Predatory Karkaroff as Stock/Type

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 34986

Judy wrote:

> By the way, I re-read the description of Karkaroff, 
> and he is described if ways that could be thought of as 
> stereotypically gay -- "fruity" voice, weak chin hidden by a
> goatee, etc. 

I saw Karkaroff as falling very firmly within a (now, thankfully, 
rather archaic) British literary tradition.  He's a variation on a 
stock that was more popular in the first half of the twentieth 
century, the Oily and Disreputable Eastern European, given a slightly 
(but only *very* slightly) more modern edge by all of the Cold 
War/Biased Olympics Official stuff.  

You see a lot of these guys in Golden Age Whodunnits.  Agatha 
Christie was partial to the type for a while: in her hands, he was 
often a Jew (up until around 1939, that is, when a dinner 
conversation with a member of a Foreign Political Party Which Must 
Not Be Named shocked Christie so badly that she apruptly abandoned 
much of her earlier anti-semitism).

Anyway, in the tradition of this Type, the effeminacy isn't really a 
signifier of homosexuality at all.  It's a signifier of unwholesome 
and *predatory* sexuality.  This stock character is often a hostile 
seducer ("ruiner") of well-born young women; sometimes he's a con man 
with fraudulent aristocratic credentials, hoping to marry wealth.  
I've also seen him written as a bigamist.

So, um...yeah.  My suspicions about Karkaroff and Krum <big smile and 
appreciative wave to Tabouli for K.I.S.S.T.H.I.S.D.U.C.K.> probably
*were* largely influenced by his effeminacy, but I think that I was 
reading that far more as a sign of "predatory" than of "gay."


While we're on this topic, I'd just like to add that JKR really knows 
her classic detective fiction tropes.  The Karkaroff character in 
1930s Whodunnits is the Designated Red Herring -- the one that even 
the readers are meant to recognize as such.  He's the character that 
nobody trusts, but while he usually *does* turn out to be No Good in 
one way or another -- he's a jewel thief, or a forger, or a bigamist, 
or an espionage agent, or a gold-digger, or on the lam for crimes 
committed elsewhere -- he's never the *real* culprit.  He is not the 
murderer.  He usually disappears half-way through Act Three; at the 
denoument, the detective then reveals his secret and explains that he 
fled out of fear of exposure, or fear of repercussions deriving from 
his exposure.

Sound a little familiar?

I don't think that I've *ever* seen this stock character's
probable eventual fate painted quite so darkly as poor Karkaroff's, 
though.  In mysteries, he just slips back into the dubious 
shadowlands whence he sprung -- presumably to resurface at someone 
else's house party a few months later...


Judy again:

> Ugh.  I found the thought of Karkaroff being attracted to Krum 
> pretty nauseating; the thought of him wanting Snape is even worse.  

Aw.  Poor Igor.  What's so nauseating about him?  At least his 
standards of personal hygiene seem up to par.  

You know, I'm beginning to agree with Cindy?  Karkaroff gets 
nothing around here but disdain.

So that does it.  I'm inviting Igor out for a few drinks and to pick 
up his S.Y.C.O.P.H.A.N.T.S. membership packet.  We'll go far over our 
limits, and sing old songs loudly and off-key, and then get all weepy 
and bathetic and sentimental before staggering home at dawn.  

I'd invite Cindy to join us, but...  Well, I fear that the weepy 
bathetic stuff might prove too much for her.  I wouldn't want her to 
snap and...well, you know.  Kill us.


-- Elkins, who can become weirdly obsessive about Agatha Christie and 
who has the Christies on her bookshelf filed in order of original 
publication date.