Of Sorting and Snape

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 175594

Pippin wrote:
> <snip> I think that JKR's biggest mistake was giving the epilogue a
heroine's ending, because people don't understand that's what she did.
The hero is supposed to get a kingdom, dammit, and it's disturbing
that JKR  *only* shows us Harry, Ginny, Draco, Ron and Hermione  with
their happy families.  Good enough for Psyche but not for Prince
Charming, you see?
>
Carol responds:
Interesting perspective. I saw it as a Victorian-style happy ending.
Instead of the Romantic Bildungsroman, which moves from Innocence
through Experience to Wisdom, the more practical and disillusioned
Victorians moved their heroes and heroines from Innocence through
Experience to Domestic bliss. (The best examples I can think of at the
moment are "Jane Eyre" and "David Copperfield.") We see something of
the same thing in LOTR (admittedly not a Victorian work), with Sam's
returning to Rosie and the babies representing domestic bliss as the
(secondary) hero's reward.

Just an aside and not a point worth developing at length. But I also
saw the epilogue as representing the improved but not perfect WW
(where going to Hogwarts is fun and exciting rather than
life-threatening) and progress is being made but not all problems have
been solved (which is humanly impossible). (Cf. "The Scouring of the
Shire" representing the new normality in LOTR). I agree with your
(snipped) remark that Hogwarts and, specifically, Slytherin, is being
given a second chance. What Scorpius Malfoy and the other little
Slytherins make of that chance is up to them.

Carol, irrelevantly wondering whether the afterlife (minus the
possibility of becoming a ghost) is the same for Muggles as for
Wizards in JKR's imagined Potterverse