Acceptable Abuses?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 96240


> > Personally, I believe that the reason Dumbledore allows things
like this to happen is that he has faced dark wizards too long.  He
has had to look at the big picture for such a long time that he has
grown a little callous to the suffering of the individual.
>
Pen: 
> But, in the face of the big picture, is it really wrong to be a
little callous to the suffering of the individual?

Kyntor70:
> > Dumbledore uses the fact that only Harry can defeat Voldemort as
the ultimate justification for allowing Harry to be abused, but is he
really justified?  Can child abuse ever really be justified?
> 
Pen:
> Does the sword like being sharpened?  Would it be as effective if it 
> were blunt?

Carol adds:
Maybe DD belongs to something like the Rousseau school of
child-rearing--Rousseau thought that cold baths would accustom a child
to enduring hardship. IOW, in DD's view, Harry *had* to suffer
deprivation (of love and comfort) to be tough enough to play his part
in the battle to come. (It's not as if he were whipped with a belt as
parents used to do when I was young.) If he'd been a "pampered little
prince" (DD's term), how could he have coped with a Dementor, much
less Voldemort himself? Just as he has to learn to ignore Snape's
taunts to control his anger, he has to learn to endure hardship, even
the cruel, blood-drawing pen of "Professor" Umbridge, if he's to fight
 the battles that are in store for him.

As I've said before, our soft, postmodern Muggle view of child abuse
would be incomprehensible to most people in the WW, where relatives
send walnuts up each other's noses as the result of holiday quarrels.
This is not our world we're talking about, and the situation Harry is
about to face would not occur in RL. Harry might be better served by
the training that a medieval squire received, or maybe even a Spartan
boy, trained from the age of five to be a warrior.

By historical standards, the "abuse" Harry receives from the Dursleys
and Snape and perhaps even Umbridge (though I have reservations
regarding that last example) is pretty mild. In my childhood, a kid
who talked back to a teacher was sent to the principal's office and
received a solid whack with a paddle. (Girls never did it for fear of
humiliation, but an occasional boy did. Cruel or not, it was a pretty
good cure for insubordination.) Please don't think that I'm advocating
corporal punishment. Far from it. I'm asking people to look at the
book from something other than a late-twentieth/early-twenty-first
century perspective, just as kids reading "David Copperfield" in the
1960s and 1970s had to look at it from an early nineteenth-century
perspective. 

Like it or not, standards of child abuse are not absolute and our
standards are not necessarily right just because they are ours. The
spare-the-rod, spoil-the-child philosophy has a much longer history
than the self-esteem theory of education, which clearly has no place
in the thinking of Dumbledore or his teachers. We can't impose our
standards on a world that has never heard of them and would probably
dismiss them as all right for poor, weak, nonmagical Muggles but not
for themselves.

Carol, who thinks the New Critics were right to distance themselves
emotionally from the works they were analyzing, however wrong they may
have been in other respects