Sexuality! and Poor Writing! - JKR's Mistake

[Mike]

> Magpie:
> Well, sure, but just because you're reading for entertainment 
> doesn't mean you can't wind up being annoyed by something in a 
> book. You might not like what a book has to say about love, death, 
> growing up, growing old, joy, suffering, courage, hope or despair. 
> You can pass judgment on a book based on just about anything. I 
> remember reading Seventeenth Summer when I was a kid and not being 
> able to stand it. I didn't like what it had to say or how it said 
> it, or the characters. Was I passing judgment based on some 
> politica agenda I shouldn't have been applying to the book when I 
> was ten? Or was I just reading a book that annoyed me and I wanted 
> to say why? To me this is all a normal part of reading. I've never 
> read just to say "Well, that was vaguely amusing." 

Mike:
I do agree with this analysis. Not speaking for Carol or Susan, but I 
think there seemed to be a little more to the opposition to this 
story than mere annoyance. Let me use one of my examples. I despised 
almost every character in "The Sun Also Rises" by Hemingway. I hated 
their personalities, their life-styles, and could find no useful 
message in any of the plot-lines. I thought their world would be a 
better place if each and every one of them drown in some boating 
accident. (OK, the bullfighter could live, he was merely annoying.) 
<g> Yet I wouldn't call the book or its message "evil", nor say that 
Hemingway was seriously warped for writing these characters. (Yeah, I 
know, some people think he was seriously warped anyway).

Hemingway's characters lived in the real world, our world. JKR wrote 
her own world, a fantasy world of magic. Sure, she styled it after 
what she knew, both from our world and from our world's folklore. But 
JKR is vilified much more for the message she supposedly sent via an 
erstwhile children's story. 

Children can't be condemned to the House of Evil by age eleven! Wait 
a minute, it's. a. talking. hat. that does the sorting! And it is 
supposed to be sorting by what it reads inside the eleven-year-old's 
head! And it's never wrong! What part of IT'S MAGIC is missing from 
that equation?

Slytherin House and *all* of its members are evil, unredeemable, the 
*other*. The defined traits of the house were inferior. Yeah, so? 
Since when does any book of this genre not have the *defined* bad 
guys? And don't they have to have the bad traits to be the bad guys? 
Didn't this story have a major character, the decendant of the house 
founder, that led this evil empire, spurning on the most vile of the 
attitudes? In the end, the hero vanquishes this abominably evil 
leader, shouldn't that signal some kind of change for the movement 
that he led? Besides, some of the members were shown to have been 
redeemed, even if that meant that they had to exhibit some good guy 
traits to deserve those redemptions.

I realize that there are hundreds of ways to read the story and just 
as many ways to interpret it. Even if I think my reading matches 
closest to the story that the author wrote, I would never presume 
that mine was the only way to read it. But I do find the extremely 
subversive readings interpretively unrealistic.


> Magpie:
> <snip> 
> I think she gives views on quite a lot of things in the story.
> I thought it was pretty clear the Dursleys treatment of Harry 
> was supposed to be bad. And then Hagrid comes and smacks them down.

Mike:
I suppose this is where I disagree. The Dursley's treatment of Harry 
wasn't just bad, it was fairy talishly ridiculous. He was treated 
worse than Cinderella. Who wouldn't think the Dursleys deserved some 
come-uppence? I thought they deserved a few years with the Dementors 
(which Dudley only got a few minutes with). I also thought Vernon got 
off way to easily, Dudley got the brunt of the retribution.

Where I disagree is that I didn't think these were JKR's views so 
much as generally accepted views for the genre she was writing. The 
mean step-family gets smacked down a few times, the traitor gets 
scarred for life, the school bullies get punished by their peers; 
these are all typical of this fare, imo. They may be annoying to 
some, but they are by no means unique to this series. Can JKR be 
criticized for using them? Yes, by all means, have at her. But it 
seems ridiculous to vilify her and/or her story for the triteness, as 
if these themes were first presented here and are just plain evil.

Obviously, in my opinion,
Mike