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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Date: 2013-05-27 06:44 am (UTC)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.
This passage caused me to realize what other character Hermione most resembles: Bellatrix. Just like Bella, she's utterly devoted to her "master," to the point of being unquestioningly subservient to his example and wishes. Like Bella, she'll use "any means necessary" to accomplish what she thinks his ends are, and she's utterly contemptuous of anyone who's not as rabidly devoted as she is. I think one reason she attacks Ron so viciously in chapter 19 is because he "abandoned the cause," if only temporarily--y'know, like that rotter Snape, who also hung out in a nice, safe place instead of rotting in Azkaban, like a real devotee of his lord and master would have.
By the way, that quotation at the beginning has a very Slytherin mindset. I wonder if there are any Slytherin Hermione fanfics.
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.
I don't think there's any question Hermione experienced a sharp moral decline under the influence of magical society. She commits and participates in a series of violent felonies over a period of several years. By the time she's reached fifth year, the crimes aren't even marginally necessary; they're just mean and vindictive. That means she's now committing violent crimes just because she feels like it, or believes her victims asked for it, not because she expects to gain any benefit from her actions. That indicates an additional moral decline right there.
We don't know anything about her life prior to Hogwarts, but I think it's extremely unlikely she had a criminal record before attending that school. I can't imagine her parents would have allowed a child already known to have violent tendencies to go off to some place they'd never heard of before, that they weren't allowed to visit, or even find, that was run by a strange group of people about whom they knew nothing. They'd want to keep a potentially dangerous delinquent under close supervision and control.
Unless...Maybe Hermione was already dangerous and violent, and she intimidated her parents into letting her go to Hogwarts. "You know, Mum and Dad, my magic is only going to get stronger with age. Even if you prevent my going to school, I can buy books and study on my own. I'll find a way; you know I will. It would be a lot healthier and safer all around if I were allowed to be among my own kind, in a school just for us." Hermione Granger in The Bad Seed.
The Grangers my also have been terrorized into submission by Scumbledore or one of his minions. Do we have any canon evidence of the Grangers being afraid of magicals, like the Dursleys were?
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Date: 2013-05-27 03:00 pm (UTC)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?
I think that you have a good argument in this post. However, there is a possible answer to the above question. If she *had* thought that Harry's scar could (or even might) transmit information to Voldemort, even before chapter nine, then the above reaction is *exactly* what she'd want to say after Harry told her that the connection was active. It would confirm to Voldemort, if he was listening, that everything she'd said to Harry before that was true, that it couldn't be misinformation that she was deliberately feeding Voldemort.
Of course, that's Snape-level thinking, and it doesn't seem consistent with how Hermione plans things, at all. It also doesn't address any of the other issues you raise; Obliviating her parents seems much more consistent with how she behaves throughout the series than lying to her friends would.
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Date: 2013-05-28 12:00 am (UTC)QFT. Though as oneandthetruth pointed out in her sporking of the chapter, Rowling's version is more of a small child's fantasy. It's like something out of a Roald Dahl book. Older readers can't help but ask, "What about the Grangers' ID and all their assets? How did Hermione get them new credit cards? Are we sure she didn't just Transfigure them into hatstands, or kill them and vanish the bodies?" That's why the idea that she was lying is attractive. As well as unethical, the alternative on the page is so incredibly stupid and implausible.
Sadly, you and lynn_waterfall above are right about it being more IC for Hermione to mess with her parent's minds, in their own best interests of course.
However, and I know this is far-fetched, she may have used something other than Obliviate on them. She says, "I've also modified my parents' memories so that they're convinced they're really called Wendell and Monica Wilkins [...] Assuming I survive our hunt for the Horcruxes, I'll find Mum and Dad and lift the enchantment. If I don't -- well, I think I've used a good enough charm to keep them safe and happy" (Ch. 6, pp 96-7).
As I understand it Obliviate doesn't "modify" memories, it removes ("wipes") them. Ideal for specific things like having seen a flying car, but surely dangerous to cast on something as huge as one's identity. (Look what happened to Lockhart, though that may have been partly due to wand malfunction). When Hermione casts Obliviate on the two DEs it might actually be the first time she's used that particular charm. Of course, technically what she cast on her parents should still be some sort of memory charm. But it's possible that "Obliviate" and "memory charm" are used interchangeably in casual speech because Obliviate is the only m.c. wizards toss around like confetti.
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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.
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