What did Tom know and when did he know it? (was: Voldy's mum)

[blpurdom]

No: HPFGUIDX 37419

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "naamagatus" <naama_gat at h...> wrote:
> the mother left a letter, prepared against the possiblity of her 
> death. This kind of letter would of course include directions as 
> to naming the child (what name would she have picked if it were a 
> girl? Marvola?). 

> I also imagine that enclosed in it would be another letter to be 
> kept for her child. In this letter she would reveal child's magic 
> origin, it's illustrious ancestry and, most importantly, it's 
> abandonment by a Muggle father. I think that Tom Riddle knew at 
> quite an early age (because of such a letter) of his family 
> history. 

Somehow this seems unlikely.  This was a sudden death, and as a 
witch she would probably not expect to die in childbirth; she would 
probably have been going to a competent witch-midwife, who would be 
able to prevent a such a death.  I think the fact that she died in 
childbirth is something that heavily supports her having given birth 
in a Muggle environment and unexpectedly.  When would she have time 
to write a letter, let alone TWO letters?  And while she's doing all 
this correspondence, why not assign a guardian to the child?  But 
she did not; her death was a complete surprise to her, IMHO.

> As a neglected and unloved child at the orphanage, the narcissitic 
> fantasy of hidden greatness (which such children often develop) 
> would be nourished by knowing himslef to be Slytherin's only 
> direct heir. 

While Tom Riddle may very well have had fantasies of being an 
important person and the heir of an important person while living in 
the orphanage (this very common fairy tale theme is the kind of 
fantasy that is, after all, at the center of the Harry Potter 
stories--Harry the orphan learns he is a wizard and responsible for 
the downfall of a formidible dark wizard, etc., etc.) I doubt he 
would have needed knowledge of his background to nourish this kind 
of fantasy, and he probably didn't learn of his background until he 
went to Hogwarts.

One has to wonder what the orphanage staff would have made of an owl 
delivering a letter to young Tom, and how he would have shopped for 
his school supplies, let alone pay for them.  Perhaps his mother 
also had a vault with some money put by, and he finally gained 
access to this once he started school.  This would also imply that, 
like Harry, his mother's parents were dead.  Sometimes, for folks 
who are supposed to live so long, witches and wizards have a 
convenient knack for dropping dead when a child "needs" to be an 
orphan with no relatives...

> At the same time, the fantastic anger and hatred of an unloved 
> child would find it's focus in the image of the abandoning father. 
> That obsessive and absolute hatred would find it's expression 
> later, in killing the father and paternal grandparents. This 
> killing (in my mind) functioned, for Tom, as a very dark rite of 
> passage: destroying the father, who, by abandoning him, acquired 
> complete power over his childhood. Empowerment as an adult would 
> mean, therefore, overcoming the father (very Freudian, isn't it?). 

Presumably, he would also have been avenging his mother, whose death 
he no doubt laid at his father's doorstep.  A reversal of the 
Orestes plot, in which Orestes killed his mother (Clytemnestra) to 
avenge her killing his father (Agamemnon).

> I see him as heading straight to the Riddle manor immediately 
> after graduation. That would make killing his father the first act 
> he has ever done as an adult (and a fully qualified wizard). If 
> so, it might very well have been the first time that he had used 
> Avada Kedavra on a human being. He had probably experimented on 
> animals, but would save it up, so to speak, to use for the first 
> time on his filth of a father (truly a "mudblood"). 

While this may have been his first act after finishing school, it 
was hardly his first time attacking those with "unclean" blood.  
(And his father was a Muggle, not a Mudblood, who is a Muggle-born 
witch or wizard).  When he was sixteen he was responsible for 
opening the Chamber of Secrets, releasing a basilisk for the purpose 
of "cleansing" the school of Muggle-borns (although how the basilisk 
was supposed to differentiate between pure-bloods and Muggle-borns 
was never clear to me).  He obviously knew the history of why 
Slytherin had a falling out with Gryffindor, and, after doing some 
digging, he undoubtedly learned of his Muggle father (someone at the 
orphanage could have told him that they contacted the Riddles, who 
denied that their son Tom could be the father--young Tom, not being 
a trusting person, would not believe this).  The only reason he 
closed the chamber again was that the headmaster informed him that 
the school would probably close down, and, like Harry, Hogwarts was 
his escape from the horrible Muggle world.  As much as he had 
developed a hatred of Muggles and Muggle-born magical people, he 
didn't want to lose his haven.

> This first murder, by the way, not only symbolizes liberation and 
> victory over the father but also rebellion against ALL authority. 
> By performing AK as the very first act in adulthood, he puts 
> himself (in fact and symbolically) in absolute and inherent 
> opposition to the ruling norms that he had seemingly complied with 
> until then.

As noted above, this wasn't his first murder; he was already in 
opposition to the "ruling norms," although, as you noted, he did 
SEEM to comply with them.  Another way he managed to "attack" a 
person of "unclean" blood is by framing Hagrid, who was expelled. 
(Hagrid is a mix of giant and wizarding blood.)  So he didn't feel 
the need to wait for the end of his seventh year to do this.  In 
fact, I never got the impression that he was out of school when he 
killed his parents.  For some reason, I thought he was going into 
his seventh year.  The murder of his father and grandparents may 
even have followed on the heels of his unsuccessful Chamber of 
Secrets plot, prompted by his frustration over that debacle.  (Do 
you think temporary escape from a Muggle orphanage would have been 
difficult for him by then?  I don't.) 

While he probably sets great store by the unblockable efficiency of 
Avada Kedavra, I doubt he feels constrained to only ever use this 
method to kill people.  It is convenient for Harry, though, that 
this is what he tried to use on him; if he'd used any other type of 
common Muggle method of attack, Harry's mother's charm might not 
have protected him.

--Barb

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HP_Psych
http://schnoogle.com/AuthorLinks/Barb/