The house of ambition?

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Hi, everyone! I do need to chime in on the excellent post on feminsim below--but I just wanted to point out another wildly illogical facet of these books.

I wasn't the first person to notice this, by a long shot. I think Terri said something about it (more than once) and so did Cardigrl, back when she was still on livejournal. But it's worth pointing out again.

Consider that you are a child with--shall we say, unusual talents? Consider that, as scared as you and those around you might be by those talents, you bring them intact to your eleventh birthday. Then you find out you're a wizard.

Rather than rejecting the message, you enter a brand-new world. Can you imagine how that would feel? I know, I know: we were supposed to experience this along with Harry, but he was not actually a Muggleborn, and he did have faint memories (shown in his dreams) of the wizarding world. His home life was also so dreadful (even if played for laughs) that learning that he was special, privileged, talented, and so on had to seem like an escape.

But picture an actual Muggleborn boy or girl entering the wizarding world for the first time. Picture Hermione, for example. Why on earth wasn't she in Slytherin house, if the Slytherins are supposed to be goal-oriented and ambitious? Is there anyone in canon more ambitious than Hermione?

If the wizarding world were logical, far from being the hotbed of purebloods, Slytherin house should have a higher than average percentage of Muggleborns and half-bloods. It should also have a higher than average percentage of working-class kids like young Severus. Instead, Rowling gives us the racist house full of rich people and their retainers. Which makes no kind of sense. In a logical world, as Cardigrl pointed out so many years ago, the racist house full of establishment types would be--

(drumroll)

Gryffindor!

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

Gryffindor definitely ought to be the house of high-born knights, and Slytherin the house of merchants.

I wonder... Crabbe and Goyle are not portrayed as well-spoken aristocrats, or even retainers. Isn't having well-spoken, elegant retainers part of the image the Malfoys would be trying to achieve? We don't know that Millicent Bulstrode, Pansy Parkinson, Wilkes in the previous generation, or some of the other background Slytherins come from money or old families; the fact that they aren't noted as bragging about their wealth or backgrounds might suggest they don't have anything to brag about. When they do, we usually hear about it (Blaise, Draco, the Black family). Maybe a lot of Slytherins are actually working-class kids who are either barely purebloods or are technically half-bloods like Harry, and they're all trying to improve their lots. How often is a terrorist group composed almost entirely of rich people who already feel like they have power and influence, after all?

Gryffindors might say, "I know like five Slytherins who are rich and have a lot of influence at the Ministry. That shows they're decadent aristocrats who rule the wizarding world!" ...while conveniently ignoring how many Gryffindors also have influence at the Ministry, or money, or how they dominate a vigilante army. (Were the Longbottoms or the Potters without money and influence and social standing? Or Dumbledore with his purported Gryffindor membership?) And how many Slytherins don't.

And maybe a lot of the Muggle-borns are nervous enough that they want to keep their heads down at first, and by the time they might develop more ambition, they're already sorted? Maybe they're mostly in Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, but if they sorted a few years into school, the balance would change. And any Muggle-borns in Slytherin probably learn to keep that quiet really quickly, and maybe claim to be unacknowledged members of wizarding families who were tragically left in the Muggle world by accident (and as in Tom's case, they might even be right sometimes).

I don't think that can explain it all, but it might make the situation a little less clear-cut.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

It does! Thank you. And it's true that kids with a certain type of bravery would be most eager to assimilate into the Wizarding World. More thoughtful types, or those with close ties to friends and family, wouldn't be so eager.

But, of course, as Torchedsong has said, it's not just the inconsistency in the way the houses are presented (Crabbe and Goyle are definitely not upper crust! Just as you say). It's that Rowling demonizes fully a quarter of the school, without even knowing she's done so. Not one Slytherin is redeemed in the text. And yet Rowling is convinced she wrote a scene with Slughorn leading the Slytherins into battle against Voldemort. She didn't. I wish she had, but she just didn't.

[sunnyskywalker]

It's really hard for me to understand designating a House of Evil Kids and sticking to it. I thought for sure part of Book 7 would be about uniting the Houses and finding out Slytherin isn't inherently evil. Harry might believe that, but the text doesn't have to support it! Instead, everyone from another House who went bad was nearly in Slytherin. When does Peter ever show any ambition?

Maybe she'll take lessons from George Lucas and have Slughorn lead the Slytherins into battle in the Special Edition one day. She's got a good start on an Expanded Universe of her own. She just needs to license about fifty more authors to write Potterverse comics and movies and books...