Dumbledore's "infatuation"(Was: Rowling says Dumbledore is gay)

[Carol]

Carol earlier:
> > 
> > Infatuation isn't love.
> > 
> > To resort to a dictionary definition from Merriam-Webster Online:
> > 
> > infatuate <snip>
> > with a foolish or extravagant love or admiration
> > — in·fat·u·a·tion noun
> 
> lizzyben:
> 
> By your own definition, infatuation is a kind of love - extravagant
or foolish love. 

Carol responds:

Good point. But I was trying to distinguish between a foolish or
extravagant attraction based on an idealized view of a person (surely
Albus was blinding himself to Gellert's faults and denying a sinister
side that even he sensed) and a mature love that recognizes and
accepts the other person's faults rather than denying them. Did Albus
feel the same way about Gellert after Gellert Crucio'd his brother and
caused the fight that brought about the death of Ariana, not to
mention what he later learned of Grindelwald as an adult Dark Wizard
who constructed prisons for Muggle-borns and became a mass murderer in
the name of "the greater good"? If so, it remained an infatuation,
IMO, and not true love as represented by Molly and Arthur, the only
representatives of a happy adult union in the books (unless you want
to include Vernon and Petunia, but I don't want to go there). 

lizzyben:

Infatuation is that first stage of "OMG this person is so perfect &
wonderful & incredible!"  And since DD/GG's relationship only lasted a
few months, DD never had a chance to settle into that long-term love. 

Carol:

the question for me is whether he would ever have done so, given what
Gellert Grindelwald became. By DD's own admission, he denied faults in
Gellert that everyone except him saw. The boy had been expelled from
*Durmstrang*, a school known for teaching the Dark Arts, for torturing
fellow students. Albus suspected that he wanted to create an army of
Inferi. How long could he have remained deluded with regard to
Gellert's sinister side, and if he could love him anyway and support
what he was doing, how is that commendable?

Lizzyben:
I'm puzzled by the comparison to Arthur/Molly - there's a huge
difference between the initial "falling in love" feeling & the solid,
boring, stable love of a long relationship.

Carol:

See above. No doubt their relationship started out as a teenage crush,
but it developed into a genuine love based on mutual affection and
respect, not just physical attraction and hormones (I doubt there was
an intellectual attraction like that experienced by Albus and Gellert
though no doubt they shared some basic values). Could Albus and
Gellert, both obsessed with remaking the WW (and using their power and
intellect to control Muggles and Muggle-borns) have developed a
stable, long-term relationship? They were both arrogant and brilliant,
and their differences, like those between Slytherin and Gryffindor,
would have surfaced eventually. And suppose that they had still been
friends or lovers or whatever they were when Gellert stole the Elder
Wand? Do you think he, the master of the wand, would have shared it
with his dear Albus? I think it would have come between them. Only one
wizard can wield the One Ring, erm, Elder Wand.

Lizzyben:

 I'm also puzzled that you now say that Snape didn't love Lily, which
contradicts other statements. He was her best friend, he devoted his
life to her memory, but he didn't love her? 

Carol again:

Poor Snape, my favorite character. Of course he devoted his life to
Lily's memory, or more correctly, IMO, to atoning for his role in her
death. I'm not denying canon or the use of the word "love" to describe
his feelings. What I meant, and perhaps "infatuation" is the wrong
word here, is that he idealized Lily, as suggested by the beauty and
strength and purity of his Patronus, which represents *his* view of
Lily, which perhaps does not correspond fully with the good but
imperfect (human) Lily we see in the books. (She calls him "Snivellus"
and refuses to forgive him for calling her a Mudblood.) Similarly,
Harry's Patronus represents an idealized James, in contrast to the
arrogant bully of SWM and the iniator of the lifelong Severus/MWPP
feud. So, yes, he loved her, but it was an idealized sort of love that
reminds me of a knight's for his lady. (There's a chivalric side to
Snape, who actually would have made quite an interesting Gryffindor,
but I prefer him as the Good Slytherin.) I'm merely saying that a
mutual, reciprocal mature love that acknowledged flaws and failings on
both sides never had a chance to develop between Severus and Lily as
it might have done had LV not come between them. What the adult Snape
loves is a *memory* of Lily, idealized and stripped of all her faults.
It even seems to me, based solely on his Patronus, to be stripped of
any sexual component: "To love pure and chaste from afar" comes into
my mind when I (re)read "The Doe Patronus." YMMV.
> 
Carol earlier:
> <snip> "Consumed by his feelings" certainly indicates infatuation,
not love, in which the lover recognizes the faults in the person he or
she loves and loves them, anyway.  Love, in contrast, is a complicated
emotion that can range from sexual attraction combined with tenderness
and affection to the reverence felt for a beloved and respected mentor
or the devotion of a parent to a child. <snip>
> 
> lizzyben:
> 
> "Consumed by his feelings" is a pretty good description of somebody
who has fallen in love. IMO. Love is blind, as they say - and it can
blind you to the faults in the beloved. How does being blinded by love
mean it isn't really love? 

Carol:
I would say "blinded by infatuation." Look at any young married couple
past the honeymoon stage. If they stay together and continue to feel
mutual affection and respect as well as physical attraction after
discovering, to take a hypothetical example, that the new wife
supports George Bush and the new husband throws his towels on the
floor and spits in the shower (or worse--choose your own examples),
then the infatuation has been replaced by mature love. GG's faults
were, of course, considerable more serious than the half-serious
examples I've given.

Lizzyben:

JKR stated that DD's love blinded him to GG's faults. 

Carol:
Exactly my point, only I'm saying that *infatuation*, a word she also
used, which, IMO, more accurately describes the teenage Albus's
feelings, blinded him and led to tragedy.

Lizzyben:
Yes, over a long period of time, people learn to see & accept the
others faults, but that's not the initial "falling in love" stage at
all. DD learned GG's faults quickly enough. 

Carol:
He saw them to begin with but denied them because he idealized his
brilliant and handsome friend, whose ideas he wanted to correspond
with his own. (He knew, for example, what GG really wanted to do with
the Resurrection Stone, but he lied to himself about it.)

Lizzyben:
And also, IMO DD shared GG's faults, so to him they weren't really bad
faults at all (world domination, love of power, etc.) They really had
an awful lot in common.

Carol:
Exactly. They had a lot in common (brilliance, arrogance, a desire for
world domination and control of the Muggles), but Albus had scruples
that Gellert (who had already tortured classmates and been expelled
from Durmstrang, as Albus well knew) didn't share. IMO, it's like the
difference between Regulus Black and his cousin Bellatrix--a similar
pure-blood supremacy agenda, but differences in what they were willing
to do to carry it out. Albus's letter to Gellert makes those
differences clear; it also shows him fooling himself. Which is not to
say that Albus's desire for power over Muggles and Muggle-borns (born,
I think, of the incident with Ariana and its tragic consequences to
his family) is in any way commendable. It's just that he wasn't
planning to create an army of Inferi or build prisons or torture
people as a means of controlling them. He believed in using power
responsibly (rather like the rulers of Plato's Republic). And he
wanted to believe that Gellert, with his handsome, laughing face, was
also acting for "the greater good" (rather than pretending to do so
and taking that slogan as his own, as he later did).
> 

> lizzyben:
> 
> IMO this isn't a huge change 

Carol:

Isn't it? Both lists are focused on homosexuality (and judging fellow
posters for their views on that issue) rather than what's actually in
the books. We've been sidetracked before, but not to this degree.

Lizzyben:
& certainly isn't a distraction from the over-arching Christian theme,
any more than the information that Lily loved Snape as a friend
somehow distracts from the major themes of the series.

Carol:
And yet it's the topic du jour, replacing everything else, as if JKR's
political views somehow determined the quality of the books.
Personally, I don't see how the presence or absence of a gay character
(whose sexual preferences are not made explicit in the books) has
anything at all to do with the merits of the book as a piece of
fiction. I'll say this, though. I've been wondering when people would
discuss Grindelwald, and at least we've started to look in that
direction, though the focus is still on DD's feelings for him. I
wonder whether GG's good looks and attractive personality (which, in
contrast to Tom Riddle's charm, seems to be natural and unforced) are
symbolic in some way of the temptation to evil. Please don't
misunderstand me and think that I believe in a literal devil or Satan,
but I've always thought that if there were such a being, he wouldn't
have horns and hoofs. He would be handsome and charming, the better to
seduce susceptible people into evil. Gellert Grindelwald, to me, seems
to symbolize the attractiveness of evil, especially to those who are
also tempted by power. (Faust, anyone?) And yet, in contrast to
Voldemort, he repents at the end of his life. An old, toothless, dying
man, and he still manages to be attractive with his fearlessness and
his defiance of the upstart Voldemort. It's hard to think of the evil
that he did in between perching on the windowsill with his stolen wand
and being defeated in a duel with Dumbledore, for whom he still felt
some sort of affection after all those years.

lizzyben:

 It's just one piece of info about one character. What's distracting
is the frenzy it's created. Authorial intent is important, but it's
certainly not the only thing that matters. Fans can interpret things
their own way, regardless of what the author intended.

Carol:

I agree that the frenzy is distracting and that fans *ought* to be
able to interpret the books in their own way. The problem is,
authorial intent seems to be controlling the interpretation, and the
issue of homosexuality seems to be taking precedence over what's
actually on the page. I suppose I should be happy that we're not still
talking about (well, I'd rather not say, for fear of bringing up
certain topics again <eg>).

> lizzyben:
> 
> Totally agree here, should've been in the books. But there again,
JKR has detailed backstories for many characters that weren't in the
books. People weren't offended when she revealed more information
about Dean Thomas' story or Theodore Nott, so how is DD's story any
different? I like getting more info about the characters (as opposed
to JKR's opinions about the characters.)

Carol:
For one thing, those other tidbits (made on her website rather than in
a highly publicized interview) didn't change the way we read the
books. For another, they didn't involve important characters or
controversial topics. No one is going to create a media frenzy about
Draco and Theo having a conversation that we don't even know the
contents of, and Dean's story is just an interesting tidbit that
throws a slightly different light on his flight from the Snatchers
(ironically, he isn't even a Muggleborn), but it isn't important
enough to dominate the HPfGu discussion. Nor is it likely to be seized
upon by opponents of the books as yet another reason why the books
should be removed from school libraries. (Not my view, of course!)

It seems to me that JKR doesn't quite distinguish between what's in
her mind and what's in the books, and she feels as if her
interpretation is the "right" interpretation because she created them.
But, as the Snape discussions alone indicate, the characters have
taken on a life and reality (wrong word--I know they're fictional)
beyond her intentions. Imagine Herman Melville coming back from the
grave and giving us Ahab's backstory (This is how I imagined him and
this is how I intended him to be read). I prefer to interpret the
books for myself without being distracted by the author's political
and religious views, or his/her opinions about the characters. (Maybe
I should stick with dead authors?)


> lizzyben:
> 
> But JKR has also stated that "tolerance" is *the* most important
message of her series. 

Carol:
But the question is, should we be distracted by that pronouncement
from finding other important themes and motifs in the series? Again, I
don't want the author telling me what to look for, and I certainly
don't want to be preached to, regardless of whether I agree with the
message. A lot of what appears in a literary work is *un*intentional
(the subconscious mind at work, maybe). Certainly, we can examine the
influences on her books (the Bible, Greek mythology, the Merlin
legends among them) without regard to her political convictions or
message or her religious beliefs. I'm certainly not reading these
books for their moral or message, and I hope that's not why young
readers are reading them, either. (Did Shakespeare have a message in
mind when he wrote his plays? No. He was writing to entertain and to
make money.) Interpretation of a literary work is a lot more complex
than finding the moral, if any, that the author is trying to convey.
The story and all its elements, especially the characters and their
relationships and conflicts, are the crucial element, IMO. And if DD's
sexual orientation was important, it should have been revealed in the
books. Revealing it after the fact as an answer to a question about
whether DD was ever in love should not be regarded in itself as some
brave statement about "tolerance." It's just the way she envisioned
the character and nothing more.

Lizzyben:

Whether she succeeded or failed is open to debate. But it's quite
clear that she was intending to create an anti-bigotry message w/the
prejudice against & persecution of "muggle-borns". Why should we
ignore that message? Different themes can co-exist - and in this
series, the "Christian" & tolerance themes certainly co-exist (along
w/some more unsavory themes like revenge). <snip>

Carol:
I'm not saying that we should ignore the persecution of Muggle-borns
(though I do think the depiction is unrealistic). I just think the
themes and motifs at the climax of the book are equally important, and
I think that forgiveness trumps revenge. (That's the lesson Harry
learns through his visit to Snape's memories, IMO.) For me, the themes
 (really, motifs) of forgiveness and redemption tie in more with the
Christian imagery (crosses are referred to three times at least) and
Harry's self-sacrifice than with the postmodern conception of
tolerance, which is not the same thing. ("Forgive us our trespasses as
we forgive those who trespass against us" relates directly to Snape
and Draco, for example.) Christian and politically correct themes can
certainly coincide (modern secular humanism is an outgrowth of
Christian humanism, IIRC--those who know more about the subject than I
do please correct me if I'm wrong), but they are not the same thing.
Remorse and redemption and the afterlife are essentially religious
motifs whereas "tolerance" is essentially political (and tolerance of
homosexuality per se is entirely extraneous to the books, as the
attackers of the books would know if they'd actually read them).
 
Carol, wondering if we should move this discussion, or those parts
that relate to GG and DD rather than JKR and her announcement, to the
main list