The thing about Umbridge's quill...

[Kirstini]

No: HPFGUIDX 69316

Terry has just made a really good point about Umbridge being a 
potential reverse psychologist. I've just deleted it, because it's 
half past five in the morning, and I'm knackered. Go and look up 
thread.

The trouble with Umbrigde's quill, though, is that it offers a 
completely different perspective on the idea of writing lines as a 
punishment - indeed, *the* standard punishment for school pupils. 
Perhaps we'd just always assumed that lines were a boring repetative 
action designed to waste our time as much as we had wasted the 
teacher's. "I must not look like a baboon's backside" a hundred times
 won't give you much more than a sore wrist, theoretically. But what 
Umbridge does with her quill is something different entirely. Most 
of the broadsheet critcis reviewing OoP for adults have commented on 
the similarity of Umbridge's quill to the execution machine in 
Kafka's "In The Penal Colony". The prisoner condemned to death lies 
down in the machine, and the machine writes the crime that he is 
guilty of into his skin as many times as it takes for the prisoner 
to "understand his sentence" (ooh, a pun) - and be killed by the 
knives doing the writing. Surely, the point of lines as a punishment 
in any school is to make the pupil understand the "sentence" that 
they are writing (why JKR foreshadows the truth of lines in Ron's 
wish re. Goyle, above, on the train?). I'm not a teacher myself, and 
so hadn't ever absorbed this fact. However, by linking the two forms 
of punishements so explicitly, I feel that a statement is being made 
not just about parachuted high school administrators, but about the 
futility of the punishment system in high schools in general. Pre 
Umbridge, whenever HR (I was going to add another 'H' there, but 
realised it wouldn't be strictly accurate) have detention, they are 
put to some sort of unpleasant, but ultimately useful, service to 
the school. However, Umbridge's method of teaching/disciplining is 
consistently undermined, not just by pupils but by staff *and* 
narrative. And I still don't think we can assume that a narrative 
which focalises through Harry most of the time necessarily *is* 
Harry's. I can't help but wonder if JKR isn't trying to take us into 
a brave new teaching experience here, by playing on the child's 
fantasy element.
 (I'm sorry to disagree with you, Terry, but I think that Umbridge 
isn't playing any sort of game for good results withi Harry and his 
DADA class. My entire theory structure of two week's standing
would crash down around my head were I to admit that!)

Kirstini, prepared to defend Terry against all sorts of Snapological 
attacks. Go off and flaunt your Pensieves and let her be, she's 
still in mourning!