More Elaborate Musings on Lily and MWPP

[pigwidgeonthirtyseven]

No: HPFGUIDX 33839


 

To my idle musings on Lily and the Marauders,

Alexander answered:

 

<<IMHO it's strange that you demonstrate such prejudice to
Lily. There could easily be nothing of that. The scenario
you paint is only possible if it's more important for Lily
to "own" James than anything else.
  But are your assumptions based on *anything*? Lily in your
description looks like a woman who doesn't know what a
friendship is. But even more, James looks like he doesn't
understand what is happening and is simply led away from his
friends by "that woman".
  Unlikely scenario. Unless there was indeed a romantic
interest involved from other members of their gang, I would
say that it's more likely for Lily to be accepted within
their gang as fifth member.

<snip>

Or they just understand their friend feelings. Personally
I would expect _this_ from Sirius and Remus at least.>>

 

 

And Katze wrote:

 

<<I guess I'm just taken aback by
Lily being painted at the fifth wheel and trying to boss James around
and tell him what he can and can't do with his friends. I just don't see
anything in the canon that reflects this type of personality in Lily.>>

 

Mmh, that’s what you get (and rightly so), if you try to rid yourself of something that’s on your mind, but do so at work where today the telephone just seemed more an invention straight from hell than a communication device. OK, now I’m at home and can elaborate.

Firstly, I’d like to say that whatever I stated in my previous post was speculation, the canon parts were clearly marked. Nevertheless, my speculation is based on pieces of evidence from canon.

About the Marauders’ tight-knit group: Three of them went through the risky and difficult process of becoming clandestine animagi, reaching their goal in their fifth year (please correct me if this is wrong, but PoA is currently in my brother’s hands). This implies a lot of studying together (James and Sirius even had to help Peter), apart from everyday homework and studying for exams, it means absolute secrecy and a fierce sense of loyalty towards each other and Remus. Therefore, I daresay MWPP are not simply a group of High School buddies hanging out together and playing Quidditch, there’s much more to that friendship.

Apparently, Sirius, James and Peter were the only ones except for Dumbledore (and, later on, Snape) to know about Remus’s lycanthropy. Once again, top secret information that had to be kept from everybody else, or otherwise Dumbledore would not have forbidden young Severus Snape to tell anybody else. To share this kind of secret not only strengthened the bond between the four friends, IMO it practically prevented other friendships or relationships with one or all of them from intensifying beyond a certain degree.

That’s exactly where Lily comes in. (Sorry, I hadn’t known about that piece of information from JKR herself about Lily being a Gryffindor, I just remembered a thread of discussion in this group about which house she belonged to). And it’s also where the time line is important: According to JKR, Snape is 36/37 in GoF, which means he was born in 58. Give or take two years, MWPP are born somewhere between 58 and 60, same goes for Lily, who might even have been a bit younger. Harry is born on 31 July 1980, therefore conceived in 1979 when James was between 19 and 21 YO. This, still IMO, rather implies that James and Lily’s romance  began already at Hogwarts.

The HPverse is an author’s fictional world and a skilled author’s at that. Unless we suppose that the HRH pattern is more or less a repetition of MWPP plus Lily, she was not part of the gang, like Hermione is part of the Trio. If she had been, I suppose she’d have become an animagus too. Maybe she was even one or two years younger than James and not even in the same year, and we have seen throughout all four books that, because of classes that go from morning till evening and homework, students of different years don’t mix too much, except for those playing Quidditch. This scenario which I think is quite realistic and canon- based, might make appear Lily as an intruder from Sirius’s, Remus’s and Peter’s POV.

I have to agree with Alexander that to accept your friend’s girlfriend would be a most desirable reaction. I would even concede that Remus might have shown acceptance, and I willingly admit that Peter is an x in the equation, but I have doubts about Sirius (apologies to all Sirius fans out there): A person who considers it to be good fun to “scare” a fellow student, however slimy and Slytherin, with a werewolf, may not be a “natural born killer”, but he is certainly irresponsible, which is a trait of character that doesn’t show on only one occasion and is otherwise inexistent, it’s a character trait, period. (Even if by now, he might have outgrown it- this to avoid howlers from his rabid fans) The irresponsible 17 YO average male doesn’t look at serious romantic relationships with a benign eye, which is my reason for thinking that at least he and maybe also Peter (“Siding with the biggest bully in the playground”) might have objected to James and Lily’s budding love story. 

Moreover, I was trying to think along the lines of canon and its characterisation: from the way JKR depicts Petunia, we can guess her- and thus also Lily’s- middle class background, we’re talking about the 70s, and Hogwarts seems to be quite immune to outside influence (no Muggle literature, films etc., for Muggle-borns only during holidays), so the idea of “boys’ talk” and “girls’ talk” is strongly suggested by the books themselves which are situated in the 90s. Therefore I suppose it’s legitimate to assume that gender roles and all that comes with them might have been even stronger back in the Marauders’ times.

 

OK, I hope to have made my point a little clearer.

Susanna/pigwidgeon37



"And how come those portraits seem to be alive?"

"What'ya mean? All paintings move."

"No, they don't. We have lots of paintings in our villa, among them a real Chagall, and none of them..."

"And d'ya expect that something painted by a jackal will move? Now really..."



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