The Little White Horse and Slytherin, SPOILERS

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 84334

Samnanya wrote:

> I have not quite finished reading TLWH yet but there are
> a lot of VERY interesting parallells to HP -- I will post
> a far more detaliled post once I have digested the book.


I'm so glad this has been introduced as a topic, though I should put 
spoiler-space for those who have not yet read "The Little White 
Horse"--

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Okay!  What I found the most fascinating is what it may tell us 
about what Rowling is intending to do with Slytherin House.  In 
TLWH, we start out with the safe assumptions that the cheerful, 
sunny squire (I can't remember his name), and his ancestors were 
the 'good guys', and the creepy, black wearing crooks were always 
the bad guys.  There was a dispute between them in the distant past 
that ended with the 'bad guy' leaving, hoovering however around the 
edge of the world of the book and occasionally causing trouble.  

Much like in HP, we slowly start to discover things that complicate 
the picture.  For one thing, many of the heroine's ancestors came 
from the side of the 'bad guys'.  For another, The 'good guys' 
weren't so pure-- much of their power and money came from seizing 
the lands of a third group, the monks.  The initial split between 
the 'good' and 'bad' was a complicated affair where both sides 
behaved badly.  There's a significant sub-plot about a couple who 
had a raging fight over something very trivial and have lived in 
resentment ever since.  I was surprised by the sophistication of 
this plot given the very young age group for which the book seems to 
be aimed.

There is also an admonition to the heroine to heal the rift and make 
good on past wrongs.  She asks the squire to return the land to the 
monks (now defunct, I think they give them to the church or 
something), unravels the mystery that caused the initial rift (a 
thing over missing jewels), and the book ends with the 'bad guys' 
(still rather scary and thuggish) being invited to tea and to rejoin 
the community.

I definitely think that Rowling is very, very consciously building 
on the themes of TLWH (if it was unconscious, I don't think she'd 
plug it so often).  These are also themes that you find a lot in 
Jane Austen, another huge influence-- that self-deception is the 
most insidious kind, and that things are always more complicated 
than they appear.

TLWH gave me a lot of hope for a resolution to the conflict with 
Slytherin, which has always been the most uncomfortable part of the 
books for me.  One of my favorite quotations is from 
Dostoyevsky:  "It would be a wonderful thing if you could draw a 
line between the good people and the bad people, and just get rid of 
the bad ones;  but the line between good and evil runs through every 
human heart, and who can cut out a piece of his own heart?"   That 
Rowling would create a world featuring the repulsive idea that you 
could draw the line and cut out the bad people at age 11 is 
something I refuse to believe.  

LTWH, like HP, doesn't suggest that EVERYTHING is just a big 
misunderstanding or that there is no such thing as bad actions.  But 
it does try to move kids away from a good-guy/bad-guy world view 
into a nobody-here-but-us-flawed-humans thing.

Predictions?  I think we're going to have to go back to the Founders 
at some point and take another look at the Slytherin rift.  I think 
the series will have to end with something positive being done on 
the House front. 

Sydney