HBP & To Kill A Mockingbird

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 160126

Katherine wrote:
<snip>> 
> Two lonely and lovelorn girls, growing up in squalor--Mayella Ewell  
> and Merope Gaunt are literary sisters in many ways. I have come to  
> believe that Chapter 10 of The Half-Blood Prince is JK Rowling's  
> tribute to Harper Lee's classic To Kill A Mockingbird.
> 
> When we first see Merope Gaunt, she is cowering in her father's  
> kitchen, surrounded by grime and filth. Yet Harry notices that
Merope has made an effort to be clean and presentable. I was instantly  
> reminded of Mayella's efforts to keep tidy, and of her struggling
red  geraniums.
> 
> Mayella and Merope have the misfortune of sharing a father.
Seperated by magic, an ocean and a couple of decades, Bob Ewell and
Marvolo  Gaunt are nevertheless the same man. Dirt poor and
ill-regarded by their neighbours, Gaunt and Ewell both consider their
race and  lineage to be their chief source of pride. <snip>

> Our heroines also share an obsession, after a fashion. Tom.
Mayella's Tom is Tom Robinson, the handsome and gentle-hearted black
man she watches through her window every day. Mayella Ewell grows to
lust after Tom Robinson, knowing that his very blackness would make
him a  forbidden lover in her house. Merope's Tom is Tom Riddle, the  
> handsome and hard-hearted Muggle she watches through her window
every  day. In her world the love for Riddle is the same as Mayella's
love  for Robinson, yet it's Riddle's non-wizard nature that makes him  
> forbidden to her. Both Mayella and Merope see their love as an
escape  from the tyranny of drunken and abusive fathers.
> 
> Each girl sets her obsession in motion at the absence of her family.  
> Mayella takes "a slap year to save [seven] nickles" to send her  
> younger siblings for ice cream. We are not witnesses to the further  
> action, but the story would seem to prove out the following events.  
> Mayella lures Tom Robinson into the Ewell shack and throws herself
at  him. Bob Ewell comes upon the scene and beats Mayella fiercely.
Due  in part to her beating and in part to her shame at being rejected
by  Tom, Mayella levels the accusation of rape that tears apart
Maycomb  county and ends the lives of Tom Robinson and Bob Ewell.
> 
> In Merope's Little Hangleton hovel events are somewhat inverted but  
> have similar outcomes. Like Bob Ewell--his muggle counterpart-- 
> Marvolo Gaunt beats and strangles his daughter upon discovering her  
> obsession with Tom Riddle. Unlike TKAM, the reader is a witness to  
> this beating. I surmise that this is JK Rowling's subtle way of  
> confirming Tom Robinson's version of events and offering Robinson a  
> postmortem exoneration. In HBP, the beating results not in Tom
Riddle  being falsely accused but in Marvolo Gaunt and his worthless
son  Morfin going to prison. At first the reader is relieved to see
Merope  finally have some peace. But just as Mayella couldn't resist
seducing  her Tom, Merope used her freedom to the same ends. Unlike
Mayella,  however, Merope has the means to concoct a love potion that
enslaves  Tom Riddle to her. The child born of this bitter obsession
becomes  the boy Tom Marvolo Riddle and the man Lord Voldemort, who
reigns  evil and chaos over both the Muggle and Wizarding worlds.
> 
> Two sad, lonely, lovelorn girls. Both seem inconsequential yet both  
> prove the far-flung disastrous outcomes of obsessive love.

Carol eesponds:
Very interesting and thought-provoking essay, but I'd like to point
out an additional difference. IMO, and I realize that there are people
on this list who *violently* disagree with me), Merope, unlike
Mayella, is not motivated by lust but by her naive and mistaken notion
of love, which she thinks that a *love* potion can conjure. She
doesn't want illicit sex; she wants a happily-ever-marriage to the
handsome "prince" in the mansion on the hill. And rather than
punishing her Tom when he rejects her after she stops using the love
potion, hoping for real love from the father of her child, she runs
away. She could have reported him to the Muggle authorities who
authorized the marriage and charged him with desertion (I don't hink
her knowledge of the WW is sufficient that she could have reported the
desertion to them), but instead she suffers abject poverty,
depression, despair, and loss of magic. Yes, her Tom has been tricked
into marrying a poor, dirty girl who turns out to be a witch, and he's
deprived of the chance to marry the girl he loves (pretty and suitably
rich), but he isn't falsely charged and doesn't die.

So, yes, there are parallels and interesting reversals, and the
similar names of the men may not be a coincidence. But I think it's
more important to look at Merope in terms of the themes in the novel,
among them the variations on mother love (and the consequences of its
absence), real vs. false love, compulsion vs. choice, yet another bad
father (thank goodness for Arthur Weasley, despite his faults).

Carol, who finds Merope to be as much a victim as Tom Sr. and thinks
that we are meant to feel compassion for her (as we are for Kreacher,
whose abuse at the hands of wizards leads him into collusion with Dark
wizards and witches)