Malfoy family (Pottermore)

[oryx_leucoryx]

I looked up the spoilers site and found there is more detailed information about The Malfoys. Enjoy!

Comments

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

I personally find it in particularly poor taste that she went and insisted that the Black Plague and Queen Elizabeth I's refusal to marry were both the result of something a Malfoy did. Seriously, is there ANY major historical event which she will not insist was somehow caused by a wizard?

[oryx_leucoryx]

I don't think it says Nicholas Malfoy caused the Black Death (which after all had spread through Europe before arriving in Britain), but that while the epidemic was going on he killed his Muggle neighbors and disguised those deaths as Black Death victims. Anyway, surely if a wizard had been behind the Black Death itself, that wizard should have been a Black rather than a Malfoy?

Personally, the part I found most interesting was about Abraxas Malfoy sabotaging the first Muggle-born Minister in the 1960s. In the 1940s lacking certifiable wizarding ancestry was considered a glass-ceiling factor, but that would have been the time Nobby Leach started his long climb in the Ministry. And he probably didn't have Slughorn's backing. This is the first time Rowling attempts to show us the Voldemort-supporters had any reason to feel they were being displaced by a new power of Muggle-borns. Too bad there was nothing like it in the books.

[t0ra-chan.livejournal.com]

What I found interesting is that the Ministry of Magic was created in 1692 but it was until about 250 years later that they got a Muggleborn Minister of Magic. If most people had nothing against Muggleborns, why did this take so long? And how many Headmasters and Headmistresses of Hogwarts have been Muggleborn?

Heck, even just looking at the genders shows how skewered in favor of males these positions are, no matter how much JKR might say about the WW being more gender equal. According to the HP Lexicon there were 10 male Minsters of Magic and only 3 female ones and of course the ones we meet in the books are all male.

As for the Headmasters, there are 9 known ones, three of which are female. But one of them is Umbridge, who I don't think really counts as she pretty much appointed herself and didn't get access to the office.

But of course JKR still likes to pretend that her world is gender blind and equal: "(I)n fact, if you look at the Hogwarts' staff - I had this discussion with someone the other day - it is exactly 50/50. Although it is true that you do have a headmaster as opposed to a headmistress, but that has not always been the case. As you will find out, there have been equal numbers of headmistresses." So in JKR's world 6 = 3. "Oh dear, Maths" indeed.

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

I guess given how socially excluded women were for most of human history, it's possible that the WW still was, at least in the past, more gender-equal than ours... for a given definition of gender-equal. I mean, having 3 female Ministers of Magic is still more than female presidents of the US (we haven't had a single female president in all this time, after all), and possibly, there have historically been fewer female government officials in the various countries around the world. So I suppose being "more egalitarian" than our world does not necessarily mean being perfectly egalitarian, but yeah--it does seem as though Rowling is trying to present the WW as perfectly equal, which I don't buy, and I don't think anyone can afford to.

Of course, what this feels like is Rowling not quite understanding what prejudice is. She seems to think that because women have ever held positions of power, they're automatically the equals of their men. It doesn't seem to occur to her that you can be sexist and still think women should be effectual--the various incarnations of the Bible and Old Testament, for example, feature powerful women at points, and they were put out there at a time when everyone would have thought women in general should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Similarly the Japanese codes of behavior from Samurai days held that women should be docile little flowers who existed to truckle to their husbands, but still wanted them armed so they could defend the home if necessary (and they could still exert a measure of control over the men in their lives if need be--they'd just have to be subtle about it).

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Yes. I also think this shows how little JKR cares about history. Back before Secrecy, magical folk would have been living as part of the same society as non-magical folk, and ought to have had roughly the same ideas. The notion of women as inferior to men wasn't some evil idea dreamed up by a group of conspirators who then forced/persuaded everyone to believe it, people who otherwise would have 'naturally' thought women and men equal. It's actually a fairly new idea, and wizards back then ought to have been just as patriarchal, overall, as their non-magical counterparts. Even after Secrecy this idea should have lingered (hell, it's hard enough to get it really taken seriously in much of the so-called "civilized" world, instead of seen as just "political correctness"). Positing a magical society that is simultaneously parasitical upon the non-magical world from which it grew AND more enlightened than the latter doesn't really work, historically. It also falls apart when you look at how backwards magical society is in many other things. JKR is talking through her hat.

[sunnyskywalker]

I could see them becoming slightly more egalitarian after Secrecy, in a similar way that some of the Western states in the US granted women the vote decades earlier than the rest of the country - there were so few (white) women out there, demonstrably doing difficult work, that they had to grudgingly accept that maybe women weren't quite as inferior as people said and that they needed to make a few concessions to get the women's support. If they were (secretly) importing and/or stealing Muggle goods and foodstuffs, thus freeing many witches and wizards from doing a lot of drudge labor such as farming and mining which they used to do right alongside their Muggle relatives, then they may also have had a situation where witches were freer to spend time on education etc., much like some aristocratic and middle class women historically (perhaps with some rhetoric about magically educated mothers being able to teach their young sons well, which also started coming into vogue in Muggle society in iirc the 18th century - Revolutionary mothers and all that). The House-elf relocation project might have also helped a little, if a significant number of elves had previously lived on Muggle properties. (Hogwarts might have had at least some human laundresses and cooks previously, for instance, if the large elf population there now is in part due to the relocations.) So perhaps a few decades into it, wizarding society could have been noticeably more equal than Muggle society.

But not totally equal. Nowhere near. How would that even happen?

[sunnyskywalker]

ETA: re the Western states analogy, I mean that the short-handedness matters. If your new British Ministry of Magic has five guys and some sheep, then suddenly hiring women in the lower civil service ranks looks like a much better idea than when you're integrated into the relatively vast Muggle government. So maybe in fact women are perfectly suited to careers doing research for the guys actually drafting legislative bills and we just never realized; what a convenient discovery!

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

RE shorthandedness, I agree. However, allowing women into some slots out of necessity and actually thinking of them as fully equal are two different things - so I guess I see the WW as more the former than the latter. As you say, not totally equal.

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Seriously, is there ANY major historical event which she will not insist was somehow caused by a wizard?

It isn't just Rowling. There are a ridiculous number of works which subscribe to the idea that anything extraordinary couldn't possibly have been done by human beings. Countless theories about how aliens must have built the pyramids/Naztec Lines/(insert cultural artifact here). More recently, any human being of any accomplishment whatsoever (Houdini, Jack London, Marilyn Monroe, etc...) must somehow be something more (e.g. demigods: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, vessens/fairy tale creatures: Grimm). At least in the good ol' days they used to be more reasonable about handing out divinities: emperors and wanna-be's only, everyone else pipe down :p

Lately I've been toying with the idea that this comes from a bizarre mix of an inferiority complex and a general misanthropy. The theory creator is on some level painfully aware that they will never have opportunity, ability, or dedication to match the accomplishments they're so envious of. On the other hand, they also have such a low opinion of every other human on the planet that none of them could have done it either. These stories gain traction and remain popular because a significant portion of the population feels the same way.

Besides, if the beings that accomplished all those great things were something intrinsically "better" than mere humans to begin with, then there's no reason to feel bad that you can't compare. Heck, why bother if you're guaranteed to come up short. No need to stress about accomplishing anything. Give up before you hurt yourself. Just let the ubermenschen deal with the world's problems while you stay out of the way like the good little parasite you are.

...

Anyone else feeling a Randian zeitgeist upon us?