The morality of love potions/Merope and Tom Sr. (Was: Snogging and Love Potions

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 152267

Potioncat wrote:
<snip>
> See, I'm thinking teenaged girl who is just going to die if that
cute boy in 3rd period doesn't ask her out. She's tried perfume and
changing her hair and wearing a different style dress and mentioning,
within his hearing how much she likes (some event she knows he likes.)
 So now she tries a little shot of love potion. He sees her and asks
her out. End of story. <snip>

Carol responds:
Here, Potioncat. I'll join your tennis match--which may not be to your
advantage considering how vehemently some of my opinions have been
rejected lately.

I agree that JKR sees most love potions (Amortentia excepted) as
essentially innocent, like most of the Weasley Twins' products and
jokes. (The reader may not necessarily share this view, but I'm
talking about JKR's apparent intention.) We have the whole problem of
what is considered acceptable and normal in the WW in contrast to the
RW, for example hexes and jinxes, all of which impose the will of
someone else on the victim (Did Crabbe ask to have his toenails
ridiculously elongated? Did Neville ask to be turned into a canary,
even briefly, by a Canary Cream? Did McLaggen ask to be Confunded?)
and which have no equivalent in our world, where kids don't hex one
another in the hallways or hit Bludgers at each other's heads or chase
Blast-Ended Skrewts as a "lesson" in COMC or face dragons and other
deadly perils in the name of international cooperation. In the WW, an
ordinary love potion like those sold by the Weasley Twins (cunningly
disguised as perfumes or cough potions) is no more dangerous and no
more of an imposition on the victim than, say, Levicorpus, which was a
fad in MWPPS's fifth year, or Petrificus Totalus, which even
first-years use on each other (Hermione uses it on Neville) or turning
a student into a ferret. The student who gets through Hogwarts without
having someone else's will imposed on him (not counting homework
assignments and detentions) does not exist.

IMO, we need to consider that Romilda Vane and her friends are
fourteen-year-old girls who aren't trying to seduce Harry, just trying
to get him to ask them to a party. If they get lucky, he might kiss
them under the mistletoe, a thrill for them, a possible embarrassment
to him but one he'll get over. The infatuation caused by a love potion
like the one in the chocolate cauldrons is not permanent, and even one
that's out of date (and multiplied by the number of candies the boy
ate, which IIRC in Ron's case was four) is easily countered by a
simple antidote. All the potion does is temporarily cause a boy to
make a fool of himself over a girl he normally wouldn't look at twice,
hardly an experience that will cause post-traumatic stress syndrome in
a world like the WW, where being made to look ridiculous is almost as
common an experience as being put into danger, which happens every day
in almost every class, even the innocent-seeming Herbology. 

I think the fact that Ginny, Hermione, and Mrs. Weasley giggled
together over love potions, along with Hermione's comment that love
potions aren't "Dark" and wouldn't be detected by a Secrecy Sensor, is
meant to indicate that their use by teenage girls is regarded in the
WW as silly but innocuous, the same attitude that Ron and Harry take
toward Puking Pastilles and Fainting Fancies being tested on first
years. I don't approve of the Twins' conduct, or Romilda's, but I
don't think these misdemeanors are any worse than Harry using
LangLock(sp?), the tongue-locking curse, on the defenseless Filch.
That, too, is an imposition, as is Hermione Confunding McLaggen and
Ginny throwing a Bat-Bogey hex at Zacharias Smith because he annoyed
her, or James hexing people in the hallways.) If love potions are
"Dark," why isn't Veritaserum, which forces a person to tell the
truth, regarded as Dark? Or Legilimency, used by Albus Dumbledore, the
"epitome of goodness," as well as by the evil Voldemort and the
morally ambiguous Snape? Compared to those things, a love potion in a
box of chocolates given by a teenage girl to a teenage boy with the
simple intention of getting him to ask her for a single date seems
fairly innocuous, at least to me. (We're talking about sexually
inexperienced kids, none of whom has gone beyond "snogging," which
fortunately has no permanent effects, not even, apparently, ruining a
girl's reputation, if we can judge from Lavender's behavior.)

It might be different if a boy used a love potion on a girl, and
certainly if he wanted something more than "snogging" from an
otherwise unwilling girl it would be reprehensible. (Sorry, Lupinlore.
Your favorite word is the one that came to mind.) There's a reason why
girls can enter the boys' dormitories but boys can't enter the girls'
dorms, as Ron finds out when he tries to run up the girls' stairs. But
these are children's books, and JKR's very young girls aren't seducing
boys, nor are they in any danger of getting themselves pregnant, as
JKR has made clear in an interview. (Fortunately, the boys involved
are sexually inexperienced and still getting over their fear of girls
and the misconception that girls belong to a different species. It
would be a serious mistake to give a box of potioned chocolates to,
say, McLaggen.)

As for Merope (who, I agree, must be giving Tom Sr. repeated doses of
the love potion to sustain his "love"), I feel nothing but pity for
her. She has been treated all her life with abuse and contempt, and
she thinks she loves the handsome young Muggle on the hill. For her,
it's like a fairy tale. All she has to do is give him a bit of love
potion and they'll live happily ever after. (I don't know where or how
she learned to make a love potion, but I suppose we just have to
accept that one on faith.) She certainly never learned any ethical
principles, such as respect for the rights of others, and she probably
convinces herself that she's doing nothing wrong--rather like Regulus,
who joined the Death Eaters and realized too late that he had made a
terrible mistake. IMO, she wasn't thinking of what she was doing in
terms of seduction at all, much less rape. She simply wanted happiness
and love, both of which had been denied her. She would have been happy
for the first time in her life, told she was beautiful and kissed and
caressed for the first time in her life, and it would have been hard
to give that up, even if she knew in her heart that he didn't really
love her and that she had trapped him into marriage against his will.
It took a real act of courage, IMO, to stop giving him the potion and
admit that she was a witch, and it must have broken her heart to
realize that he not only hated and rejected her but wanted nothing to
do with their unborn child.

Potioncat: 
> But I'll toss out a question or two. Did Tom Riddle know Merope was 
> pregnant? What should his responsibility toward the baby have been? 
<snip>

Carol:
If Merope had any sense at all, she would have waited to tell him
until the pregnancy was obvious so that he couldn't claim that she was
lying about carrying his child. That being the case, no matter how
much he hated and rejected her, he ought at least to have had some
concern for the unborn baby once he recovered from the initial shock
and humiliation. He could, and IMO, should have made some sort of
arrangement so that his innocent child, his legal offspring whether he
liked it or not, had some share of his wealth and at least the
necessities of life. It is never right or justifiable, IMO, to condemn
our own child to a life of poverty and rejection even if we were
tricked into fathering or conceiving that child if it is in our power
to prevent that from happening. Nor do I think that Merope should have
been punished so severly for a mistake that she regretted and tried to
remedy. She needed mercy (which is by definition unmerited) and
received none. Her plight was far worse than Tom's, and a good man
would have realized that and made provisions for her and her child.
Instead, he never made inquiries after either of them, allowing her to
die in misery and his child to grow up unloved and unacknowledged. (I
am *not* saying that he deserved to be murdered by the son he rejected
or punished in any way, only that he was as much in the wrong as
Merope. Two wrongs don't make a right.)

Throughout history, both men and women have been forced into unwanted
marriages as a result of the custom of arranged marriage, the parents
(or often just the fathers) choosing the prospective wife or husband
for their children. However the bride and groom felt about the
marriage, it was their responsibility to raise any resulting children
to the best of their ability. The woman (or girl) would have no choice
but to give birth to the child, but the duty and obligation to care
for it belonged to both parents. 

Merope is in the position of a female rape victim who "asked for it."
She's now rejected, penniless, helpless. Even if she retains her
magic, she can't conjure food or money (as DD, IMO, whould have
pointed out to Harry). Nor can she live on rats like the Animagus
Sirius Black, and it would appear that she has no education and no
marketable skills. Her position, regardless of the fact that it's her
own fault, is IMO wholly pitiable, and her unborn baby's is worse. (It
doesn't matter that he's the future Voldemort and the WW would be
better off if his mother had died before he was born. The characters
are not in a position to know that.)

I realize that Tom Sr. would have been horrified to discover that he's
married to a girl he would consider a hag, wall-eyed and homely and
wholly unsuitable to a young man who had dreamed of marrying a pretty
girl in his own social class. Since he probably can't get either an
annulment or a divorce, his marital prospects are destroyed.
Nevertheless, he has fathered a child and he has the same moral
obligation as any other unwilling father, or any rape victim mother,
to provide for that child to the best of his ability. And Tom's
ability goes far beyond Merope's. He has plenty of money, and he could
easily do as the upperclass fathers of "natural" (illegitimate)
children did in the Middle Ages--provide a nice little home and an
adequate income to the mother during the child's minority. Of course,
that little home was generally far away from the father's house, as it
certainly would be in this case.

Yes, Tom Sr. is a victim (not so much of "rape" as of an inescapable
marriage, which IMO is a much bigger deal to a young man of his social
class), but so is the unloved and abused and rejected Merope, and so,
above all, is her unborn child. It's just possible that if he had
grown up knowing who he was, loved by his mother and acknowledged and
provided for if not loved by his father, he might not have become the
most evil wizard of all time. He might, at least, have been more
susceptible to Dumbledore's influence. And even if that isn't the
case, Tom Sr. had no way of knowing what the child he had fathered
would become. Regardless of his own status as victim, he had no right
to reject his unborn child when Merope clearly had no means of
providing for him (and her ability to do magic would not have been a
sufficient excuse; he had seen how she lived with her father and must
have known that he would be condemning his child to grow up as another
Merope or Morfin if it remained with its mother, unacknowledged and
unaided by him).

Carol, knowing that she's once again taking an unpopular stand that
will be regarded as "wrong" by three-quarters of the list members