DH as Christian Allegory

[Ceridwen]

No: HPFGUIDX 173547

> -- Sydney, heavy-hearted

Ceridwen:
Oh, Sydney, Sydney!  Come here, behind the potted plant, a while, and 
enjoy the tequila.  What it doesn't burn, it purifies.  That's why 
there's a dead worm in the bottle.

Sydney:
> 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. 

Ceridwen:
I think she tried to show predestination.  The Calvanist belief that 
we are chosen before birth, that only certain people make the cut, 
and it doesn't matter what they do or how bad or good they are, they 
will go to Heaven, fits very well with this story as an alternative 
reading.  Harry and the Gryffindors are the Chosen.  They can swell 
Dudley's tongue, scar Marietta's face, shove Montague into a 
misfiring Vanishing Cabinet, and not suffer punishment.  Everyone 
else, the ones who are not Chosen, can do pennance forever and never 
quite measure up.  I may be misreading the Wikipedia article about 
Predestination, of course, but this is what it seems to say.

Sydney:
> 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.

Ceridwen:
To me, too.  I was taken aback when Harry refused to shake hands with 
Draco Malfoy in the first book.  Granted, Draco made a complete idiot 
out of himself with all those things he was saying, and granted also 
that Harry didn't have a good upbringing to that point, but it seemed 
to be more alienating than showing Harry's strength.  I waited for 
seven books to see a reversal.  All that stuff about house unity 
spouted by the Sorting Hat didn't help.  I really, really thought 
that's where it was going, that Harry's last and best lesson would be 
that bigotry, for any reason, is wrong.

Instead, we get, "Old Greaseball died, so I can safely say he was 
brave without having to mea culpa to him."

Sydney:
> 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.

Ceridwen:
I wholeheartedly believe the symbolism was unconscious.  Anti-
semitism was rampant until WWII, when the scope of the horror was 
just too much for anyone to ignore.  Even then, it hasn't died out 
all the way, and the symbols are still around.  These symbols are 
part of our recent unconscious experience.  It isn't surprising that 
JKR uses what is cultural to denote the Bad Guys, unconsciously.  The 
Bad Guys are now generically ugly in kid's fare, but some of our 
ideas of ugly are also the left-over stereotypes like the hooked nose 
and dead black eyes, pointed faces, pale skin.  Kids react to these 
without the context we as adults see.  I think that, consciously, 
this is why she uses them, because they will be a signpost for young 
readers, her target audience.  That they are still negative 
stereotypes in this day and age says a lot more about our culture 
than it says about JKR.

Sydney:
> 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.

Ceridwen:
You're not being provocative, in my opinion.  A lot of people have 
mentioned these same things before DH.  That was without the 
resolution, so we didn't know where things were going.  Now, DH is 
out, it's closed canon, and we have all the threads we need to 
discuss.

Sydney:
> 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.

Ceridwen:
Yes, and I was waiting to see Harry grow out of trying to cast 
Unforgivables, and to notice and listen to other people who have just 
as valid a take on things, and perhaps a more comprehensive one since 
they're older and have more experience.  I thought the houses would 
have to be integrated to heal the scarring in the WW that began with 
the rift between Griffindor and Slytherin.  I thought that Harry 
would have to shake Draco's hand after all, and learn from Snape, 
while teaching both of them from his perspective and experience.  
Give and take, working together to root out the evil.  I thought we 
would get tolerance for different viewpoints, and acceptance for 
different methods of doing things, the very things we see every day 
in the Real World.  Instead, we got the message that it's okay to 
dislike Other, to treat them badly, and to even break laws because of 
course, I'm right and everybody else is just toothpaste.  There is no 
understanding of others, no growing, no moving beyond a selfish stage 
of existence.

*sigh*

It's nice here behind the potted palm.  There's tequila and latte and 
good music.  Come, join us.

Ceridwen, responding backward tonight.