JKR, Harry Potter, and the Nature of Evil

[Ebony Elizabeth Thomas]

No: HPFGUIDX 19534

"Evil takes many forms besides cruelty.  Lockhart doesn't take pleasure
in causing suffering as such, but he does cause it."
--Amy Z

If you're choosing to write about evil, you really do have a moral
obligation to show what that means.
--J. K. Rowling


Last week's edition of the U.S. newsmagazine *Newsweek* contained a very 
interesting article... "The Roots of Evil".

Evil in the Harry Potter books comes in many forms.  We have argued about 
whether or not many characters are truly evil or have the propensity to 
cause intentional harm--Voldemort and Lucius Malfoy often come up in these 
discussions for obvious reasons, but Draco Malfoy, Gilderoy Lockheart, 
Severus Snape, Crouch-as-Moody, Ron Weasley, and even Harry himself have 
been mentioned in our ongoing discussions about morality--or the lack 
thereof.

As I read the article last week, all I could think of was the Harry Potter 
series, and how the factors delinated could be applied to several of the 
main characters.

Below are excerpts from the Newsweek article.  Full text can be found at 
http://www.msnbc.com/news/572659.asp .

NARCISSISM  (Gilderoy Lockheart, Severus Snape (?))

"It is normal and-as evolutionary biologists say-adaptive to be 
self-centered. It keeps us alive. But if there is a single trait that allows 
lack of empathy and compassion to rot into pure evil, argue many 
psychiatrists, it is the extreme form of self-centeredness called 
narcissism. Narcissism is the huge multiplier, says Dr. Jeffrey M. 
Schwartz, a neuropsychiatrist at UCLA. The grandiosity that McVeigh 
exhibitedthat by his act he would bring down the governmentshows how badly 
the hero ethos can go wrong when it is not grounded in a strict moral code. 
Narcissism is what allows you to get evil acts from seemingly ordinary 
people. Grandiosity also allows a person to play god, deciding whose lives 
are dispensable in the service of which goals."


CHILDHOOD ABUSE AND NEGLECT  (Voldemort, Harry Potter (?))

"If a child suffers extreme neglect or cruelty, especially from a trusted 
friend or beloved relative, the result is often shame and humiliation: I 
was not worthy of love from those I love most. Those feelings, if not 
countered by compassion from others in the childs world, can grow into a 
self-contempt so profound that the only way to survive is to become 
indifferent to other people, too, says Goldberg. I may not be worthy, but 
neither is anyone else. Someone who hates himself projects that hatred 
onto his victims. He puts his hated self in the shoes of the victim, then 
tortures and kills that person, Simon explains.

"Studies of sociopaths indeed find that many experienced horrific abuse 
during childhood, which is a good start toward fostering self-hatred. But 
abuse also seems to leave a physical trace on the developing brain, 
assaulting it with a constant barrage of stress hormones. The result is that 
the child becomes inured to stress and, indeed, to most feeling. 
Emotionally, he flat-lines. He can no longer perceive another human beings 
distress; he cannot feel what another is feeling. One of the most consistent 
findings about the biology of violence is that sadists and coldblooded 
killers show virtually no response to stressno racing heart, no sweating, 
no adrenaline rush."


ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS  (Draco Malfoy)

"But just as evil can spring from a failing of the heart, so, too, can it 
grow from the head. You can have people who have a well-developed capacity 
for empathy, relating, who are very close to their friends, but who have 
been raised in an ideology that teaches them that people of another 
religion, color or ethnic group are bad, says psychologist Bruce Perry of 
the Child Trauma Academy in Houston. They will act in a way that is 
essentially evil based upon cognition rather than emotion. But the heart 
and the head interact. People who grew up amid violence and cruelty are more 
susceptible to ideologies that dehumanize the other in favor of the self."


MOB VIOLENCE (Death Eaters)

"Historys collective acts of great evil required the complicity of men and 
women who showed up at work, processed the papers that sent people to the 
crematoriums or the gulag, even participated directly in ethnic cleansing 
and gang rapeand who in their spare time played with their children and had 
a soft spot for animals. Most of those who carried out the Holocaust were 
ordinary Germans who rationalized the atrocities that they were committing 
by viewing Jewish lives as worthless, argued Simon in the fall 2000 issue of 
Phi Kappa Phi Journal. The unmistakable lesson is that ordinary, good 
people, devoted to their families, their religion and their country, are 
capable of inflicting horrific harm on those whom they dehumanize and 
demonize. As Hannah Arendt noted, it is the banality of evil that is so 
horrific."


THE ORDINARINESS OF EVIL (Peter Pettigrew)

"Historys collective acts of great evil required the complicity of men and 
women who showed up at work, processed the papers that sent people to the 
crematoriums or the gulag, even participated directly in ethnic cleansing 
and gang rapeand who in their spare time played with their children and had 
a soft spot for animals. Most of those who carried out the Holocaust were 
ordinary Germans who rationalized the atrocities that they were committing 
by viewing Jewish lives as worthless, argued Simon in the fall 2000 issue of 
Phi Kappa Phi Journal. The unmistakable lesson is that ordinary, good 
people, devoted to their families, their religion and their country, are 
capable of inflicting horrific harm on those whom they dehumanize and 
demonize. As Hannah Arendt noted, it is the banality of evil that is so 
horrific."


Anne Frank wrote in her diary, "I believe in the good in man."  I 
emphatically do not.  Yes, there is kindness and goodness everywhere, but I 
do not believe that goodness is the natural state of mankind.  Every man, 
woman, and child has a dark side.  Our natural tendencies, if unchecked by a 
moral compass, often persuade us to serve the self rather than the other.

The secular nature of the Harry Potter series is all well and good, as it 
allows people from all ideological backgrounds to enter into the world that 
JKR has created.

The downside of this is that it leaves the issue open for debate.  Exactly 
*what* is evil?  What is good?  If we do not define our terms prior to the 
debate, what we have is not reasoned discourse but chaos... which may be a 
reason why readers of the books view various characters in such radically 
diverse ways, and are passionately convinced that their interpretations of 
their favorite characters are always *right*.

As a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I have been criticized several times 
for making the canon characters do not-so-nice things, things that some 
consider to border on evil.  My own morality, as a result, has been 
questioned.  Which is ridiculous--we are what we write in one way or the 
other, but I do question why we are so uncomfortable with heroes that are 
less than perfect and villains who are less than contemptible... for no one 
is completely black or white in their character (don't get me started on 
color symbolism), but varying shades of gray.

I agree with JKR.  I think that a writer has an obligation, to quote 
Senghor, to be brave enough to let their "song grow dark".  To have 
characters in their stories like Snape, who is on Our Side, but is the 
opposite of nice.  To write characters like Sirius Black, who has his own 
demons to wrestle with, but finds time to parent an orphan the best he knows 
how.  To write characters like Draco Malfoy, who is the epitome of nasty 
because that is all he knows how to be.  To write characters like Ron, in 
whom the seeds of discontent have obviously been sown, although it remains 
to be seen whether or not there will be a harvest.

Jo Rowling, by her own admission, says that one of her intents in writing is 
to show what evil is really like.  By her own admission, she is not a 
relativist (neither am I)... I do not have the chat, but JKR has at least 
once expressed her dismay that modern children have no real concept of what 
evil is.  I am not surprised--she used to be a teacher.  One does not have 
to be a member of the religious right to be horrified about the increasingly 
arbitrary value system of today's youth--which is directly the fault of 
their parents and schools.  To many, "evil is what I say it is", but when we 
get to such a point, civilization itself breaks down IMO.

My question is this:  What *is* evil, and how is it expressed in the Harry 
Potter books?  Conversely, where's the "good" in the series?  Is it always 
diametrically opposed to "evil"... or do they sometimes exist in the same 
context, the same scene... even in the same person?

--Ebony

<>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <>< <><
Ebony AKA AngieJ
ebonyink at hotmail.com

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"Be not amazed, beloved, if sometimes my song grows dark...
Perhaps, beloved, I shall fall tomorrow on a restless earth
Lamenting your sinking eyes, and the dark tom-tom of the
    mortars below.
And you will weep for the twilight, for the glowing voice
That sang your black beauty."

--Leopold Sedar Senghor, Negritude movement, 1963

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