Hermoine, compassion, and idealism

[malic-ba.livejournal.com]

Hi everyone

First post, hope this works!

This started out as a comment in response to DH chapter 9, below, but I decided to put it where it can be seen more easily because I'd really like to learn what people think.

The discussion was about Hermione as compassionate and/or ruthless, which grew out of a discussion of her changing her parents' identities.

To me it seems that she cares about the rights of others as an ideal, from her own perspective. That does show compassion but it's patronising. I think that's something pretty common among Western do-gooders (and probably do-gooders more generally) and it's something I have to struggle against myself. It's entirely likely in someone so young.

The scary thought is her level of potential power and the lack of guidance in the WW to help her really consider those she's trying to help. Ron points out that house elf values are different - whether because he actually considers them or to protect the status quo - but Hermione doesn't respect anything he says. Her approach agrees perfectly with the most 'enlightened' wizarding attitudes to muggles, and there are plenty of wizards who've grown up with them. I can easily see a 'greater good' type attitude developing as Hermione gains power in the Ministry.

Since JKR worked for Amnesty I wonder if this aspect of Hermione is based on what she found there?

Also, I wonder what message she was trying to send. Is it supposed to be a good or bad part of Hermoine's character? Or, with unusual subtlety for these books, both? The message almost seems to be that 'do-gooding' is pointless - SPEW is a misguided joke, compassion is wasted on goblins and giants, and no-one questions the inferiority of muggles. At the same time I'm sure it's meant to show Hermoine's courage and goodness.

What does anyone think? Is JKR really trying to turn people off idealism? If so, does that have anything to do with the actual wishes of the 'helpees'?

Comments

[oryx_leucoryx]

Severus is right and Hermione is wrong. Her 'helpfulness' was neither needed nor useful. She should have realized that her teacher, who was already at the start of the lesson, already made his plans as to how to spend the class time. And he was not going to change them based on her answer. He was not asking 'where did you stop last time?' in order to improvise a lesson from some point that to him would be arbitrary. He made a lesson plan to teach a self-contained unit. And if she did not realize this the first time, once he announced the topic she should have understood and not interfered any more. Really, the curriculum was a series of Dark Creatures, each can be taught independently of knowledge about the other creatures. There is no pedagogical reason to teach them in one particular order. From a student's POV - a teacher was asked to substitute, maybe at the last minute, without knowing what the class was doing. Since the order of instruction of this particular curriculum is arbitrary, it would make sense to choose a topic from a late part of the text book, because it would be less likely that the topic had been covered already, if the regular instructor was going in the order of the book.

And this being her third year she should have realized teachers don't like letting one student answer - it leads the other students to coast. Yes, it was the first contents-related answer she offered this lesson, but she offers answers all the time in all her classes (or so we are led to think). And in any case, a teacher is not obligated to call on a student who is volunteering an answer, nor does the student have the right to blurt out the answer without being called on. It is the teacher's privilege to decide which student speaks when.