DH as Christian Allegory

[lizzyben04]

No: HPFGUIDX 173884

> 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.

lizzyben:

I'm getting the sense that many of us were reading a totally different
series than the one JKR intended. Because, in a series where the
antagonists are actual "human beings", as opposed to orcs or monsters,
you naturally think that they're going to have to find a way of
reconciling or co-existing at the end. Because the alternative is
slightly monstrous. 

But even if we accept the (IMO horrifying) contention that JKR
intended her world to be a Calvinist split between the "divine elect"
& the unclean, evil masses, it still doesn't make sense to me. Because
how do we explain HBP? In that novel, Harry spends a lot of time
learning about, and integrating, Slytherin qualities. He inherits the
home of Slytherin wizards, rides the train in the Slytherin
compartment, interacts positively w/Slughorn, shadows Draco all year,
& learns from Snape's potion book. He actually considers young!Snape
as a kind of friend, and feel a sense of pity & compassion for Draco
(for the first time). The Slytherins were arguably the most
interesting characters in that novel. It seems like all of this was
about integration - internally, w/Harry integrating the Slytherin
shadow side into his personality, and externally, w/Hogwarts
integrating the Slytherin house into the school as well. 

Then, all of a sudden, in DH she suddenly reverses course and
literally isolates & eliminates Slytherins from the narrative. All the
subtlely of HBP is lost as Slytherin = evil once again, and Draco &
Snape are marginalized & reduced to the stereotypes. That's what's
weird to me. It's like she started writing about Jungian
integration, and then suddenly switched to Calvinist pre-destination
mid-stream. 

Sydney:
> 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.

lizzyben:

Yeah, me too. All the imagery of the pure good Gryfindors vs. the
impure evil Slytherins set off every type of alarm bell in my head.
Because once you start talking about "pure" & "impure" people, it gets
all kinds of ugly. Salman Rushdie has eloquently campaigned against
just this desire for purity, & his quote says it much better than I
ever could:

"I have spent much of my writing life celebrating the potential for
creativity and renewal of the cultural encounters and frictions that
have become commonplace in our much-transplanted world. ... In the age
of mass migration and the internet, cultural plurality is an
irreversible fact; like it or dislike it, it's where we live, and the
dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic
fantasy and at worst a life-threatening menace — when ideas of purity
(racial purity, religious purity, cultural purity) turn into
programmes of "ethnic cleansing" or when Hindu fanatics attack the
"inauthenticity" of Indian Muslim experience, or when Islamic
ideologues drive young people to die in the service of "pure" faith,
unadulterated by compassion or doubt. "Purity" is a slogan that leads
to segregations and explosions. Let us have no more of it. A little
more impurity, please; a little less cleanliness; a little more dirt.
We'll all sleep easier in our beds." 

I don't want a mono-culture of pure Gryfindors feeling superior to the
impure masses; I want a multi-cultural view, with each house & culture
sharing & learning from the other, learning how to co-exist, learning
how to appreciate their differences. That's the world we live in, and
that's the multicultural world that children who read these novels
will have to live in. 

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.
> 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. 
> 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.  

lizzyben:

Sydney, thank you for going there! I agree that JKR never
intentionally meant to give an anti-semitic message, but it's still
sort of there. Just because Slytherin is an amalgation of every single
type of negative stereotype out there. She throws in practically every
negative ethnic stereotype, plus various evil groups, plus people that
she personally Does Not Like - conservatives, aristocrats, plus your
general thugs & bullies. Slytherin is just a big bowl of bad. It's
every "other" that JKR could think of, all conveniently sorted into
one house to make them oh-so-easy to hate. 

Sydney:
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!

lizzyben:

I honestly think she doesn't have a clue. In her interview, JKR said
that the one message she hopes kids learn from her books is
"tolerance." OMG. Yikes indeed.

Sydney
> 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.


lizzyben:

Yes, she did. I had actually convinced myself that JKR used all this
negative sterotypical imagery in order to subvert that type of
bigotry with a reversal at the end. Because she did exactly that type
of reversal in SS. Snape was the 'greasy foreigner' stereotype that
everyone suspected of being a villain because he "looks the part".
Then, in the end, it turns out that he was actually the good guy, and
had saved Harry's life. Reversal of the stereotype. So, I foolishly
thought that this meant that the negative stereotypes of Snape &
Slytherin would be reversed as well in the final book. Silly me. 
This was also why I was almost desperate for a DDM!Snape, because it
seemed like making Snape evil would totally reinforce those
stereotypes. But what actually happened in DH is almost worse. Snape
actually was DDM, and Lily's love, and Harry's protector, and none of
it mattered. Because he was not redeemed. He was not able to join the
divine elect, because he had been sorted into the house of evil, and
nothing he did could change that. The most he could hope for is a
compliment that he is *almost* (but not quite) as worthy as they are,
and faint praise for exhibiting a Gryfindor trait. 

Sydney:
> 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

lizzyben:

I wasn't hugely surprised by this, because IMO there's been an
undercurrent of nastiness & cruelty throughout the novels. But I still
hoped that there was a deeper message beyond Gryfindors rock! Alas.
The oddest part, to me, is that JKR seems to consider "Gryf" qualities
to be synonymous with goodness, when they are not. All of the Houses
are pretty harsh & unforgiving - there's no house for kindness, mercy,
or compassion in the Wizarding World. And while bravery & loyalty are
usually good traits, it doesn't make you a good person. Because
Bellatrix Lestrange is the ultimate Gryfindor. She is recklessly
brave, charging into battle while people like Snape slither away. She
is fanatically loyal, giving up family, friends, even her life for
Voldemort. And she's totally evil. While DD, the "epitome of
goodness", exhibits Slytherin traits of cunning, ambition, and using
any means necessary to reach his goal. So, what? What's the message
here? How can Slyth traits = evil, & Gryf traits = good, when those
traits are seen in characters on the opposite side of the spectrum? I
can't wrap my head around it either. 


lizzyben, who suspects she'd be a Hufflepuff & unable to join the
divine elect.