The Challenge for January 2011:
Lily revisited
Lily revisited
Years ago (we've been around for a while, oh yes!)we had 'Severus and Lily' as a monthly challenge.
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alicekinsno1 suggested to take a closer look at Lily's character:Maybe something that discusses the character of Lily more deeply? I'd love to see what some of your ideas are for just how Lily went from treating Snape so harshly and talking back to James, to being the stereotypical "saintly mother" at the end of her life. There's something about her personality that doesn't add up.
That is to say, how her apparently selfless decision to die for her baby makes sense in light of the way she treated Severus or even James. With possibly a side comment about how despite being so powerful and gifted she didn't really show any of that by dying pleading for her baby's life without even trying to take on Voldemort.
Please post your entries here or in a separate post. I'm looking forward to your entries.
If you have ideas for new challenges, please post them here. (This is a new list, your earlier suggestions are still in the old post).
The "saintly mother" image IMO is just that: an image, manufactured after her death and by the author (although Harry IMHO never seems to fully grasp that it is an image, nothing more, but then his only real experience of her that he remembers is in images of her, actual and narrated. People don't like to speak ill of the dead, especially not the heroic dead, and to their children). It's not that we see many scenes of Lily being the perfect mother: we have one brief letter of hers from the time and one scene of her in a highly unusual circumstance, trying to save her own baby, which I think any mother with a modicum of caring would do. It's one thing to die for one's own child; dying for (for example) a stranger's child, or a child you despise (no you oughtn't to despise them), etc. is another kind of challenge. Both are brave and admirable, but one requires a greater extension of unconditional love than the other, and is correspondingly more difficult. The one marks her as a genuinely loving mother who is brave; the other would mark her more as a saint. IMHO. In her letter, she comes off to me as a sincerely loving and good mother but also a young and slightly irresponsible parent who is just starting to get the hang of the parenting thing (unsurprising, since she is just out of her teenage years).
He relationship to James also actually doesn't come across as so OOC to me. Lily seems to me to be the sort of person who, while meaning well, likes to get on a moral high horse and be the voice of morality instructing all around her in her wisdom, regardless of how much wisdom is really there. (Certainly she genuinely believes she knows best.) In this James is just one more 'student,' like Severus, except he's one (she thinks) she's actually gotten through to! Clearly there's something to the fellow, she thinks. Also, while she likes the image of moral saintliness and thinks well of herself in that regard, she comes across to me as slightly more shallow than she cares to admit (hardly a surprise in a teenager, and a common temptation for everybody, I suspect). She does care about her social image, and though calling her a golddigger IMO goes too far, I could find the prospect of wealth as one among several threads of her *initial* attraction to James believable, given how much her sister cares about such things (meaning is strikes me as something stemming from their childhood together). Later something genuine could have sprung up between them, I can buy that. She and James are not that far apart in basic personality, although she doesn't possess the same streak of sadism as he does - but he hides that from her. She also is fiery and rather Gryffindorish, so she and James are rather well-matched there in personality; she can be somewhat cold, though not necessarily deliberately; empathy is not beyond her but also comes to her naturally only to a limited degree, and Gryffindor isn't a house that really teaches one to value or expand it in practice. (The rhetoric is another matter.)
I'm at a loss when it comes to judging how magically powerful Lily herself really was. All we have is a lot of hearsay and one accidental act of magic that does not seem to necessarily be dependent upon the subject's own magical strength to function - it's a piece of ritual magic, if anything (the three times denied request, followed by voluntary death); it's the arrangement of the parts that matters. She might have been a truly powerful witch, or merely a slightly-above average one who was charming and bright. Her not trying to take on Voldemort…well, the not having her wand on her was sheer stupidity, but I can believe that a young woman like her facing a supposed dreaded serial murderer froze in the moment. Logically her attempt to save Harry wouldn't work, but I can just about - just about - buy that she was beyond logic at that point. Although I'm not sure what that says of her vaunted Gryffindor (charge-into-battle type) bravery then. Maybe here her characterization does break down a bit. It's certainly not what we were led to expect her sacrifice to have been like, anyway.
I'm also not clear why on earth it *worked* (beyond authorial fiat). Magic in the Potterverse supposedly is all about will, but she didn't know of any such protection beforehand so she can't have been willing it to happen (and Voldie certainly wasn't). I can't buy that this was the first time in the history of magic that a mother ever begged thrice to be the one killed, not their child, or that Lily's mother love was *that* extraordinary here compared to what mothers in history have done. I don't know why Voldie bothered with the asking and then killing, when he could have stunned her at any point (and if he's a Dark Arts expert of such caliber, did the possibility of ancient magic coming into play NEVER occur to him? wtf)