that keeps Barty alive and helps him escape.
The Blacks, of course, are as crazy as you get, but there too yeah, I'm seeing love and pain, not flat abuse. I believe Kreacher when he says Sirius broke his mother's heart, and when Sirius talks about Regulus as being an idiot I do hear him trying to kill lingering feelings he has for his brother: Why did you have to be so stupid? Sirius is ultimately destroyed by a family that has already been destroyed, and this is partly because he keeps feeling hurt by them and trying to hurt them back. He's "waging war" on the house where he grew up, and all that's left of it then is a crazy house elf who keeps enacting these scenes of family love that to Sirius are obscene, a screaming portrait and a mad cousin who knocks him through a curtain. Had Sirius been able to come to terms with his family, accept them as part of himself, he probably would have lived and had a happier life. He ran away from them once, and when he was brought back and couldn't run away they won. And it’s the same on their part—they blast him off the tapestry, and in the end he’s the only one left in the house.
Perhaps in the afterlife the family will be somewhat healed--at least I hope so. I can't help but see Sirius and Regulus finally making up two halves of a whole--two brothers and two Shadows, etc. Sirius was good but ultimately impotent and kept from doing anything. Regulus was the bad one but possibly able to act in the end. (Personally, I can't help but always picture Sirius as actually being the favorite despite being the black sheep, but that's a different essay.)
The Durlseys are meanwhile another family at an extreme. All their abuse gets pushed onto Harry, the stand in for the family Petunia has lost. Dudley is so little chastised he's confused when he's described as abused. His parents always say he's right, always say he's great. Anything he can't do isn't worth doing. They make excuses for him. And he's totally fucked up.
And of course we see what appears to be one snapshot of the Snapes at home and...yeah. Not so good there. And yet the Snape Harry liked came out of his mother's textbook—there’s those hints of love. (Not to mention, do Dumbledore and Aberforth talk? I think JKR said Dumbledore's family is important, yet they're never seen together despite living nearby--is Aberforth even at the funeral that we hear?)
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. So Harry still has both the love and the pain. Hagrid, btw, is probably another good example of that type of thing. His mother left him when he was small, and he seems to seek to fill that hole she left through animals. But I think that the animals he chooses are supposed to be significant that way, not just because his mother, too, was kind of monstrous but because Hagrid's ideas about his animals are, well, pretty fucked up. In his way he's a bit like the Dursleys cooing over Dudley and defending everything he does even when he bites or squashes some kid by sitting on him. It's an idealized version of parent/child relations (or sibling relations with Grawp) and as such not a completely good thing. Harry, too, sort of has this problem since for all we're told about his capacity to love he's actually not that good dealing with people. Harry tends to have great waves of affection when people are pleasing him and feel very betrayed when they let him down--which makes sense since that has been his experience of love: you were perfect, and then you were gone.
Phew! That was a lot longer than I expected it to be. I just started babbling about families. The basic idea being that this is why it drives me crazy when any family gets made one-dimensional either way, because it seems like it really goes against canon to both say a family is just completely negative or to say a family--usually the Weasleys--is ideal. I honestly don't even know if JKR *could* write One Big Happy Anybody's Family, because she just seems too aware of how people, especially families, fuck each other up and hurt each other. It’s not just that Voldemort comes from a bad family and Harry from a good one, it’s that while Harry’s family was good and then gone, Voldemort’s was just always gone. (Which of course probably means he never bonded and a sociopath is an expected result, but anyway…)
Are there any really happy families in HP canon?
The point of this post is not to judge families for being happy or not, or play them off each other. It’s that JKR seems to see all families as being combinations of love and tragedy, comfort and pain. It's pretty realistic that way. Nobody really seems to escape family fucking them up. Even Amos Diggory, whose love of his son seems so total in GoF, would probably come across as flawed and sometimes hurtful if we saw him interacting with Cedric in canon (the first time we see him he's embarrassing his son, actually, though it's obvious he's just really proud of him). Is Luna's interest in her father's paper due to a genuine shared mind, or is she trying to draw closer to the parent she has left the only way she can—through his newspaper rather than himself—since for all we know he's withdrawn into that and left Luna coping with the loss of her mother on her own. (She herself could have retreated into her fantasy beliefs to cope with pain--maybe he has too.)
This usually seems to come down to the Weasleys vs. the Malfoys, and what often happens is someone will say that the Malfoys are "better" and someone else will say Malfoy-fans are just crazy and the Weasleys are one big happy family. The thing is, though, the Weasleys aren't one big happy anything--and that's not said as a big trash of the Weasleys or a compliment to the Malfoys. They just aren't. They love each other, sure, but they also have a lot of tension simmering under the surface--and that's canon. Percy's exile is not a case of a bunch of shiny happy people betrayed by their suddenly alien son, shaking their heads in bewilderment. That blow up is built up over a few books with lots of antagonism of Percy and from Percy.
A lot of families could have weathered that fight between Arthur and Percy. But part of the problem is that Percy has apparently said what he's not supposed to say--that the family struggles financially and maybe this isn't just because Arthur is too noble to get the promotion he deserves. That’s not just about money—money can stand for a whole lot of other things, and I think it does here. In GoF the twins are, according to Ron, becoming very obsessed with money, and turning to blackmail. This doesn't have to make them DEs or evil, but I think there’s frustration there coming out in a different form. When Percy says what he says everyone has their own resentment ready to throw back at him, including Arthur. He's not just offended on principle that Percy doesn't trust Dumbledore. Basically, you don't have a family where one person is hated and hates without some well of real resentment to draw on there. The Weasley siblings are often described as damaging each other, and among the ones we see there seems to be a clear distinction between the aggressors who are sometimes too aggressive (Ginny and the Twins) and the resentful passive ones (Percy and Ron). This doesn't make the Weasleys a "bad family" as opposed to a "good one." It just says that families can hurt each other more than outsiders can--and that seems to be a pretty big theme of the series.
The Malfoys, by contrast, can sure be held up as sticking together. Draco, at least up until book VI, seems to have no criticisms of his father like Percy has of Arthur. But the Malfoys, to understate the point, have problems of their own. There's the fact that the kid is taught to be bigoted and to value cruelty and to believe in a psychopath, obviously, but also by HBP I can imagine that Draco could also be realizing that even on a personal level his family has fucked him up. He's followed his father blindly for years, just like his father wanted, and Lucius has led him straight into a dark alley and disappeared. He’s also an example of a kid really trying to be his father and simply not having it in him. So on the surface, the Malfoys are a pretty bad family, but they still do manage to also produce some form of the positive side of family: they do actually seem to love each other and want to do right by each other to an extent (at least Draco and Narcissa do, since we don't see Lucius' reaction to the crisis in HBP, but I think he has some basically good impulses towards his family mixed in with all his bad ones). The most important thing Draco really has to draw on is the same thing as the Weasleys do--despite the faults, there's love there. When everything else is breaking down in HBP, that appears to be the only thing that really keeps him going.
Neville is another Pureblood family often contrasted with the Malfoys, but there again you've got these relatives who seem to be at the heart of all of Neville's problems. People cheer when McGonagall tells Neville his grandmother should learn to be proud of the grandson she's got instead of the one she wishes she had, but jeez, to me that line is frankly humiliating! Would you want some teacher to tell you your grandmother is disappointed in you? Not that Neville doesn't know that already. I was recently talking about his boggart scene and I really do think that part of the point of Snape/Neville is that Snape isn't just a mean teacher but also a symbol of the way he's seen by his family. His grandmother seems to constantly be comparing him negatively to his father, not even giving him his own wand to use.
But on the other hand, that doesn't mean she doesn't care about him. Some of her harshness is probably tied to her grief over her son, which she shows in a different way that Neville does. She seems to share some of Snape's ideas about tough love, taking Neville to see his catatonic parents (possibly frightening him by doing that) and pushing him to talk about them because to not do so, for her, is to be ashamed of them (while Neville is not ashamed but finds it painful). He seems to get good presents from his family--thoughtful presents. He and his gran do seem to talk. And more than that, Neville has his mother, who is just sentient enough to show him she loves him (which is why theories that the Droobles Gum Wrapper are a clue to some mystery are so wrong--the gum wrapper is the ultimate example of "it's the thought that count" and its meaninglessness is what makes it so damn meaningful). ::sniffles over Neville::
Barty Crouch Jr., for all the judgments of the main characters, also comes from a family that includes both pain and love. His mother loves him, obviously, but I think his father probably did too. Re-reading the scene where he's stumbling around in the woods, saying it's his fault and introducing his son who’s gotten "12 OWLS," I can't help but think that yes, he too loved his son just as he hurt him. I think when he says it's "his fault" he is speaking about Barty's being a DE as well as Barty escaping. As a control freak, I think Crouch would see this as the case even at the time--and perhaps see Barty in Azkaban as some attempt to fix things. That's why this man, whom most of the Weasleys consider to be a complete failure as a family man, manages to inspire such devotion in their own black sheep, Percy. Ron often darkly suggests Percy would "pull a Crouch" and not protect his family even if they've committed a crime. Ironically, while Percy rejects the family, he has not turned them in for anything and distances himself from Scrimgeor's attempt to use the family on Christmas (I’m not saying Percy does nothing bad to his family, just saying that it’s not this, exactly). Meanwhile those who claim to think family should stick together offer no such universal acceptance of Percy. It's the "good" side of the Crouch family that keeps Barty alive and helps him escape.
The Blacks, of course, are as crazy as you get, but there too yeah, I'm seeing love and pain, not flat abuse. I believe Kreacher when he says Sirius broke his mother's heart, and when Sirius talks about Regulus as being an idiot I do hear him trying to kill lingering feelings he has for his brother: Why did you have to be so stupid? Sirius is ultimately destroyed by a family that has already been destroyed, and this is partly because he keeps feeling hurt by them and trying to hurt them back. He's "waging war" on the house where he grew up, and all that's left of it then is a crazy house elf who keeps enacting these scenes of family love that to Sirius are obscene, a screaming portrait and a mad cousin who knocks him through a curtain. Had Sirius been able to come to terms with his family, accept them as part of himself, he probably would have lived and had a happier life. He ran away from them once, and when he was brought back and couldn't run away they won. And it’s the same on their part—they blast him off the tapestry, and in the end he’s the only one left in the house.
Perhaps in the afterlife the family will be somewhat healed--at least I hope so. I can't help but see Sirius and Regulus finally making up two halves of a whole--two brothers and two Shadows, etc. Sirius was good but ultimately impotent and kept from doing anything. Regulus was the bad one but possibly able to act in the end. (Personally, I can't help but always picture Sirius as actually being the favorite despite being the black sheep, but that's a different essay.)
The Durlseys are meanwhile another family at an extreme. All their abuse gets pushed onto Harry, the stand in for the family Petunia has lost. Dudley is so little chastised he's confused when he's described as abused. His parents always say he's right, always say he's great. Anything he can't do isn't worth doing. They make excuses for him. And he's totally fucked up.
And of course we see what appears to be one snapshot of the Snapes at home and...yeah. Not so good there. And yet the Snape Harry liked came out of his mother's textbook—there’s those hints of love. (Not to mention, do Dumbledore and Aberforth talk? I think JKR said Dumbledore's family is important, yet they're never seen together despite living nearby--is Aberforth even at the funeral that we hear?)
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. So Harry still has both the love and the pain. Hagrid, btw, is probably another good example of that type of thing. His mother left him when he was small, and he seems to seek to fill that hole she left through animals. But I think that the animals he chooses are supposed to be significant that way, not just because his mother, too, was kind of monstrous but because Hagrid's ideas about his animals are, well, pretty fucked up. In his way he's a bit like the Dursleys cooing over Dudley and defending everything he does even when he bites or squashes some kid by sitting on him. It's an idealized version of parent/child relations (or sibling relations with Grawp) and as such not a completely good thing. Harry, too, sort of has this problem since for all we're told about his capacity to love he's actually not that good dealing with people. Harry tends to have great waves of affection when people are pleasing him and feel very betrayed when they let him down--which makes sense since that has been his experience of love: you were perfect, and then you were gone.
Phew! That was a lot longer than I expected it to be. I just started babbling about families. The basic idea being that this is why it drives me crazy when any family gets made one-dimensional either way, because it seems like it really goes against canon to both say a family is just completely negative or to say a family--usually the Weasleys--is ideal. I honestly don't even know if JKR *could* write One Big Happy Anybody's Family, because she just seems too aware of how people, especially families, fuck each other up and hurt each other. It’s not just that Voldemort comes from a bad family and Harry from a good one, it’s that while Harry’s family was good and then gone, Voldemort’s was just always gone. (Which of course probably means he never bonded and a sociopath is an expected result, but anyway…)
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