Blame the Sorting Hat, not Slytherin

[elfundeb]

No: HPFGUIDX 51332


  Derannimer:
  > 
  > The Sorting Hat does not put the biased in Slytherin; it puts the 
  > *ambitious* in Slytherin. Ambition is, canonically, the standard the 
  > Hat uses to Sort the Slytherins. So why is it that all the ambitious 
  > just happen to also be all the bigoted?

  Dicentra:

  the *first* definition [of ambition] in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary: "an
  ardent desire for rank, fame, or power." [snip]
  If you crave power for power's sake, and you're a wizard, you are
  going to acquire as much *magical* power as possible, and that means
  turning to the Dark Arts, the way Tom Riddle did.

  And if you're
  aspiring to be on the top of the wizard totem pole, there's no reason
  to consort with Muggles, because those powerless stiffs can't help you
  rise to the top.  And if you want to be at the top, you have to define
  a bottom: might as well be the Muggle-born and Muggle-lovers.  Why
  *anyone* would want to associate with or defend Muggles would be
  beyond you.
Me:

All this leaves me with the firm conviction that the house system is broken and can't be fixed.  In fact, it may have never worked, if Salazar Slytherin never accepted the other founders' philosophy of educating all magical children:  i.e., his belief that magical learning be kept within all-magic families did not stem, as Binns states, from the fact that "it was an age when magic was feared by common people, and witches and wizards suffered much prosecution" and therefore Slytherin "disliked taking students of Muggle parentage, believing them to be untrustworthy."  Instead, as Dicentra suggests, he apparently had a hidden agenda to keep magical education, and the power that goes with it, to themselves.  Yet (perhaps because the founders entered into a binding magical contract with the Sorting Hat), Salazar Slytherin's influence remains and his house, which McGonagall describes as having "its own noble history" before Harry's sorting, is like a cancer since its objective is the destruction of the vision on which the school still operates -- that of educating *all* magical children.

  
The education Hogwarts provides is only partly one that teaches magical competence.  Harry and his Gryffindor peers are receiving a valuable moral education as well.  On the other hand, Dicentra suggests that the Slytherins are being tacitly encouraged to dabble in forbidden Dark Arts because that's where the power is.  If so, there is an amoral overlay on the Slytherins' education, as the Slytherin philosophy is itself amoral.  There's not much difference between what the Sorting Hat says of Slytherin and Voldemort's own philosophy that "there is no good and evil, only power and those too weak to seek it."

Pippin suggests that Salazar's initial prejudice against Muggle-borns faded and "Riddle, with his "intimate friends" was 
responsible for re-introducing anti-Muggle prejudice into 
Slytherin House."  I'd like to believe it, but that doesn't quite make sense to me.  If the Sorting Hat is, year after year, telling students that the Slytherins are power-hungry and will use any means to achieve their ends, it's encouraging a prejudice of its own.  It's reminding the other three-quarters of the school that the Slytherins are out to get them, which ultimately manifests in such overbroad statements as Hagrid's assertion that all of Voldemort's followers were Slytherin - which can only reinforce the Slytherins' own prejudices.  

I get the impression that the other three houses have been ganging up to root against Slytherin for centuries.  Because they're told the day they arrive by the Sorting Hat that it's going to pick out the ones who are prepared to cheat to attain their goals and put them in Slytherin so everyone else will know who they are.  And we don't know a single Slytherin who's truly fair, at least yet.  Snape may not be evil, but wasn't the spark for this thread Snape's unfair treatment of the Gryffindors? 

Basically, I think the Sorting Hat plays God with 11-year-old minds, and I don't like it.  I never thought much of predestination theories, but that seems to be exactly what's going on.  Some students are selected for the Heaven of Gryffindor, conveniently located atop a castle tower; others are selected for the dark Hell of the Slytherin dungeons, whose temptations are *very* hard to resist.

Perhaps, then, victory will only be achieved not when Voldemort is defeated but when the Sorting Hat itself is destroyed or Salazar is somehow banished from it, because it is a repository of Salazar Slytherin's amorality and seems to have been furthering Slytherin's ends for the last millennium.

And people wonder why there are so many Snapefans out there?  He's the one shining example for all those students sent to *hell* by the Sorting Hat.  Snape's conversion must have carried with it a terrible personal cost, because one's house is, as McGonagall says, like one's family at Hogwarts.  She has stacked the deck against the Slytherins, and asks them to pay a price to reject evil that Gryffindors don't have to pay.  

While I was writing, Dicentra quoted the following from an old post of Pippin's:

If you leave the author's chosen viewpoint and go poking around
backstage as it were, you will find the illusion spoiled. It is like
looking at a backdrop up close.... [M]uch of Rowling's world is not
realistically rendered after all. Certainly the Slytherins are not.

The young Slytherins are one dimensional and most of their
atmospheric and symbolic contribution to the Potterverse rests
in this. However, Slytherin's artificiality has to remain
imperceptible to the characters themselves.... Of course Dumbledore
can not recognize this either.... He can't very well explain to them
that they are part of a literary construct <g>.

I can only respond that I did not *choose* a different viewpoint from JKR and, like Dumbledore, I can't resolve my issues merely by reassuring myself that the Slytherins are *only* literary constructs.  By having portrayed some of the students in such a manner that they can be analyzed as if they were real people (albeit with a narrative function), and by bringing all of the students together and subjecting the protagonist and his friends to the same school rituals as the others, the text allows the reader to view the Slytherins through the same lens as the Gryffindors.  Asking me to take that lens away and accept the house that symbolizes the evils the protagonist must fight against as one dimensional, IMO, cheapens the evil and cheapens the message.

 
Debbie
who wants to know if Blaise Zabini is a *good* Slytherin

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