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: 2013-05-31 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)