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Wonderful post and interesting comments! Thanks also for the link. That's a very powerful (and frighteningly believable) fic. Bravo terri_testing!
I agree, I do think James as far as our eyes can see (including that 800-word prequel) is a character consistently showing tell-tale signs of would-be abusers. But I wouldn't really say that it's analytically meaningful to wonder if James actually ended up abusing Lily. And not just because it's clear from the text that JKR wants us to see that couple as "ideal happy husband-and-wife." It's because while James is textually readable as potentially abusive, he is only one character in a long, long line of characters with abusive tendencies, in HP's universe.
Dumbledore the empathy-deprived narcissist is my prime example. Then we actually have Lily, who (while on the surface only ever presented as a sweet and nice girl) is capable of leaving her so-called friend on the ground struggling and choking on soap suds while she righteously chit-chats with his romantic rival, and suggests to Snape that he should abandon his House-mate friends if he wants to keep on being friends with her, without so much as suggesting any alternatives for boys that she might have him consider being friends with (which she knows and we know that he has none). And then we have cases like Hermione's callous treatment of all her enemies (Marietta, Rita Skeeter, etc.) and even of her friends and allies (her parents in DH, Ron in HBP when she gets jealous), and Sirius treating his house slave with extreme cruelty and happily enticing his godson into seeking out danger, etc. etc...
So James is not an isolated case, and that's my primary reason for seeing him and Lily getting married as more of an image of "bullying jock and shallow cheer-leader couple" as someone said above. Not that there isn't such a thing as a pecking order among bullies, and since gender and especially mother/father roles seem to be very rigidly set in the Potterian universe, I suppose yes, it is extremely likely that Lily did eventually get abused. Or would have been, if they had lived long enough.
But I think that wondering about James abusing Lily distracts us from the true patterning structure of the HP universe: the most salient thing to note about the abusive relationships of this world IMO is what we see in the relationships between narratively glorified characters and narratively condemned characters: Lily and Snape, Lily and Petunia, Dumbledore and Snape, etc. Dumbledore and Snape, for one, reads as *textually* abusive. No potential prospect about it. And as I discussed with several fen in this post -- http://raisin-gal.livejournal.com/1539.h
That's the thing of it, really. As someone commented in the thread here about JKR'S "bad boy syndrome," the most horrific thing about these books is that the narrative insistently aligns our reader POV with that of abusers and bullies, making us empathize with them rather than their victims. We are told to look on with an indulgent smile as James takes another boy along to attack his romantic rival while he's alone. We are instructed to find it humorous when Snape, who has jumped into the very stage of his childhood trauma (on the night of the full moon no less) believing Harry was in danger from a werewolf and the murderer of his parents, is floated around unconscious and purposefully bumped into ceilings.
I agree, I do think James as far as our eyes can see (including that 800-word prequel) is a character consistently showing tell-tale signs of would-be abusers. But I wouldn't really say that it's analytically meaningful to wonder if James actually ended up abusing Lily. And not just because it's clear from the text that JKR wants us to see that couple as "ideal happy husband-and-wife." It's because while James is textually readable as potentially abusive, he is only one character in a long, long line of characters with abusive tendencies, in HP's universe.
Dumbledore the empathy-deprived narcissist is my prime example. Then we actually have Lily, who (while on the surface only ever presented as a sweet and nice girl) is capable of leaving her so-called friend on the ground struggling and choking on soap suds while she righteously chit-chats with his romantic rival, and suggests to Snape that he should abandon his House-mate friends if he wants to keep on being friends with her, without so much as suggesting any alternatives for boys that she might have him consider being friends with (which she knows and we know that he has none). And then we have cases like Hermione's callous treatment of all her enemies (Marietta, Rita Skeeter, etc.) and even of her friends and allies (her parents in DH, Ron in HBP when she gets jealous), and Sirius treating his house slave with extreme cruelty and happily enticing his godson into seeking out danger, etc. etc...
So James is not an isolated case, and that's my primary reason for seeing him and Lily getting married as more of an image of "bullying jock and shallow cheer-leader couple" as someone said above. Not that there isn't such a thing as a pecking order among bullies, and since gender and especially mother/father roles seem to be very rigidly set in the Potterian universe, I suppose yes, it is extremely likely that Lily did eventually get abused. Or would have been, if they had lived long enough.
But I think that wondering about James abusing Lily distracts us from the true patterning structure of the HP universe: the most salient thing to note about the abusive relationships of this world IMO is what we see in the relationships between narratively glorified characters and narratively condemned characters: Lily and Snape, Lily and Petunia, Dumbledore and Snape, etc. Dumbledore and Snape, for one, reads as *textually* abusive. No potential prospect about it. And as I discussed with several fen in this post -- http://raisin-gal.livejournal.com/1539.h
That's the thing of it, really. As someone commented in the thread here about JKR'S "bad boy syndrome," the most horrific thing about these books is that the narrative insistently aligns our reader POV with that of abusers and bullies, making us empathize with them rather than their victims. We are told to look on with an indulgent smile as James takes another boy along to attack his romantic rival while he's alone. We are instructed to find it humorous when Snape, who has jumped into the very stage of his childhood trauma (on the night of the full moon no less) believing Harry was in danger from a werewolf and the murderer of his parents, is floated around unconscious and purposefully bumped into ceilings.