Of Mudbloods and Bathtubs

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Author’s note: This essay offers a Watsonian explanation for certain things in the Potterverse. It ignores any Doylist explanations for those things, including Rowling’s.

In reply to my DH sporking, chapter 29, maidofkent wrote in part,

You're right that it seems pretty hypocritical to joke about Snape running away from shampoo, when the male Hogwarts students seem so uninterested in cleanliness. (Perhaps the Slytherins, being under the female influence of water, are namby-pamby types who do bathe regularly and Severus was indeed sorted too soon :))

This got me to thinking about a trio of seemingly unrelated subjects: baths, “mudbloods,” and the Slytherin prejudice against the latter. Many commentators have speculated the reason Salazar Slytherin didn’t like witches and wizards from non-magical backgrounds was because they threatened to expose the world of magical people to their non-magical families and friends. That’s a reasonable explanation, but could his dislike be founded on something more simple? Could it just be a matter of cleanliness?

When Hogwarts was founded a thousand years ago, it was difficult for most people--that is, non-magical people--to take baths. For magicals, of course, all they had to do was Scourgify themselves. With their warming, cooking, and water-producing charms, it also would have been much easier for them to collect and heat water if they wanted a real bath. Other cleaning charms would have kept their homes, clothes, and dishes clean. It therefore seems likely that people from magical backgrounds would have had higher standards of cleanliness than their non-magical neighbors just because it was so much easier for them to keep their persons and premises clean. Purebloods would have been the cleanest of all magicals because they would have been raised in homes that were the most familiar with the necessary spells. Once house elves were enslaved, keeping clean would have been even easier for their owners.

Magical people from non-magical backgrounds, however, would have known nothing about these charms, so their standards of cleanliness would have been just as low as those of their non-magical families and neighbors. When forced to mix at Hogwarts, it’s easy to imagine the fastidious purebloods being repulsed by the dirtiness of these newcomers and ridiculing them: “Why, they’re so dirty, when it rains, they’re covered in mud!” “They’re so dirty, even their blood is probably muddy!” Over time, those insults would have evolved into the shorthand epithet mudblood. Conversely, the super-clean (by that era’s standards) magical people from magical backgrounds would have come to be known as purebloods.

Then there is the similarity of the words mud and muggle. While magical people might have started out referring to those dirty non-magical people as “muddy” for one, or “muddies” for more than one, this could have been corrupted over both centuries of usage and the difference in regional accents into “muggly,” and eventually into muggle. Magical people from this dirty background would have become known as muggleborns.

As a proud pureblood, it stands to reason Salazar would have been more repulsed by these dirty interlopers than his less exacting co-founders. It’s not surprising he wouldn’t have wanted the invaders literally “dirtying up” his House. And maybe that famous “Slytherin ambition” was nothing more than the desire to have a home, body, and clothes that were as clean as magic could make them.

On the other hand, for people who don’t care about being clean, fastidiousness is a sign of snobbery. This prejudice towards cleanliness could also have been the beginning of Slytherin House’s reputation as the House of elitist snobs. Once that reputation had been established, non-Slytherins, particularly the rough-and-ready (i.e., unsophisticated and unrefined, or dirty and careless, to be blunt) Gryffindors, would have found other reasons to continue justifying their prejudice. That’s how the human mind works: Once one’s mind is made up on a subject, one automatically remembers information that supports one’s prejudice and forgets information that contradicts one’s prejudice.

“There goes the neighborhood,” the Slytherins thought upon seeing the dirty new “muggleborn” students. They didn’t realize that there went their own reputations as well.