Harry’s Memory of his Parents’ Death

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

How Harry maybe wasn’t a sociopathic infant

I think it was Mary_j_59 who pointed out that Riddle’s memories of Godric’s Hollow, if accurate, paint a remarkably disturbing picture of infant Harry. We’re told that when Tom approached the crib after killing a screaming Lily in front of her son, the boy looked up at him with “bright interest,” only starting to cry when he identified that Tom was a (scary-looking) stranger.

Yet any normal child, hearing his father shout in fear and then his mother start screaming, would have started screaming his lungs out too, in empathy with them. What sort of monstrous baby would not get even slightly upset at hearing his mother screaming and begging for mercy, followed by her falling down?




Well, one who didn’t hear it.

Once we accept the possibility that Harry’s eventual memories of high-pitched laughter and screaming might have come from Riddle’s soul-fragment, not Harry’s own subconscious, a very simple piece of magical technology might make sense of Harry’s reaction.

Consider how often parents of infants spend a sleepless night because something accidentally wakes the baby, and then they can’t get hir to settle again.

We know at least one muffling charm in the WW. It’s even one-way; the persons inside can hear perfectly what those outside are saying, just not vice-versa. If someone invented a crib with a one-way muffling charm on it, so the parents could hear if the baby cried but the baby wouldn’t be disturbed by noises from outside the crib…. Well, wouldn’t you buy it? Never again having to worry that every time you had a fight, or a loud bout of lovemaking, or a raucous party, or just knocked over something, you might wake the baby?

And such a charm would have to be set on the crib itself, not on, say, the baby’s whole bedroom, because if there were an emergency, a fire, or as it might be, a death eater attack, while one or both parents were in the bedroom with the baby, the parents would want to hear the alarm.

If that were the case… then if Lily had already put Harry in his crib when Tom broke down the door, Harry would have heard nothing. The crash of the door, his father’s shouts, his mother’s screams, her frantic scrabbling to barricade the door when she realizes she doesn’t have her wand—none of it. If he had shut his eyes after mummy’s nighty-night kiss or was playing with something, he might not have registered anything at all until Lily heard Voldemort at the nursery door and rushed over to the crib to pick Harry up. At which point he’d have had, perhaps, a bare moment to register the distress and fear on her face and in her body before she realized there was no way to flee and dropped him back “into the crib behind her and threw her arms wide.” In other words, she has her back to Harry, who promptly pulls himself up on the bars of the crib to watch. He can’t see her face, and he can’t hear her voice.

And then there’s a flash of pretty light and Mummy falls down. And then the man in the cloak comes over, and Harry sees it’s not Daddy who’s pointing his wand at him, or Unca Siri, or anyone he knows —and finally starts to cry in fear.

And then there’s another flash of light, and his head hurts, and the building falls down.

And that would make sense of why, when Harry lay in bed at 4 Privet straining his memory trying to remember the car crash that killed his parents, nothing would come but a soundless flash of green light and the pain. He hadn’t registered anything significant happening until that moment.

Comments

A RL Similar Situation

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

This is ingenious, but it's not realistic. I'm basing on my opinion on a similar experience I had when I was a little older than Harry. Although it was 50 years ago, I still remember it very clearly.

When I was about 2 1/2, my mother and I went up to the attic of our house one day during the summer. It was a hot day, with no air conditioning, and she wanted to open the attic windows to let the heat out, assuming that would make the main house cooler. I was playing on the floor while she did this. One of the windows stuck, and in trying to push it up, she shoved her hand through the window and cut her wrist. I remember the sound of the glass breaking and her scream, both of which caused me to look up at her. She grabbed her wrist with the other hand and tried to hustle me downstairs. I didn't want to go because I was content playing on the floor and didn't realize there was anything seriously wrong. I remember her blood dripping and her starting to panic (her normal reaction to any crisis) as she tried to get me moving. She finally got me up and downstairs. Then there's a memory lapse until the ambulance arrived, and she was taken away. I had to be held by a neighbor because I was screaming and crying and wanted to go with Mommy. (She healed completely and is still in good health at 87.)

The reason I bring this up is because when I remember this event, the thing that is most vivid for me is the fear and panic of my mother. Once it sank in that there was something really bad happening to Mommy, I freaked out. I can still feel the echoes of that terror as I write this half a century later.

However, it took me some time--probably a minute or two--for me to realize there was anything wrong, and I would have been about twice Harry's age at the time of this incident. Very young children just are not very perceptive when it comes to emergencies. The things that seem obvious signs of a serious problem to an older child or adult--breaking glass, a scream, dripping blood, Mommy's distress--don't register as a big deal to babies and toddlers. They just don't have enough life experience to know what constitutes danger at that age, and their instincts are socialized out of them from birth onward, so they can't rely on those as much as other animals do.

It's important to realize the entire event from Voldemort's breaking in to Lily's death probably took less than a minute. So even if Harry had heard everything that happened, he wouldn't have considered it a big deal. A door bangs; Daddy yells; something falls; Mummy screams, runs upstairs, and barricades the door--he'd probably think, "Oh, goody, we're playing a new game! Yay! I don't have to go to bed yet! What fun!" He might have started to get distressed when Mummy dropped him, and she fell to the floor, but even then, he probably wouldn't have realized anything was seriously wrong until Mummy had not moved or responded to his cries for a while. However, since Voldemort attacked him, that didn't get a chance to happen.

Harry's not a baby psychopath. He's just a normally clueless young child.

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

I remember the original conversation Terri referred to, and I'm pretty sure I also brought up some of the points she mentioned. The truth is, babies are *highly* attuned to the distress of those around them, especially their closest care-givers and other infants their age. You mentioned that panic was your mom's default reaction to *any* crisis. Don't you think it's possible that by 2 1/2 you had learned that when mommy starts yelling it's usually not something the baby has to worry about, since you *did* start screaming when you realized there was a serious problem?

Here are a couple articles I managed to pull up with a few minutes Google-fu. I'm sure I could find something more extensive if people would like, but the empathic ability of babies is well attested to in scientific literature. Harry NOT exhibiting them is the element that requires explanation.

http://www(dot)nytimes(dot)com/1989/03/28/science/researchers-trace-empathy-s-roots-to-infancy.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

http://www(dot)k-state(dot)edu/wwparent/programs/courage/Milestones_in_caring.pdf

With all that being said, this scenario seems plausible, and saves us far more headaches than it creates.

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

(Repeat comment due to linkage issues - please delete if necessary)

I remember the original conversation Terri referred to, and I'm pretty sure I also brought up some of the points she mentioned. The truth is, babies are *highly* attuned to the distress of those around them, especially their closest care-givers and other infants their age. You mentioned that panic was your mom's default reaction to *any* crisis. Don't you think it's possible that by 2 1/2 you had learned that when mommy starts yelling it's usually not something the baby has to worry about, since you *did* start screaming when you realized there was a serious problem?

Here are a couple articles I managed to pull up with a few minutes Google-fu. I'm sure I could find something more extensive if people would like, but the empathic ability of babies is well attested to in scientific literature. Harry NOT exhibiting them is the element that requires explanation.

(Links omitted due to moderation issues.)

With all that being said, this scenario seems plausible, and saves us far more headaches than it creates.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Don't you think it's possible that by 2 1/2 you had learned that when mommy starts yelling it's usually not something the baby has to worry about, since you *did* start screaming when you realized there was a serious problem?

Yeah, that occurred to me after I'd posted that. I'm the youngest child in my family, and my parents' marriage was in the toilet several years before I was born. Although I don't remember it that way, things must have been pretty tense in our house, particularly since that house wasn't big enough for a family of six.

So here's my New, Unified Theory of Harry's Infantile Emotions, incorporating your observations, Mary's story about the Palestinian baby, my story, and a modified version of Terri's story.

I came from a rather tense family, and that Palestinian baby was probably used to a high level of tension, also. So when we were confronted with stressful situations, instead of getting upset, we just dismissed them as "more of the same," until they were proven to be worse than usual.

In the same way, things were probably pretty unpleasant in the GH cottage. Anyone would get tense being cooped up in a small house for months on end, especially if they were young, lively, extroverts like Lily and James. We know James was getting antsy about not being able to go out and have fun. Having a baby around just made things worse. Even if their marriage had not become physically abusive--and I don't think there's enough evidence to prove that--there were probably arguments that got increasingly nasty as time wore on and tensions rose. So Harry was probably used to hearing his parents yelling and slamming doors. He also would have been used to hearing occasional visitors, so he would not have associated a strange voice, yelling, and slamming doors with anything out of the ordinary. As I said above, even if he saw Mummy fall, he wouldn't necessarily have considered that a problem until she didn't get up or respond to his cries. People do fall down sometimes for perfectly ordinary, nonviolent reasons. This explains why Harry wasn't upset until he saw the weird-looking stranger looming over his crib. It's also possible, as Danny suggests below, that Harry was in shock.

While contemplating this, I couldn't help thinking how Severus would have responded if he'd been the one to marry Lily and go into seclusion. He'd probably have been delighted to have his wife and child all to himself. I can just imagine him saying to Lily, "But darling, why do you want to go out and see other people? I'm happy just being here alone with you and our adorable baby." (Accompanied by a sappy, puppy-dog look.)

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Yes. I cited a similar situation in a discussion with a teen as to why Harry couldn't always see thestrals. In Palestine, a young mother was shot dead while holding her little son (just 1 year old) in her arms. The baby was not upset - not at the time. A day later, missing his mother and sensing the stress and grief of his father and grandparents, he was crying inconsolably. But not at the time.

I always thought that Harry saw, but didn't understand - just like that little Palestinian baby.

And I'm glad your mom completely recovered. I think you must actually have been quite distressed, since you remember this event. Most of the things I remember before I was about 3, I remember because I was scolded or spanked!

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Well, was the baby accustomed to gunfire going off? Frequently passed back and forth between relatives? Had the Mom been forced to dive, or been knocked down by shockwaves often enough that the baby had some idea of what to expect? (e.g. baby gets passed to relatives while Mom is treated for cuts and bruises/has to deal with other children who may have been wounded.) Furthermore, if the mother was killed almost instantly, then she wouldn't have had *time* to exhibit distress, which would leave the baby with only the stimulus of her falling/slumping over to draw any conclusion that something was wrong. Which may have occurred often enough that the baby assumed this was no different.

I get the feeling that people on this thread are vastly underestimating babies' processing capabilities. Human babies are designed to be information gathering machines. This why infants and young children love routines so much: they can predict what's going to happen next, their framework of the world is functional, they don't have to stress over incorporating new data. Which is also why songs and entertainment successfully directed at young kids tend to have a lot of repetition, and why those same young kids will play the same movie over and over (and over and overandoverandOVER) again, long past the point where they (and their parents) can quote the movie line for line.

To take a few examples specifically from language acquisition: Babies, as long they're developmentally healthy, have already learned within roughly the first year of life which phonological features are relative to their native language and which aren't. For instance, in Chinese, the intonation of a word carries information that must be incorporated with the phonological production of sounds to reach the word's meaning. English does not encode linguistic information with this feature. So an infant growing up in an English speaking household will learn very early on that the tone of a word is irrelevant in regard to base meaning, and stop attending to it, while an infant in a Chinese speaking household will learn that rising or falling tone *is* important, and continue to attend to it. (This is tested by showing the infant an entertaining show each time a different phoneme is sounded - after a certain point, children stop distinguishing between phonemes not native to the speakers around them, and are surprised by the show while children only a few months younger will catch the show every time once they've learned the rule.)

This isn't in any way a conscious process, and the parents don't need to direct it. As much emphasis as Western countries tend to place on interacting with your baby to make sure they learn to speak properly, it's not strictly necessary. Some "primitive" African tribes have a custom of not speaking to their babies at all until the infants show signs of being ready to speak to them. However, anthropologists have found that the rate of speech development is roughly equivalent for these babies as that found in more "developed" nations. The leading hypothesis for this is that because the babies are left out in the open, where they have a clear view of the community, they have enough opportunities to collect data and correlate patterns that they can figure out most of the basics on their own. Later interaction leads to refinement.

That infants learn about their world by generating rules for it is also supported by the fact that early speakers tend to reach a point where they over-apply their rules as they gain increased competency. For instance, in regard to irregular verb conjugations, a child may show proficiency in the go/went distinction, but then switch over to using go/goed despite their parents' corrections because that formation fits the pattern of English verb formation better. This period trend does correct itself as the speaker gains greater proficiency in the language at large, but it's presence is quite common.

tl;dr: Babies are extremely good at forming mental models of their world and the routines they can expect. Unless Harry was *USED* to seeing Lily begging and crying, and being alright later, that scene should have upset him deeply.

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Um- I'm aware of all this. I took psycholinguistics, including early childhood language acquisition, in college, and I have younger siblings. Babies are people, and they are quite aware. BUT -

I don't think you can extrapolate too much about 1-year-old Harry's state of mind from what we're shown. The main reason is that this is Rowling writing! And she doesn't think things through.

I also do think that babies do not always have enough life experience to react as an older child or adult would in a given situation. That was the point of the example I gave. Yes, the mother was killed instantly. I didn't want to give further details, because they were horrible. But the baby didn't know his mommy was dead. Harry probably wouldn't have understood that, either.

Getting back to Rowling's writing, she has said in interviews that Harry didn't see his mother die. That seems impossible given what we're shown of his memories. He must have seen. He certainly saw Voldemort looming over him menacing him with a stick. And, unless the house was usually that loud, he can't have slept through the whole ruckus. So why wasn't he screaming the house down? There are two possible reasons for this:
1. Movie corruption. The little child in the movie sits calmly looking up at Voldemort when the man AK's him. Or-
2. On a Watsonian level (that means, in the world of the story, right?), Harry must have been used to mommy and daddy shouting and crying. As Terri says above, Levicorpus is canon! This actually makes sense given the little we see of James, Lily, and their relationship.
3. But the most likely reason is that Rowling herself never visualized this scene clearly and didn't consider the implications, whether of oddly disengaged infants or spousal abuse. As I said, she just didn't think it through.

Because, though I do see Harry as something of a sociopath in the last two or three books, he was presented as a little boy with somewhat kind and generous impulses. I'm sure Rowling didn't mean to write him as an abnormal baby.

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry if I came across as patronizing, that truly wasn't my intent. I put the information on language acquisition in there because I've been banging my head against a lot of people lately who really don't seem to expect babies to be aware of much of anything, so it was more a general PSA to anyone reading the thread. Sorry again if it came across as directed at you personally :(

My larger point, which I really should have made clearer, was that Harry didn't have to understand that his mother was dead, or even the concept of 'death' in order to understand from her obvious, and loud, display of distress that Something Bad was happening. And at that age, infants really don't have a concept of 'other people,' so Harry really should have reacted to anything upsetting his mother that badly as something that was directly upsetting to him. Unless he had reason to think that such a display of stress and fear was 'normal' or some kind of fun game and not actually something to be upset about. So yes, I agree completely that his non-plussed reaction to Lily going into a complete meltdown strongly supports the events of Liberacorpus! or worse as a common occurrence.

...which I thought I put in my reply above but now realized I didn't. I really shouldn't post when I'm that tired. Anyway, the idea that Harry didn't react because as far as he knew, from his limited experience, this was normal was the reason I kept bringing up the fact that in the anecdotes offered as counterexamples there was evidence that the initial events really didn't present any obvious stimuli indicating something was Wrong to an infant that looks at the surface without actually reasoning out what they're seeing. An older child would understand that their mother had died, but if an infant only feels their mother slump slightly before another caretaker picks them up? Why wouldn't this be part of the normal 'Mommy fell asleep so Daddy/Grandpa/Auntie is playing with me now' routine? And in both cases presented, the infants *did* freak out when it became clear that this *wasn't* part of the established routine.

As for excusing the scene because Rowling's a bad writer... if we don't give her a pass for the rest of the series, why should we here?

I apologize to everyone if it feels that I'm beating a dead horse over this scene, but Harry's behavior here freaked me out more than anything else written into these books, which have already been established as nightmare inducing in their own right.

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

As for excusing the scene because Rowling's a bad writer... if we don't give her a pass for the rest of the series, why should we here?

Fair enough! and I do see where you're coming from. I guess I'm wrong below, but 11-year-old Harry doesn't seem that bad to me. If he were this disengaged as a baby, he'd surely be Tom Riddle redux by the time he was 11, don't you think?
OTOH, if we posit Harry as a fairly normal child, the only two excuses for his behavior which work are:
1. He's seem mummy and daddy doing things like this before, so he's not freaked out.
2. Or, as Terri suggests, there's a silencing charm on his crib, so he can't actually hear what's happening.

Otherwise, it's just sloppy writing, and I can understand you not giving her a pass for that!

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

I'm glad we're on the same page :)

In addition to the above, I'd add
3. What Voldemort presented as a flashback isn't an accurate representation of what happened.

Which opens the possibility that Rowling was right in her interview statement that Harry didn't see Lily die, but I think that statement can be taken or left as is without actually affecting anything.

Assuming the scene was a straight-forward 'this is exactly what happened and Lily'n'James really truly awesomely were a loving-n-sweet couple, we promise!' I'd assume a child behaving like Harry was even *worse* than Riddle- maybe closer to Damien from the The Omen. On the hand, if I ever decide to write a horror story about demonic infants, I'll know where to look for inspiration :P (/is still SERIOUSLY creeped out by that scene...)

Still, this conversation has me wondering: if we do assume option one is correct, and Harry was simply desensitized to his mother's distress signals, how terrible must the conditions in that household have been that even with a lack of self/other distinction Harry has no response to his mother's tears, though she's the one he should be most attuned to?

Maybe James put some kind of 'happy/calm baby charm' on Harry to keep him quiet and content? Maybe even James and Lily together, if they truly had no idea about how to deal with a baby other than magic. This would (possibly) absolve James of being abusive to his wife, but it also opens up a whole 'nother can of worms...

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

I should have replied here. I suggested below that a third possibility is that Harry was in a state of shock.

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Reply below.

Re: A RL Similar Situation

[oryx_leucoryx]

Getting back to Rowling's writing, she has said in interviews that Harry didn't see his mother die. That seems impossible given what we're shown of his memories. He must have seen. He certainly saw Voldemort looming over him menacing him with a stick.

To a wizard baby sticks aren't menacing. They make pretty colors, make fun things happen, make food or toys come within range, etc. I don't believe Harry was asleep - he was awake when Lily carried him upstairs and I don't think there was time for him to fall asleep until the noise started. The only way he could have not seen Lily die was if he remained lying down in his crib and only stood up after she was dead. Not that I think this makes much sense.