DH as Christian Allegory

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 173514


Magpie:
> You're a braver woman than I for laying this out--I've literally been
> dancing around it since I finished the book.

Sydney: 
I'm such a Slytherin.  Whenever people tell me, "You're so brave for
saying that!" I think, "Uh-oh".
It's just the two of us, then, and also the 10 people who've told me,
"I'm so glad you've said that!  I was thinking the same thing!  But
you go ahead and post while I hide behind a plant!"  LOL.

Magpie:
> Like you, I don't think this has anything to do with Rowling being
> anti-Semitic. The Slytherins aren't supposed to "really" be Jews in
> an allegory (another reason this whole idea seems to kind of haunt
> threads about people being offered saving and rejecting it.)

Sydney:

Yes, exactly-- and I'll say again and again that I'm certain she never
realized she was doing it.  The problem is that if you're writing a
story where the 'Other' actually *is* bad and fundamentally different,
you're not going to be drawing from a very pretty stock of imagery.  I
mean, is there a *nice* set of stories where a section of the
population is pernicious and needs to be kept apart from the clean
people?  Normally these fantasy epics deal with this by using actual
monsters-- orcs, or the wolves in Narnia, or something like that.  I'm
really hard-pressed to think of books where the Other is actual humans
and they never get reintegrated, never mind where the Other is *children*.

Magpie:
The funny thing is I actually did once write about this
> subject--but it was after OotP. That was the book where one of my
> first reactions was, "Wait, the Slytherins are Nazis...but they also
> seem to have a lot in common with certain representations of Jews."
> And what's strange is how it's like there's this house full of all
> these things you've described, only with a big Swastika hung over it

Sydney:
Well, unfortunately using Nazi labels with anti-Semitic imagery isn't
exactly unusual these days.  In any event, it's all part of the same
thing:  the Shadow House, if I can still call it that, gets everything
negative piled on.  It's hard to think of anything more negative in
the popular imagination than Nazis, so they get to be Nazis.  They
also get KKK hoods.  They also get hook-noses and greedy expressions.
 It's all part of this nonsense melange of 'bad', like 'ambitious' and
'concerned with ancestry', 'cunning' yet 'stupid in a troll-like way'.
 When I thought these books were wiser I thought there was going to be
a payoff where it actually WAS nonsense.

Anders:
> I thought Jo fought against the labeling idea when Sirius told Harry
> that the world isn't divided into Death Eaters and good guys. I
> thought the biggest example of that in the last book was her
> treatment of Snape.

Sydney:
Yes, it was things like Sirius' line that made me think that JK was
going to fight against the idea of labeling.  I thought that right up
until the tiniest last sliver of pages in the last book.  At which
point I had to concede that she thought labeling was fine, provided
you had magic labels that were really accurate, not like our clumsy
human labels that don't put the labels directly onto people's souls. 
 *Labels right on your soul*, people.

Anders:
> Harry himself would likely have been a Slytherin had he not fought
against
> it. 

Sydney:

Actually, this is again where I get totally confused.  Because the
only reason Harry 'fought against' going into Slytherin, is that
Hagrid happened to mention that a Slytherin killed his parents, before
he got the Sorting Hat experience.  If he just arrived without that
info, and the Hat said 'You'd do well in Slytherin', and Harry said,
'Uh, sure, whatever', what would have happened?  I guess he would have
hung out with the horrible racist kids, been ostracised by the rest of
the school, and then died in CoS because he wouldn't have gotten the
sword.  How is that even a choice if you don't know what you're
choosing?  And the fact that you're allowed to question the Hat
doesn't seem to be common knowledge, even 19 years later.  It just
seems so arbitrary.  It's stuff like this that made the ending so
totally shocking to me.

Anders:
It seemed to me that even Slytherin himself wasn't always a bad guy,
> since it said that at first all the houses got along.

Sydney:

I know, I know!  And this is precisely why I was ready to lay money
(thank heaven's I didn't!) that we'd get the Founder's backstory, as
opposed to what we did get, which was a totally random backstory of a
kid of the Founders that did nothing to enlighten us about what
happened.  Sorry to keep bringing up "Little White Horse", but if you
want to see what a really lovely complicating backstory and how it can
mess up relations between communities for generations, read that book!
 As it is I don't have much choice but to stick with what the book
ends on, which is that, yes, Slytherin was totally wrong (and
'monkey-like', with a foreign name..) and Gryffindor was totally pure
and right (and all-British). 

You know what was every kind of weird?  The thing with Gryffindor's
sword and the Goblins.  She starts heading down "Maybe Gryffindor
wasn't totally awesome and good, he stole from the Goblins", and then
hits the brakes, and then it's "The Goblins have this strange and
unreasonable culture that makes it not REALLY stealing.  Never mind."
 And then the Goblins get it back, but then it goes back to Our Heroes
because.. I dunno, the Sword was more loyal to Goderic's culture so
the Goblin's culture was just wrong.  My head is just *spinning* with
what post-colonial theorists are going to make of this.  I'm not
usually fan of post-colonial theorists, but in this instance I think I
could write the paper myself.

> Magpie:
> Yeah, that was weird. And interesting that the lesson of how people
> might actually be inspired to courage and being better people if you
> reach out to them and treat them with respect was restricted to the
> non-human House Elf slave desperate for a new loving master.

Sydney:
Okay, you got me started about the House Elves.  So, children, if you
have slaves, you should be nice to them because.. they'll be better
servants!  And more loyal!  And serve in your armies, shouting 'Fight
for my Master!'  Of course they'll still be slaves, but they're
happier that way.  Some races are just born to serve.  What??!?!

I was so ready for a plot-line where they free Kreacher, and he goes
over to the other side, but they do it anyways because you know, it's
just the right thing to do.  Slavery is wrong and if the freeing part
is messy you just have to suck it up.  I did not picture a resolution
where they give Kreacher some glass beads and then he makes them
pancakes and he tells them, 'Y'all bettuh wrap up wahm, chillun!'

Yes, I know the House Elves aren't human, so it can't really be about
slavery, can it?  Yeah, whatever.

On the other hand... oh Rowling.  Rowling!  You're like a lover who's
so sweet, and then he's pure evil, and then he's so sweet again.. stop
messing with my brain!!  The Regulus/Kreacher backstory was so cool
and awesome.. come back to me JK!  But don't steal my rent money this
time!

Albers:
> I also didn't see that Jo was slurring Eastern Europeans, but just
> chose Albania as a random place for Voldy to run to.

Sydney:

But Durmstrang, the Dark Arts stronghold with the DE Headmaster, whose
students all sit at the Slytherin table, is also in Eastern Europe. It
kind of stops being random and becomes a pattern.  And it's not that
she's slurring Eastern Europeans-- it's the other way around.  She's
using the association with Eastern Europe to add an aura of shiftiness
and foreigness and.. um..yeah.. , to tell us that there's something
wrong with the Slytherins.  Can I hide behind that plant, too?  It
feels awful just typing this out.  But it feels pretty awful reading
about the tear sliding down Snape's hooked nose, too, because it
couldn't just slide down his face like a normal person.  

> Anders:
> And finally, I thought by continuing with the sorting hat, I thought
> she was telling us that it's okay to be in a group with others of
> similar tastes and abilities as long as one group doesn't begin to
> think they are superior to others.

Sydney:
I totally agree.  When you lump people into a group and define your
group as categorically better and nobler than that dirty group over
there, all kinds of ugliness occurs.  That's why I'm really shocked
and heartbroken and feel betrayed that JK made a story that said
actually that was okay.

> Anders:
> How would you suggest she should have portrayed "the bad guys" to the
> readers? She had to make some type of distinction to move the story
> along. I didn't read her description of Bellatrix as a slur against
> any particular ethnic group,

Sydney:
It's very hard to express what I mean here.. of course there's no slur
in the HP series against any particular ethnic group.  But Rowling
borrows the language, she borrows the imagery, and she borrows the
mindset, that in the past was constructed and used by actual bigots,
and then she creates a group in her world and and applies it all to
them.  That we are nice and they are bad;  they are animal-like,
monkey-like, bat-like, troll-like;  it's okay when we do it;  those
people ALWAYS do that.  She uses and she uses it, she uses it's power
over the tribalism in the human soul, and in the end she validates it. 

--Sydney