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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to the parent she has left the only way she can—through his newspaper rather than himself—since for all we know he's withdrawn into that and left Luna coping with the loss of her mother on her own.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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I think you're dead right -- there are no genuinely happy families in the Potterverse. And maybe the most puzzling thing about that is how it squares with the "love" theme. Why does JKR go on and on about Lily's love, when she's also so busy subverting Harry's initial idolization of his parents and his infatuation with the smothering love of Molly Weasley? Why is the sacrifice of Barty's mother one of the most genuinely tragic stories in the book, when the male Crouches themselves are so worthless and unworthy of it? What's the point of love when it creates family relationships that turn poisonous, or smothering, or into a mockery?
It's possible to read this as deliberate sentimentality -- families are a mess, but at least people are trying to show love. Or, just the opposite, to read it as deliberate irony -- for all the hype it gets, love is a pretty futile thing. Or else again, as a clear-eyed meditation on the contradictions of the world -- people do fall in love, and do, also, consistently mess up the people they are closest to, and both things are just part of the way things are.
I can't decide which of these JKR may intend. I'd like to believe she's just taking an honest measure of human nature, in all its messy contradiction, but she really does seem to privilege love: Harry's capacity for it as well as Lily's sacrifice. And she really does seem to have a soft spot for the Weasleys, despite the mercilessness of some of ther characterizations.
Bad faith on the author's part? Or is there a better explanation?
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Can Harry ever show that impressive a capacity for love? Because that would seem to suggest he would be able to find love for Snape, Voldemort and Draco--people like that. Or else all he'll have to do there is forgive them and it will be his great love for his loved ones which isn't really that impressive of a thing. Most people in canon do that. Draco seems to have plenty of capacity to love his loved ones. What's special about Harry?
I wonder if it's tied to the Slytherin "problem" being that they choose to save their skins, as contrasted to the Gryffindor recklessness in running in to sacrifice themselves. I hope that's not supposed to be the big thing there, because I don't really think that's love and I'd hate to think that that kind of thing will be that important, especially since it seems like Slytherins are quite capable of love and sometimes effect me more than the good guys on that score.
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*nods vigorously* That seems to be the only aspect of love left intact once JKR has done her number on its other manifestations. I mean, I'm connecting to your post about family by treating it as one case in a general puzzle -- just as she dismantles the idea that love = happy families, she ridicules the idea that love = romance in HBP; she makes it part of an ugly manipulation plot in the Merope story; she subverts the idea that love is ennobling by making it Narcissa's and Draco's leading motive in their murder plot. And of course, there's Dumbledore on how Harry is "unique" because he's preserved his capacity for love -- so now he can go kill Voldemort! (I keep harping on that particular bit of cognitive dissonance . . . )
So yeah, love as self-sacrifice -- pretty grim and joyless on its face. And what's worse, even that kind of love is not consistently redemptive. It's supposed to be in Harry's case, I guess, but it clearly isn't in the Crouch or Riddle cases. And yet: love, love, love is all you need. It doesn't hang together.
I saw your comment on another post that I skimmed yesterday (and that I'm too lazy to look up now and double check!) where the poster talked about how JKR really doesn't have any master plan or scheme, that she doesn't really do world-building, she just invents characters and makes up the context as she goes along. I think your point (or maybe you were replying to someone else's point?) had to do with how certain tricks drew the reader in effectively, and maybe that was all she was trying to do.
And I wonder if that's the answer to our love-family puzzle. The parts don't make sense together because she hasn't bothered to make them coherent. They're just part of a mixed bag of rhetorical tricks for getting the reader involved in the story. So we hear that love conquers all because it's fun to believe in and it draws in the sentimental side of readers. And then we see complicated and messy families because we can all connect with that. And the highest purpose is just to have a fun, engaging read, moment to moment, not to have all the separate themes add up to say anything complex or coherent or serious.
Now, as some posters on that other thread pointed out, it would take a terrible snob and prude, I'm sure, to not enjoy the fun parts of the books because they don't aspire to be anything more than entertainment. :) But this may connect with one of our old conversations about serious vs. "genre" literature -- in "genre" literature the author uses his/her rhetorical tricks to engage and stimulate and divert the reader without any responsibility for larger thematic significance, or even coherence. While a "serious" writer might start with the same tricks, but would try to work from those moments of engagement to build up themes that cohered despite their complexity, and that maybe added up to some genuinely startling or powerful insight.
*facepalms* Why do I always end up with the same issues? For some of us obsessives, indeed, everything means another spanking!
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Part I
In fact, for me the parts that seem the least honest are the parts where she tries to have anyone speak about love. It's not that she can't write people loving each other. She can, and all these families prove it. It's just when she tries to reach some sort of Greater Love (for lack of a better word) I don't think it's really there. And that's mirrored in fandom discussions, imo. I've recently been reading a lot of things about what should happen to Snape, etc., and some people assume that the "love" thing means that Harry and Snape will have to reconcile (as Harry and Draco will, imo), and others are very against that because Snape must be punished as JKR's characters are.
It just occurs to me that you'd think at this point, one book away from the end of a 7 book series, that the "love" people should have more evidence for their side, or have more of an idea of how it will work not just in terms of telegraphing ideas but in seeing it actually played out. Instead it's more they (we) are reacting to stuff that characters have said and what we think that must mean. But there's very few examples in the books of anyone really having the sort of love or compassion we assume must be coming into play. Is it just that Harry hasn't developed it yet? But shouldn't he know people who have, or have had some glimpses of it? Instead this kind of love often seems attached to naivite-DD's plans for Snape and Sirius going wrong, for instance. Or his weird speech about wanting to give Harry house cups and not tell him about the prophecy. DD tries to talk about universal compassion, but even he doesn't seem to really have it.His speech claiming responsibility for a lot of what went wrong in OotP is actually a big explanation of how other people failed to live up to the chance he gave them. Not all compassion seems to come naturally to JKR. (By god, the woman thinks Ginny is compassionate and that says it all!)
The best example of the idea being dramatized for me is, ironically, Draco's story, but we don't even know where that will go. We've got two examples of boys sparing another's life. Draco is the villain, but his set up seems more connected to compassion--compassion he's tried to repress--and even so his scene is easily read as cowardice by many. The other is Harry sparing Peter, but it's so different a scene it just doesn't seem to get into quite the same issues. Plus it's even got that pesky life debt (like James and Snape) which also kind of makes it something else. Would DD have owed a life debt to Draco had he lived? Of course not, because the life debt depends on the other person deserving to die. The extra reward undercuts the compassionate ideal.
So I can understand why there's many people who feel no compassion for many characters and don't think Harry really should either, because those feelings are far more dramatized in the text while the "love stuff" seems just tacked on as a non-sequitor. As are many of the lessons in the books, imo. Harry rarely if ever has to choose between what is right and what is easy, and his choice of Gryffindor doesn't say much about his character at all.
From:
Part II
(Hagrid is another place where she seems to want to show love and Hagrid has lots of Harry's same limitations in that area. He loves his pets and doesn't see them as they really are--and that includes his brother.)
So yeah, like I was trying to suggest in my comment to that other post I think we are seeing a worldview here, it's just that its tied together not by internal coherence or consistency but by being all from one person. Most people probably really don't think through their beliefs or emotional reactions to things and wind up being inconsistent and hypocritical-we all do it. Often that's the defense, that the characters are "human" because they do that, only in the end what will that mean? Because usually the characters who are "human" are those people like. No such leniency is given to characters people don't like. And while it's fine for all the heroes to remain flawed, if they are flawed they don't really have any business being role models or teaching us lessons, and despite what people say there obviously are places where they're supposed to be teaching us lessons. It's a coming of age novel and Harry can only become the best adult the author can imagine, which reminds me of what you said once about Stephen King, how ultimately the author's ideas can make a difference between genre and serious literature. Does the author have ideas that will lift the series onto another level or will it just remain engaging and fun but not inspiring? It's like the ceiling in the Great Hall--it could have had just a high carved ceiling, but instead it's a ceiling that is the sky full of stars. The books themselves may stay firmly under a carved ceiling.
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All right. I buy that! :) Let me modify the argument just a little, then -- it's not so much that issues aren't felt, as that they aren't fully examined. The raw emotions and family dynamics, etc., are presented to the reader as discrete chunks of experience, and yes, they feel authentic, and yes, that takes some significant artistry on JKR's part. But I still think there's a difference between, on the one hand, sketching a character or a set of family members, however skillfully, to produce a familiar and recognizable emotional effect, and on the other hand shaping the material as a whole into something unified and meaningful, something that feels like it's been thought about with some rigor and some critical perspective.
You suggest, in part, that what ties together a series of disparate attitudes and effects is that they reflect ordinary experience, the unity of a single viewer looking at life in all its contradictions. I completely agree that actual experience is like that. And again, conveying how that feels, making it vivid and compelling, is no mean trick. JKR's families feel like families, and that part's brilliant.
But is that all that a story can or should do? And what criteria do we use for deciding how much to expect? I mean, honesty is important, but traditionally "art" has a selective and shaping component, that some people might see as idealizing, but that you could also think of as just making issues clearer and more rigorous so that they're easier to think hard about.
I think it's clear that JKR wants, at least part of the time, to do more than depict an ordinary muddle of lived experience -- she wants to provide a shape, a message, for her epic as a whole. As you point out, her tone rings false precisely when she's trying to do this most crudely, with her ex cathedra statements about love and sacrifice and various other virtues. She's more effective when she just juxtaposes ideals and examples, the way she does when she contrasts Harry's hunger for a happy family with the reality of the Weasleys, or with the evidence that refutes his imagined version of James. In both cases, she's clearly trying to make her examples say something, to give them their proper place as part of an over-arching message.
So I think it's certainly fair, it's not necessarily crabbed or petty (as some on that other post suggested) to consider whether she does this well or not. The books are often brilliantly funny, there is great character observation, and reading them is a lot of fun. I have no complaints about the money I spent on them! But if you are reading something that looks like a Bildungsroman, it's reasonable to expect a compelling vision of maturity, a wise and judicious sense of what components make up an integrated personality. And if you're reading a Quest novel, it's reasonable to expect the author to have a notion of what significant inner transformations happen along the way to the goal. You want something more than a muddle of sentiment and partial insight.
If you don't have that, then it's a plain old adventure story, with maybe a few bromidical life-lessons thrown in along the way. Not that there's anything wrong with adventure stories! But it's reasonable for a reader to adopt generic expectations, to expect a starry vs. a carved ceiling, as you put it, based on generic clues. If you've got Dark Forces! Ancient Magic! contrasting Archetypical Orphans! Good and Evil fighting to the death! not to mention, um, seven volumes of the stuff, then you expect a little more rigorous intention, a little more hard-earned insight, than you might look for in, say, The Adventure of Pirate Cove.
Examples. Um, yes. Gotta run! Seriously, I really do want to climb down from this level of abstraction and talk about some of your points about specific characters. Must. Return. Later.
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But I still think there's a difference between, on the one hand, sketching a character or a set of family members, however skillfully, to produce a familiar and recognizable emotional effect, and on the other hand shaping the material as a whole into something unified and meaningful, something that feels like it's been thought about with some rigor and some critical perspective....I mean, honesty is important, but traditionally "art" has a selective and shaping component, that some people might see as idealizing, but that you could also think of as just making issues clearer and more rigorous so that they're easier to think hard about....But if you are reading something that looks like a Bildungsroman, it's reasonable to expect a compelling vision of maturity, a wise and judicious sense of what components make up an integrated personality.
I think I just quoted the whole thing.:-) But yeah, I do think this is definitely the distinction and that to me it feels like this is something the books avoid. But I won't say anything more to this so you can continue!
And
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Well, of course it's gone wrong. They keep the door locked. The wizarding world runs on fear, not love. Whatever love there is has seeped in around the edges. And it isn't enough.
I really have begun to wonder whether an intrinsic part of Harry's "Heroic task" is to open the bloody door.
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It's been great to read such a thoughtful and perceptive post and discussion. Admiration!