The Dullest Redemption Subplot Ever -- Draco the Nutter

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 51687

Errol wrote:

> <g> I got your point Elkins, and I agree that nothing Draco 
> has done makes him "irredeemable", or indeed vile enough to 
> require drastic redemption. A tiny repentance will do. 

Yes!  Yes!  An itty-bitty redemption.  A teeny-tiny redemption.  
A wee, twee, bite-sized *lady-like* redemption!

> However, at this point in time he does have some things to 
> *repent* of, including his bullying attitude and his lack 
> of empathy.

Oh, definitely.  He's been a very nasty boy, I grant you that.
Unpleasant little creature.  Sort of like myself at that age, 
actually, which may be why I always feel this strange urge 
to defend the rotten little twerp.

Urge to defend or not, though, I still can't quite find an 
Empathic!Draco in the text.  I squint hard at the page,
I cross my eyes a little bit...but I just don't see him
there.

Mind you, I don't have any difficult in taking Heidi's 
approach and reading the QWC and Train gloats as warnings.
That's dead easy for me: even on first reading, that QWC 
scene struck me as *very* bizarre, and as unsettlingly 
ambiguous as well.  But even when I do that, I still don't 
find myself reading him as possessing anything in the way 
of empathy.  When I parse those lines of dialogue as veiled 
warnings, I find myself interpreting their subtext as: "I'm 
*important!*  I Know The Score!  You should all *listen* to 
me!  I can help you!  'Cause I'm a Malfoy, dammit, and that 
means that I am Ever So Important!"

Which, er, isn't exactly empathy.  It's 'pathy' of a type,
to be sure -- maybe even of several types.  It's certainly 
*pathetic.*  One might even call it a wee bit pathological.  
It's even slightly sympathetic (or it is to me, anyway, but 
then, you know, I was pretty darned spoiled myself as a child, 
which likely allows me to relate to such things better than 
perhaps the author really expects me to).  But empathic?  

No.  I wouldn't call it that.


> If on the other hand, Draco is aware of what he is doing and 
> has consciously taken a stand at his father's side, he is well 
> on his way to needing
umm, redemption! ;)

Definitely. 

It's so hard to reconcile all of Draco's "my fathering" with 
his actual behavior in regard to his father, though, isn't it?
Has Draco Malfoy ever *once* obeyed his father's wishes?

Seriously.  Has he?  As far as I can tell, every single thing
that we know for sure that Lucius has ever told his son to 
do, Draco has immediately gone and done the exact opposite.

In CoS, we learn that Lucius told Draco to feign affection
for Harry Potter.  Draco made the most half-assed attempt to
befriend Harry imaginable -- and then lost no time at all 
in making his antipathy towards Harry Potter known to all of 
Hogwarts.

We also learn that Lucius Malfoy told his son to "keep his 
head down" in regard to the entire Chamber of Secrets business.  
Therefore, naturally, when the first signs of the business begin, 
Draco *pushes his way to the front of the crowd,* just to make a 
spectacle of himself by screaming Voldemortian rhetoric at the 
top of his lungs in front of half the school.

In Borgin and Burke's, Lucius tells Draco not to touch anything.
The instant that his father isn't looking at him, Draco immediately,
indeed almost deliberately, resumes touching things.

Lucius obviously wants Draco to apply himself to his studies.
Do we ever see him doing so?  Err...well, maybe he's studying
up a storm in the Slytherin common room.  Maybe.  Mainly, though,
what we see him doing in the classes he shares with Harry is
goofing off.  He doesn't pay attention in Hagrid's CoMC class.
He uses his injury as an excuse to slack off in Snape's Potions
class.

Really, I'd say that quite possibly the *best* hope for Draco's 
future spiritual well-being is that we have so far in canon never 
once seen him obey a single one of his father's direct orders.  
Indeed, although he certainly does give the *impression* of wanting 
to follow in his father's footsteps, he nonetheless always seems
to go out of his way to do precisely the *opposite* of what 
Lucius tells him to do.

Strange, isn't it?

> Is there any real indication in canon whether Draco has done so 
> or not? It can be argued both ways I guess.

Yeah, I think it can be argued both ways, and (as I mentioned on 
OTC a while back, in fact), I *always* find myself fence-sitting 
on this particular issue.  I just don't know quite what I think 
of it.  It would be far less irritating to me, I think, if I
felt convinced that it was meant to be as intriguingly ambiguous
as it is.  Sadly, though, I often feel that Draco's portrayal
is just, err...  

<looks both ways, lowers voice to a whisper>  

A little bit inept.

> I agree with you Elkins. *Wanting* to do an evil deed, or 
> having the temptation to do evil is not Evil in of itself. 
> But I read Dicentra's comment as evil *intent* - and in my 
> naivety I put that as having given in to that want and to 
> fully intend to do evil, willingly. 

Oh!  Oh, okay, I see what you mean, I think.  You mean something 
along the lines of if you point the gun at someone and pull the
trigger because you really genuinely want to *kill* them, then 
you don't get off the hook (in any moral sense) just because you 
were so pathetically lame that you forgot to take the safety catch 
off first?

Yeah, okay.  I can agree with that.  I'm just sitting the fence, I 
guess, on whether I think that certain classic Dracoisms -- saying 
that he hopes that Slytherin's monster will kill Hermione, for 
example -- really indicate that he's got enough inner malice to 
want to *really* kill someone.  I tend to just read lines like 
that as bored, spoiled, whiney kid talk, so it always startles me 
somewhat to be reminded that others took them so very seriously.  
It really just would never have occurred to me to read such lines 
that way.

Then, I think that I tend to read Draco as rather less deeply 
malevolent than many people here do, probably due to the fact 
that it seems to me that when he's at his *most* beastly, then
that's also when he always seems to me to be acting somewhat 
deranged, as if he's cracking under some type of rather severe 
mental strain.

But that leads us to MadMadMad!Draco...

I wrote:

> Although really, he often strikes me as far more in danger of 
> a nervous breakdown than of becoming Ever So Evil in the classic 
> sense.

Errol asked:

> Hee! How so Elkins? I see Draco as a strong character, evil or 
> not. I wouldn't make him a candidate for a nervous breakdown...
> I'd be interested in your diagnosis!

A strong character?  Really?  That's funny, because he always
strikes me as really incredibly weak.  I *wish* that I could
see him as a stronger character, honestly.  I think I'd find
him a lot less annoying that way.

Let's see.  Well, first off, I don't see Draco as having very
much in the way of emotional resilience.  He's not just a 
coward; he also seems to be somewhat prone to hysteria.  He 
fled screaming from that scene in the forest, for example.  
Even Neville, who is canonically established as not only 
quite timid but also as very easily flustered, was able to 
keep his head enough to send up the flares when *he* had 
been frightened.  Draco, on the other hand, just went completely 
to pieces.  Two years later, he showed the same failure of 
nerve on the train, when confronted by the dementor.  We know 
that he is proud and arrogant, and that his family holds the 
Weasley clan in utter contempt, yet he fled into the train 
compartment occupied by *Fred and George.*  That *had* to 
have been a rather serious failure of nerve, I'd say.  For 
Draco to have done that, I think that he must have been 
seriously panicked. 

He doesn't recover too well from trauma either.  Long after
the Bouncing Ferret incident, he's still jumping and blanching 
at even the sound of Moody's *name.*  "Twitchy little ferret,"
yes?  

He loses his temper easily.  Although he verbally provokes
others all the time, he can't stand being verbally provoked
himself.  Not only can't he take what he dishes out; he 
actually loses his *head* over it.  He flushes, he blanches,
he shrieks; he spits out racial epithets; he goes for his wand.  
His emotional control would seem to be virtually nil.

So I do see him as rather unstable, I guess.  Mainly, though,
what interests me about that aspect of his character is that
it often seems to be at its *most* pronounced when he is also
on his very *worst* (and most "Junior Death Eater-ish") behavior.

When he pushes his way to the front of the crowd to deliver
his gloat over the writing on the wall in CoS, for example,
he is described in oddly febrile terms, "cold eyes alive, his
usually bloodless face flushed."  Perhaps this is meant to
convey merely sadistic excitement.  To me, though, it always 
reads like he's tottering on the brink of his own sanity.
His demeanor at the QWC, while the Muggle-baiting is going
on, is similarly peculiar, and even slightly reminiscent of
Snape: he is ostensibly relaxed, even nonchalant, but there's
a strange intensity to his dialogue and "his pale eyes" are 
"glittering."  During the train scene at the end of GoF,
of course, his smirk "quivers," and he seems to stammer over
his line.

It's just odd, it is.  I don't think the boy's quite in his
right mind, myself, and I do find it interesting that when
he seems nuttiest is always also when he's being the most
horrid.  Whether this is just JKR's way of indicating that
the Voldemortian ethos *is* a kind of madness, a cultural
mass hysteria, or whether she means to depict Draco as
internally conflicted is something I'm not quite sure about.

I do wonder, however, about an author who would describe
a character's smirk as "quivering" *without* meaning to give 
the impression of some degree of ambivalence or latent
conscience.

> But I don't see him as becoming ever-so-evil in the classic 
> sense either. I compare him to what Tom Riddle would have 
> been like at the same age and find Draco curiously lacking 
> in initiative to perpetuate evil. 

Heh.  Yes, well.  The chapter title "The Writing On the Wall"
is certainly *suggestive,* isn't it?  Maybe that's what Draco 
was *really* reading in that graffiti, scrawled in blood 
behind Filch's poor petrified cat:

"You have been weighed in the balance.  And found wanting."


Elkins