Crouch in 9 parts

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 49009

Some Crouch responses here.  I *had* been trying to wait patiently 
for Eileen to finish up her responses, so that I could combine 
these, but since Eileen seems to have been eaten alive by the 
two-headed Exam and Holiday monster, I guess I'll just abandon
that plan.

The Catlady (whom I kept up all night earlier this month with 
my obsessive Crouching -- sorry, Catlady!) wrote:

> Is it Livius Junius Brutus (in post 2 of 9) or Lucius Junius 
> Brutus (in post 3 of 9)?

The dude's name was Lucius.  Lucius Junius Brutus.  That "Livius"
must have just been a kind of leakage from "Livy."  It's not even
a proper Roman praenomen.  Sorry 'bout that.  I must have been
fatigued while typing.

> I know it's very impolite to make personal comments, but ... *you* 
> have shown no signs of being a dedicate servant of an Evil Overlord.

And I know that it's very OT to respond to them, but ... thank 
you! ;-)  Of course, no Evil Overlord (or his agents) ever approached 
me when I was 17 or so.  If one had, I don't like to think about what 
might have happened.  It was not precisely a high point in my life.

'Course, I do like to think that I might have managed to do a Snape.
I rather suspect, though, that I would have been a lot more likely
to grow up to be...Avery.  Or maybe Karkaroff.  Why else do you think
that I sympathize so strongly with those sorts of characters?

> I can NEVER remember what the four loves are, but isn't Junior's 
> devotion to Voldemort (which is dictating his actions once he 
> escapes his father's Imperius) some kind of love? 

Oh!  Oh, this is so terrible!  I sat down to list the four loves, and 
I couldn't remember the fourth one!  I typed in 'agape,' which is 
divine love, the love of man for God, or of co-religionists for each 
other.  I typed in 'eros,' which is sexual or romantic love.  I typed 
in 'philos,' which is the love between friends. . . .

And then I just sat there, utterly perplexed, because I *could* not
for my *life* remember what the fourth one was.  I had to look it up.

The fourth love, of course, is 'storge.'

You know, storge?  *Familial* love?  Like, filial devotion?

<buries face in hands>

I really am a sad case, aren't I.

Storge.  Right.  Storge.

But it's an interesting question, isn't it?  Barty Jr's feelings
for Voldemort strike me as quite obviously displaced filial 
devotion.  So does that mean that he's motivated by storge?  Does
love, of a sort, drive his actions?

Well, maybe it does.  Maybe it does at that.  I also do read his
treatment of his father's body as a kind of deranged attempt to
avenge his mother, which might also qualify as a twisted manifestation
of _storge_.  Certainly, I think that one of the saddest things
about Crouch Jr's confession scene is the extent to which it shows
him as very human.  He comes across as schizoid, but not really as
sociopathic.  So perhaps he was motivated by a kind of love after
all.

This would be in keeping with his role as a double to his father,
IMO.  In both cases, they are motivated by their own understanding
of love -- and in both cases, they are shooting rather far from the
mark.

> In my opinion, which has a very poor track record....JKR isn't 
> going to re-visit the Crouches, and therefore is not going to 
> confirm or deny what was said under Veritaserum, but I think she 
> intended that what was said under Snape's strongest Veritaserum to 
> be truth.

I agree with you that JKR is extremely unlikely to revisit the 
Crouches, as sad as that makes me.  So far in the canon, JKR
has shown a tendency to treat her secondary villains as disposable
commodities.  My guess is that Crouch Jr. is just like Quirrell and 
Lockhart: one-volume characters.

I'm not so sure about that veritaserum, though.  I think that
we are meant to read a good deal of subjectivity into a number
of Crouch Jr's lines in that chapter -- most notably "he loved
her as he had never loved me."  Also, I'd say that the subjectivity
of Junior's final statement is rather strongly highlit.  He is not,
in fact, going to be rewarded for his loyalty or honored above all 
other Death Eaters or anything of the sort.  He is about to have
the soul sucked right out of his body by a dementor, one of his
master's "natural allies."  With that statement, I'd say that the
author is showcasing Crouch Jr's lack of objectivity and insight 
quite deliberately, and she's doing so for ironic and pathetic 
effect.  We are meant, I think, to be reminded of the fate of the
unfortunate Quirrell, and of Dumbledore's comment about how 
Voldemort discards those no longer of use to him.  I think that 
the statement is also meant to draw the reader's attention to the 
running motif of misplaced loyalty that dogs the Crouches like a 
kind of family curse.  Barty Jr's loyalty to Voldemort is misguided, 
just as his mother's faith in him was misguided, and just as Winky's
and Percy's faith in his father was misguided.

So on the whole, I don't feel that Barty Jr's confession is meant
to be read as *objective* truth.  There is, however, probably no
way to prove this one way or the other.


Bel wrote:

> "Hallo!  I'm not sure that I'm really ready for TBAY, but I
> did want to ask a question.  I'm Bel, by the way."

Hi, Bel!  And a *very* belated welcome to the list.  (You
seem to have settled in perfectly nicely by now all on your
own, but I've been away, so...er...well, welcome anyway.)  
Feel free to jump into one of those TBAY threads any time, 
by the way, and please don't worry about the format.  You 
absolutely don't have to use that fictive style if you don't 
feel like it.

> "I was just wondering -- in light of everything you've said
> about Crouch, Sr and Winky, isn't it also suggestive that
> Barty, Jr. changes his father's body into a bone?  Maybe you
> have to know American slang for that to be obvious, but
> changing his father's body into something that's a metaphor
> for...well, you know...male anatomy...certainly suggests a
> few things to me about the way he felt about his father and
> his father's behavior.  It certainly ties into the reasons
> Elkins is postulating for Junior's disappointment, doesn't
> it?

Hah!  Excellent (if slightly Bent) point!  You know, I never 
even *considered* that?  That's great.  Is that just American
slang, though?  If so, then it's probably not what the author
had in mind, but hey.  Who cares?  The author is *so* dead! ;-)

> "I've always wondered, though, if Crouch, Sr. being turned into
> a bone just before Voldemort needs 'the bone of the father'
> doesn't tie together somehow...

I think that it does tie together thematically and symbolically,
definitely.  It helps to establish the Crouch family drama as
a kind of echo of the Riddle family drama, and Crouch Jr. as a
literary double to Voldemort.  I also see a strong linguistic
connection between the "bones" of these doubled victims of 
parricide and the "skeletons in the family closet" which both
Crouch Jr. and Voldemort represented before they each turned 
the tables on their fathers, so to speak, transforming their
fathers into the buried hidden bones, while they themselves
emerged into the light.

(I wrote quite a bit about this back in May of this year, btw.  
If you're interested, the message number is #38398.  It's really a 
post about Neville and Harry, but it's also got quite a bit of 
Crouch Jr. and Voldemort in it.) 

On the level of the *plot,* though, I don't really think that
the two events are connected -- in other words, I don't think
that Crouch Jr. was consciously attempting to emulate his master
or to offer a kind of homage to him when he chose to transform
his father into a bone.  Crouch Jr. himself doesn't seem to have
been appraised of the details of the ritual that Voldemort was
planning on using to achieve his reincorporation.  He questions
Harry quite intently about these details, and his "hiss" when 
Harry tells him that Voldemort took his blood indicates
surprise to me -- if not outright alarm.  

(It has been suggested on the list in the past that Crouch Jr's 
hiss might be the flip side of Dumbledore's infamous gleam, a 
notion which I find completely convincing.  It seems to me that 
"Oops, Phoenix tears, I forget!" Voldemort probably made a rather 
serious error when he chose to confide the full details of his 
plan to the one of his two servants who was an utterly *mediocre* 
student back in his schooldays, rather than to the one who took 
the 12 OWLS.)

So while I do think that the congruence of "bones of fathers" is
very significant on the thematic and the symbolic level, I don't 
myself believe that it has any particular plot significance.  Others, 
however, as the Catlady mentioned, believe that JKR might have been
setting up another "rebirthing ritual" for Crouch Jr. 

The Catlady wrote, about this theory:

> Of course, some people are convinced that Junior will re-appear, 
> getting his soul back by using some variant of Voldemort's spell 
> for getting his body back because that spell uses "bone of the 
> father" and JKR so carefully made sure that bone of Senior is 
> available -- a plot device reason for transfiguring him into a bone 
> and hiding it that has *nothing* to do with wizarding opinion of 
> what is to be done with dead bodies ... 

Yeah, I've seen that theory.  I've never been able to subscribe to
it myself, though.  For one thing, like I said before, I really
don't think that JKR is planning to do anything else with Crouch Jr.
For another, Crouch Jr's problem isn't that he's missing a *body.*
His *body* isn't his problem.  It's his *soul* that's missing, and I
see no reason to believe that the bones of ones father would be of
the slightest bit of use in recovering that.  And finally, I don't 
believe for a minute that poor old Crouch Sr's body is still lying 
around in Hagrid's pumpkin patch for any old person to come by and 
disinter (or for Fang to dig up and chew on, for that matter).  
Surely once Dumbledore learned what had become of it, he would have 
seen to it that it received a decent burial, don't you think?  I 
suspect that the bone that was Crouch Sr. was retrieved and then 
given some form of proper disposal even before the Leaving Feast.  

Then, there's also the fact that I can't believe for a moment that
JKR would offer a "cure" for the Dementor's Kiss in such a manner.
The Kiss has been quite firmly established as permanent, irrevocable.
"There's no chance at all of recovery," Lupin says in Ch. 12 of PoA.
The Kiss is scary.  It's horrific.  It's part of what makes the idea
of the dementors joining forces with Voldemort so terrifying.  It is 
the Potterverse's Fate Worse Than Death, and it is highly dramatically
effective as such.  

JKR would have to be *mad* to throw all that away just to bring back 
a secondary character, or to provide her villains with a subplot that 
would by necessity have to be happening mainly off-screen.  She's far 
too canny an author ever to do such a thing, IMO.  If JKR did ever 
produce a cure for the Dementor's Kiss (which I doubt she ever will), 
then I'd say that it would have to be a major plotline for *Harry,* 
and the victim that it would be used to save would have to be a 
*beloved* character, someone that both Harry and the reader genuinely 
care about.  Someone like Sirius Black, for example.  Or (heaven 
forbid!) Ron.  I don't believe that she'd ever do it just to bring 
back a secondary character like Barty Jr who, as much as I may 
personally have adored him, really has already played out his 
dramatic purpose in the story.

> But while I was reading this part of your discourse, I was heard 
> to clearly say: "Oh, shit" because I thought you were about to 
> prove that Mrs. Crouch had NOT gone to her horrible death of her 
> own will, but rather her husband had bullied her into it with 
> remarks like "It's not such a big sacrifice for you; you're already 
> dying" and "What kind of mother could let her child suffer like 
> that?"

Wow, you must really think that I hate Crouch Sr, eh?  Now where
on earth could you have received that notion, I wonder. ;-D

Nah.  Believe it or not, I really wasn't trashing poor Mr. Crouch's 
character just out of spite.  (Well...not *just* out of spite.)  I 
was just trying to explain how I read him, that's all.

Althooooogh...

<brief inner struggle>

No.  No, I still can't make myself believe it.  I think that what 
little we see of Mrs. Crouch in the Pensieve scene is perfectly 
consistent with someone who would have wanted to save her son's
life without having to be bullied into it.

<< 'Just so you know, boy, I would have happily left you to rot in 
Azkaban, if only your sainted mother hadn't forced my hand with that 
blasted dying request of hers.' >>

> I don't think that's so implausible, at least maybe phrased 
> differently. 

No, and neither did Eileen.

To tell you the truth, even *I* wasn't so sure that it was all
that implausible, really, which was part of why I wrote Eileen 
responding ambiguously there, rather than forcing her to mouth 
yet another one of those godawful Socratic Dialogue Stooge lines 
("Why, that is true, Elkine!" "It is indubitably so, Elkins!")
that I kept smacking her with all throughout the novenna.  
<apologetic grin at Eileen>

Yeah, I guess that I can imagine Crouch Sr. telling his son something 
of that sort in a moment of stress or exasperation -- and I can 
certainly imagine him doing so in a fit of temper.  So I suppose that 
it is possible that Crouch Jr. was going by what his father had told 
him.  I still don't believe the story, though.  After all, the things 
that we say while stressed or exasperated or angry are often not 
entirely true (Crouch Sr., after all, is the same man who 
bellows "you are not my son!" when he's in a temper), and as I said 
in Part Six, Crouch strikes me as having been far too deeply invested 
in keeping his son alive for me to believe that he didn't really want 
to save him in the first place, even apart from any dying request his 
wife may or may not have made.

> My year 2000 searches on mythology websites all found that an 
> "alastor" is a spirit of vengeance, a male nemesis.

Oh, Catlady!  I didn't know that!  *Thank* you!

<I suggested that Crouch Jr. likely mistreated his father in
order to demonstrate his loyalty to Voldemort>

> A horrible thought in connection with the recent discussion that 
> Dumbledore has persuaded Snape that Snape will win his way back 
> into Voldemort's trust by bringing him Dumblehead's head on a 
> platter (CHOP: Cranium of Headmaster On a Platter).

Hee!  I was sooooo sad to miss my opportunity to play on that
thread while it was active, but I really loved CHOP.  Now I'm
hoping that it's true.  Although I'm also hoping that the rather
gruesome twist you suggest here (Severus proving his loyalty to
Voldemort by handing over Dumbledore alive to suffer unspeakable
torments) is not, because even I am not quite twisted enough to
have any stomach for the thought.

Fortunately, I really don't really think that JKR is planning to 
get *that* dark with the series!  

<< I mean, you have to figure, don't you, that the elves probably 
fill the Nanny role in those households? >>

> I don't figure anything of the kind, primarily because there is 
> nothing of the kind in the tradition of house elves, brownies, 
> dobbies, all those names: they do the *housework*, sometimes even 
> cooking, sometime shoe-making, during the night, *unseen* by the 
> humans of the household. And the House Elves of Hogwarts do their 
> work sufficiently unseen by the humans there that Hermione would 
> never have learned their were House Elves at Hogwarts if Hearly 
> Headless Nick hadn't *told* her.

Yes, that's true, but the house elves of folklore also don't leave
their houses, or like having their work acknowledged in any way, and
they *absolutely* do not like being thanked.  In many folk stories,
if you ever spot a dobbie at its labors, it will leave the house
instantly, or even turn against you, and in British folklore, you're 
absolutely *never* supposed to thank the fae.

JKR's house elves, OTOH, don't really mind being seen -- their 
invisibility is the invisibility of a competent Edwardian servant,
not of a folkloric brownie.  The Hogwarts elves are perfectly fine
with having visitors to the kitchen, and far from being insulted
when Ron compliments them on their service, they positively *beam*
with pleasure.

They also leave their houses to serve as personal servants, which
their folkloric equivalents never do.  Dobby accompanies Lucius
Malfoy to Hogwarts at the end of CoS, and nobody seems at all 
surprised to see that Crouch chose to take his house elf with him
to the QWC in GoF.  

All of that leads me to read the house elves as a far more
generalized slave or servant class than the dobbies/brownies of
folklore.  When Bertha Jorkins comes calling at the Crouch residence
while the master is away, Winky seems to have taken on the role of 
butler-cum-parlor-maid before returning to her kitchens.  They
seem to me to fill quite a wide range of domestic functions.

I do take your point about size, though.  The house elves would
be rather too small to perform the Nanny role entirely.

<my suggestion that Crouch Jr's verdict of "disappointing" upon
his father may have been due to his father's marital behavior>

> Oh, Merlin's ba-beard! Those Crouches are in a social class where 
> sexual fidelity in marriage *doesn't matter*, as long as the wife 
> doesn't bring in any wrong-fathered offspring or be caught with a 
> low-class lover! If Mrs Crouch whined and threw things just because 
> her husband had affairs, she was even more manipulative and 
> coercive and all that than I had thought when she was depicted 
> coercing him into rescuing Junior.

Yes, but things often look rather different to the children of
those families, particularly to those in the throes of an angry
and idealistic adolescence.  Mrs. Crouch doesn't need to have
been kicking up a fuss for Barty Jr. to have taken it amiss.
And besides, bedding the house elves could be viewed *very* 
differently than taking human mistresses would be.

But.  That would bring us to Barty Jr. as Quentin Compson, which 
while it might not be quite as perverse as Eileen's Barty-as-Faramir, 
is nonetheless pretty stunningly anti-canonical.  

If also very amusing.

("Why do you hate the wizarding world?"  "I don't I don't hate the
wizarding world I don't I don't I don't.")


I wrote, of one half of what I perceive as a strongly and rather
disturbingly divided maternal role in the books:

> The ones who get down in the trenches of the actual day-to-day 
> dirty work of mothering, whose sacrifices entail *living* for their 
> children, rather than just dying for them. *That* role...is filled 
> by the house elves. Who are grotesque and faintly ludicrous. 

The Catlady wrote:

> Whose role was being filled by JKR herself at the time she wrote 
> Book 1 and envisioned the whole plot of the septology.

Indeed.  Which is part of what makes the divided maternal role
so interesting, IMO.  If JKR had been a wealthy or a childless
woman while writing the books, or if she were a man, then I doubt 
that I would find it nearly so curious.

> How can it possibly be misogyny for a woman to refuse to do 
> loathsome and unpleasant slave labor, which no one really wants to 
> do...and which is traditionally assigned to women only because 
> women have traditionally been kept in the position of slaves?

It's not.  It's only misogyny once one allows ones distaste for
the labour itself to extend to a distaste for the people who
traditionally get stuck doing it -- ie, women.

It is one of those sad facts of life, though, that *someone* always
has to do the sh*t work.  Naturally, it shouldn't always have to be 
the women.  Then, in my household, it's *never* the women -- 'cause 
the woman is *me,* and I won't touch the stuff.  I make the menfolk 
do it all.

I'd love to claim that this is just a case of redressing the
balance, or something of that sort, but it's not, you know.  It's
really not.  It's actually just because I'm neurotic, spoiled, 
manipulative, and *profoundly* selfish.  

Then, I did mention that I felt a rather strong (and uncomfortable)
sense of reader identification with Crouch Jr, didn't I?  <rueful
grin>


Elkins 

(who doesn't agree that a woman who believes in doing her own 
domestic labor, rather than hiring others to do it for her, is 
necessarily misogynist at all, btw, but who guesses that maybe 
if she's going to tackle that issue, she should probably do it 
over on OTC)