Real child abuse/ Snape again

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 145711

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Magda Grantwich 
<mgrantwich at y...> wrote:

> 
> Since it seems that the child abuse issue is never going to go away
> (despite my fervent Christmas wish), it almost seems like it should
> be set up as a separate list so devotees can go at it with full force
> (my latest desperate New Years wish).
> 

Well, you are certainly right that it isn't going to go away.  It is 
far too important an issue for that.  As to a separate list, why on 
Earth would we need that?  This is about the HP books, and the child 
abuse issue certainly does arise out of and pertain to canon.

Perhaps you mean that we should confine our canon discussion to issues 
that JKR definitely means to put forth AS issues?  I suppose in that 
vain we would keep on talking about Snape and whether he is ESE (I 
personally don't think so), OFH (a good way of dealing with him, from 
a storyline standpoint), DDM (which I think is very possible, although 
I also think it would be poor writing and, frankly, so silly, 
unbelievable, and downright laughable that I would probably give 
myself a hernia from guffawing in derision), Grey (better than OFH and 
leagues better in terms of writing than DDM) or LID (which is the most 
logical and believable of all the possibilities).

However, what JKR wants is not at all what JKR gets, and what she puts 
forth as issues may, perhaps, not be the most important issues in her 
stories.  It is rather an old fashioned thing to say, but stories are 
like living things, they grow in directions their parents don't 
anticipate, and often take on meanings that their creators did not 
consciously infuse into them.  

I remember a friend of mine, a Tolkien expert by way of a degree in 
medieval literature (she became a Tolkien expert when she discovered 
nobody cared about her theories concerning Sir Gawain and the Green 
Knight as medieval myth, but everybody was fascinated by the story as 
a bit of Tolkienia), talking about whether the War of the Ring 
resonated with WW II.  Tolkien always claimed it did not.  She said it 
did.  As she put it, "The LoTR is about WW II because readers say it's 
about WW II.  Just because Tolkien was the author doesn't give him any 
more say over what the story's about than anybody else."

So, in a very real way, the HP stories are about child abuse because 
we say they are about child abuse.  JKR, I am sure, did not mean for 
them to be about child abuse.  But she doesn't have anymore right than 
anybody else to determine what the stories are about.  Her rights 
consist of signing autographs and cashing royalty checks.

In any case, no the issue isn't going to go away.  And no, it isn't 
going to get it's own separate list.  And my advice to anyone who 
doesn't like the subject is don't read the threads.  The titles of the 
posts on this subject tend to be very clear, after all.


Lupinlore