Orphans - Harry and Tom

[Ceridwen]

No: HPFGUIDX 150781

Tonight I was looking for something else entirely (Does JKR have a 
duty to present feminist issues in her books because she is female?  
Do you think Google!Mort is being helpful?)  and ran across the 
summary of a lecture about the books.  One point really intrigued me -
 the place of orphan in a story.

The point:
Yet orphanhood also a technique of liberation (see Harry's wanderings 
in Diagon Alley) – orphan goes where he pleases, he has adventures
http://www.english.und.ac.za/English2/Potterlec3_2005.htm

The lecture was written before HBP came out.

Harry, Tom and Hagrid are orphans, or were left in the same 
situation.  Orphans are supposed to elicit sympathy, yet their state 
also liberates them from parental constraints.  We don't know much 
about Hagrid's early life and his relationship toward his parents, 
but we are shown Tom's and Harry's.  Both without parents as they 
begin their education, both left on their own, yet Harry accepts and 
warms to his guide into the WW, while Tom rejects any such guide.

The typical orphan story I read as a child shows good, dutiful 
orphans, polite, eager to please (The Boxcar Children, Cinderella), 
spit upon by life but getting by on pluck and goodwill.  Harry isn't 
nearly as compliant as the older versions, but he still has the same 
feelings they do - the wish for family, honoring his dead parents, 
knowing he would have had a better life if they had lived, longing to 
belong.

Harry, while fighting his situation, still remains within bounds and 
when he crosses them, he expects to be punished.  He looks for better 
without trying to undo everything around him.

Tom turns all that on its head.  And I find that curious.  At nearly 
the same time as Shirley Temple was dancing down the tables of her 
movie-set orphanage singing 'Animal Crackers', Tom was frightening 
other students, stealing their toys, killing their pets, and doing 
who-knows-what to them in seaside caves.  When he is offered guidance 
in his first trip into the WW, he refuses it.

No one can constrain Tom.  He is more powerful than the matrons at 
the home, he is more powerful than his mother who was weak enough to 
die, he is more powerful than anyone, until he meets Dumbledore.  And 
by then, it seems that his lack of self-restraint has become a part 
of him.

I understand that Tom is supposed to turn out bad.  But this changes 
the whole orphan thing, at least for me.  He does not wish for 
family, he wishes to be unique.  He does not honor the mother who 
died giving birth to him and he kills the father who left him and his 
mother.  He doesn't mention anything to Dumbledore about wishing for 
his parents, and he doesn't show much feeling about the subject - all 
he wants is revenge.  He seems to have nothing but contempt for his 
mother's 'weakness'.  He doesn't want to belong, he wants to rule and 
let others belong to him.

I was taken by the obvious differences between them.  Maybe it's just 
JKR showing how bad Tom is.  But, I am getting something else thrown 
in now, the dangers of liberation without constraint, and the huge 
gulf between Tom and Harry.

Ceridwen.