sistermagpie | In which I'm again disappointed by JKR explanations

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In which I'm again disappointed by JKR explanations

So here's what JKR has recently said about Dumbledore, getting more into his sexuality:

"I had always seen Dumbledore as gay, but in a sense that's not a big deal. The book wasn't about Dumbledore being gay. It was just that from the outset obviously I knew he had this big, hidden secret, and that he flirted with the idea of exactly what Voldemort goes on to do, he flirted with the idea of racial domination, that he was going to subjugate the Muggles. So that was Dumbledore's big secret.

Why did he flirt with that?" she asks. "He's an innately good man, what would make him do that. I didn’t even think it through that way, it just seemed to come to me, I thought 'I know why he did it, he fell in love.' And whether they physically consummated this infatuation or not is not the issue. The issue is love. It's not about sex. So that's what I knew about Dumbledore. And it's relevant only in so much as he fell in love and was made an utter fool of by love. He lost his moral compass completely when he fell in love and I think subsequently became very mistrusting of his own judgment in those matters so became quite asexual. He led a celibate and bookish life."

Clearly some people didn't see it that way. How does she react to those who disagree with a homosexual character in a children's novel? "So what?" she retorts immediately "It is a very interesting question because I think homophobia is a fear of people loving, more than it is of the sexual act. There seems to be an innate distaste for the love involved, which I find absolutely extraordinary. There were people who thought, well why haven't we seen Dumbledore's angst about being gay?" Rowling is clearly amused by this and rightly so. "Where was that going to come in? And then the other thing was-and I had letters saying this-that, as a gay man, he would never be safe to teach in a school."

So this is how a lot of this doesn't fit with my own interpretation. EtA: It's been pointed out to me that this line caused some confusion--I'm not disagreeing with "He is a character that just happens to be gay" or that Rowling concurs with that idea. I'm saying I had a different interpretation of why he'd be attracted to Grindelwald's ideas based on what I read in canon. So I took out the last paragraph of the quote, which wasn't really needed.

As an aside, if Dumbledore is celibate and maybe never consummated his relationship with the evil Gellert, that actually *is* the point according to many people, because as many will explain, the problem isn't having "gay feelings." The problem isn't love. The problem is you're having sex with someone of your gender. If you don't "choose to sin" by actually having sex, you're not entering into that wicked "lifestyle" they don't like. Dumbledore's done just what a gay man is supposed to do according to many anti-gay opinions. It actually is about sex: a-sexual gay men are always more acceptable than sexual ones.

But the weirdest thing here to me is in the second paragraph, where Dumbledore is apparently an "innately good man" who only flirted with essentially *being a Nazi* because he became a "fool for love." This is bizarre to me because frankly, I don't have any trouble trying to figure out why Dumbledore would have flirted with taking over Muggles. This is a guy who's constantly manipulating everyone, thinks he's smarter than everyone else, treats them as pawns that are morally inferior to himself...why on earth would it be hard to imagine him deciding to dominate Muggles "for the greater good?" Of course he would think the answer was having the right people in charge.

But it's disappointing in a familiar way, the way that once again something that seems to be an inherent flaw in a character on the good side that totally mirrors the evil they're fighting, the author wants to make it the fault of the evil characters. Dumbledore's "love" says no more about him than Harry's Voldemort sliver. It takes the blame for unacceptable behavior. Suddenly Dumbledore's real racist tendencies (unlike Snape's) don't come down to his own desires or his own personality. He's acting unlike himself because he's been vaguely "made a fool by love." And love, as we know, is just some random thing that hits you like Cupid's arrow or the author's pen. It's not even presented as something you can analyze in terms of...well, why exactly did you find Hitler so attractive? Doesn't that say something about what calls to you? (Without even getting into the fact that this most poisonous loves is the one gay one.)

The author here seems to be saying that she needed or wanted Dumbledore to have flirted with all of this, but then needn't to figure out why he would do it. Rather than looking at the character and saying, "Ah, I can totally see how this guy would be attracted to this." Instead it "just came to her" that "he fell in love." It's about someone else, something beyond his control. It's about this other person. He "lost" his moral compass because he fell in love (which was beyond his control to begin with)--his compass never truly pointed to this.

Dumbledore himself even agrees! He becomes mistrustful not of his moral compass, not of his own abilities to know right from wrong. No, he becomes asexual, deducing that the problem is that he needs to keep himself pure from others so that he can always be sure he's relying on his own "innately good" moral sense. He's got more reason to keep secrets; he doesn't decide he maybe ought to keep other people around to make sure he's not going down the bad path again. Listening to other people can only be trouble.

Well done, Dumbledore! Way to be morally superior about your own past as a wannabe Nazi!

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Exactly! She's too insignificant to do real harm, even when she's sending birds to rip him apart. It looks superficially like it's to the woman's advantage, but it's based on the assumption that she's a trivial bit of fluff, even if she's a powerful witch.

Don't get me started on the awful way Lily treated her supposed friend Sev, though. Poor guy was given the bum's rush, then crushed, then made to feel eternally guilty. Lily the Saint just doesn't fly, except in a religion where knifing friends in the back is a good thing.

Thank you! She treated him simply awfully. There was not a glimpse of kindness from her anywhere in those flashbacks. And I remember, after I had first read OotP, how I went back to the Snape's worst memory scene, and read it over and over again looking for clues for a possible Snape/Lily friendship. Finally, I put the book away, satisfied that there was nothing in there that in any way hinted at friendship. She appeared much like somebody who would try to save a wounded rat from drowning in the sewer. Filled with contempt and disgusted, and very much aware that this thing was beneath her, but nevertheless doing it because it was right.

If it were my best friend, I would have been livid, not casually strolling up and and in an off-hand manner suggest that they release him.

I wonder if she suffers as the same problem as Ginny who's supposed to be coming across as "warm" and "compassionate" in the very book where she treats everyone like dirt--but is nice about Luna. Maybe the mere fact that they say nice things about losers they're totally superior than is supposed to be enough to show they're compassionate instead of just condescending?

And that is just plain disturbing, isn't it? For school girls, perhaps unsurprising though not inspired towards sympathy, but for an authorial view point not to grasp this... I can't help but wonder if JK's success and improved monetary situation did not change her for the worse.

Right, she just tried to stop them like any prefect ought to. There was nothing to suggest that they were friends, or that they knew each other since before Hogwarts. I don't know where the Snape/Lily shippers got their suspicions, but it couldn't have been from Snape's Worst Memory!

Some friend. Even hiding a smile at his predicament. I'd sure not have a friend if I acted that way when my friend needed help. Instead, of course, Snape tried to hang on. It's pretty clear that she just used him for information and because he was the only WW child she knew - as soon as she met others, he was done for in her book.

I'd say it was the same problem: the author thinking she's showing us something she isn't. Ginny's X-treme make-over made her a thug, not a princess. The more time we see Lily on-page, the worse she comes off. It isn't what you say, it's what you do and how you act. Words are just bandages to try and fix the cosmetics.

I think I need to get a kick out of hating where the series went. I can't believe half the stuff that ended up as canon. The saints are cruel and aloof and the sinners are the only ones really worth redemption. Our Hero should be sent to bed without dinner and tried for using Unforgivables, but instead he gets to run the entire law enforcement branch without training. Riiiiiight.

All that practice he got choosing what was easy over what was right, I guess.

Somebody quoted that line today and I just thougt wow, it's like the whole series was mostly about proving that you really don't have much hope of changing yourself or your life through choices, and that if it's easy, it's right.

What the scene came down to for me, after all those re-readings, was that Lily and Snape clearly had a problematic relationship based on a mutual but not particularly personal animosity. A history of insults and dislike as that between any muggleborn and aspiring Death Eater. But that Lily felt that this situation had gone too far and therefore decided to intervene. There was nothing to dislike about Lily's characterisation from that. But to find out that they were supposed to be best friends shines a whole new, repulsing light on that scene.

Lily/Snape shippers were already rampant at this point, hence my intrigue with the chapter :)

I had entirely forgotten about the smile! Repressed it, probably. What kind of friend does that? I would have been hurt and humiliated on a friend's behalf, amusement would have been the farthest thing from my mind. I do not understand what that reaction is supposed to show us at all. Imagine how Ron or Harry had taken if it had been Hermione!

Lily just came off as cold to me. I do not understand why she befriended him at all. She certainly was never any friend to him.

a boy who doesn't go out with the girl who wants him to go out with her, even though she's never said a word

She did. She asked him to Slughorn's party and he said yes, previously to the Lavender kissing.

I haven't been able to understand why Hermione inviting Ron to the Slug Party = commitment entitling her to attempt to rip his face off for dating another girl, while Harry inviting Luna = charity. Nobody thought Harry was cheating on Luna when he dived down Ginny's throat. Nor was Luna snogging and writing long love letters to another boy. The funny thing is, Harry's invite to Luna was actually nice and befitting a friend while Hermione was the one who acted like she was earning her Take A Loser to an Exclusive Party merit badge and that Ron owed her his eternal gratitude for stooping so low to ask him.

I just now got to this post after posting up above. Now that you've written the scene out, it's even worse than I remembered! So it's literally Hermione sending the birds after Ron and blubbering all over the place because she thinks she owns him and is enraged to find out she doesn't. Who does she think she is?

Yet we're expected to believe that Umbridge/Riddle Jr. is an innocent, helpless victim and Ron so much as looking cross-eyed in her general direction makes him Scott Peterson. Bull. Crap.

You know, I have this bizarre urge to write a Muggle-world AU where Dumbledore is a writer of his maiden children's novel series and Snape is his tortured editor.

Not as an actual insinuation about anything, because it's not like I even know either of the editor's name, but as a kind of an extension of exploring how Dumbledore's battle plans might have become a saner affair had he had at least one subordinate he actually trusted with his ingineous plans, and whose constructive opinion he could have an ear to listen to.

Which is odd, because somehow, when Unforgivable curses were first demonstrated to us in book 4, I really didn't get the impression that they were *easy*. But then, that was before Harry showed that he could do complex Imperius curses with no practice, or that the true hatred and rage to sustain a Cruciatus curse, which couldn't quite be found for the woman who murdered his friend and father figure, was easy to bring up for someone who was, you know, kind of nasty and rude to a teacher he'd liked but never particularly cared about.

I know a lot of people have a problem w/McGonagall's "gallant" response. I had assumed she was being slightly sarcastic -- like she wasn't going to really object or deal with it due to the impending battle, but she was going to subtly let him know that she *didn't* approve, or she thought it an overreaction. For one thing, the slight sarcasm seems more in line with her character than calling a student "gallant", no matter *what* action she was talking about. The other possibility is that I totally projected that response because she's one of the few characters I still really liked at that point of the series. Did anyone else see it the way I did?

The Calvinist connection with the predestined, "innately good" (or more common innately evil) characters in the book really didn't register with me until some things I read recently. I actually go to a church that comes from the Calvinist traditions. Her concepts of these is so very far away from anything we teach, or probably any other modern Calvinists, that I don't doubt it's an influence, but I really wonder how it got so screwed up in her brain. (And I'm guessing that by "tripped-out Calvinist", you mean that her version of Calvinism is tripped out, rather than Calvinism as a whole.)

Going on a religious tangent, I can't speak for all Calvinist churches, but in mine, we don't really speak of predestination or the elect. What comes across (and this, not often), is that people don't really choose, and definitely don't earn, their own salvation, but that it's purely due to the mercy of God. Yes, this brings up a wide variety of questions (some of which I'm currently struggling with). Yes, this suggests that some people will go to heaven and some won't -- the elect, so to speak. Or, apparently, Gryffindors. This does *not* mean that they're better people, or more moral, much less "innately good". They rather specifically *not* better people. In more bleak terms, they suck just as badly as everyone else does, and they aren't worthy of salvation (no one is). Somehow, after the Sorting Hat has served as God, here, it's an indication that they really are better, more worthy, and more good.

Harry would have stood around angsting over whatever was happening to Hermione; Ron would have yelled her name - at least according to DH. Harry had a "saving people thing", so in other circumstances, if he wasn't locked in a dungeon, he might have fought for Hermione. I doubt if either would have suppressed a smile. (If they did, I can just imagine what Hermione would've done to them - canaries would be the least of the choices)

I think Lily befriended Snape because he knew what it was she was. He had information she needed. She could control her magic at age nine or ten (floating from swing, animating flower), so she didn't understand accidental magic when it happened by Snape against Petunia. She censured him for the branch incident. She was in with him for reading Petunia's letters, but blamed him for it all. As the person who lived in that house, as Petunia's sister, it was up to her to stop any incursion into her sister's stuff, but she knew what was in the letter so she was in it to her eyeballs. But, it was Sev's fault. As for whatever Mulciber etc. did to Mary MacD, I doubt if it was nearly as bad as trying to kill her by werewolf, yet she didn't want to hear about St. James and St. Sirius being that bad. She had already chosen her friends by then, and it was the glorious Gryffindors, not her oldest friend in the WW. She got what she needed out of him, then tossed him aside. If you ask me, she'd have done well in Slytherin.

I did see McG's response as an impending battle response, but not as sarcasm. In another circumstance, I thought she might have given Harry a lecture, but with the whole Facing Death etc. in front of him, she gave him a break.

Of course, that's NOT McGonagall. That's some ringer author insertion, which I had begun to see more and more of during the course of DH. No character moved from what they had grown into in the previous books to something logical in DH. That was one reason I thought portions of DH, not just the epilogue, were written well in advance of all the subtleties, growth, life arcs, etc. that happened between PS/SS and DH. The characters all seemed to revert to tentative frameworks instead of fleshed-out personalities. The McG who called Harry "gallant" was, to me, more akin to the McG who said Dumbledore was too noble to use certain methods back in chapter one of PS/SS than to the McG who fought Aurors in OotP and Death Eaters in HBP.

Did anyone else think parts of DH were pre-written early on and not edited to conform to the new realities of the series?

Well, sometimes it's what you say. For instance, when someone in your immediate family brings home the person he's in love with, and you make it clear with your every word that you despise her, constantly calling her by a disgusting, extremely juvenile nickname, that's technically words. But it still says a *hell* of a lot about who you are as a person and your level of maturity and morality that you would do that.

And I agree for Lily as well, that she's supposed to be great, but everything we actually see contradicts that. As soon as Slughorn started talking about Lily in HBP, I knew she was intended to be the same type of girl that JKR clearly loves and most of us hated -- I commented at the time that she was probably going to be described as "spunky" next. I didn't think much of her intervention in the OotP flashback. She came of as better than the folks who were torturing some kid just because they didn't like him, but the driving force was obviously, "What's that Potter prick up to now?" (which in JKR's world is a form of flirting, anyway), rather than, "OMG, that's my best friend up there," or even, "This is wrong and why is no one stopping this?" I suppose in that case, the action was technically right, but not really right enough, you could say.

Antinomianism!

That's the actual doctrine, not Calvinism. In Antinomianism (Wikipedia article - missing citations and footnotes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomianism), the Elect don't have to obey laws meant for lesser people. Since they are Elect and therefore predestined to go to Heaven, they have carte blanche to do as they please. This can be conflated with a Calvin tenet, wherein someone is predetermined to be saved. However, the writings of Jonathan Edwards (difficult to get through, his religious ecstasy is so voluable!) show that a person who is predestined toward salvation actually wants to do what's right.

This doctrine can also be applied to political rather than religious causes: breaking the law for the "greater good", as in releasing other people's animals, trespassing to chain oneself to trees, etc. Even a revolution could be seen as in a way being Antinomian, in that the revolutionaries are definitely and deliberately breaking the laws of their country in order to change the regime and/or current laws.

In HP, this comes across when Harry uses Unforgivables without any repercussions of either conscience or law, and when he continually breaks school rules with little to no punishment and the apparent encouragement by authority when Dumbledore gives him the method of sneaking around undetected. This is the Elect breaking rules because they're Elect anyway and already guaranteed the goodies at the end, not a true Calvinist approach to humility and duty and self-examination.

As I said above, with the flashback scene, Lily clearly demonstrated herself to be better than the jerks who were torturing some kid because they didn't like him. But not that much. Her motivation obviously seemed to be "What's that Potter prick up to now?" (which in JKR's world is a form of flirting, anyway), rather than, "OMG, that's my best friend up there," or even, "This is wrong and why is no one stopping this?"

And yes, it's only in the very earliest scenes of their "friendship" that she comes across as at all *friendly*. Not that Severus is doing a great job, but it's obviously up to him to bend every step of the way -- including not being friends with any of his own housemates. Because he's a Slytherin, she might still be willing to call him a friend (in the most condescending way possible), but basically only if she's his *only* friend, or if she gets approval or veto power over any other friend he may want to have.

Well, sometimes it's what you say.

But then, you have the whole dynamic of history behind you and the person making the snide comments about the GF. It's the level of knowing someone, I suppose. We don't know the characters in HP except what is shown to us on the page. Any grand speech by any one of them will be contradicted by things the author shows us. I guess I need to qualify that words are just there for the author to try and patch up what she's shown us. It falls flat to me.

And I agree for Lily as well, that she's supposed to be great, but everything we actually see contradicts that.

The words people use to describe her - yeah, "spunky" does come to mind, along with "pert" and "sassy", or as Slughorn fondly recalls, "cheeky". What we're shown is a different sort of flower, more like a weed that won't go away. Sure, she did a good thing in protecting her child, but what mother wouldn't? It was the way she treated her sister and her friend that turned me off of her, as well as the way she used James's torturing of Snape to flirt with the torturer in OotP. That one incident started me on the sour taste for St. Lily. Until then, I was ready to believe in a really good person who was still human. I've known people like that and enjoyed their company. I couldn't enjoy Lily's, she'd be too full of her plots and plans for my taste. Oh, yeah, and her own greatness. Could control magic even before Hogwarts. What a pain!

...only if she's his *only* friend, or if she gets approval or veto power over any other friend he may want to have.

Oy, you're right. Rowling does love those manipulative sorts, doesn't she?

I could definitely imagine her being sarcastic about it, myself, but even if she is being sarcastic she's shut down anyway--as often happens with McGonagall. Because she says it's gallant but is really going on to say that it was bad because it was stupid. I forget what she says exactly, but it's something like "Do you realize..." and he says "Yeah, I do." And that shuts the woman up. Hero saving the world here, don't presume to teach him anything about ethics or good battle strategy. (Even though McGonagall's not the one who's been sitting on her butt for 9 months.)

I think what you're saying about UVs is true--I wasn't so bothered by Harry's Crucio, but I think peoples' objections to it are totally true--it's more like I just gave up by that point. It's another instance of magic just changing to suit whatever storyline's going on. If Harry had never used a UV I've no doubt that would be considered proof of his goodness. It's just that when he uses it it has to be reimagined as something that's cool. That's why I always find JKR's "he's never been a saint" funny, because she *is* setting him up as a saint--or as a Christ figure, at least. Usually saints have to live up to the title. (That is, when the title is being used the way it is here--I'm sure at least some actual saints could be jerks when they got impatient with people for not listening to God's word, but that's a different thing.)

Edited 2008-03-12 14:02 (UTC)

The thing about any Calvinist ideas in this series is that there's no God. I mean, not mentioned by anyone. So the whole thing falls apart. It *feels* like we've got an Elect here, certainly, but the only God is the author. So it's totally backwards, as I see it. Instead of exactly what you said, where nobody's worthy but some people will be given grace and some won't, God's taken out of the equation and it just becomes that some people will be born inherently good and some will obviously be inherently bad. The only grace comes from the author to the characters, outside of canon, if that makes sense. Within canon there is no grace--Harry doesn't need grace. He's just awesome. Grace (in the form of Harry or Lily saving them or reaching out to them in some way) doesn't help Snape or Draco or even Dudley much.

Ooh, new word. :-)

Yeah, I can see that. Of course, if you take the same Calvinist, predestination starting point, you can apply it the other way, too. The elect are going to heaven, no matter what, so they have carte blanche to do whatever they want. Obvious corollary: the non-elect are not going to heaven, no matter what, so they may as well do whatever they want. Good idea.

I can see it going with the political causes, too, though then you get into the difficult question of where you draw the line between peaceful civil disobedience to take a stand for equal human rights, and breaking into labs to "save" all the cute little animals (and doing thousands of dollars worth of damage, frequently harming the animals they're saving, etc) or calling death threats on abortion doctors.

I remember reading an HP-fic several books ago where Snape commented on his strict no-exception policy to the rules, and his hatred of exceptions being made for Harry, for exactly this reason. If we say it's okay for one student to break the rules, even for good reasons, then any student can decide that he, too, is above the rules, or knows better than the rules. And then why have rules?

As far as this applying to HP (the character, as well as the books), I completely agree. Harry does whatever he wants without repercussions. Or worse, the minimal repercussions are either overruled or else seen as just so incredibly unfair. In the first couple books, this makes sense more often than not, and is usually pretty reasonable. There should have been worse punishment for the flying car, but otherwise, they're generally blamed for their screw-ups, like being out past curfew, and genuinely feel bad, or else they really are trying to save the world. Which, you know, is necessary for the structure of the books, even if in most cases, they would have been far better off to either tell McG what they knew (ie, about the basilisk in CS) or stay the hell out of it (like in PS, where Quirrell wouldn't have been able to succeed if Harry hadn't shown up at the end).

In the later books, the divorce from (or perceived unreasonableness of) consequences gets worse and worse. I *despised* Umbridge -- she was by far JKR's best-written villain, and seriously made me want to throw the book across the room. That said, if I were head of a school where, at the end of an intramural sports match, two members of (the winning) team responded to childish taunts by together beating the shit out of one of their opponents, only stopping when physically forced to, I'd have expelled them both. If that weren't possible, I'd have seen to it that they never played another Quidditch match or were involved in any other extra-curricular activity as long as they were at the school, their team would have forfeited the match (and possibly had their season halted), and their house points would have dropped to 0. Yet the Quidditch ban *alone* was considered OMG so unfair!!

It got even worse the next year, when Harry nearly *murdered* one of his classmates. For about 30 seconds there, Harry actually showed some terror at his own actions and remorse, and I truly thought that was it, we were finally going to see some real moral development in this kid. Yeah, right. As soon as Snape shows up, all that disappears (which is also part of another rant). He just cares about protecting his precious book, and once-a-week detentions, near the end of the school year, are considered just outrageous punishment, because it means he also has to miss a Quidditch match. (Add to rant accompanying, even worse, Ginny-Hermione scene.)

I wonder if any of this separation of Harry's actions from his presented morality has anything to do with the early Fundamentalist reaction to the HP books. From the start, the Fundies were against it on ridiculous charges that they were turning kids to witchcraft (which are still going on in some circles, BTW), but that clearly wasn't convincing enough people who are, you know, sane, so they started pulling in all this other crap about the morality of the series. In one top anti-HP book, the author only analyzed book 1; among his charges were that the books presented a stance that there is no right or wrong, only power (IOW, presenting the major villain's words as a moral of the story) and teaching kids to lie, because of the bit in the same scene where Harry resolves to lie to Quirrellmort about what he sees, in order to directly prevent him from becoming immortal and taking over the world. Ludicrous charges -- at the time. But I wonder if JKR's reaction to that was to determinedly insist that Harry was the *good* guy, fighting for *right*, so what he did was okay and moral -- and then subconsciously take that much farther than she otherwise might have.

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Page 9 of 14

In which I'm again disappointed by JKR explanations

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Wandering freely away from the topic at hand

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Part I, because I am verbose

Part II