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First, I all want to recommend 'Liberacorpus' by terri_testing. You can find it here: http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/756
The following under the cut can't really be called an essay, it's nature to rambling, but I'd love to see what you all think.
We've seen not many glimpses of James, but what we have seen is pretty scary. My warning bells are ringing with this guy. And if James really was a manipulator and a possible abuser, then the whole Lily/Severus relationship changes. Before I thought Lily a shallow bint, who acted like a real b*tch to Sev during the SWM incident, but what could've have gone before? Before reading my ramblings, you really ought to read terri's fic, though. Be warned, James turns out to be nastier than many people give him credit for.
It's the only thing that makes *sense*, really. I've been rereading Gavin DeBecker's 'The Gift of Fear' again in response to this fic and it always amazes me how people will fall for creepy guys because culture has somehow convinced us that guys who will not take 'no' for an answer, will threaten violence, who are 'charming', who brag about their ability to flaunt authority are somehow 'cool' and desirable as mates instead of pushing all our 'warning' buttons.
It makes *sense* that James would be abusive. It's in the text! It is CANON that he and Sirius would sneak away under the Cloak to Hogmead to drink Rosmerta's. Fifteen, sixteen year old boys who sneak out of school to go drinking? Warning sign! It's CANON that the Marauders roam around the countryside, endangering people, every month. For *years*. Warning sign!
Look at James' friends, they tell yo so much about him. People will say, "oh, but the Marauders were such wonderful friends!" Really? There is Remus. You know, the guy they cared so much for that they learned how to be animagi, just so they could comfort him in his pain. Because they were so nice and good that they just didn't care about his lycanthropy. Weren't they nice? So nice, that when they leave school they dump the werewolf because.. they are afraid that The Werewolf was a DE?! Because you can't really trust werewolves after all? Canon would have us believe that this was a legible reason for James and Sirius to distrust their friend, but I say that if you distrust a friend for being a werewolf, then that whole song and dance about the Marauders turning animagi to help their werewolf friend is bogus. They became animagi because it was illegal and they wanted to and they joined Remus every month because it was against the rules and thus exciting.
Then look at Peter. We all thought that Peter must've been such a wonderful actor; acting as if he was a timid nice boy all the while plotting to defect to Voldemort, but when we look at CANON, we see that even as a boy Peter was very, very creepy. A syncophath of the worst order. 'Almost wetting himself', as Sirius sneeringly remarks, in his fervent bootlicking. Would any nice guy *want* to be friends with such a slimy, creepy guy? No, he wouldn't, but a nasty guy would want to have 'Wormy' (the name just hits it on the head, doesn't it) around to do some dirty jobs you don't want other people to know about. You'd want him if your ideas of a 'good time' and yours coincided. Think about it; Remus and Sirius weren't surprised that Peter betrayed James for an 'even bigger bully', they were just surprised that had the guts and the brains to do so. Peter is portrayed in CANON as a cringing, wheedling, slimy, smarmy creep, and this is *not* the 'face behind the mask' but the way he *has always been*. And he was one of the Marauders and James and Sirius trusted him above Remus to be Secret Keeper.
James 'friendship' with Remus wasn't very deep if he dumped him so easily.
James' only real strong relationship was with Sirius (Red Hen did an excellent essay on this) with Sirius firmly being the follower and James being the Alpha dog. Sirius was the follower, the doer, the guy who acted and reacted impulsively. It was James who always got the ideas. It was James who got the idea from the start to bully Snape throughout school and who did so, JKR tells us, because of his jealousy about Snape's friendship with Lily. When we first see him in Snape's memory of the Hogwarts train, it was *James* who badmouthed Slytherin and Sirius kept quiet (Sirius whole family was Slytherin, after all, and who would want to diss his family, certainly at that age?) but when Sirius was Sorted he was so in Gryffindor, and when we see him again he hates everything Slytherin, he hates his family and even moves out and *moves in with James* when he is sixteen. Gosh, *somebody* must've done a good headjob on that boy. *Somebody* must've recognized Sirius biddable and controllable qualities...
Sirius was the ideal fallguy too. Think of how Sirius felt so guilty about suggesting Peter for a Secret Keeper that he was raving 'I did it, it was my fault' when the Aurors picked him up. Now think back to SWM and the Prince's Tale. CANON tells us that the SWM incident took place shortly *after* the Shrieking Shack Incident. We also see that Lily berates Snape when he tries to warn her against the Marauders and especially James. She says, "I know about your theories that Remus is a werewolf". (I'm quoting from memory here)
What? Snape *knew* that Lupin was a werewolf (or at least suspected it) and still he went into the Shrieking Shack during full moon? Why would he do something so stupid? What could Sirius possibly have said to lure him into such danger? How about "Evans was so curious about where Lupin goes every month, we've decided to show her, har har har." I can't imagine Snape willingly going into a suspected werewolf den just to 'get the Marauders into trouble' but I *can* imagine Snape doing so to rescue his friend from the jaws of one.
And suddenly it all falls into place. We've been staring ourselves blind on Snape in the Slytherin Common Room getting his ears filled with anti-muggleborn propaganda, but we've totally neglected Lily in the Gryffindor Common Room. James must've spent years poisoning Lily's thoughts about her Slytherin friend, twisting Snape's actions and words to discredit Snape and make himself look good. *That's* why SWM is his Worst Memory. It was *the* moment that Lily finally, totally 'went over' to the Other Side, and look what happened to her.
*That's* why Snape felt so guilty for her death; for years he had been warning his friend about no-good James Potter. *He* was not such an idiot to be fooled by that smooth talking bullying pureblood bastard. James played 'devide and conquer', playing Severus and Lily against eachother, bullying Sev and manipulating things so that it looked as if it was *Severus* fault (classic manipulator behaviour: shifting the blame of the abuse onto the victim). Hey, he got the *teachers* gobbling up his pretty stories about 'Snape giving as good as he got' after all. Lily turned out to be a harder nut to crack; it took him five years. Five years of bullying Snape, five years of manipulation, shifting blame, smooth talking, charm and badmouthing Slytherins in general and Snape in particular. It took a while - Lily *knew* Severus after all - but in the end he succeeded.
First he would wait until a new full moon. Then, just before the Marauders would go to the Shrieking Shack he would say something about Snape suspecting Lupins lycanthropy. He would then smoothly suggest to Sirius something like "Oh Snape would never dare to follow us, you know how all Slyths are cowards at heart. Wouldn't it be fun if he did, though? He'd shit seven colours! But he'd never... well, maybe if he thought that pretty redhead Evans were with us. Even slimy Snivellus might want to rescue a damsel in distress, ha ha ha!"
Sirius would be off in an instant (probably thinking it his own idea) to find Snape (Marauders map) and say something like, "looking for your girlfriend Snivelly? She's with us tonight. Arrhooooo!!"
Snape would leg it to the Shrieking Shack, just as Lupin transformed, and of course James would be waiting there to be 'just in time to save Snape'.
James would spin his usual tale and just as usual be believed by DD (isn't it weird, you might ask, that Dumbles didn't even know the Marauders were animagi who let Lupin out of the shack to roam around the countryside for *years*? This tells you something about Dumbles, but it also tells you something about James' ability to lie and charm his way out of murder *just as a certain other Head Boy we could mention*!)
After this 'incident' James stages the very, *very* public Worst Memory incindent, carefully checking (canon!) that Lily is in the vicinity and at the end of that day Lily has permanently broken with her best friend and is shown as believing James' every lie. Oh, the also spewed her anger at *James*, but James is nothing but tenacious (another warning sign!)
For two years he keeps on bullying people (and especially Snape), he just hides it better. He keeps telling Lily that he 'cleaned up his act' and that she and her actions that day 'made him a better man' (again, shifting the responsibility of his own actions, "if you don't become my girlfriend/wife I might regress into my old behaviour and then it would be your fault" - warning sign!)
The rest is history.
So poor Snape, who at first congratulated himself for not being so stupid to fall for James' tricks, finds out that he has, instead, been playing to James' tune. James called every shot during the SWM incident. Snape had been so furious with Lily, listening *again* to that bastard instead of hexing his balls off and freeing him. Hadn't he warned her again and again that Potter was no good. Why did she listen to him? And how had Potter learned the Levicorpus? He had told only Lily of his new spell (Lily had, of course, shown the spell to James to prove that 'look, Sev *isn't* a Dark wizard. He makes these spells himself, you know, he doesn't learn them from the other Slytherins. He's very clever.. Look at this one..") So he lashed out in utter fury at her, calling her the one name he knows would hurt the most because he *wants* to hurt her that one time, for so betraying him (and he is immediatly sorry for doing so) and it played into James' hand.
Think of the guilt he must've felt. "If only I had.. she might not have married that bastard, she wouldn't be in this situation.." etc. etc.
I loved the bit about the photos. Now we know why Snape cried and tore that foto in Sirius' room. We also know why that letter sounded way to naive for a young, intelligent woman. We also know why Lily, for such a 'brave Gryffindor', ended up huddling pathetically, pleading for her child's life without so much as trying to accio her wand; abused women will cower, not fight.
In the end, it just comes down to two options. If James was really a nice guy, then Lily must've been a nasty golddigging bitch who dumped her poor halfblood friend so she can marry the rich jock/biggest bully on the playground. Then Snape must've been mentally disturbed for continuing to carry a torch for such a horrid girl.
Or James is really a nasty piece of work. A possible abusive husband, who only associates with people he can use and whose closest relationship is with best buddy, rebel-without-a-cause, Sirius. At least a manipulator who poisoned Lily with lies for years, who filled her head with stories about 'those Slytherins' until she believed them and discounted the stories of her friend Severus.
I suddenly find myself liking Lily again and can truly feel the tragedy of her and Sev's history.
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 so agree with everything you've said here! Reading the Potter books are an execise in doublethink, knowing what right and wrong is and yet having to believe that right is wrong when the wrong person is doing it and wrong is right when the right person is doing it. And I so, *so* detest the way the author is *nudging* me all the time; "look, look, the fat boy is choking on a toffee! hah hah! Isn't it funny how his stupid parents flap around like distraught animals flapping around their wounded offspring?! hah hah! The fat kid's tongue is all thick and gross and he is getting all purply and blue! This is even better than *last* time when we gave him a pigs tail! Hah hah!"
I swear, every time I read a scene like that I feel as if I have to scrub my eyes with bleach. Ugh.
I really shouldn't say this, because it is not done to psychoanalyze authors by their works, but reading the Potter books and reading JKR's interviews I sometimes wonder if JKR doesn't have a touch of Aspergers herself... (yes, yes, I know people will whack me down for making personal remarks) She simply *does* *not* *seem* *to* *get* that people really don't enjoy watching bullies 'playing jokes' on their victims. She really does not get that what people *do* says more about them than what they *say*. She really does not get that teachers that are 'mean' to you can really be good and even kind people (suddenly a scene from the 'Love Actually' dvd comes to mind. It's one of the deleted scenes where the Headmistress of a school, who has been shown in one scene to be very strict and feared by parents and children alike, comes home to her very ill partner. The scene is so poignant, with them chitchatting about sausages, whilst they both know that one of them is dying. Wonderful movie! *snif*)
I find it very telling that a fully grown, adult woman feels the need to publicly declare that she has created a character (whom she loathes and whom everybody is *meant* to loathe) as a revenge upon her old chemistry teacher because he was 'mean' to her.
Hello? Talk about schoolgirl grudges! Grow the hell up, woman!
I've read your post about Petunia, and I *love* it! JKR is playing such a devious (although devious isn't really the word since JKR seems to do this without actually meaning to) game where she has two parties, a party of nazis and a party of Old Southern Cottongrowing Slave owners. When you say that slavery is wrong, that to kill somebody for insulting a lady (he spits at her, you lynch him), that both the ideologies of Slave owning and fascism are based on the idea that people are unequal, that there are ubermenschen and untermenschen and that's its okay to harass, torture or kill untermenschen because they don't count, then people will shout at you: "if you are against the Slave owners you are for the nazis!! You filthy fascist #@%!!!!"
It's enough to make you bang your head against your desk.
Actually, I've got a few ideas about JKR and her inspirations for the Potterverse which might explain a few things, but I've been typing away for several *hours* now, in response to all the replies I've gotten to my humble post, so it will wait until another day. Hugz!
I'm totally with you and vern, both about not wanting to go there, and yet feeling helpless but to wonder about JKR's personality itself. You're right, we're none of us medical professionals (and if we were it would be even more irresponsible of us to pretend as though you could possibly diagnose someone through her literature and interview comments alone -- it's not like we're trying to profile a serial killer here) and we have no right to make any insinuation, seeing as we're not JKR or her loved ones, nor employed by any of them for such jobs. But when the author of a problematic children's book comes out and talks in ways that are so totally resonant with the problems underlying her narrative voice...
That's the disturbing part of this whole issue, really. JKR in her public statements sometimes sounds as if she herself might have some cognitive condition inhibiting her capacity for interpersonal empathy, and her story's narrative voice seems to have the exact same disorder, along with most of its main good-guy characters, typically (but not limited to) Albus Dumbledore. That guy has Narcisstic Personality Disorder, or something along those lines, plain and simple. That is not just a person being "Machiavellian." (And oh the irony of the stunningly socio-cognitively-handicapped character getting described as Machiavellian.)
But you know, whether it's JKR we're talking about (or the hypothetical image we have of her through her public appearances), or her narrative or her characters, it's probably not Aspergers or anything else on the Autism spectrum, IMO. If anything is diagnozably wrong with any of these entities (and we can't ever know whether it is) it's more likely to be a personality disorder or psychopathy, or something along that continuum. Or so I've come to think. Because if your empathic ability suffers from Autistic limitations, how can you portray all of the characters that you are incapable of empathizing with in such consistent and coherent detail? (JKR/the narrative) Or how can you instinctually understand the emotional states of the people around you, and use them to manipulate everyone to your own advantage? (Dumbledore, who always knows how to play everybody like a violin, from Snape to Harry to Slughorn etc.)
I don't know, I'm not at all knowledgeable about either personality disorders or Autistic conditions, though, so I could be way off base in making such uneducated guesses. (I'm sure there're at least some high-functioning autistic people among us fen; I'd appreciate it if anybody could correct me if they spot something wrong!) But I just wanted to add a shout-out here -- as a person who herself read DH and reflexively went: "My god, how empathy-deprived Dumbledore is... Okay, lack of empathy? Aspergers!" -- that just because a person's most significant characteristic is his lack of empathy doesn't mean that his condition is necessarily Autism or anything related. I've now come to think it may be a huge disservice to people with Autistic conditions to characterize the Potterian psychology (Dumbledore, Harry, the narrative, and possibly JKR) as Autistic or Aspergic.
Hi raisin_gal!
Well, actually, you can. Not with Aspergers perhaps, but Narcissists are *brilliant* mindf*ckers. I've read quite a bit about the disorder because I've always suspected my eldest sister to be a narcissist.
People seem to think that narcissism is about loving yourself, but actually it's about being without a 'mirror'. A narcissist is a one way street (I call them 'black holes' because no matter how much love and adoration you throw at them they always want more and never give anything back)
Narcissists *want* adoration. They believe they've got a *right* to it. They don't believe other people matter and because they lack empathy they don't care how many people they destroy in getting what they want.
How can anybody with a lack of empathy play people so well? Because when they are intelligent (and a lot of them are) they will be watching from a very early age to see how people react to things. They will watch and learn and use what they learn. Think about Ted Bundy, a psychopath and totally without empathy but sooo charming.
Now, before people start screaming at me that I'm accusing JKR from being a psychopath: I'm not. But I *do* think she's got something slightly *wrong* with her. Because she talks the talk, but she doesn't seem to *understand* what she is saying. Take Quirells claim that Voldemort taught him that there was no such thing as right or wrong, only power. That rings a bell, doesn't it? It sounds so familiar.. Of course, it's an old chestnut, but still, it sounds straight out of Orwell, and it is. Nothing wrong with that. She pinched a lot more and a lot worse from a lot of sources (jeez, even Harry Potter himself is a rather obvious Tim Hunter clone. I've been reading Neil Gaiman for fifteen years and read 'The Books of Magic' years before Harry Potter hit the market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Hu
But that isn't what I'm on about. What I mean is that she will use prhases like 'there isn't good or evil, only power' without truly understanding it. Because then she'll write seven books about heroes who will do evil things as much (and maybe even more) than good but will never be hold accountable for it because they are just too powerful. And we notice that. And we think she meant something deep and philosophical, but in reality she just *doesn't see the disparaty (sp?) between what she said and what she showed*.
Take whole house elf slave thing. I know why she wrote them as she did, and I know why Hermione changed her tune while still being considered a 'heroine' (a happy slave owning endorsing herione)
Well, I think I know why JKR wrote about slavery this way, and I think it's the perfect illustration of what is wrong with her writing. It's a long story, and it's the first time I wrote about my JKR house elf and Hermione theory and it's a long story, so bear with me (and feel free to quote me, as long as you tell whom you quoted)
Okay, Hermione and the house elves.
JKR told in an interview (here: http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/200
This name rang a bell. I've heard about Jessica Mitford before.
continued in next post
I'm agreeing with you about the mindf*cking capacities of Narcissists. That's why I'm proposing that we stay away from bringing up Aspergers in talking about the weird mentality of the HP universe or of JKR. Autistic conditions are to do with gene-related problems of socio-cognitive abilities. Confusing Asperger sufferers with the types of minds that can selectively tune into other people's feelings when they want to manipulate them, while switching off their empathy completely whenever it suits their own desire, is misleading as well as in danger of reinforcing an unfair stereotype, is all I'm saying.
part two
Jessica and Unity, the youngest, shared a room together when they were young girls. This was in the thirties, and Jessica was a devout follower of Communism (which was the fashionable thing to be if you were young, rich and rebellious) Her side of the room was hung with posters of Lenin. Unity, who was less pretty, less talented, less everything than her sisters loved to shock her family and garner their attention by openly declaring her alliance with the nazi party in Germany and idolized Hitler. Her side of the room was hung with nazi posters and swastica flags.
This would all have been a girlish adolescent notion of a foolish fifteen year old, but her older sister Diana divorced her husband to become the mistress (and later wife) of Sir Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Diana's father, Baron Reedesdale (whom Jessica described as 'nature's fascist'), loathed Oswald and Hitler, and forbade his youngest all contact, but of course Unity rebelled and became a member of the British Union of Fascists.
She then persuaded her family to let her study in Germany, where she stalked Hitler and eventually was introduced to him and became one of his inner circle.
Jessica went the opposite side of her sister's leanings. She was a member of the communist party, fought against Franco etc. etc.
So alright, this sounds as if the Mitford sisters were the inspirations for the Black Sisters. So what does this have to do with Hermione and the house elves?
Well, Jessica went to live in London's East End (a strictly working class erea) for a while, to rally up the workers to overthrow the kapitalists. The East Enders weren't interested in this posh girls rantings though. They were *proud* of their work, their culture, and they didn't need this rich girl telling them what to do. Jessica was exasperated. "Are *these* people going to be the Army that throws down the Enemy?", she wrote in her diary.
Then the lights went out. The electricity no longer worked. Disappointed, Jessica returned home. Why didn't the electricity work? Because she had never paid the bills. She had been cut off. But she had never had to pay bills before, daddy had always taken care of such things, so she had just ignored those annoying things.
Years later, when she wrote her autobiography 'Hons and Rebels', she would be amused at her youthful zeal and her foolishness.
Years later and years older and living and working in the US, Jessica got disenchanted with communism and left the Communist Party USA (her co-worker Dobby had invited her into it btw. Dobby, you say? Yes, Dobby)
So there you have it. Hermione is trying, just as Jessica was, to incite the house elves to revolt against their masters, only to learn that she has foolishly assumed to know better what is good for them. They need to decide for themselves what they want with their lives.
So what is wrong with this picture?
What is wrong is that JKR apparently has *no idea* that being working class is not the same as being a slave. Being proud of being working class is not the same as being proud of being owned.
Now, if she had said 'the house elves are representatives of the working class, and I've made a political statement about how some people will always be on the bottom end of the pile because they seem to prefer it', I would say 'fair enough, that's your political view', but she doesn't. She doesn't seem to see the difference. It's as if she read the book, was inspired by Jessica's umph, wanted to emulate her as a child and when grown up reflected that in the character Hermione Granger and she never, ever saw what was wrong to mold her middle class ideas about the 'working class' into a slave race and her ideas about 'the kapitalists' into a race that loves gold and therefore has to be kept down. She doesn't even see what is wrong with those ideas, and it's very very creepy.
PS
Unity Valkyrie Mitford. Or should we say 'Bellatrix LeStrange nee Black'?
Re: PS
What strikes me as creepiest is the part where... Okay, your point about "OMG she took that and equated 'working class' with the issue of slavery!" is also spot on and disturbing as all hell. But another "aha!" moment I had while reading your comment was: "Oh, so this was where that whole ideology = bad attitude came from!" As I mentioned in a comment to Mary, there seems to be this strong mentality in HP where authority and lawfulness is always supposed to be ridiculed and defied (Dumbledore-Ministry, Harry-Scrimgeour, Percy's story arc etc.) and yet such defiance should *always* be carried out completely silently and privately (Cf. Hermione's SPEW failure). Revolution bad, the story is essentially saying. And it's not even a message that social changes should be brought about gradually, because while that reading would fit with at least Hermione's case (*if* we are to take JKR's comment about her future anti-slavery job as somehow part of canon -- which it's telling that that conclusion to her story arc wasn't deemed necessary to be included in the epilogue) in the other cases of social justice we see Dumbledore, Harry, etc. constantly deciding to just shut up and go behind the back of the authority, rather than lift a finger to change the authority in any legitimate way. Dumbledore sees the Ministry as corrupt and ineffectual, and yet he doesn't do a thing to try to change it. He has his whole Order on his side, and yet it seems he's never tried to rally the public to bring down Fudge *or* Scrimgeour, even during the peace time when he wasn't busy with any war efforts. Harry also never tries to question the legitimacy of the school rules and fight for a change, despite how much popularity he has among the general students and most of the teachers. He just goes ahead and breaks them. Which, I thought this mentality was very post-1970s, and part of why the HP series resonates so much with today's youths and young parents. But thinking of the vividness of Hermione's tale (the silly girl, who attempts something no wise man or boy ever tries) maybe this mentality of "enthusiasm for ideology and social change can be nothing but a girlish infatuation" was not something that came from her generation's worldview, but rather something harbored very early in JKR from following the tale of the Reedesdale sisters. Coupled with, of course, her whole middle-class mindset, which supported and amplified it.
I mean, that's another sad thing about the HP series. JKR has suffered poverty, welfare-level poverty, and so she should know better than to make fun of (and condone characters making fun of) Snape's mismatched clothes and gray underpants, right? We trusted her on that score at least, simply by virtue of her bio story... Only, we shouldn't have, because apparently while JKR's poverty was a tragedy, for the class of people who *should* be poor to be poor is a fine target of humor. Arrgh.
Back to your point about Jessica and her sister -- You know, reading your take on their story, I wouldn't equate Unity with Bellatrix Black. She came from a family of purebloodists and went on to become a purebloodist fanatic, after all. No, the sister that resonates with her is (scarily) Andromeda Black... Who, while doing a *good* thing (supposedly, if defying his purebloodist family was such a glorious thing for Sirius and marrying a muggleborn was such a noble act for James) ended up, if not attempting suicide and dying in misery, at least birthing a not-entirely-human child and having that child, her husband, *and* her own husband all killed in the war. She has to raise her grandson (who's half-werewolf to boot) singlehandedly while mourning the triple losses. As mothers go, there's nobody that suffered a more miserable fate than that, with the sole exception of Merope.
p.s.
Snape, Tom Sr. and James
Talk about schoolgirl grudges! Grow the hell up, woman!
...And the even creepier part of it is: she has taken that Hated Professor and slotted him into the role of loving her Mary-Sueish heroine unrequitedly. Tied to her and memory and slaving for this love of his until his miserable death. I shudder to think of JKR having a model for that character, even if it's just the personality traits she's talking about when she calls him her model.
I have this idea, too, about the story that JKR is trying to tell through HP (maybe unconsciously). It seems to me that this story is only masquerading as a story of a boy's journey, because his destiny is fixed at the point of his mother's sacrifice. The real mechanism of the story, then, lies in his mother's life and her choices, and therefore I think HP is a redemptive story wherein the sin of Merope is absolved by the righteousness of sacrificial Lily. I mean, why did we need to hear the whole story of Merope again? That subplot had absolutely zero relevance to Harry's horcrux hunt, and it didn't even get referred to by Harry to rattle Voldemort's resolve in the final battle either. But in the female-driven story arc of the redemptive journey, that character plays a key part. Because she's essentially Eve... But scarily, it's not the sin of curiosity or sluttiness that Merope was culpable of. It was the sin of loving a beautiful man that didn't love her back, and aggressively pursuing him to the point of marrying him when he didn't want to. That's rape, what she did, but it's significant that this story doesn't ever call it rape. It focuses on Tom Sr.'s lack of "real love," and attributes Voldemort's murderous disposition to the fact that his father didn't love his mother enough to stay, and that his mother loved his father too much to stay alive to raise Tom Jr. This monster is then eradicated by Harry, the product of Lily's sacrificial marriage. The most sacrificial thing about her is that she ultimately committed suicide for him, but that's not all. She started out being friendly with both of her suitors, Snape and James, and left herself open for either of them to claim until one of them made the sinful offense of calling her a Mudblood. That's the supposedly good, unique thing about her childhood personality: that she was, in a word, slutty and ready to whore herself to whichever guy ended up on top and came to claim her. But the masturbatory part of this whole deal is that James was already richer and more handsome and with purer blood and better connections than wretched Severus, before the whole horn fight started. Yet Lily didn't choose James because of these things. The boys chose themselves as winners and losers. Lily did not agentively go around looking for her favorite boy to mate with, and this is what characterizes her as the exact opposite of Merope the original sinner. And this whole redemptive tale is neatly summarized in Ginny the ultimate romantic heroine. Unlike Merope who never went to school and didn't know right from wrong, and Lily who was innately virtuous (as in whorishly non-agentive), Ginny goes through the learning process of going through both stages. First replicating Merope's sin (in CoS when her obsessive love for Harry brings on a huge disaster in the form of the once-again-born child Voldemort), she then learns from the wise one (Hermione) that she should "relax" about her heart's true love and "maybe go out with some other people" (HBP, Ch.30) and follows this advice, dating different boys with no discernible favorite type and acting so slutty that Ron takes offense. Which is how she landed her heart's true love! So follow her example, avoid the beautiful men and go out with whichever man that comes onto you, and you'll become truly happy in the end, the narrative tells our little children.
Sorry for getting so longwinded... I have ranted about this before, but I just cannot help but shudder at this fundamental story structure. And it's so horrifyingly unique a thing to preach to the kids that you kind of start to wonder, where on earth did this structure come from? Surely not 19c literature, as good as Mary's new essay is...
Re: Snape, Tom Sr. and James
Um. Whatever else you can say about Lily, she is NOT portrayed as a "slut". Unless you are saying that JKR (perhaps subconsciously) is so prudish that being attracted to more than one person during your lifetime is "slutty". (And I think we're meant to think she had no attraction to Severus, anyway, so all we see is her attraction to James.)
I would have said that with Lily it was a mirror image with the sexes reversed. Severus commits the sin of loving a beautiful woman that didn't love him back, although he does not pursue this to the end of subverting her will with a potion.
I know it sounds extremely odd to categorize Lily and Ginny together as "sluts" -- that was a completely wrong choice of term, there, you're right; I'm still kind of in the middle of operationalizing my impressions into coherent words. What I mean when I say "slut" or "whore" (maybe I should just stick to "whore") is not what those words signify in our normal world of sexual conducts, but rather a displaced sort of idea in a universe where sexual conduct isn't what's relevant. It's always about love in the Potterverse, and *never* about sex. JKR is right on this. So how that applies to romantic morals is: if we were talking about sexual whorishness, it would be an issue of sexual appetite and a willingness to fulfill it with whichever person happened to take you up. Whereas this is all to do with *love*, so the issue is how willing you are to allow whichever man wants to love you to love you. That's how agentivity becomes the key factor.
Yes, Lily was, in a word, a prude. But her prudish attitude and post-CoS Ginny's sluttish attitude are fulfilling the exact same function when you look at who they are allowing to love them. The Ginny who was so in love with Harry that any boy who had eyes would take one look at her and know he didn't stand a chance with her, no *she* was un-slutty by the sluttiness scale of loving capacity (or more accurately, that of the *openness* of her loving capacity -- i.e., whorishness). When Ginny reformed herself into the popular girl that hops from one boy to the next, what she was doing was discarding that romantic agentivity and throwing herself (not her sexual body but her psychological self as the agent of love) at whichever boy happened to show interest in her. She became *friendly* towards all boys around her -- friendly enough that even Neville wouldn't hesitate in asking her out to the ball. Now, Lily was doing the exact same thing in terms of her open loving capacity, by showing the exact opposite sexual/romantic attitude. She treated *both* Snape's and James' approaches as not good enough and/or obnoxious, to the point of calling James an "arrogant toerag" straight into Severus' face. What that did for Severus was that he retained his hope for a potential romantic future with Lily. Meanwhile Lily did not go out with Snape ("why would she since he never asked her out?") which was enough sign for the self-assured James to take as his cue to keep on pursuing her. She tells him she would rather date the squid than date James (again in front of Severus) but this clearly did not function to make James stop loving her -- because she hadn't agentively chosen anybody yet, and thus was an open invitation to further romantic pursuit. James pursues, aggressively. Severus apparently steps down and accepts his defeat once his friendship tie with Lily gets broken as an indirect result of him losing the horn fight. But what's important here is that Snape does not *stop loving* Lily. Or maybe he did, but he goes on to rekindle and hold onto his Lily love, because he once thought (for quite a long time) that he stood a chance with Lily. He wouldn't have loved her so much and so fiercely if she had said on the first day at Hogwarts: "Wow, look at all these pretty wizarding boys! You know what, Sev, I've fallen head-over-heels in love with that pretty boy called Black" -- and kept loving this other boy and ignoring Severus' existence (and his romantic potential) completely for seven years.
pt2
That was Lily's goodness, her lack of agentivity in deciding which boy to take as her boyfriend. That's how she is exactly the same as the born-again Ginny of PoA through HBP. And I tried to describe this goodness by calling it "whorish sluttiness," but like I said, perhaps "sluttiness" was too misleading a word to use there.
She was whorish. Tom Sr. was *not* whorish. He couldn't have been, because he is a man and men can never be (*should* never be) whorishly non-agentive, passively awaiting the outcome of Merope and that Muggle girl's wand duel so that he can happily go with whichever one happened to come out on top. The narrative thus sets Snape/Lily as not a mirror image of Merope/Tom Sr., and that's where the narrative voice's claim about Lily's goodness lies. Never mind that textually she might read to some of us as not much less shallow than Tom Sr. The narrative says she was a nice girl that was prudishly non-committal to either of the boys while keeping her friendship with both (unlike Tom Sr. who ran away as soon as he found out he was married to somebody he didn't agentively choose), and Merope was a misguided fool who didn't know that she shouldn't be doing the mirror image of Snape.
Arrgh... Am I making any sense? Not only did my power hold until I was done but this got way too long. I'm sorry for all the rambling, and if this confuses you more than you already were. I'll tie these up a bit more tightly sometime in the future (maybe very distant future) to assemble them into a coherent whole. In the meantime, I've uploaded a related snippet draft that's been stewing on my harddrive on my LJ for your perusal if you're interested -- although it might still confuse you more than inform you of what it is I'm thinking about, because it starts off at a point *after* my main arguments >_