[HPforGrownups] Hermione's growth

[elfundeb]

No: HPFGUIDX 81788

Two caveats.  First, this got way too long.  I am not blessed with the gift of brevity.  Second, though it may not be apparent from the comments herein, I like Hermione; in fact, I like her better for her faults.

Jim Ferer wrote:

> And that is exactly what Hermione is all about. She came to 
Hogwarts
> for purely intellectual challenges and found much more. Her mind 
has
> grown (!), but so has her courage, heart, sense of purpose, 
physical
> bravery and people sense. She is, and ever will be, always 
looking to
> test herself and the world around her. 

David responded:

<<However, I feel she has gone badly adrift in OOP. She has IMO 
become overconfident. [snip] Much has been made of Harry being the typical teenager in his anger. But Hermione has become a typical teenager of a different kind.

The word that comes to mind is 'arrogant'.>>

And hg added:

<<David's points were strong enough to lead me to doubt 
her. Kneazle, however, read the same things as David, but has seen 
them in a different light, one that's IMO more consistent with who 
Hermione has been all along.>>

Who's right?  I think that David's right (mostly) but that JKR has written Hermione in such a way as to intentionally obscure her faults and focus our attention on her strengths. 

For example, in OOP, Hermione seems to make all the right moves, while Harry lets his anger take control, and Ron struggles with Quidditch and his own self-doubt. She recognizes immediately what the Ministry is doing at Hogwarts, and takes aim against it. Dumbledore's Army is her idea, and she's the engine behind making it a reality. She devises the plan to ensure its secrecy. She engineers the Quibbler article that restores Harry's reputation and simultaneously undermines the Ministry's position on Voldemort's return. She shows increasing bravery (of which saying Voldemort's name is but one example). She brilliantly manipulates Umbridge when she catches them trying to use her fireplace. All this highlights her logical and strategic thinking, as well as her genuine concern for Harry's welfare. She appears to have an excellent grasp of when rules should be broken to further the greater good. 

The spotlight is focused on that because while Hermione does make mistakes - as she did in the Forbidden Forest with the centaurs - she does not experience the consequences of failure, as Harry does. The quick change of scene to the Department of Mysteries refocuses everyone's attention - ours and Hermione's - elsewhere. 

Recalling Dumbledore's philosophy of allowing people to try and fail and learn from their mistakes (witness his patience with Hagrid's poor teaching), though, it seems to me that for Hermione to fully develop as a character, she needs to suffer from her mistakes. If there's always a Grawp to rescue her, this growth will never happen.  She will become more and more convinced that she's right and insistent on doing things her way, and without consulting anyone.  Hermione's combination of overconfidence, secrecy and blindness to other points of view is a dangerous combination, but only the hanging house-elf subplot suggests that there's trouble ahead for her.

David wrote:

<<Yet she simply does not test herself and the 
world around her. She has lost interest in rigorously finding out 
and discerning what the evidence is really telling her.>>

This is where I disagree with David. This is not a new phenomenon in OOP. Well before OOP, Hermione has made mistakes in judgment because she analyzed the situation based on her own preconceived biases. But I think it's harder than with other characters for us to pick up on it, because they've been obscured by other elements in the story. Remember in OOP when the only thing that mattered to her about Crouch Sr. was his treatment of Winky? Some more examples: Snape's a teacher so he can't be trying to get the Philosopher's Stone. (He wasn't, but Quirrell was a teacher, too.) Fred and George wouldn't blackmail anyone. (They did, but because Bagman was scum.) Percy wouldn't throw over his family to the dementors. (Not quite, but Percy *did* throw over his family for the sake of his career and for Dolores Umbridge, who sent dementors to Privet Drive.) Crookshanks is just a cat and didn't have it in for Scabbers. (No, he's more than a cat, and he *did* have it in for Scabbers, but Scabbers turned out to be Wormtail so Hermione's defense of Crookshanks seems to be right.)

She makes another big mistake in OOP (in addition to her miscalculation regarding the centaurs). Hermione casts a spell on the parchment all the DA members sign so they'll be branded if they tattle. But she doesn't tell anyone, and when Marietta does tattle, Harry is nearly expelled and Dumbledore is forced to leave. Had she told them the consequences of tattling this would likely never have happened.  Hermione's secrecy is not always a virtue.

Kneazle255 wrote:

<<She can be insensitive other people's feelings when they 
contradict her logic. I don't think this is arrogance. More like 
blindness. [snip] She needs practice with empathy and that is common enough with 
teenagers.>> 

Hermione's lack of empathy is, like her mistakes, often hidden in OOP, because she *seems* quite adept at gauging others' feelings. David points out:

<<She presumes to direct Harry's love life without checking whether he 
wants her to. She confidently explicates Cho's feelings without any 
sense that it might be good for Harry to verify her opinions by 
seeking Cho's own view.>> 

I believe she gets way too much credit for this. Her assessment of Cho's feelings may be astoundingly insightful to Harry and Ron, who are stymied by the phenomenon of teenage girls, but Hermione's explanation seems to be a fairly standard picture of teenage self-doubt. She's applying her analytical skills to Cho's behavior and filling in the gaps based on her own experience. 

David continues:

<<She decides what Sirius thinks of Harry, and has the cheek to assume 
that Sirius' support of an idea is a counter-recommendation.>>

Hermione receives a lot of credit for her assessment of Sirius, but she's really simply echoing Molly's criticism, which happens to accord with her own biases. 

She doesn't really even understand her two best friends. She gets them homework planners for Christmas whose irritating comments all reinforce *her* organizational skills and study techniques which (as should be obvious by now) are not the same as Harry and Ron's. Harry vows to throw it away at the first opportunity.

It is not accidental, I think, that Luna Lovegood (the anti-Hermione), first appears in this book. Hermione dismisses Luna out of hand and is frequently rude to her. Hermione even has time to murmur a snide remark about her in the Department of Mysteries. Yet she doesn't hesitate to use Luna's connections to the Quibbler when it suits her purposes. 

David continued:

<<She rewrites the 
rules of her bargain with Rita Skeeter, just because it suits her.>>

And Kneazle255 responded:

<<She rewrites her agreement with Rita to aid in a WAR.>>  

This illustrates my point rather well. Because Hermione's ends are good, we don't just excuse, we applaud her manipulative techniques. Same thing with Hermione's treatment of Umbridge, who is as hateful as they come. But doesn't this sound a lot like what a certain hat said about Slytherin? That they'll "use any means to achieve their ends"? 

Hermione reveals in OOP that the Sorting Hat considered her for Ravenclaw. I think the Hat might have done well to consider Slytherin. When something truly threatens Hermione, she is quite willing to use any means to achieve her ends. 

I think Hermione is often viewed through rose-colored lenses because her motives seem very altruistic, as exemplified by her genuine concern for others, in particular Harry and the house-elves. In fact, nearly everything Hermione does is motivated by self-interest. Hermione's brewing of the polyjuice potion in CoS, in order to find out who the Heir of Slytherin really was, has been cited as an example of her willingness to break rules to help her friends. But as a muggleborn, the Heir of Slytherin was a much greater threat to Hermione than Harry at that point. I always found it quite significant that the first time she engineered a major flaunting of the rules, the reason was a personal threat.

The same goes for the DA. The DA was obviously a wonderful idea. But Hermione faced a dual threat. She has chosen to make her mark in the WW and not the muggle one. She knows she won't earn an OWL in DADA without practice. But even more fundamentally, Voldemort is a threat to her as well as to Harry. He's not after her directly, but she is a muggleborn and a friend of Harry's, and a WW with Voldemort in control is not a place where she could live safely, or hope to achieve her goals, whether she chooses to be an Auror or to win freedom for the house-elves. 

Hermione does not help Harry just because he's the key to defeating Voldemort and eliminating a threat to herself; he's one of her best friends and she obviously cares a great deal for him (NOT in a shipping sense). She's made it a personal project to keep him on the path he needs to be on, to encourage or nag him as needed, to the point of running his life without his consent. But it's ignoring facts to suggest she has nothing to gain from it. We just don't notice because Harry needs help.

And while it's true that Hermione doesn't have anything to gain from her campaign to free the house-elves, except the satisfaction of having helped them, house-elves are, like muggleborns, discriminated against in the WW, so drawing attention to their plight raises the consciousness of the WW to their prejudicial attitudes in general. 

However, her misguided campaign merely perpetuates the lie of the statue at the Department of Mysteries. It's not her role to decide what the house-elves need, any more than it is the MoM's job. She needs to recognize their right - and the centaurs' right - to want something different for themselves. 

And it's not her job to manage Harry's life without his consent, either, even though the outcome of OOP make it appear that it was the right thing to do. She needs to work *with* those that she cares about, not *for* them.  This is how I see Hermione's potential tragic flaw playing out. She sums it up herself, in ch. 31 of OOP:

"On Friday, Harry and Ron had a day off while Hermione sat her Ancient 
Runes exam . . . .They stretched and yawned beside the open window - when
the portrait hole opened and Hermione clambered in, looking thoroughly 
bad-tempered.
'How were the Runes?' said Ron, yawning and stretching.
'I mis-translated ehwaz,' said Hermione furiously. 'It means 
partnership, not defence; I mixed it
up with eihwaz.'
'Ah well,' said Ron lazily, 'that's only one mistake, isn't it, you'll 
still get -'
'Oh, shut up!' said Hermione angrily. 'It could be the one mistake that 
makes the difference
between a pass and a fail.'"

To paraphrase only slightly, for Hermione this could be the difference between success and tragic failure. 

Debbie (wondering if anyone made it to the end)


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