Amortentia and re The morality of love potions/Merope and Tom Sr.

[Tonks]

No: HPFGUIDX 152412

I told myself that I was going to stay out of this one.  But here I 
am. Let me present this whole situation from a different perspective.

Let's look at the 2 young women Merope and Cecelia.

Merope is plain, she is poor, sort of a Cinderella type.

Cecelia is from a family of means. She is able to do as most young 
women do when they are tying to "catch" a young man.  She can use 
makeup and fancy clothes and a nice hair style, some training in 
etiquette and advice from a more experienced older woman to tell her 
how to "win" the man of her dreams.

Merope has none of that. All she has is magic. 

We don't know anything about the personality of either woman. But we 
can guess from Merope behavior that she is probably a gentle, kind 
person with a good soul.  Otherwise she would be like her father and 
brother.  She would have a Bella type personality.  She wouldn't 
take any crap from her father and brother.  

Now what we see in Merope is the natural human need to be loved.  
Any normal person has that need. 

For illustration purposes let us assume that Cecelia has the same 
personality as Merope.  The major difference between the two young 
woman (other than one is a Muggle and the other a Witch) is 
everything that is on the outside.  All of the superficial things.  
What Merope really needs is a Muggle "makeover", like you see on 
TV.  Then she can compete with Cecelia for the love of Tom Sr. like 
any other Muggle woman with money.  But Merope is a witch, all she 
has is magic.  So she makes a love potion.  The love potion turns 
Cinderella into the charming Princess.  And Tom falls for her.  But 
unlike Cinderella where the Prince still loved her even when he sees 
her in her rags, dirty hair, etc.  Tom Sr. does not love Merope when 
the potion wears off.  He does not love Merope for the PERSON that 
she is.  He only loved the superficial things that the love potion 
was able to produce.

I think that this is the point that JKR is trying to make of all of 
this. In HBP we see all forms of love or attempts at love. Here we 
see a young woman who wants to be loved for herself alone.  But the 
young man is only attracted to what is on the outside.  Merope knows 
that she can not compete with the Muggle who has access to a 
different type of trickery (known to every Muggle woman) so Merope 
uses the only thing she can, magic
 a love potion.  When she 
realizes that this is wrong, and perhaps by then she hopes that her 
husband will love her for herself alone she stops giving him the 
potion. And Tom Sr. shows his true colors.  I don't think this is 
much different that a man who once his wife has a couple of kids and 
doesn't get dressed up for him like she use to, goes looking for 
someone else. 

I think that we are meant to feel sorry for Merope and to see Tom 
Sr. as a superficial young man. He is so bad in fact,(as our author 
tell us) that he not only leaves his young wife, but leaves knowing 
that she is pregnant. He abandons his child.  (I listened to the CD 
version and it is a bit clearer on there that he probably did know.)

Then we move on to the fact that every child has a right to be 
loved... and so on into a different thread about the sins of society 
producing a LV. 

Tonks_op