Courage, was Re:Children's Books (was Re: A Sense of Betrayal)/Malum Blah blah/JO's

[littleleahstill]

No: HPFGUIDX 174480

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Bruce Alan Wilson" 
<bawilson at ...> wrote:
>
> For those who don't understand JKR's valuing courage above all 
virtues, consider
> this: Without courage, all other virtues are useless.  Compassion 
(for example)
> without courage will only be compassionate when it is safe to do 
so.  Loyalty
> without courage will be loyal only when there is no price to pay 
for loyalty.
> Any other virtue not accompanied with courage will be virtuous 
only when it is
> not risky to be so.
> 

> 
> Bruce Alan Wilson


Leah:

You are of course right in what  you say, and I agree with it, but I 
don't think that can be the whole picture. JKR seems to me to 
attributes a positive 
 to a morally neutral quality.  It is as you say often 
necessary to have courage to exercise a virtue. Equally, it is often 
necessary to have courage to carry out a wrong act.  As Lady Macbeth 
said to her husband as they prepared to murder Duncan, 'But screw 
your courage to the sticking point, and we'll not fail'.    It would 
have been quite possible to have been a loyal and brave member of 
the Waffen SS, indeed Bellatrix Lestrange is a loyal and brave 
woman.  At no time does she put her personal well being above her 
loyalty to Lord Voldemort- a Gryffindor, rather than a Slytherin?  
In fact, Voldemort values courage as we see in the graveyard in GOF 
and in his speech to Neville in DH.

To be a virtue, courage, like loyalty and like wisdom, and indeed 
like ambition, has to be informed by other qualities.  Sometimes 
this happens.  Neville for example is, I think, a personification of 
what a true Gryffindor ought to be.  He was not a courageous boy 
when he started at Hogwarts, but the compassion, friendship and 
loyalty shown to him by others, particulary the Trio, gave him 
courage.  And his displays of courage have always been against evil 
or wrongdoing.  His courage was both produced by virtues in others 
and expressed virtuously.  That balance is there.

It is the balance of qualities that I think is important, not only 
is courage necessary in expressing good  but good is also necessary 
to inform courage.  In many ways, I do think this is expressed well 
in the septology which can be powerful and moving.  There is moral  
complexity in characters.   However, it seems to me that this just 
doesn't work when we come down to the mundane level of separating 
children into houses.  Those qualities which inform each other are 
separated out and virtue or vice is attached to them.   There were 
clear hints given that this problem was going to be resolved and it 
wasn't.  One of the reasons that I felt the epilogue was so banal 
was because of its almost total IMO failure to address this problem. 

Leah