Punishing Draco (was:Re: Snape, Hagrid and Animals)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 143786

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" 
<horridporrid03 at y...> wrote:

> Betsy Hp:
> See, this is the thing I *really* don't get.  Draco is the series' 
> punching bag in, I believe, each and every book.  And the amount of 
> pain he dishes out himself is practically negligable.  So much so 
> quite a few people were ready to write him off as totally 
> unimportant to the series until HBP.  He *annoys* Harry and 
> friends, but I don't recall him ever actually hurting them.

So, why does Rowling *make* him the punching bag, the object of a 
kind of Schadenfreude that gets a good degree of overt authorial 
approval?  [And it's even more overt when she disapproves (albeit 
jokingly) of certain attitudes fans take towards this character.]

I think the answer is that she cares a great deal about intention and 
character.  It's fair to say that Draco doesn't manage to do physical 
harm; he's not killing people or anything.  But as I've raised before 
in other contexts, the 'no harm no foul' standard has all kinds of 
ramifications that make it an undesirable measure.

Draco is malicious.  Draco wants to see bad things happen to other 
people who he doesn't like, and he's happy to exploit whatever he can 
exploit.  One prime case is the whole affair with Buckbeak, where the 
text repeatedly points out how Draco is malingering.  These are not 
the actions of a person of good character, and that's a lot of what 
is being weighed on the scale when it comes to determining 
comeuppance.

And make no mistake, Rowling really, really likes comeuppance.  Why 
else phrase the comments about Umbridge in the way that she does:

MA: Are we going to see more of her? [Jo nods.] You say that with an 
evil nod.

JKR: Yeah, it's too much fun to torture her not to have another 
little bit more before I finish. 

Now, you might object that Umbridge is really and truly evil and 
Draco is not in her category.  I'd say this is generally true; 
there's no way that Draco is as nasty of a person as Umbridge.  But 
he is indeedy nasty--and hence Rowling writes him as taking the 
punches.  She thinks he's done wrong, but that does co-exist with the 
nuance and sympathy that she shows characters.

That's why (contra Steve) I actually *do* expect some kind of overt 
comeuppance for Snape, probably a little more than his flight at the 
end of book 6.  Why?  Because I think she regards his behavior 
towards the students as nasty and unpleasant.  She's the one who 
calls it an abuse of power, after all.

It's not realistic, of course, but that's the joy of writing 
fiction.  You get to determine the moral rules of your universe--
indeed, you get to determine *if* you're writing a universe with some 
kind of definite moral structure to it.  This isn't George R. R. 
Martin, writing a story explicitly lacking in the punishment and 
reward regulators of fiction.  Rowling's in a different part of the 
genre.  

Each reader is free to like and approve of this approach or not, but 
I think it's there regardless, and has to be taken into account.

-Nora still ponders an unholy melange of Kant, Aristotle, and Shklar 
to try to keep track of things