sistermagpie | Whatever Happened to Baby Draco?

Okay, I think I'm ready to talk about Draco, why I still love him after OotP, why I've always loved him, what he stands for for me, all of that. I also hit upon a relationship that sort of reminded me of him and Harry. If you've seen "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"...Jane seems a little like Draco to me, to Harry's Blanche.

If you haven't seen the movie, it concerns two sisters. One was a child vaudeville star, the other an early movie star. Baby Jane, the vaudeville one, was the biggest brat in the world. Blanche was the sweet one. As adults the tables were turned and Blanche was the star, Baby Jane became a grotesque version of her child self, never maturing, completely emotionally arrested. When they're both in their 50's Blanche, still sweet as ever, takes care of Jane even though she's often childishly cruel--that's when the movie takes place.

Late in the story makes a big revelation that one would would expect would enrage Jane, who is so easily enraged. Instead she just blinks at Blanche and says sadly, "You mean all this time we could have been friends?" See Jane, as grotesque and monsterous as she was, really had remained...pure. What's scary about Jane is that she has no idea how scary she is. She thinks she's a kid.

The situations are not completely parallel at all but often I really could imagine Draco's final line being something like, "You mean all this time, we could have been friends?" I think that's why the slash vibe is so strong no matter what happens. Draco does want to be friends, obviously. His strength, to me, has never been his power but in his innocence. As angry as he gets at Harry it's an innocent's anger. One who's never seen a death or a crucio, who runs away at the sight of Voldemort. If he did see these things he might still not understand them on an adult level. Some people like to think of children as being exceptionally "good" and later corrupted by life, others think of them as more cruel than adults and believe they need to learn to repent or something as they grow. I disagree with both. Children are just...still learning. They expect things to be fair, that things will turn out okay, that the foundations of their world is secure. Their world is more sure and simplistic. I see this a lot in Draco. At 15 he seems much younger than that. Harry's view of their relationship is that Harry didn't like Draco straight off for good reason, he rejected him, and Draco has gone after him ever since with no provocation. Harry doesn't do anything to Draco, yet Draco continues to attack him.

In Draco's mind, though, I think Harry has done a lot to him. Even he would have gotten tired of all this by now if it weren't so, imo. With every move he makes Harry tells Draco he's nothing. In fact Harry does think Draco is nothing. Harry is wrong. Draco isn't nothing. I think he has gifts of his own, very different from Harry's, which are very valuable. In fact, they would probably have won him some friends at a regular school, or in a school without Harry. I think they make him genuinely popular with Slytherin here in their darkest days.

When Harry sees his father in the pensieve he's horrified at his arrogance before he actually does anything to Snape. It's just there in his every move: the way he ruffles his hair, the way he let's Peter worship him, the way he sees the girls looking at him. This, I think, is not completely unlike how Harry comes across to others. We are in Harry's pov in this book and other students barely make his radar. He's uninterested in working on his relationship with Seamus, who until now has seemed around his equal. When they have a disagreement Harry quickly throws down an ultimatum and then Seamus is dead to him until he comes slinking into a DA meeting, ready to join Harry's ranks. Then there's Ron. As I had feared, all the tension between Harry and Ron from GoF has disappeared leaving us with more mature Ron who's always happy with less--he's Stepford Ron. Harry does expect to make prefect because he's Harry Potter (though he manages to pretend to be happy for Ron using an imaginary Draco as a guide for how not to be). I got the sense of everyone (meaning everyone not Slytherin) slightly bowing to Harry throughout this book, bowing in apology, in politeness, in respect. Harry is ever more furious with those in the WW who don't. It's almost comical how self-absorbed Harry is at times. He misses mentions of himself in the paper not because he didn't look in the paper but because what do you mean he's on page 6??? He spends 5 years in what seems to be a small class and only now finds out that the weedy looking boy's name is Theodore Nott--quite a feat.

When you're a kid for whom things rarely go right, who fails more than you succeed, who has to struggle to be noticed yes, I think this is going to fill you with jealousy. Every unconciously arrogant gesture from Harry becomes, imo, an insult to Draco. Draco watches Harry incessently. Surely he sees how everyone follows Harry's orders, pays careful attention to his moods, always asks how he is, how even the teachers pay attention to him, how every year he manages to discover some new super power he didn't know he had that gains him more attention, more drama. More pain too, perhaps, but even his pain is special and how many people wouldn't eagerly undergo some pain in order to be Somebody? Harry may say he wants to be ordinary but it was all too clear in this book that is no longer true. I think Harry's idea of being ordinary is just as romanticized as Ron's idea of being special is.

Draco often just expresses openly a resentment that's always bubbling under the surface of most WW kids, erupting openly in GoF and OotP when the kids have valid "reasons" for expressing hostility towards this kid they can't help but be in awe of, however grudgingly. Draco's Potter Stinks buttons may have supposedly been about Cedric Diggory, but I think most kids wore them as more than that. These kids have grown up learning about Harry as their Savior. If Voldemort's back he's their Savior again. Nobody wants to owe a life debt to anyone--just ask Snape. The school's not provided any other form of defense against Voldemort. You're loyal to Harry or nothing.

I've heard people say the problem with Draco in OotP is that he's no longer Harry's equal--but he never has been Harry's equal. Even at Quidditch, the one place he competes closely, Draco wasn't the youngest player ever, he wasn't born knowing how to fly, he hasn't won every Quidditch cup he played in. Draco's real talents are nothing like Harry's--he's curious and energetic and above all, creative in ways Harry is not. Unfortunately all those talents are completely dismissed in this world and we only see them in their darker, twisted form: Draco imitating Harry and his friends, Draco making up stories about Harry. We do hear about Draco making up adventure stories back in first year, but even there it's given as proof that he's a loser, which is funny because in my book the kid who makes up stories, no matter how outlandish they are when he's 11, is the kid to encourage. Draco's instinct is to entertain, to please. He seems to genuinely make his friends laugh in this book, while Harry's are usually walking on eggshells.

When I picture Draco as a kid, given his personality, I think he was usually alone. He hates being ignored; probably a good portion of his scenes center on trying to get attention. In CoS he's frustrated at his dad not letting him in on what's going on, in GoF he's sent into the forest. Draco pretends to know more than he does (and uses the little he does know for more attention). He's always playing a role, usually one he can't back up with action. (Even as a member of the Inquisitor Squad he's hardly out there getting himself hexed.) I picture him as the kind of kid that if you went to his house to play he'd already have some elaborate fantasy game planned, complete with costumes, and you'd be sucked into it before you knew it. He probably had millions of imaginary friends to keep him company. Of course his father's stories of Malfoy pride figured into that fantasy world--he was a little prince isolated from the masses beneath him instead of a lonely child who had trouble making friends. Faced with real people he adopts a role; in the robe shop I've no doubt Draco was imitating his father. I think most of the things he says about himself are half-truths at best--that his father wanted him at Durmstrang but Mummy needed him close, that he has the O.W.L. people over to dinner, that he can get his parents to buy him everything he wants. For many kids, though, an imagination like that, an ability to create a world in his head where he was adored, that would be his salvation. People might be drawn to the stories he spun and how fully he inhabited them (this is what ART is). That ability seems curiously undervalued in this world, though many slash writers pick up on it and make Draco an artist of some kind. It's ironic because in our world imagination is where the real magic is-it's what HP really came from. Draco's a sad kid with a huge disconnect between who he wants to be and who he is.

But that is not entirely his fault. It drives me crazy the way Dumbledore & Co. spend so much time preparing to fight Voldemort by creating the Order and shaping Harry while they ignore the most powerful weapon at their disposal: They're a school. Education is the best weapon against racism there is! They've got these kids for most of the year from ages 11-18, why not be truthful with them? Try to show the Slytherins the way the world really is? Because they really don't seem to know. What they do know is that they are paraiahs at the school and their families are threatened, so I can see why Draco's popular in his house. He's the master at re-inventing himself as the victor rather than accepting the truth of defeat. There again Draco is a powerful weapon the school completely ignores. He's not a weapon like Harry who kills dragons and whatever else stands in his way. He's a creative force full of passion who appears to be one of very few bright lights in Slytherin house. He's even avoided the ugly stick so far. And he's dying to play a big part.

Is Draco ready for that? No, probably not yet. Left to languish so long he's still very much a child, twisted and completely innocent of the real things at stake here. He can't yet be trusted with much. But he could learn. There are people he cares about, just as Harry does. Harry may have started off this book in a cupboard but Dumbledore reveals here flat out that his power comes from having been loved so much. He still is loved. While Draco tries so hard to be closer to his father and possibly Snape Harry has picked up parental figures by the bushel: Dumbledore, Remus, Sirius, Snape (a protector, even if it's a reluctant one), Hagrid, the Order, the Weasleys, McGonnogal, the ghosts of his parents. Even the Dursleys have been revealed to have some loving feelings concerning him through Lily. Hermione often acts like a mother as well. Harry has all these people concerned with him yet still rages in OotP that Dumbledore's treating him like a plain old headmaster would (and yes, of course Harry has good reason to expect more from Dumbledore). Umbridge has to get rid of no less than 3 people before Harry feels cut off at Hogwarts, and even then he's got Snape if he could swallow his own pride and go to him. Most students probably feel cut off all the time!

If the uplifting point is that Voldemort and his minions can't stand up to Harry the love child, what is that saying exactly? Because it seems rather smug. Does Harry have this love because he deserved it as a baby more than Tom or Draco? Was his parents' love more pure than the Riddles' or Lucius' and Narcissa's? That seems pretty damn fatalistic. I was reading a Nero Wolfe book today and Wolfe says, regarding culture that it's like money because it "comes easiest to those who need it least." Could not the same be said of love in this universe? I can't help but think Draco would have wet himself with joy if Snape wanted to give him secret Occlimancy lessons. With Harry it's just another burden, uninteresting as a subject and no great honor.

I guess that's part of why I feel like Harry's hatred of Draco is so unhealthy. Draco still seems like Harry's shadow (in a Jungian sense) to me. (He is the parts of Harry that he most represses and therefore repulses him. No one can have self-awareness unless they confront and accept their Shadow.) I have a cousin who's husband once played a rather mean joke by telling her that Harry in the books is really just an abused child who's imagining he's a wizard to deal with his abuse. She was horrified of course and that isn't true, but still I feel like if Harry was imagining this whole story in the end we'd find out his real self was more like Draco, who in the story appears as the boy who deserves to be despised and abused, who pushes people away, who fails at everything, who has parents, yes, but parents nobody would want. The boy Harry cuts himself off from the first day and continues to beat off with a stick whenever he comes around. When Draco loses his father, it's simple justice. But Draco, bless him, will not be put off. You can't run away from your shadow. Yes, the one thing Harry wants everyone in the WW to know is that he's not Draco and therefore will not be Voldemort. Unfortunately, I'm not so sure about either.

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Date: 2003-06-27 02:43 pm (UTC)

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