Our Reading of Hermione
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deathtocapslockOur Reading of Hermione
I trust none of them. Only my existence
thrown out in the world like a towchain
battered and twisted in many chance connections
being pulled this way, pulling in that.
… I don’t trust them, but I’m learning how to use them.
Adrienne Rich, “For a Sister,” in Diving into the Wreck
I’ve been thinking about a suggestion made a while ago (in the sporking of chapter nine?) in a debate about our reading of Hermione: that the contradiction between chapters six and nine of DH, between Hermione claiming to have memory-charmed her parents and Hermione claiming only to know the theory, could be resolved by assuming that Hermione had lied to her friends to protect her parents. Madderbrad, of course, was all over that idea, but I had reservations. Unfortunately, my reservations come from the same source as Madderbrad’s enthusiasm: our prejudices about the character. The suggestion clears Hermione of one of the most problematic crimes she committed in Harry’s service, and so runs counter to my perception that she had degenerated morally under the influence of Albus, Hogwarts and the Wizarding World.
That Hermione should have Obliviated her parents and sent them off to Australia seemed to me to be a crime in line with her past, increasingly lawless, behavior. (Only for a good cause, of course!) So the suggestion violated how I’d come to read Hermione’s moral progression (or regression).
But the suggestion that, instead, she’d simply lied to Harry that she’d done so, to persuade HIM of her dedication (while hiding her parents’ true whereabouts from him, lest he inadvertently betray them to Tom), seemed…. wrong to me on another level.
True, that suggestion very neatly cleared up one of JKR’s egregious factual contradictions.
But I found it harder to credit that Hermione would deliberately deceive Harry, than that she would Obliviate her parents.
Oneandthetruth’s discussion of spiritual stages gives me a framework to try to articulate why I read her that way: why it seems to me that lying to Harry (and possibly Ron) about her parents seems out of character for canon Hermione, while shoving them out of danger—and out of Hermione’s way--under a memory charm, does not.
I agree with oneandthetruth’s reading of Hermione—within the framework of spiritual stages, canon Hermione wavers between stages two and three, the literalist and the loyalist. She still relies on authority, but accepts her friends (and her friends’ authority figure) above her parents.
Her autonomy in canon is to choose which sources she regards as reliable/authoritative, when sources disagree: Dumbledore IS to be accepted, the Ministry and the Prophet are NOT, books ARE…. except when a book fails Hermione.
(I was raised Catholic, and I can remember, as a teen, being able to question the Church’s precepts about, to take an important example, women’s sexuality, only by instead privileging the feminist theorists I’d started reading. A battle between authorities, rather than using an authority to support a position I held in the absence of any permission to do so…. I said, if Gloria Steinem says so, it must be true, rather than if Father X and Sister Y say the Pope says so. As opposed to, I say so, this is true to my experience and beliefs, and oh, look here, Mary Daly supports what I say! Or, how a Stage Two manages to disagree with precepts she was raised with… )
At the same time, Hermione’s emotional loyalty, through the books, is always to her peer group. Which for Hermione, consists of Harry, or Harry-and-Ron.
We know that Hermione lied to authorities to win her peers’ approval (book 1 and passim). We know that she’d become so alienated from her parents that they finally resorted to trying to bribe her with a ski trip to spend her winter holidays with them (book five—trace her increasingly short holidays in the Muggle world in books two through five), at which point Hermione lied directly to her parents in order to spend extra time with her peers.
And in HBP Hermione stayed at the Burrow for most of the summer with no excuse at all.
We further know that Hermione punished Marietta as a traitor for choosing her mother’s values and/or safety over Marietta’s peers’.
Finally, we know that most middle-class western parents would object strongly to their seventeen-year-old child going off to fight in the front lines of a civil war. And in the Muggle world to which the Grangers belong, seventeen is legally under age, and they’d have both a legal and a moral right to stop their child from flinging herself into danger out of loyalty to Harry and at the word of an elderly eccentric (who expected a sixteen-year-old poorly trained boy to accomplish what he himself could not).
Having the power to prevent, absolutely, one’s parents from interfering with spending time with and helping one’s friends (but without harming them, natch), is a teen’s fantasy come true.
So for a stage three teen, placing loyalty to peers above all, Obliviating the Grangers to keep them from interfering with Hermione’s going off and helping Harry save the world, would seem both an obvious duty and a dream come true.
While for someone in stage two, a Literalist wanting rules to follow, but graduated past accepting parents as the sole source for the rules to follow….
Well, Hermione makes it clear which source of rules she’s chosen to trust absolutely: Albus Dumbledore.
And we know that Dumbledore taught Hermione, both directly and by example, to use magic and subterfuge, illicitly if necessary, to bypass inconvenient directives from official authorities, rather than to rely on persuading people to see her (or his) view.
Book One: Dumbledore rewarded Hermione for her part in assisting Harry to destroy the Philosopher’s Stone against McGonagall’s and Snape’s direct instructions to leave the situation alone.
Book Two: She wasn’t punished for defacing a library book, or for trying to tell her peers, rather than Madam Pince, what she’d realized about Slytherin’s creature, even though her failure to tell adults led directly to her petrification, and almost to Ginny’s death.
Book Three: She had Dumbledore’s sanction, indeed instructions, for the rescue of Sirius and Buckbeak, against the Minister’s orders and in explicit understanding that she MUST act against the (non-Dumbledore) authority, not attempt persuasion.
Book Four: It wouldn’t surprise me if Dumbledore directly gave Hermione sanction to assist Harry in the Triwizard, against the rule that the champion was supposed to work alone. Even if he did not, if she believed, like Ron and Harry, that Dumbledore knew pretty much everything that went on at Hogwarts, the fact that he didn’t put an end to her assistance she’d take as implicit sanction to help Harry illicitly.
Book Five: Albus supported her “Dumbledore’s Army.” Hermione might have claimed to prospective members that the D.A. was just a study club, but that loyalty oath, and her penalty for “betraying” the group, belied her claim. And Hermione knew, of course, that Dumbledore had an “Order” which included Ministry officials perfectly prepared to betray the Ministry’s orders on Dumbledore’s lightest word,
And she probably knew that Dumbledore, or someone acting on his behest, had topped her disfiguring curse to silence potential traitors by permanently Obliviating Marietta.
Neat, quick, simple: why didn’t she think of that?
So yes, getting rid of her parents’ probable objections to her plans to ditch school and put herself in danger by packing them off, Obliviated, to Australia, doesn’t seem out of line with what she’s already done, or what she knows Dumbledore’s already done or condoned.
However, a critical observer (critical in the sense of being stage four or above), looking at Mr. Roberts, and Gilderoy’s victims, and Gilderoy himself, and Bertha Jorkins, and extrapolating from the effects that were observed, might entertain some qualms about the effects of wide-scale use of the Memory Charm.
But someone who took Albus to be a Pole Star, an infallible guide for determining what’s utterly unobjectionable, what’s obviously flat out wrong, and what’s questionable…..
Well, Albus says that directly physically torturing and killing anyone (including Muggles) is dead wrong.
He further says that using either Dementors or Unforgivable Curses against condemned or suspected criminals is questionable. He’d rather it not be done, but he doesn’t outright forbid either to his followers. .
But mere little Memory Charms? Albus uses them, he endorses their use, he never voices a concern about using them. And his entire faction of the Wizarding World bases their understanding of how Secrecy should be enforced on the widespread use of Obliviates.
So using a Memory Charm on parents would seem, to a Literalist accepting Albus as her Bible, to be unexceptionable. The Least-Harm answer to an unpleasant problem not amenable to a perfect solution.
To a Loyalist, attacking parents with such a spell in order to keep them from stopping her from helping a peer (in a life-and-death struggle, no less, which the parents weren’t equipped to understand the importance of!), would seem meritorious.
Whereas packing her parents off to Chelsea, and then lying to her best friend(s) that she’d sent them, Obliviated, to Australia….
*
That would, after all, be a sensible thing to do, if Hermione feared that Harry were still broadcasting to Tom. Except that we know that she didn’t fear that when she made her arrangements, whatever they were.
She told Harry in chapter nine (shrilly), “Your scar again? But what’s going on? I thought that connection had closed!”
Yet if she was not in fear that Harry would inadvertently broadcast her parents’ location to Voldemort through that connection, why feed Harry a lie?
*
It would, of course, atill be sensible if she were worried about the Trio being captured, and feared Harry or Ron might give up her parents’ whereabouts under torture (whereas she would not). That their loyalty to her, and their willingness to suffer to protect her family, might be less than hers to protect theirs.
Only, that makes no sense either. The only reason to threaten the Grangers would be either to put pressure on Hermione to betray Harry, or to punish her for not having done so.
Except, if Tom had captured either Harry or Ron, and wanted to put pressure on or threaten Hermione, he could do so by threatening the already-captive friend.
Tom didn’t need the refinement of “forcing” Ron or Harry to betray the Granger parents’ location, in order for his capturing Ron or Harry to put pressure on Hermione.
That would be both redundant, and ineffective.
We see canon!Hermione put gaining friends ahead of her parents’ values. We see her putting spending time with friends ahead of her parents’ expressed wishes. We see her say she’s willing to lie to her parents, as well as to her teachers, for her friends. (We also see her attack teachers for her friends’ sake.) We don’t see, anywhere in canon, her putting her parents, or their values, or their wishes, ahead of her friends.
And Dumbledore clearly is her Daddy-figure now, the one whom she blindly obeys, not Dr. Granger.
In the terms oneandthetruth set forth, someone at spiritual level three wouldn’t put her parents ahead of her peers. And we’ve seen canon-Hermione lie to teachers, disavow her parents’ values, say she’s lied to her parents, and attack teachers, for her friends. Why not take the next step, of attacking her parents when they were in the way of her giving Harry the help he so desperately needed? If she let her parents stop her from going Horcrux-hunting with Harry, he would almost certainly die without her help! Why not do anything necessary to stop them from interfering?
And someone at level two, who’d accepted a Muggle-disrespecting authority-figure, wouldn’t put her Muggle parents and their probable misgivings ahead of her mentor’s probable approval of her solution. She knows, or thinks she knows, that Dumbledore got rid of inconveniences by Obliviating the originator. She knows that the entire “good side” of the WW is in agreement that this is a harmless and humane way, the MOST harmless and humane way, of handling inconvenient Muggles.
Why not use that to solve her problem?
I trust none of them. Only my existence
thrown out in the world like a towchain
battered and twisted in many chance connections
being pulled this way, pulling in that.
… I don’t trust them, but I’m learning how to use them.
Adrienne Rich, “For a Sister,” in Diving into the Wreck
I’ve been thinking about a suggestion made a while ago (in the sporking of chapter nine?) in a debate about our reading of Hermione: that the contradiction between chapters six and nine of DH, between Hermione claiming to have memory-charmed her parents and Hermione claiming only to know the theory, could be resolved by assuming that Hermione had lied to her friends to protect her parents. Madderbrad, of course, was all over that idea, but I had reservations. Unfortunately, my reservations come from the same source as Madderbrad’s enthusiasm: our prejudices about the character. The suggestion clears Hermione of one of the most problematic crimes she committed in Harry’s service, and so runs counter to my perception that she had degenerated morally under the influence of Albus, Hogwarts and the Wizarding World.
That Hermione should have Obliviated her parents and sent them off to Australia seemed to me to be a crime in line with her past, increasingly lawless, behavior. (Only for a good cause, of course!) So the suggestion violated how I’d come to read Hermione’s moral progression (or regression).
But the suggestion that, instead, she’d simply lied to Harry that she’d done so, to persuade HIM of her dedication (while hiding her parents’ true whereabouts from him, lest he inadvertently betray them to Tom), seemed…. wrong to me on another level.
True, that suggestion very neatly cleared up one of JKR’s egregious factual contradictions.
But I found it harder to credit that Hermione would deliberately deceive Harry, than that she would Obliviate her parents.
Oneandthetruth’s discussion of spiritual stages gives me a framework to try to articulate why I read her that way: why it seems to me that lying to Harry (and possibly Ron) about her parents seems out of character for canon Hermione, while shoving them out of danger—and out of Hermione’s way--under a memory charm, does not.
I agree with oneandthetruth’s reading of Hermione—within the framework of spiritual stages, canon Hermione wavers between stages two and three, the literalist and the loyalist. She still relies on authority, but accepts her friends (and her friends’ authority figure) above her parents.
Her autonomy in canon is to choose which sources she regards as reliable/authoritative, when sources disagree: Dumbledore IS to be accepted, the Ministry and the Prophet are NOT, books ARE…. except when a book fails Hermione.
(I was raised Catholic, and I can remember, as a teen, being able to question the Church’s precepts about, to take an important example, women’s sexuality, only by instead privileging the feminist theorists I’d started reading. A battle between authorities, rather than using an authority to support a position I held in the absence of any permission to do so…. I said, if Gloria Steinem says so, it must be true, rather than if Father X and Sister Y say the Pope says so. As opposed to, I say so, this is true to my experience and beliefs, and oh, look here, Mary Daly supports what I say! Or, how a Stage Two manages to disagree with precepts she was raised with… )
At the same time, Hermione’s emotional loyalty, through the books, is always to her peer group. Which for Hermione, consists of Harry, or Harry-and-Ron.
We know that Hermione lied to authorities to win her peers’ approval (book 1 and passim). We know that she’d become so alienated from her parents that they finally resorted to trying to bribe her with a ski trip to spend her winter holidays with them (book five—trace her increasingly short holidays in the Muggle world in books two through five), at which point Hermione lied directly to her parents in order to spend extra time with her peers.
And in HBP Hermione stayed at the Burrow for most of the summer with no excuse at all.
We further know that Hermione punished Marietta as a traitor for choosing her mother’s values and/or safety over Marietta’s peers’.
Finally, we know that most middle-class western parents would object strongly to their seventeen-year-old child going off to fight in the front lines of a civil war. And in the Muggle world to which the Grangers belong, seventeen is legally under age, and they’d have both a legal and a moral right to stop their child from flinging herself into danger out of loyalty to Harry and at the word of an elderly eccentric (who expected a sixteen-year-old poorly trained boy to accomplish what he himself could not).
Having the power to prevent, absolutely, one’s parents from interfering with spending time with and helping one’s friends (but without harming them, natch), is a teen’s fantasy come true.
So for a stage three teen, placing loyalty to peers above all, Obliviating the Grangers to keep them from interfering with Hermione’s going off and helping Harry save the world, would seem both an obvious duty and a dream come true.
While for someone in stage two, a Literalist wanting rules to follow, but graduated past accepting parents as the sole source for the rules to follow….
Well, Hermione makes it clear which source of rules she’s chosen to trust absolutely: Albus Dumbledore.
And we know that Dumbledore taught Hermione, both directly and by example, to use magic and subterfuge, illicitly if necessary, to bypass inconvenient directives from official authorities, rather than to rely on persuading people to see her (or his) view.
Book One: Dumbledore rewarded Hermione for her part in assisting Harry to destroy the Philosopher’s Stone against McGonagall’s and Snape’s direct instructions to leave the situation alone.
Book Two: She wasn’t punished for defacing a library book, or for trying to tell her peers, rather than Madam Pince, what she’d realized about Slytherin’s creature, even though her failure to tell adults led directly to her petrification, and almost to Ginny’s death.
Book Three: She had Dumbledore’s sanction, indeed instructions, for the rescue of Sirius and Buckbeak, against the Minister’s orders and in explicit understanding that she MUST act against the (non-Dumbledore) authority, not attempt persuasion.
Book Four: It wouldn’t surprise me if Dumbledore directly gave Hermione sanction to assist Harry in the Triwizard, against the rule that the champion was supposed to work alone. Even if he did not, if she believed, like Ron and Harry, that Dumbledore knew pretty much everything that went on at Hogwarts, the fact that he didn’t put an end to her assistance she’d take as implicit sanction to help Harry illicitly.
Book Five: Albus supported her “Dumbledore’s Army.” Hermione might have claimed to prospective members that the D.A. was just a study club, but that loyalty oath, and her penalty for “betraying” the group, belied her claim. And Hermione knew, of course, that Dumbledore had an “Order” which included Ministry officials perfectly prepared to betray the Ministry’s orders on Dumbledore’s lightest word,
And she probably knew that Dumbledore, or someone acting on his behest, had topped her disfiguring curse to silence potential traitors by permanently Obliviating Marietta.
Neat, quick, simple: why didn’t she think of that?
So yes, getting rid of her parents’ probable objections to her plans to ditch school and put herself in danger by packing them off, Obliviated, to Australia, doesn’t seem out of line with what she’s already done, or what she knows Dumbledore’s already done or condoned.
However, a critical observer (critical in the sense of being stage four or above), looking at Mr. Roberts, and Gilderoy’s victims, and Gilderoy himself, and Bertha Jorkins, and extrapolating from the effects that were observed, might entertain some qualms about the effects of wide-scale use of the Memory Charm.
But someone who took Albus to be a Pole Star, an infallible guide for determining what’s utterly unobjectionable, what’s obviously flat out wrong, and what’s questionable…..
Well, Albus says that directly physically torturing and killing anyone (including Muggles) is dead wrong.
He further says that using either Dementors or Unforgivable Curses against condemned or suspected criminals is questionable. He’d rather it not be done, but he doesn’t outright forbid either to his followers. .
But mere little Memory Charms? Albus uses them, he endorses their use, he never voices a concern about using them. And his entire faction of the Wizarding World bases their understanding of how Secrecy should be enforced on the widespread use of Obliviates.
So using a Memory Charm on parents would seem, to a Literalist accepting Albus as her Bible, to be unexceptionable. The Least-Harm answer to an unpleasant problem not amenable to a perfect solution.
To a Loyalist, attacking parents with such a spell in order to keep them from stopping her from helping a peer (in a life-and-death struggle, no less, which the parents weren’t equipped to understand the importance of!), would seem meritorious.
Whereas packing her parents off to Chelsea, and then lying to her best friend(s) that she’d sent them, Obliviated, to Australia….
*
That would, after all, be a sensible thing to do, if Hermione feared that Harry were still broadcasting to Tom. Except that we know that she didn’t fear that when she made her arrangements, whatever they were.
She told Harry in chapter nine (shrilly), “Your scar again? But what’s going on? I thought that connection had closed!”
Yet if she was not in fear that Harry would inadvertently broadcast her parents’ location to Voldemort through that connection, why feed Harry a lie?
*
It would, of course, atill be sensible if she were worried about the Trio being captured, and feared Harry or Ron might give up her parents’ whereabouts under torture (whereas she would not). That their loyalty to her, and their willingness to suffer to protect her family, might be less than hers to protect theirs.
Only, that makes no sense either. The only reason to threaten the Grangers would be either to put pressure on Hermione to betray Harry, or to punish her for not having done so.
Except, if Tom had captured either Harry or Ron, and wanted to put pressure on or threaten Hermione, he could do so by threatening the already-captive friend.
Tom didn’t need the refinement of “forcing” Ron or Harry to betray the Granger parents’ location, in order for his capturing Ron or Harry to put pressure on Hermione.
That would be both redundant, and ineffective.
We see canon!Hermione put gaining friends ahead of her parents’ values. We see her putting spending time with friends ahead of her parents’ expressed wishes. We see her say she’s willing to lie to her parents, as well as to her teachers, for her friends. (We also see her attack teachers for her friends’ sake.) We don’t see, anywhere in canon, her putting her parents, or their values, or their wishes, ahead of her friends.
And Dumbledore clearly is her Daddy-figure now, the one whom she blindly obeys, not Dr. Granger.
In the terms oneandthetruth set forth, someone at spiritual level three wouldn’t put her parents ahead of her peers. And we’ve seen canon-Hermione lie to teachers, disavow her parents’ values, say she’s lied to her parents, and attack teachers, for her friends. Why not take the next step, of attacking her parents when they were in the way of her giving Harry the help he so desperately needed? If she let her parents stop her from going Horcrux-hunting with Harry, he would almost certainly die without her help! Why not do anything necessary to stop them from interfering?
And someone at level two, who’d accepted a Muggle-disrespecting authority-figure, wouldn’t put her Muggle parents and their probable misgivings ahead of her mentor’s probable approval of her solution. She knows, or thinks she knows, that Dumbledore got rid of inconveniences by Obliviating the originator. She knows that the entire “good side” of the WW is in agreement that this is a harmless and humane way, the MOST harmless and humane way, of handling inconvenient Muggles.
Why not use that to solve her problem?
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no subject
Date: 2013-05-28 09:46 pm (UTC)Though perhaps Hermione didn't realize that, and now "Wendell and Monica" are in jail or a secure psychiatric facility, the Muggle authorities having almost immediately identified the couple with the ridiculously phony papers and apparent disorientation and memory loss. Because Muggles know how to take fingerprints and other mundane but effective things...
The only reason to threaten the Grangers would be either to put pressure on Hermione to betray Harry, or to punish her for not having done so.
Except, if Tom had captured either Harry or Ron, and wanted to put pressure on or threaten Hermione, he could do so by threatening the already-captive friend.
On the other hand, that leaves less room for stepping up the threat level. If he has Ron and her parents, he can torture and kill three people in sequence, building up to Ron. Ron on his own might not last long enough for adequate pressure.
Plus, what if he wants to use them as some kind of public example? "This is what happens to the wicked Muggle families who let their kids pretend they have magic. Fakers, give up your wands or see your families suffer like the Granger brat's!" (if he wants to tie into Umbridge's campaign). Or, "This is what happens to the families of witches and wizards who risk Secrecy by telling Muggles about magic. Halfbloods, take notice: cut ties with your Muggle scum relatives and maybe we'll let them live. Mudbloods: you can run, but you can't hide..." Or any number of other possibilities which aren't directly about any of the Trio.
So I'm torn. I think the biggest argument against Hermione just lying to Harry and Ron is that it would be the logical thing to do, and after a few years in the wizarding world logic isn't going to be anyone's strongest suit anymore. She also doesn't often seem to directly lie to them unless she's really upset for some reason. She meant to give Ron the impression that she was interested in McClaggen in HBP because she was angry (but didn't explicitly say so to him), for instance. She is slightly better at refraining from telling them things - concealing Lupin's lycanthropy in PoA, for instance, though she made a production over how she knew something.
Actually, the one big thing I can think of is her both not telling them about and deliberately misleading them about having a time-turner in PoA. (Ie, whenever they noticed she seemed to be in two places at once, she said things to the effect of "don't be ridiculous" or "I was right here, what are you talking about?").
When, notably, she was under explicit orders not to tell. Is there any way that someone she sees as a viable authority figure could have told her to keep her parents' location a secret? Or at least some way she might have believed that was what they wanted her to do? Dumbledore probably hadn't gotten around to remembering she even had Muggle parents, but she arrived with Alastor "Constant Vigilance" Moody for the 7 Potters mission. The Order must have at least had a prior meeting about the mission before the big night, so it's at least possible that Moody also had a "cleaning up loose ends" talk/session. For that matter, he might have even helped her do whatever it was they ultimately did - no sense leaving potential hostages lying around for You-Know-Who, Moody might reasonably have thought.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-28 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-29 07:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-30 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-29 07:32 am (UTC)That's now got me thinking that maybe the reason "wizards haven't an ounce of logic" is because using magic causes the frontal lobes to deteriorate. Such deterioration would also help to explain why their culture is so backward. (Additional factors would include the laziness engendered by being able to do almost everything by "waving your magic wand," as well as the immaturity that would result from being able to fix almost any mistake magically, so that one would almost never have to suffer permanent negative consequences from one's actions. Harry's immaturity would actually be the norm in such a society.) Maybe using magic overworks the amygdala (the emotional center of the brain) to such an extent that other parts of the brain become atrophied because they're underutilized. Maybe magic is a primitive ability from humankind's earliest evolutionary stages that gradually died out as (1) technology became more prevalent and took over the functions magic formerly performed, and (2) the norms of society developed the expectation that maturity involved being able to accept the permanent consequences of one's actions. So rather than being superior to "muggles," wizards are actually inferior because they are the dying remnants of the first Homo sapiens.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-30 05:02 am (UTC)*Since supposedly only wizard souls can stick around as ghosts, maybe magic actually alters the soul somehow - not necessarily for the better, and if Tom's deteriorating abilities are a symptom of his ripped soul, that might indicate that soul-damage affects one's mental state dramatically. It's possible that a magical soul isn't in such hot shape compared to a Muggle one.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-31 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-31 11:02 pm (UTC)Interesting you mention that, since it's actually my headcanon that Draco is a hemophiliac.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-01 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-01 02:56 pm (UTC)Well, there's evidence of genetic problems among the old Pureblood lines, all right.
Family tendencies to mental instability and violence not only in the Gaunts, but in the Blacks, the Potters, and the Dumbledores (who, Swythyv pointed out, might have married out a generation too late). Learning disabilities in the Crabbes and Goyles.
Harry sees most Slytherins and most Death Eaters (the house and the political group most likely to attract PB supremacists) as being physically unpleasant and/or unhealthy-looking; his (and Jo's) prejudices aside, the descriptions include pallor, hunchbacks & asthma (the Carrows), extreme wall eyes (the Gaunts).
Squibs would probably be classed as suffering from a birth defect too by these people, and all the Squibs we hear of either come explicitly from old PB families (the Blacks, the Prewetts) or have PB-sounding names (Argus, Arabella).
Then there's infertility: the Gaunt, Black, and Dumbledore names all dead or dying, the Longbottoms and Malfoys apparently down to one PB heir, the Potters left with a single half-blood.... Andromeda and Narcissa manage one living child, each; Bellatrix has none.
The only PB family we see in this generation with obvious high fertility is the Weasleys--and Ron tactily admits in CoS that they have recent Muggle blood, and tells us his family's claim is that all of the surviving "old" families must.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-01 05:09 pm (UTC)The Blacks in particular only appear to be dying out because of the recent wars. Narcissa and Andromeda only had one child each, but *their* generation had three sisters, and two cousins in just one other branch. Narcissa and Lucius might well not have wanted to give the Dark Lord any additional hostages. Bellatrix had time before Azkaban when should *could* have had kids, but was probably busy enough that she would have wanted to put it off. And neither Sirius nor Regulus had time unless they had been in a major hurry to settle down and have kids.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-01 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-01 11:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-02 08:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-02 12:09 am (UTC)What I think happened is that it suddenly dawned on people like Nott that the rules for defining 'old pureblood families' - relying on unbroken lines of purebloodedness for centuries - were unsustainable, because while families could change from half-blood to pureblood within a few generations they could never become *old* purebloods, while Old pureblood families were constantly losing this status. It was becoming very hard to find an acceptable spouse - the list was a desperate move. And as a last ditch attempt the purebloods on all sides of the war coordinated their reproductive efforts in order to give the resulting children pureblood classmates they would be able to marry when the time came.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-02 08:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-02 05:00 pm (UTC)So in reverse, if some Potter male, even not an ancestor of Charlus but some great uncle or whatever, married 'out' (whether a Muggle woman, a Muggle-born, a half-blood), and especially if said great-uncle had children, the Potters would be off the list of 'safe' matches (because that's what the list was for). But as long as careful examination revealed that Charlus' direct line was pure, it was OK for Dorea to marry him without losing her family ties.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-02 05:26 pm (UTC)I think the threat of men marrying out to the status of old pureblood families results in an attitude that Muggle women are out there to seduce 'good' pureblood men, leading to a belief that Muggles are these sexually depraved beings - hence Molly's poor attitude to Hermione in GOF.
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Date: 2013-06-02 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-02 06:15 pm (UTC)IOW there are many ways to reconcile James' pureblood status, his ownership of the Peverell cloak and Charlus Potter's presence on the Black family tree with the Potters not being on the list. And the same goes for Crabbe and Gamp. Heck, since the list was from the 1930s, the Gamps may have only lost status in the early 20th century.
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Date: 2013-06-02 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-06 04:57 pm (UTC)But the Black Family Tree is a troubling document.
It's not just that the Black name dies out (though that's odd enough when Phineas produced four sons--surely that's insurance enough?). But also... Phineas's older brother died at age 8--the age, per the Longbottoms, for a Pureblood family to kill off a Squib offspring lest he grow up and disgrace the family. One sister married "out" and was deleted from the tree, the other never married. So of four siblings, only one passed on the blood in a pure line (never mind the name).
And... the families the Black daughters married into ALSO all show signs of becoming extinct in the Pureblood male line. Which means that not only have Phineas’s sons’ sons all died out, so apparently have his daughter’s and granddaughters’ sons.
Phineas's daughter married a Burke and bore him 2 sons and one daughter. We know that a Burke, the right age to be one of Belvina's sons, bilked Merope of her heirloom locket and later hired her son as a shop assistant. But by Harry's time, the shop is being run by Mr. Borgin and there’s no mention of Burkes at Hogwarts.
There might be Burkes running about the WW. Or that family might be endangered or extinct.
Then considers Phineas's granddaughters' marriages: one married a Longbottom. We don't KNOW that Neville is the only Longbottom child of his generation as well as Frank's only son, but it certainly seems that way. Where are Neville's aunts, his uncles, his older and younger cousins? If they exist, we've never heard of them. What we hear fits the picture of a dying family—a few two-generation-older elders and the one orphaned scion.
About the other two granddaughters' marriages to proper Pureblood grooms, we DO know for sure. One married a Crouch: line extinct as of Barty Jr.'s Kiss. The other married the Potter heir: of which the last Pureblood scion died October 1981.
As for the great and great-great granddaughters’ marriages, not only did Lucretia and Bellatrix fail to present their hopeful spouses with an heir, there’s no evidence for any sister-in-law succeeding where they failed: no Prewetts or Lestranges are noted among Hogwarts enrollees or young adults.
So the lines Black females may respectably marry into seem uniformly in trouble too.
Finally, Draco is listed by name on the Tree, the only daughter’s son so honored. That suggests to me that he was being considered as a possible Black heir, being the Pureblood male of his generation with the most recent Black blood. Would he have been asked to revive the name if be inherited, or become a hyphen? Draco Black, or Draco Black-Malfoy?
We’ll never know.
Moveover, it seems clear there was something resembling an entail on the Black estate, which failed when the last male Pureblood Black died. Orion and Walburga could not manage to bar gaoled Death Eater Sirius from inheriting their house and goods, but Sirius DID succeed in leaving his inheritance to a Halfblood distant male cousin, away from any of his surviving Pureblood female relatives AND from the Pureblood male first cousin once removed who’d probably been his parents’ choice of heir.
That, and the fact that Grimmauld houses the tapestry that goes all that way back, suggests to me (though does not prove) that Phineas's line was the last surviving of the Pureblood Blacks. Because otherwise there should have been a third cousin four times removed to Sirius of proper pure blood and carrying the Black name, who should have inherited.
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Date: 2013-07-20 04:51 pm (UTC)We are told Caractacus was one of the founders of the store. Why didn't his heirs enter the family business? Hmm, if a Borgin was framed with Burke's death this could have led to a permanent break between the families (though the store still bears both names). But if there were any younger Burkes working in the store in Tom's days, maybe they were bedazzled with the charismatic shop assistant?
BTW that we don't know of any Burkes in Harry's days at Hogwarts tells us very little. Neither of the Weasley cousins overlapped with Harry's years, but we know they exist because we see them at Bill's wedding. And we hear of only a small minority of the students who overlapped with Harry, especially those from other years.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-06 04:58 pm (UTC)Finally, there's one other relevant set of information on the Black family tree: birth-and-death dates. Which are APPALLING, if you look at them from the POV of the WW, still lest of this being a record of one of the richest, most privileged families within it.
Start with Phineas: died at age 78. That would be fine, if he were one of us.
But the standard of comparison in the WW is Griselda Marchbanks, who's at least a generation older than Albus Dumbledore (she was an established professional when he was a scrubby schoolboy), and who was still, not merely alive, but exercising a position of authority, when Harry took his OWLs. So, in the WW, a woman aged over 130 years is not yet due to retire! By that standard, Phineas died at least 50 years earlier than he ought.
Compare his tenure to Albus’s--by the earliest computation, Twinkles was in his mid-seventies when he attained the position of headmaster. By other calculations, he was older than Phineas (at P's death) when he ascended to the post. And then Albus held the position, without apparent effort or attempt to make him retire, for DECADES as of when we meet him.
This is a country for old men. But not for ANY of the Blacks.
Phineas died at age 78; his sister (the one who died unmarried, rather than running off with a Muggle) at age 81. His recorded children died at ages 54, 75, 75, and 76. His grandchildren at ages 53, 54, 57, 61, 77, 78, and 90 (with one alive as of 1995 at age 80). His great-granchildren at ages, 50, 50, about 50 (Alphard, to give Sirius the inheritence when he did), 60, and 67.
This would be rather poor longevity for a Muggle family. It's much, much worse when we translate into WW terms.
If you were given nothing but ages-at-death of a family, and told that said family was wealthy and could buy the best possible medical care and that this family's peers, barring accidents, typically survived to age X (70 for us, 100 in the WW) and could with luck and care continue not just alive but healthy and functioning until age Y (90 for us, 130 in the WW)...
But in this family, out of about 20 individuals recorded , not a single one makes it even to age X. Their deaths (excluding the very early deaths by violence), cluster in two age ranges: half in the range 50-61 (with an outlier at 67), half in the range 75-81, with a single outlier of age 90.
Translating this back into Muggle life expectancies, it's as though we have a wealthy family with every access to the best health care.... no recorded member of which lives past age 60, half of whom die in their mid fifties, the other half in their late thirties.
We'd have to conclude that said family has either abysmal luck, or very, very poor genes.
So yeah, I’d say the Black Family Tree contains evidence for genetic damage among purebloods.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-06 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-07 04:16 am (UTC)Genetic damage seems awfully likely, though. Magic might protect you from extreme falls, but there must be limits to how much it can compensate for.
Though it would be interesting if some irate Muggleborn back in the day had cursed any line that shows up in Nature's Nobility, very quietly, and everyone has just been blaming inbreeding and wars and bad luck ever since. Because they're either too clueless to see that there's something funny going on, or too wrapped up in their explanations of how it's all those Mudbloods' fault, or just can't face the awful possibility that they, the very best people EVAR, might just be helpless before some of the very magic they're supposed to be masters of. (Or it's The Curse That Cannot Be Named. Don't talk about it and maybe it'll go away! Wizards...)