death to capslock

Our 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 )