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

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Just read the post, and I see where the author's coming from--it's interesting. But, as one of those water types, I'm not sure I agree. My morality is much more what s/he describes as Gryffindor. I do think everyone looks out for "their own"; I certainly do. But the question then is: how do you define your own? I learned early on that it's everybody. The whole universe, and all that dwell therein. Why wouldn't that be equally true of some Slytherins?

Also, if Salazar Slytherin were anti-Muggleborn, there may well be a reason. That reason is exemplified by Tommy Riddle. Little Tom became a monster because he had power no one could control; mentally/morally, he stayed three years old, or less, all his life. It may well be true that the overwhelming majority of Dark Lords or Dark Ladies (and I agree Hermione is a candidate!) were Muggleborn. It's not us agains them, then. It's trying to keep the world safe from a real danger.

The weirdest thing of all is that, no matter what her books seem to imply, in her interviews, Rowling keeps proclaiming the Death Eaters are right! For example, all Muggleborns have a wizard somewhere in their ancestry (she says); Muggles really can produce bursts of uncontrolled magic if they get hold of a wand; and so on.

[sunnyskywalker]

Tom was basically Anthony from "It's a Good Life," wasn't he? I think probably Dark Lords are disproportionately raised in the Muggle world, and wizards blame that awful Muggle culture. Maybe Gellert was so feared because he was the first (presumably) pureblood Dark Lord in practically forever, and so they didn't know what to expect?

Re: Salazar, I seem to remember the 10th and 11th centuries having just as much political turmoil as any other time. (Depending on the exact timing of those "many happy years," the Founders could have seen both the tail end of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, just for starters.) Maybe some of the students used their magical learning for military and political gain in the Muggle world, possibly fighting former classmates who sided with other factions. Or brought their Muggle families' feuds to school--that might have been part of the "clash of friend on friend" the Hat described. Those conflicts might have legitimately threatened the survival of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade and a good chunk of the magical population. But has anyone seriously asked the Hat what Salazar meant? Was his objection to Muggle-borns genetic or political? Would he have been just fine with Muggle-borns who were identified as infants and raised by wizarding families?