Source of LV's evil nature

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 113691

DuffyPoo wrote:
> 
> Especially since, IMO, TR's mother is much more in the wrong, yet TR
doesn't seem to include her in his wrath.  He appears to hold her in
higher regard in this situation. Considering that she deceived Riddle,
Sr for at the least, some weeks and at the most, possibly a couple
years, then once they were married, and she was pregnant, she informed
her Dear Hubby that 'oh, by the way, I'm a witch and I've been lying
to you for all this time.'  LV, in GoF, says "My father lived there.
My mother, a witch who lived here in this village, fell in love with
him.  But he abandoned her when she told him what she was.... he
didn't like magic, my father ..."  To TR the proof that Riddle, Sr
didn't like magic is simply that he abandoned his wife when he found
out she was a witch, but he doesn't take into account that the witch
had been deceitful to the husband.  What I see is not so much a man
who disliked magic (which he may well have), but one who didn't
appreciate being lied to for whatever length of time is in question.  


Carol responds:
Withholding information is not the same as lying. If it were, Lupin
would be a liar for not revealing to his students that he was a
werewolf. He feared the same sort of reaction. (OTOH, he would be very
irresponsible to marry a woman and then reveal that he was a werewolf,
because his condition would endanger his wife. I don't think Mrs.
Riddle was in that same position.)

And I disagree in any case that her deception was more immoral than
abandoning a pregnant wife and her innocent child. (Who knows what Tom
Riddle might have become if his father had accepted his own
responsibility and better still, had loved his son.) And after his
wife died, shouldn't he have taken care of their child in any case,
whether or not that child had magical powers, rather than dumping him
in a Muggle orphanage?

Please note that I'm not blaming either Tom's mother or father for his
evil nature. The choice to become a murderer as a teenager was his
own. I'm only saying that his mother is not to blame for the treatment
that she suffered at her husband's hands or for what her husband did
to her son after she died. If he loved her enough to marry her, he
should have kept on loving her after he found out she was a witch.
Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

Carol