Our Reading of Hermione

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Our 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?

Comments

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Speaking of European royalty, I wonder if magicals have hereditary diseases caused by inbreeding, such as hemophilia and porphyria. Queen Victoria encouraged her children to marry outside their close relatives because she saw the unusual prevalence of hemophilia in the family and was trying to prevent it. She wouldn't have known about genetics, but observation and common sense, not to mention the knowledge of animal breeding that would have been part of her upbringing, would have shown the dangers of pulling too many children out of the same hereditary pool.

[kahran042]

Speaking of European royalty, I wonder if magicals have hereditary diseases caused by inbreeding, such as hemophilia and porphyria.


Interesting you mention that, since it's actually my headcanon that Draco is a hemophiliac.

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

So, the Sectumsempra Harry did on him was only so bloody because Draco's blood wouldn't clot on it's own without Snape's chanting? You know that makes an interesting parallel between Snape and another of Rickman's roles? Rasputin.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Nature's Nobility!

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.

[lynn-waterfall.livejournal.com]

Dunno... I don't think that the family names dying out supports your point. When a family name's survival depends on *male* children, there will be a natural tendency for fewer family names to continue on to the next generation, each generation.

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.

[ladyzenobia.livejournal.com]

I always thought that Bellatrix never wanted children. Is that just my head-canon then? I'm sure she said something to Narcissa about it...

[oryx_leucoryx]

She said she would have gladly sacrificed any children she would have had to the Dark Lord. So I guess she wanted kids. But not grandkids.

[ladyzenobia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was it! Thanks!

[oryx_leucoryx]

In previous generations of Blacks there are quite a few people who never married, and one case of marriage between first cousins. I think finding suitable pureblood matches was becoming difficult. Also, in Harry's year, despite them being conceived at the height of the war, out of 40 children (with 29 surnames mentioned by name in canon) 9 have surnames from Kantankerus Nott's list of 28 old pureblood families, yet in other years overlapping with Harry's we have students with 55 surnames, of which only 3 are on the list of old pureblood families.

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.

[ladyzenobia.livejournal.com]

But that list is missing some of the really obvious names, like Potter, so I'm not sure it can be trusted entirely.

[oryx_leucoryx]

I'm fine with the Potters not being on the list. The list is of families that had not a single member carrying the name who was not a pureblood since the 1600s. So if a woman named Black marries out the Black family is fine (though they'd want to ostracize her for good measure anyway), because her non-pureblood children will not be Blacks anyway, but if even one Black man had married a first generation half-blood back in 1882 the entire Black family, even those that adhered to all the rules, would have lost its 'old pureblood family' status. They would still be marriageable, even within old family circles, but the prospective bride/groom's family would scrutinize them more closely and the couple wouldn't be as high-status within the family as it could have been.

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.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Continuing my previous response:

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.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Ugh! That attitude is much too close to the attitude of Whites in the South of the 1950s and earlier. Well, this is what i mean when I say that, in the Potterverse, all the "good guys" are racists, too.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Alternatively, the Potters could have been descended from a half-blood who married a pureblood woman (herself a descendant of Ignotus Peverell, though her name was something else) in the 1700s, old but not old enough to be included in the list.

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.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Slight correction: I think we have 57 surnames in 91-98 outside of Harry's year. Still, only 3 of them on Nott's list.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Mmm... certainly Tom contributed his poor mite to try to wipe out the old Pureblood families. And I agree that Lucius and Narcissa, once they had Tom's measure, might not have wanted to produce more hostages if they were convinced there was a danger of Tom's returning.

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.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Re: the Burke family: Considering Tom's strong reaction to Hepzibah's tale of how little Caractacus paid Merope for the locket, I think Caractacus was one of Tom's first victims upon his return. The last we know of Caractacus was that he spoke to Albus when the latter was investigating Tom's background and past misdeeds. If we are right that the investigation was triggered by the aftermath of Hepzibah's death, perhaps following her heirs need for the help of a Legilimens to understand what Hokey really witnessed and did - then the conversation took place within a year or two of Tom's flight to the continent. I'm sure Tom found someone else he could frame with Burke Sr's death.

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.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

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.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Or they all insist on playing with Dark Magic and suffer health consequences and accidents as a result.

[sunnyskywalker]

Or a curse, this being the Potterverse. If you can curse a job title, why couldn't someone have cursed a family? Given how much Purebloods intermarry, if someone cursed one of them back in 1850, they've probably all been affected by now.

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...)