Marietta yet again

[zeldaricdeau]

No: HPFGUIDX 176850

> > zeldaricdeau: 
> 
> > How do we objectively determine 
> > who deserves what? 

> Eggplant:
 
> You do the best you can. You don't really expect me to give a more
> detailed answer than that do you; philosophers have been arguing 
> about that for thousands of years.

zeldaricdeau:

No, I don't expect anyone to answer that, but I assume you must have 
SOME sort of answer since you believe (to my understanding) that 
Marietta deserved what she got and Burbage did not. Therefore, you 
must have your own idea of an objective code of morality/ethics at 
work in your reading.

> > zeldaricdeau:
 
> > I don't believe that, at the time,
> > Marietta was involved in an actual war

> Eggplant:
 
> Dumbledore called it a war, Harry called it a war, and the
> organization she betrayed was called Dumbledore's ARMY.

zeldaricdeau:

It's been several years since I read the book and I only read it 
once, so I'm willing to accept I may be misremembering, but if 
Dumbledore or Harry told Marietta that she was participating in a war 
against Umbridge and the Ministry (and when I say "war" I mean of the 
kind we see in Deathly Hallows) then I missed it. I assume she, like 
me, interpreted the name "Dumbledore's Army" as not completely 
literal.

> > zeldaricdeau:

> > and I certainly don't think she saw 
> > herself as being involved in one. 

> Eggplant:

> Then she was dead wrong and when you make an error of that colossal 
> magnitude you can expect to pay a price.

zeldaricdeau:

I generally don't think people should be consciously punished for 
being wrong in the face of large amounts of information that 
corroborates their beliefs. If that were the case, then everyone in 
the books, including Harry, has a lot of punishment facing them as 
they've all been guilty of being wrong, sometimes with extreme 
consequences.

Of course, you see Marietta as being aware of certain things that I 
don't, and (correct me if I'm wrong) you don't believe that the 
influence of her family/the WW equivalent of the mass media should be 
taken into account in examining her motives/actions.

The point of the post was to consider, firstly, how a "lasting 
physical effects" guideline for Dark Magic affected Hermione's hex, 
and secondly to question whether the punishment in Marietta's case 
fit the crime. You see Marietta as being guilty of (and correct me if 
I'm wrong, as I'm drawing from a lot of different post) breaking a 
contract, treason, either extreme and unjustified ignorance or a 
desire to bring extreme punishment including physical harm to her 
fellow classmates and close friend, and either conscious or 
unconscious support of Voldemort. You also say, in another post, that 
Marietta brought about the death of Sirius Black (I can only assume 
you mean in a very indirect manner).

On the other hand, I consider Marietta's crime to be breach of 
contract and betrayal of the DA. Any further crimes, IMO, depend on 
what her motivations were and what knowledge she had of how Unbridge 
operated. As I said, it's been a while since I read OotP and I only 
read it once (yet it's my favorite of the books--go figure), but my 
recollection is that her status as traitor was exposed, but the 
reasons for it were not. And as for what she knew of Umbridge, again 
there seems to be mixed opinions and my recollection may be shaky, 
but I was under the impression that she believed that Umbridge was 
strict and that punishment wouldn't be nice, but that she was unaware 
of to what lengths that punishment would go.

As for how this relates to Hermione and her hex, I still don't see 
Hermione's hex as a particularly impressive moment for her. While the 
hex would have had the effect of alerting HRH to an act of betrayal 
and the identity of the betrayer, it would only do so if and when 
they saw the traitor or heard about someone else who saw the traitor. 
The fact that the spell doesn't, for example, write the name of the 
traitor on a sheet of paper in Hermione's pocket but physically 
punishes the culprit tells me that the spell wasn't really just 
intended to notify the trio but to punish. It doesn't work as a 
deterrent (no one knows about it), it doesn't work that well as an 
alarm (you have to see the traitor or hear about the traitor to 
know), and it causes effects that aren't directly related to 
*helping* HRH but only to punishing the culprit. 

Was Hermione wrong to want to punish a culprit regardless of who that 
person was or under what circumstances they broke the contract? Maybe 
so, maybe not. I don't like what Marietta did in the least, 
especially as someone "in the know" who knew for a fact that Harry 
was right, Voldemort had returned, and the Ministry was endangering 
the WW. But I'm not convinced yet that from Marietta's end she had 
any inkling or should be expected to have any inkling of what was 
really going on. And I don't believe that if she didn't have any 
inkling she deserves to be punished for it.

Personally, I think the hex was extreme of Hermione: I'm not a fan of 
retribution for retribution's sake in MOST cases. It doesn't make me 
dislike Hermione--she's my second favorite character--and I certainly 
don't expect or want her to be a saint! But add to it the "permanent" 
nature of the punishment and I am made rather uncomfortable and do 
feel an inkling of sympathy for Marietta, traitor or not.

I'm starting to believe this really does come back to a schism 
between my own ideology and JKR's. I've stayed out of the discussion 
of JKR and her portrayal of Slytherin. I don't feel as qualified to 
speak about it because my canon knowledge isn't as solid. But the 
more I read the more wary I become of what JKR has written. I love 
the books dearly, but I've always gotten a sense of unease while 
reading them that I could never pinpoint, and I'm starting to think 
it was my gut telling me that there's something going on with the 
ideology of these books that is contradicting itself and at odds with 
my own. The latter is to be expected of course, but the former is 
troubling.

-ZR (who generally never gets responses to her posts and had no idea 
that this one would lead to such a discussion!)