[HPforGrownups] Re: Fathers (was: A message?)

[Kemper]

No: HPFGUIDX 178965

>  Mus:
>  I missed Crouch too! To be fair to him, though, we really only have
>  his son's word for what he was like as a father, and Barty Jnr is
>  clearly a nutter, filled with loathing for the man who justly
>  sentenced him to Azkaban. When we first encounter the two of them
>  together, in the pensieve court scene, our sympathies lie with Jnr,
>  and we're touched by his apparent terror and repelled by his father's
>  coldness(' "Father, I didn't," shrieked the boy in chains below. "I
>  didn't, I swear it, Father, don't send me back to the Dementors - " '
>  [GoF, UK pb: 517] When we hear the true voice of Barty Jnr,
>  straight from his black little heart, crowing of his almost erotic*
>  delight in Voldemort's service, I don't think that we can take his
>  word for his father's behaviour at face value.

Kemper now:
Even though we only have CrouchJr's words of his father, the words
that we do have /to/ his father is suggestive of the relationship he
had with his father.  You already provided some of the text, but right
before it, there's:
"Father... Father... please..."
Then:
"Father, I didn't!  I didn't, I swear it, Father, ...--"

Using 'Father', seems formal, cold, and distant to me.  Though,
perhaps JKR was using 'father' to suggest a different, upper(?) class.

Malfoy also uses 'Father' (as well as 'Mother' as does CrouchJr);
however, Lucius' relationship with Draco pre-DH seems to be more
sculptor then mentor: trying to hammer and chisel his son into a thing
of beauty to be envied by others.  It doesn't work out like that, but
it's the impression I get of Lucius especially in CoS.

At the end of DH, Lucius seems more humble as he is huddled together
with his wife and son unsure if he should be among the living, jumbled
defendants of Hogwarts.  I wonder what shift in perspective Lucius had
as a citizen of the WW and as a father.

Kemper