God for Harry, England, and a Sandwich

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 178902

> Jen:  I think you're saying here that the burden of proof is on 
> someone to prove the house elves aren't natural slaves rather than 
> the other way around.  And yet, the idea that house elves are 
natural 
> slaves and embracing slavery isn't presented as an overt part of 
the 
> storyline, or at least it's been referred to as an unintended 
message 
> on this list.  

Magpie:
I don't think the burden of proof can be on anyone because there's 
no answer. We don't know. All we know is how the House Elves behave 
now. It more depends on whatever a certain reader wants to imagine. 
There's equal "proof" for them being natural slaves as there is for 
them being forced into thousands of years ago and forgotten. 


> > Magpie:
> > Could be, but I don't see it presented that way in canon myself.
> > All JKR would have to do is show it and she didn't. She showed 
> > Hermione's plans about SPEW all the time in books 4 and 5. Then 
> > suddenly in 6 SPEW completely disappears and Hermione's just all 
> > about treating them okay when it comes up.  
> 
> Jen: SPEW as a literal organization that Hermione talked about 
> disappeared.  We don't hear about her goal to free the house elves 
> past a few pushes for the idea with Kreacher in OOTP.  Those are 
the 
> types of things that I wouldn't argue with.  But the last point, 
that 
> Hermione is only about treating them okay when it comes up, I 
> obviously read more emphasis in the story on the importance of 
that 
> than you do.  The reason why I do goes back to the idea of 
projecting 
> human qualities.  House elves are presented with some higher-level 
> reasoning ability and feelings that are human-like, so it doesn't 
> seem like much of a projection to me:  Dobby can't stop self-
> punishing even after he's free.  Harry says 'you just need a bit 
of 
> practice' when Dobby starts to punish himself in GOF.  That 
indicates 
> the enchantment is only the beginning, that self-punishment is a 
> learned behavior that a house elf is capable of unlearning by 
> practice, a cognitive skill that requires self-awareness to carry 
> out.  

Magpie:
The story doesn't tell us one way or the other. I can't argue your 
reading doesn't work, but it seems far too removed from what's going 
on in the story for me to really see where it's being shown in 
canon. It could just as easily see a Dobby who was trying to go 
against his own natural behavior. Some people on the list see Elves 
as just being this way, some see the answer as being that they're 
animals and not people, some say they're people who have been 
conditioned badly--the true answer isn't anywhere. 

In terms of Hermione, she's not working with anybody to re-condition 
House Elves either (yeah, she's got other things to worry about, but 
there it still stands). Somebody could write a fanfic that set it up 
any number of ways, including the one here, but since House Elves 
aren't human and human slavery obviously doesn't involve enchantment 
one way or the other, I don't know if this particular psychological 
reading is true or not. It all eventually comes down to "this is how 
I'd write the House Elf stuff if I were writing a fanfic about 
actually turning them into free elves.

Jen:
Dumbledore says flat out that 
> house elves have 'feelings acute as humans' so there's a 
comparison 
> to human qualities and expectations for how to interact with house 
> elves in that statement imo.  Kreacher is seen rubbing his 
eyes 'like 
> a small child.'  Those types of references run throughout the 
story.

Magpie:
Feelings are not intelligence and do not make one human. The fact 
that they look like small children doesn't make them human. Animals 
can also have acute feelings (in talking about how they have "real 
feelings" Dumbledore to me sounds like he's talking about them as 
lower creatures--one would never think that an animal is on level 
with a person, but one might say to remember they feel things too). 
The physical descriptor of Kreacher looking like a child i a scene 
doesn't believably build into him being human. He may sometimes look 
like a child, but he will never be a man--it validates the 
paternalistic attitude.


> Magpie:
> > This, too, is a perfectly realistic evolution for a social 
> activist. You can be very liberal in your youth and very 
conservative
> >  in your adulthood or anywhere in between. You can go through a 
> > fad. It's possible Hermione decided on a new plan for freeing 
House
> >  Elves via good treatment (most of the elves we see in canon are
> > well-treated already), 
> 
> Jen: Eek, how can a house elf be well-treated if they're allowed 
to 
> punish themselves whenever they deem themselves unworthy of their 
> masters?  Besides self-punishment, Hermione said in DH: "He's a 
> slave; house elves are used to bad, even brutal treatment; what 
> Voldemort did to Kreacher wasn't that far out of the common way." 
So 
> the common way is bad or brutal treatment.  I didn't need to see 
> every house elf suffer a grievous fate to believe this was true.

Magpie
If House Elves punish themselves by nature they're not being 
mistreated. Maybe it's their nature and we're talking about re-
training House Elves to behave differently because it's repulsive to 
wizards--though Hermione isn't re-training anybody in canon either. 
The idea of projecting the wrong ideas about them is also canon in 
Hermione's story. (Wizards seem to find Giant society inferior too, 
judging them by their own standards.) If they trained an Elf to not 
self-punish he could still be a slave. Hermione isn't making 
Kreacher any more or less self-punishing in DH. She thinks it's 
horrible, but that doesn't mean she's got a cure for it. House Elf 
slavery being bad isn't something that many readers got from the 
story.

> Jen: I was talking about the fact that she is still focused on the 
> plight of house elves in DH when she talks to Harry about why 
> Kreacher acts the way he does, the state of affairs of house elves 
as 
> she understands it.  She's progressed in her knowledge and 
> understanding of their situation to the point that she can explain 
> their psychology, history and feelings to someone else in a way 
that 
> shows she's no longer forcing her own agenda on them but meeting 
the 
> elves where they are in that moment of their history imo.  Others 
> read that as Hermione training to become a coach for Happy Slaves 
> Inc.  I see both but give more weight to one because of everything 
> that's come before.

Magpie:
She now understands House Elf psychology differently (however she 
got to that--it's a bit of a leap from her confident freeing of 
elves in OotP to her disinterest in Harry's inheriting one in HBP). 
You've added the part where she's meeting House Elves where they are 
at this point in time and is in the process of doing something else. 
Hermione is repulsed by Elf self-punishment. Whether she's embraced 
House Elf slavedom or just accepted that she can't change it and 
decided Elves should all just have good masters she approves of 
there is nothing in DH that indicates this will be changing in the 
future thanks to Hermione. I knew her feelings about House Elves in 
GoF and OotP because she lectured about it. If she were on a new 
tact of the same idea I expect she would still lecture about it. She 
does seem to have skipped to "I told you so" by HBP, but this is 
bizarre since she herself seems to have never acknowledged that she 
was House Elf Offender #1.

-m