Historical Analogs to the WW -- "Quaintness" and Nostalgia (was Nel #10)

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 41773

In message #41413, Pippin wrote:

> I think Adams' analysis misses the point Rowling is making. 

She then went on to post an excellent class analysis of the wizarding
world, one which seems to me to be essentially in agreement with 
Pierre Bruno's Marxist-structuralist critique, which Adams cited and 
summarized in his article.

This, for example, is Pippin's analysis:

> In the wizarding world, as in medieval Europe, the new system of 
> trade is replacing the old economy based on personal holdings. . . 
> Slytherin, who did not want the authority of all-magical families 
> destroyed, represents a subversive conservative element within 
> Hogwarts. . . . Voldemort, Heir of Slytherin, is trying to re-
> establish the old system...

And this is Adams' summary of Bruno's analysis:

> Slytherin -- named after the aristocratic Salazar -- represents the 
> propertied-classes and Gryffindor -- Harry's house -- the ascendant 
> class of the bourgeoisie. The whole series is therefore not about 
> the traditional struggle of Good and Evil but "the conflict between 
> established and rising classes." 


This is certainly a compelling reading, and it has a good deal of 
merit.  Like Adams, though, I see a number of problems with this 
analysis.  In the end, the reading of the struggle within the 
wizarding world as one between a landed gentry and an emergent middle 
class just doesn't hold up very well for me.

For one thing, I feel that the text draws such strong parallels 
between the larger scale political struggle and the 
Gryffindor/Slytherin rivalry that it is virtually impossible 
not to read the two as inextricably connected.  But surely it is 
*Slytherin,* and not Gryffindor, whose values more accurately reflect 
those of an emergent trade economy, is it not?  

Ruthlessness, ambition, cunning, a certain willingness to cut 
corners, a penchant for "cheating," which is to say, for breaking the 
traditional rules of engagement in order to ensure personal victory --
 those aren't the values of a land-based aristocracy at *all.*  
They're the values of the city-state, the polis.  They are
"Machiavellian," which is to say, the values of the trade-dependent 
Renaissance states.  They are also the values of those who hold power 
within an education-dependent beaurocracy.  They're the values of the 
urban or the palace politician, rather than those of the rural land-
holding aristocracy.

No, if any of the Houses seems to me to represent the ancient land-
holding aristocracy, then *that* would have to be House Gryffindor.  
Even the language in which the Sorting Hat phrases Gryffindor values -
- "chivalry" rather than, say, "generosity," "bravery" rather 
than "courage" -- is suggestive of a feudal conception of honor.  The 
values that House Gryffindor represents aren't the values of an 
ascendant middle class at all, nor are they the values of the 
literati.  They are the values of a warrior caste.  

Furthermore, they are the values which seem to prevail within the 
wizarding world as a whole.  It is not only the members of House 
Gryffindor, but the entire wizarding *culture* which places a high 
value on bravery and daring, while holding Slytherinesque strategies 
in low regard.  Draco Malfoy is not proud of himself when he is 
accused of having bought his way onto the Quidditch team.  He is 
shamed and angered.  And he doesn't like being accused of cowardice 
either.

Pippin wrote:

> Voldemort, Heir of Slytherin, is trying to re-establish the old 
> system: his followers are sworn personally to him, and are rewarded 
> in kind rather than in cash. His politics are those of feud and 
> vendetta. His preferred contest is the duel.

I hardly see these values espoused only by members of House 
Slytherin.  They seem to me to be the values of the wizarding world 
as a whole.  The Pensieve mob at Crouch Jr's trial in GoF exemplifies 
the politics of feud and vendetta, as do Lupin and Black in the 
Shrieking Shack, where it takes the Muggle-raised Harry to prevail 
upon them to abandon this aesthetic in favor of a more contemporary 
notion of judicial due process. In CoS, students from all four houses 
are sufficiently interested in learning to duel to show up for 
Lockhart's duelling club, and in the first book, Draco plays off of 
Harry and Ron's presumably "Gryffindorish" preference for the duel as 
a ploy to try to get them in trouble.  Harry receives aid from Fawkes 
and the Sorting Hat at the end of CoS by means of his *personal* 
devotion to Dumbledore: it is not his fidelity to an abstraction that 
helps to save him, but rather, his loyalty to Dumbledore as a person,
as an individual leader.  

If this is the "old system" (and I agree with Pippin that it is), 
then the "new system" against which I think it must be compared is 
not the value system of House Gryffindor, but rather the value system 
of the muggle world itself.  House Gryffindor is indeed more 
sympathetic to and welcoming of this population, and it has been ever 
since the days of the founders.  But the values of the muggle world 
are nonetheless not at all, as I see it, really the same as those of 
House Gryffindor.

When it comes to the class basis of the Gryffindor/Slytherin rivalry, 
I tend to agree more with Richard Adams, who writes:

> ...the distinguishing characteristic of the Gryffindor house is 
> bravery -- a more noble image than the competing Dursley 
> representation of the middle class world, with its company cars and 
> televisions. More importantly, it is Voldemort who is reacting 
> against the status quo acceptance of Muggle blood. The conflict 
> between them is not between a rising middle class and a declining 
> gentry; rather it is a civil war among a ruling class over how 
> it treats its members, whom it admits into the ruling class, and 
> how it treats a lower form of life, the non-magician Muggles.

Even more specifically, I tend to view this conflict as one between 
an increasingly dispossessed and resentful beaurocratic aristocracy 
(Slytherin), and a far more socially mobile warrior class 
(Gryffindor), which managed to wrest control away from the earlier 
aristocracy some thousand years ago and whose values have since
come to predominate within wizarding society as a whole.

The real world historical analogy that I always see here (and I admit 
that this is very likely due to my own educational background) is not 
eleventh century Europe, but the late Roman Empire, in which the 
older aristocratic Senatorial orders had been superceded by the 
military class, in large part due to the military's meritocratic 
nature and its ready acceptance of "new blood" in the form of 
provincials, freemen and "barbarians."  

Like the subversive reactionaries of House Slytherin, members of the 
old Senatorial class enjoyed hearkening back to a nostalgic view of 
their own past status as a warrior elite, while simultaneously 
opposing the actual warrior values of the *real* warrior caste which 
had come to supercede them.  Also like Rowling's "pure-bloods,"
the Roman Senatorial class was crippled in part by a declining 
birthrate (In CoS, Ron makes the claim that if wizards hadn't married 
muggles, they would have all died out), exacerbated by an 
unwillingness to admit "new men" into its ranks.

The ascendant Roman military, on the other hand, gained power and 
vibrancy in part due to its inclusive policies and emphasis on skill 
and ability, rather than on blood.  In this respect, they were like 
House Gryffindor, which while it may not be doing too well in that 
House Cup competition at the time of the series' opening, is 
nonetheless clearly in control: House Slytherin is mistrusted by all 
of the other houses, Dumbledore is the headmaster of Hogwarts, 
McGonagall is his lieutenant, and as a newcomer to the entire 
culture, Hermione immediately identifies Gryffindor as the "best" of 
the Houses.  (Presumably she received this impression from _Hogwart's:
A History,_ which would seem to be THE history text available to 
students within the culture -- and which would also seem to have been 
written by the cultural winners.)


Pippin wrote:

> What Rowling seems nostalgic for is not the old ruling class per 
> se, but the virtue it once espoused: nobility of spirit, the desire 
> to protect the weak without exploitation. 

> Rowling's ideal seems to be a synthesis of the two systems, ancient 
> and modern. She would like to see the idealism of the old chivalric 
> system as represented by Gryffindor House preserved as a shelter 
> for those who need it, but combined with the mobility and 
> meritocracy of the new.

I would agree with this statement (although I'm afraid that I'm just 
cynical enough to find it impossible to believe that the ruling 
classes have *ever* truly exemplified those ideal virtues.  
Historical record does tend to suggest otherwise).  

I also, however, see a good deal of nostalgia for the late nineteenth 
century in JKR's writing, and I don't see this nostalgia as limited 
only to the idealized notion of the past as a country where people 
have a strong sense of noblesse oblige.  Much of it seems to me to be 
a far less intellectualized form of nostalgia than the ethical 
idealism described by Pippin's excellent and well-reasoned essay.  To 
my mind, JKR's nostalgia seems to represent more of a kind of 
inchoate yearning for the stability of relatively recently departed 
social structures and hierarchies.  I view it as kissing 
cousin to the "frontier nostalgia" of the aesthetic that we often 
refer to as "Americana," or to the nostalgia many people in this 
country feel for a softened and idealized vision of the Old South.  
And like both of these forms of nostalgia, it comes complete with 
some rather unsettling political and social implications which even 
the best-intentioned often find difficult to remove.


I am reminded here of Daniel Harris' essay "Quaintness," which is to 
be found in his quirky collection of cultural essays, _The Aesthetics 
of Consumerism._  

Harris wrote:

"If historians seek to know the past intellectually, those who revel 
in that most ahistorical of aesthetics, quaintness, seek to know it 
sensually, not through knowledge but through atmosphere, stripping it 
of facts and mining it for sensations. Quaintness focuses squarely on 
the physicality of Olden Times, on their creature comforts, and is 
therefore set more often in the nineteenth century than the Middle
Ages, which bring to mind cold flagstone floors and drafty, smoke-
filled dining halls draped in mildewed tapestries, whereas the 
nineteenth century conjures up images of toasty Christmas interiors, 
brisk sleigh rides, and cups of piping hot cocoa.  Quaintness
reproduces the past selectively, editing out its discomfort, 
inconvenience, misery, stench, and filth and concentrating instead on 
its carnal pleasures, its 'warm and homey feelings.'"

That, to my mind, is a very apt description of the type of archaism 
we see in the wizarding world, particularly at Hogwarts.  
Intellectually, it may represent an authorial yearning for idealized 
myths of departed ruling aristocracies, but on a far more visceral 
level, I tend to view it as mainly a yearning for a combination of 
social stability, coziness, and security that we may think of as a 
more generalized nostalgia, a yearning for the quaint, for "past-
ness." 

Just as the nostalgia of quaintness seeks to edit out physical 
discomfort, it also seeks to gloss over those political realities 
which are part and parcel of that image, that sense of "atmosphere," 
that feeling of "past-ness" which we define as "quaint" and which 
nostalgic writing like JKR's seeks to reproduce.

Harris wrote:

"Quaintness is also an aesthetic of clutter because it represents 
different periods simultaneously.  Its chaotic style...is the outcome 
of its historical fallaciousness, its scrambled sense of chronology, 
which mixes together disparate epochs and cultures, collapsing time 
like an accordian."

Sounds like Hogwarts to me.


-- Elkins