House Pride (wasRe: Sorting Hat (was: muggle baiting...)/Arthur is right or not?

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 155978


> Sydney wrote:
> 
> Something to bear in mind is the so-called "Pygmalion Effect", the
> phenomenon of self-fullfilling expectations.  <snip>
> It's hard to think of a more classic scenario that would produce such
> an effect than to put a hat on an 11-year-old, tell them it's a magic
> hat that knows who they really are inside, and then tell some of them
> that they are brave and good and some of them that they are cunning
> and selfish. Of course it's going to result in different behaviours.
> <SNIP>
> 
> 
> Joe:
>  Of course in a world with magic it could have nothing to do with
real world issues. The Sorting Hat could "just know" what the kids are
like and be right about it.
> 
>   I think we always want for their to be a real world reason for
everything in the HP universe and as such we tend to read more into a
lot of things in the book that are meant to be taken at face value. 

Ah, the old "reading too much into it"... I thought this was, like, a
discussion group?  Are we all here really to squeal about how perfect
Harry and Ginny are for each other? The Sorting Hat is a bit more than
a cute throwaway gimmick, isn't it? Doesn't it go into that whole
unity and choices and who we really are and how kids grow up and are
influenced by their environment and stuff?  

The effect the Sorting has on the kids is basic psychology, if you're
going to exclude it as a "real world reason", it seems to me you
should also be hunting around for magic spells to explain pretty much
everyone's behaviour in the series. 

Anyhow, I'm not just pulling all this out of a hat... there is plenty
of stuff in the text that suggests the whole Sorting thing is going to
get a complication:


1.  The discrepancy in the story of the Founder's split between Binns
and the Sorting Hat.

2.  The Hat's assertion that Sorting the students is wrong, describing
itself as "condemned" to do it: 
 
"But this year I'll go further,
listen closely to my song:
though condemned I am to split you
still I worry that it's wrong,
though I must fulfill my duty
and must quarter every year
still I wonder whether sorting
may not bring the end I fear."

So, should I take THAT at face value?  Or should I say, silly hat,
it's really useful to be able tell which 11-year-olds are power-hungry
and which are noble!


3.  The fact that we have now been given a literal example of a
self-fullfilling prophecy, in, uh, the Prophecy.   A device of which
JKR says she is particularily fond, hence how much she likes "Macbeth".


4. To get into extra-textual things, Rowling has still vivid and
unpleasant memories of being  "sorted":

     "Mrs Morgan positioned everyone in the class according to how
clever she thought they were; the brightest sat on her left, and
everyone she thought was dim sat on the right.  I was as far right as
you could get without sitting in the playground.  By the end of the
year, I had been promoted to second left â€" but at a cost.  Mrs Morgan
made me swap seats with my best friend, so that in one short walk
across the room I became clever but unpopular. "

She tells the same story again to Stephen Fry in the BBC interview:

 "Her name was Mrs. Morgan. And she used to sit us all in class
according to how clever she thought we were. And my first day at
school, she had a 2-minute chat with me, and she put me in the "stupid
row". Which is about the nastiest thing I can think of a teacher doing."

Does it sound plausible that JKR would have been perfectly fine with
it if the teacher had had a magic hat so it would be able to determine
which kids were really clever, so JKR need never have even had to sit
to close to the 'dim' girl who was her best friend?  It seems like the
memory of deciding something so huge about a child as their basic
potential on the basis of a 2-minute interview followed by a walk
across the classroom is a very unpleasant one.  And that is the memory
she is using to write the Sorting scenes.

5. Something extra-textual again, but I think important, is (to get on
my hobbyhorse again) "Little White Horse", JKR's avowed favorite
children's book.   (it's very short, and you can get it second-hand
for less than two bucks: 
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0142300276/sr=8-1/qid=1153846973/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-4429167-3508764?ie=UTF8)

Like Harry Potter, the heroine is an orphan from the normal world who
inherits a place in a hidden, magical kingdom, where she is taken in
by a benevolent family from the 'Sun' branch of the Kingdom, whose
emblem is a lion and is associated with warm colours and courage.  She
is told that the 'Moon' branch went bad hundreds of years ago due to
the treachery of their king, and had to be driven out, where their
descendants theive on the edges of a dark forest.  As the story
continues she discovers that actually the split that led to the war
between the kingdoms was a complicated one that could have been
avoided,  that the Sun branch was just as culpable of selfishness and
deceit, and that... well, much further and I'll have to go into
spoilers!  

Anyways, as in HP there is vague talk about something needing to be
done about reunifying the kingdoms, but it takes the heroine solving
the mystery of what really happened in the past to make anything happen.

6.  Which brings me back to the text-- the Horcruxes are emblems of
each Founder that Harry has to hunt down.  Surely this will wind up
involving some insight into the history, and about who the Founders
really were?  


-- Sydney, realizing that checking this site once a day is clearly not
going to cut it...