Tom Riddle's Origins (was No Sex, Please)

[o_caipora]

No: HPFGUIDX 84037

Two thoughts on Ma Riddle. Changing mores and medical advances must 
be taken into account.

Decades ago, an out-of-wedlock pregnanacy was a shameful thing. 
Hurried weddings would be arranged, expectant mothers would leave 
town before they showed, and return after the child was safely 
deposited in an orphanage.

The infant was the "corpus delito", the body of evidence of the 
shameful occurence. The secrecy of orphanages was motivated by the 
need to preserve the mothers from unending shame. A husband might not 
be thrilled, twenty years on, to discover on his doorstep six feet of 
hulking proof that his blushing bride had not in fact been a virgin.

Orphanages would have a cult of secrecy because so many of their 
charges were born of unwed mothers.

If the Riddles were unmarried, and Tom a bastard in the literal as 
well as the figurative sense, the failure of his grandparents on 
either side to take an interest in his welfare would be explained.

Nowadays a healthy white infant is easily adopted in the US. That may 
well not have been the case in the UK of Riddle's infancy. The 
superiority of foster families to benevolent government care in a 
large institution is a recent notion, too.

Illegitimacy would explain his abandonment by family. But even if not 
illegitimate, once in an orphanage of the early part of the 20th 
century, he'd be more likely to remain there than not.

Grannybat has contended that one of the failures of the WW is that it 
is at least as morally backward as ethically backward. If the 
Hogwarts Express is a magical version of a steam engine rather than a 
diesel or electric locomotive, the WW's attitude towards unwed 
mothers may have been far behind the steam era, especially in 
Riddle's youth.

Regarding Ma Riddle's death in childbirth, Miss Manners notes in 
today's Washington Post that when the rules of etiquette were set, 
death in childbirth was far more prevalent than today.

With ultrasound, a high-risk birth can be identified far in advance, 
and precautions taken. That's new. Not until the last couple of 
decades have parents known beforehand to expect a boy or a girl, and 
twins were often a total surprise. 

If Ma Riddle were married, she might have defied her wizarding 
parents to marry a Muggle. I'm going to guess that excessive pride 
runs in Tom's blood.

Had she defied her parents to run off with Tom's father, that pride 
might have kept her from turning to her parents, or the wizarding 
world for help. Muggles give birth all the time, she might have 
reasoned, and not turned to a hedge-witch midwife for help. 

Once she encountered problems, what them? Image her in a Muggle 
hospital, perhaps a charity ward of iron bedsteads and starched 
matrons. A breech birth, perhaps, or internal bleeding that would not 
stop. 

She realizes she has problems, and needs Wizarding medicine. So, she 
asks for her wand? Asks for her owl? 

What do you thing a hospital nurse would say?

People always tend to treat the sick as if they were somehow mentally 
deficient. If she asked for a wand or an owl, she would be humored, 
and if she persisted, she would be restrained.

In a hospital of many years ago, the interval between the onset of 
problems and death could be quite brief.

So, I think the argument for illegitimacy explains Tom's abandonment 
to the orphanage. His remaining there is a product of the times and 
requires no further explanantion. His mother's death in childbirth 
can be explained by pride, and the medicine of the times.

One detail I find odd, which is Tom's status as the "last descendent 
of Slytherin." 

Several years ago in the film "The Shadow" the bad guy was "the last 
descendent of Ghenghis Khan." Recent medical scholarship and DNA 
tests indicate that about five percent of the human race is descended 
from Ghenghis, which knocks that characterization for a loop.

That Slytherin's progeny, after a thousand years for his blood to 
mingle widely, should be reduced to a single survivor, suggests some 
sort of congenital defect.

- Caipora