Does JKR sees ambition as a flaw?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 99999

Alla asked:
> Could someone give me any ideas why. I alsor ead somewhere, maybe 
> even on this lists that for many Brits ambition is not considered to 
> be a virtue. Is it true?

Carol:
Possibly JKR was influenced by her reading of English literature.
Shekespeare's "good" characters seem to regard ambition as a serious
character flaw, even a deadly one:

Surrey (in Henry VIII):

Thy ambition,
Thou scarlet sin, robb'd this bewailing land
Of noble Buckingham, my father-in-law. . .

Cardinal Wolsey (same play):

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition:
By that sin fell the angels.

Macbeth (in MacBeth):

I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only,
Vaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself, 
And fails on th' other.

That's just a sample, of course. We know where ambition led Macbeth,
and Claudius in "Hamlet," and Shakespeare's unhistorical Richard III,
and a number of other figures in his. Just possibly JKR's Salazar
Slytherin was influenced by those characters, or rather by the
assumption behind their depiction that ambition leads to disaster (cf.
"pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall").

That's the best I can come up with at the moment.

I don't think though, that JKR's favorite author, Jane Austen,
considered ambition a vice, but then she wrote romantic comedies, not
tragedies.

Carol, who is too sleepy to come up with any more examples at the moment