DH as Christian Allegory

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 173427


> Lizzyben:
>It seems to be an internal need to cut off &
> > destroy those qualities, instead of understanding them.... The
problem is that JKR never managed to integrate the
> > "shadow" House, the shadow figure into the overall narrative. And IMO
> > the novel suffered for it.
> 
> Renee:
> I don't see this need to destroy the qualities embodied by Slytherin
> House in the books. It's is an integral part of Hogwarts - and didn't
> JKR say in an interview it was a necessary part? In other words, the
> Shadow has been given a place, not just in her world, but also in the
> narrative; JKR doesn't deny its existence at all. But because it is
> the Shadow, it's influence can't be benign.
> 
> Magpie:
> I don't know...it doesn't seem like the kind of acknowledgement it 
> gets is the healthy kind--which is I think why you could ask earlier 
> if maybe this wasn't more about Christian sin than Jungian Shadow. It 
> felt to me much more like Calvin than Jung to me, reading it. 

Sydney:

I agree with Magpie (shock!).  I think I was reading Slytherin as
obviously the Shadow House and looking for Jungian integration,
whereas the concerns of the HP series were much more about spiritual
purification, something I suppose that comes from the Alchemy thing.
>From what little I know, this features burning away and separating the
impure elements.  Hence the ritual 'exclusion' scene for the
Slytherins at the end of every book, which (in my parallel universe of
HP) were set up to be reversed with an inclusionary scene in the final
book; but in fact were just recapitulated.  I suppose there's a
certain kind of Christianity that shares these concerns about purity
and the separation of the saved from the unsaved, but right up until
the last chapters of HP I would never have associated it with Rowling.
For one thing I was putting a huge amount of weight on her favorite
children's book being "Little White Horse", a transparantely Jungian
allegory that DOES end in integration.

What it really breaks the story for me and turns into something that
makes me a bit ill, is that whatever your philosophy of life might be,
she's projecting this allegory of purification onto a bunch of kids. 
 Rowling's extraordinary gift for creating rounded human characters
for me resulted in a story about an actual society of human people
being being divided into the pure and impure.  When she started to
bring in all the Nazi imagery it created some extremely weird
resonances in my head.

*takes a deep breath*  Okay, here's the part where I get an inbox full
of flaming emails, but I just have to get this out.

What is she giving us in Slytherin House? I'm not trying to be
provocative, I'm just laying out what it is we're looking at here.
This book has given us a population characterized by 'ambition' and
'cunning', they are often described as having 'greedy' expressions.
They always seem to be in positions of power and have more money than
seems right. They're not admitted into certain clubs and quite right
too. They can't be trusted-- their loyalties are not those of the rest
of society. In a war they will probably run or switch sides or try to
profit from the suffering of others. They manipulate the government
from behind the scenes to their own purposes, using money and mesmeric
powers. They keep themselves to themselves and never fit in; who they
are seems to be partly by birth-- established by nasty inbreeding--,
partly by belief, and partly by some invisible taint.  

They killed Harry Potter and refused to accept his Salvation.

What does a House like this sound like to you? A House associated with
reptiles and ghettoes like Nocturn Alley? A House whose Founder has a
'monkey-like' face and a name that's suspiciously foreign? A House
with sinister ties to Eastern Europe? Whose Head-- redeemed only by a
passion, presented as kind of creepy and wrong, for a woman on the
'pure' side-- has greasy black hair and a freakin' *hooked nose*??!
What was she *thinking*? JK Rowling, I appeal to you, *what were you
thinking*?

I'm not, please believe me, I'm NOT accusing Rowling of anti-Semitism
here (I will guarantee 90% of replies to this post will say "OMG
you're saying JKR is an anti-Semite!!!"). I wholeheartedly believe all
this stuff is entirely unconscious-- it is inconceivable that she
could have written that kind of symbolism otherwise. But believe me,
there are large parts of the world where this unconscious message,
will be recognized as a validation for something that I'm sure she
would be utterly horrified at.  Part of the reason I was so certain we
would get a reversal of Salazar's story, a proper reconciliation with
the Slytherin kids, and the destruction of the Hat, is that I didn't
think that someone who was gratuitously leaning on Nazi analogies left
and right could *possibly* not have realized what sort of imagery she
was using to construct Slytherin House. Not to mention the Goblins..
yikes!

JKR tells us that she hates bigotry.  When 11-year-old Harry looks
over at the 11-year-olds at the Slytherin table, after being told all
about 'what they're like', and thinks to himself that they do look
rather nasty, this to me was obviously about how bigotry works. When
an entire society has built itself on labels and tribalism, that's how
bigotry works. When what our tribe does is justified or at least
mitigated by our purer feelings, and what their tribe does has selfish
ulterior motives and is obviously wrong, when you can say, 'oh, he's a
Slytherin and Slytherins always do this or that', that's what bigotry
looks like. So, she's not advocating taking the kids sorted into
Slytherin aside and shooting them. She's just totally fine with the
idea that there is *something different about them*, but our Heroes
should be kind and magnanimous like they are to House Elves (and don't
even get me started on the House Elves). Oh, JKR wrote a book about
bigotry all right.

I could handwave and read between the lines and try to find a way that
this ends on a message of hope, but the bottom line is, Voldemort
tried to destroy the Hat, and Harry saved it.

*sighs heavily* I really hate feeling like this. I wasn't being
facetious when I said this might be my favorite book. There was a lot
of beautiful stuff in it and Rowling is a storyteller of immense,
almost frightening power. I never heard a bad thing about her
personally in my life. But.. yeah, the total and utter validation of
labelling people, labelling them at such a young age, and then having
the people with good labels and people with bad ones.. it just goes so
deeply against me it makes me feel sick. Maybe I'm just bitter because
my vainglorious predictions were so totally wrong! And obviously I
have strong preference for reconciliation and reversal stories. "The
Little White Horse" is one of my favorite books. Bizarrely, it's also
one of Rowling's. I can't get my head around it.

-- Sydney, heavy-hearted