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I see what you're saying. But I think we're coming at the text from two very different angles. JKR may have *meant* it to be this - I could buy that. My problem is not with what she intended. It is with what she *wrote.*
For me, extra-textual information about the author's intentions may be interesting to compare with the text, but it has little bearing on how I actually interpret the text itself. Only what is in the text count for me. Statements of authorial intention enlighten us only to the contents of the author's mind, not of the actual text. The text, since it is fixed in specific words and phrases with multiple connotations, and cannot include everything in the author's mind, is necessarily less than a perfect representation of the author's imagined world and is open to the reader's interpretation. Even given the best editing and so on...which is not really the case with HP.
JKR may very well think bravery is the highest virtue, especially moral courage, but the books themselves do not give us a sufficiently unambiguous presentation of bravery as moral for it to stand as the representative of moral virtue more generally, IMHO. Had she fully done her job as an author here, it would be fully clear *from the text alone* that by acknowleding someone's bravery you are also implicitly granting them very high moral status. The fact that many readers don *not* get this signal points to the text being rather more ambiguous or open on this subject. I'm not saying you are wrong - I can totally see where you are coming from with you reading - but my response is to cry out "She shouldn't have to TELL us this!" It should be leaping out of the text at us. An author's job is to *communicate* through their *works.*
She can do that - the idea of Snape/Lily arose with PoA! But it doesn't happen here, in the text. Which is, IMHO, where it *should* happen. Otherwise it simply is not there for me. I don't think a book ought to be something you have to plug the author's official set of Interpretation Coupons into in order to get the "real" story. There may be redemption for Severus in JKR's mind, and I may write my own mental fanfic to give him redemption in my own, but it is not there *in the text* for me.
For me, extra-textual information about the author's intentions may be interesting to compare with the text, but it has little bearing on how I actually interpret the text itself. Only what is in the text count for me. Statements of authorial intention enlighten us only to the contents of the author's mind, not of the actual text. The text, since it is fixed in specific words and phrases with multiple connotations, and cannot include everything in the author's mind, is necessarily less than a perfect representation of the author's imagined world and is open to the reader's interpretation. Even given the best editing and so on...which is not really the case with HP.
JKR may very well think bravery is the highest virtue, especially moral courage, but the books themselves do not give us a sufficiently unambiguous presentation of bravery as moral for it to stand as the representative of moral virtue more generally, IMHO. Had she fully done her job as an author here, it would be fully clear *from the text alone* that by acknowleding someone's bravery you are also implicitly granting them very high moral status. The fact that many readers don *not* get this signal points to the text being rather more ambiguous or open on this subject. I'm not saying you are wrong - I can totally see where you are coming from with you reading - but my response is to cry out "She shouldn't have to TELL us this!" It should be leaping out of the text at us. An author's job is to *communicate* through their *works.*
She can do that - the idea of Snape/Lily arose with PoA! But it doesn't happen here, in the text. Which is, IMHO, where it *should* happen. Otherwise it simply is not there for me. I don't think a book ought to be something you have to plug the author's official set of Interpretation Coupons into in order to get the "real" story. There may be redemption for Severus in JKR's mind, and I may write my own mental fanfic to give him redemption in my own, but it is not there *in the text* for me.