Canon argument and Hermione's age

[dfrankiswork at netscape.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 39457

I rushed in where Angelinas fear to tread:
> 
> <<Another hoary debate is over Hermione's age: is she nearly 11 or 
> nearly 12 at the begining of PS?  It has produced some pretty 
> impassioned writing on both sides.  However, when interested listies 
> outside the debate asked (more than once) why it mattered, hardly 
> anyone was able to explain it - only Penny really rose to the 
> challenge, and she struggled, IMO.>>

Penny swelled:
> 
> Gee, thanks, Dave!  Struggled??!  

I'd better retract that about struggling as I had a quick look at the archives and found the relevant posts (I think).  Message 29806 refers.  See also 28241, also by Penny.  They didn't correspond to my memory, really, the nearest being, from the end of 28241:

<<<<<<< Anyway ... this is a long way of saying that while I have no hard 
evidence to support my position, my instinct is that Hermione was born 
in 1980. Given that I was an older kid myself, I don't know why or how 
I came to that conclusion other than my interpretation of the "year" 
reference by JKR is a calendar-year interpretation for some reason.>>>>>>>

The relevance to the current thread is that phrase "I don't know why or how".  But really, the point about Penny personally is that she faced up to the question when asked 'Why does it matter?' - most of the list fell silent.

Penny, subsiding:

>>> The significance of the question, as I see it, is that it bears on the question of whether students receive their Hogwarts admission letter during the calendar year in which they turn 11 (which would make Hermione 2 mths younger than Harry) or only after they've turned 11 (which would make Hermione 10 mths older than Harry).  That's not an earth-shattering issue, to be sure, but as Ali says, it ought to be one of those things that we just "know."  It's pretty factual, and fanfic authors would certainly be interested in getting it right.>>>

The third possibility, which Penny discussed in those earlier posts, is that students receive their letter towards the end of the academic year they turn 11.  That possibility gains a degree of plausibility from the fact that the Hogwarts year aligns with the UK academic year, and that Ginny's letter also arrives in the summer, not apparently related to a birthday.

I take the point about fanfic authors wanting to get things right.  However, it seems to me that we simply don't have enough information to decide the issue, so if the plot of a fanfic turned on Hermione's age, it would seem legitimate for the author to tacitly acknowledge the uncertainty, perhaps by having the characters as confused as we are ("Gee, Hermione, I didn't realize you were sixteen already" "Oh, and how old did you think I was, Mary Sue?"), and then go with their decision.  I'm not sure that an arbitrary decision taken for writing purposes necessarily leads to the strength of feeling that has been expressed on the issue.

Ali's point that there is a nationalistic element perhaps goes some way to explaining why British exponents of old!Hermione dig their heels in, in the face of "the youngest people in my grade school year were born in September" assertions from across the Atlantic, with their implication that the poster's school experience is normative for the UK situation.  I'm not sure that there is any intrinsic American reason for believing in young!Hermione, though.

I was one of the ones who kept quiet when the question 'why does it matter?' was raised, mostly because it doesn't, to me.  However, I did have some mean and nasty suspicions at the time about why it might matter to other people.  None of them are concerned with the *evidence* for either position, they all deal with the *consequences* in the wider story, should she be young or old.  FWIW, here they are:

"It would be improper for a teenage girl to date someone younger than herself/Hermione could not respect someone younger than herself as a date, So That Would Put the Kybosh on H/H or H/R and We Couldn't Have That, Could We?"

"I identify with Hermione's academic and bookish bent - it is rare for fiction about children to have a Strong Female Character and if her strength and academic development were found to be due to an age advantage it would Undermine the Warm Feeling I Get About Myself When I See Myself Represented in Fiction"

"For a fourteen year old girl to date a seventeen year old boy would be Tew Ew to be Trew, so I must assume Hermione is fifteen, In Which Case It Would Just About Be All Right, But Still Only Just, Mind You, And There's No Telling What I Might Do If Someone Points Out That Krum is Nearly Eighteen at the QWC"

"If old!Hermione is true, then she will, according to the UK's decadent and corrupt legal system, reach the age of consent a few weeks into OOP, and That Just Doesn't Seem Right"

"I find Hermione's shrill and tiresome bossiness with the boys embarrassing and put it down to immaturity.  For her to turn out to be older would be Embarrassing Beyond Belief, Up There With Jar-Jar Binks"

Now, the above are caricatures (er, you worked that out for yourselves, right?), but I think it more credible that fixed views about Hermione's age stem from half-perceived feelings about teenage sexuality or the emotional benefits that accrue from identifying with a character, than they do from the inner workings of bureaucratic education systems.  In general I think strong feelings about a theory come from its perceived consequences, not the evidence for or against it.

However, having got the above out of the way, another possibility occurs to me.  This is that the details of the reading process are considered very intimate by the reader, and any challenge to the way they work generates an automatic strong negative reaction. If that is so, then readers may start off with a very mild impression about Hermione's age, based on her interactions in the first half of PS.  Entrenched views are then the result of later argument, not its cause.  After the fact, chasing down those original mild impressions may be almost impossible as the debating sides remember only their subsequent 'canon discoveries' - discoveries that are actually irrelevant to the process by which the conclusion was arrived at.

David


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