Sadism or not WAS: Re: Lack of re-examination
a_svirn
a_svirn at yahoo.com
Sun May 17 20:59:29 UTC 2009
No: HPFGUIDX 186624
> a_svirn:
> But that only means that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her abuse, whereas
> Snape has some preferences. Still they both indulge in humiliating and
> inflicting emotional pain on a student – which in your book amounts to sadism.
>
> Alla:
>
> Not really, no. I see Snape smirking plenty of times when he deals with Harry for example, I do not remember McGonagall once enjoying what she has to do.
> The fact that McGonagall is indiscriminative in her punishment is the reason why I called it borderline abuse, I know it is mirky line, but that is why in my mind it is a **little bit** better than what Snape does, not much of course, just a little bit. Of course if she was enjoying the pain of the students, whether she gives it to everybody or to some people, I would still call it sadism.
a_svirn:
I find it hard to believe that she didn't enjoy picking on students, even if she didn't smirk. I mean, why do it in the first place, if you don't like it? Here is a pretty girl exited and full of anticipation waiting for international delegations to arrive. And McGonagall snaps at her so that everyone would hear 'Miss Patil, take that ridiculous thing out of your hair.' I am not saying it's super cruel, but this is exactly the sort of pettiness we are invited to dislike in Snape. Certainly, she didn't *have* to do it. Snape used Neville squeamishness to bully him with horned frogs? McGonagall did the same with Lavender and mice. And Lavender had lived though the trauma of loosing a pet bunny. (Ok, a bunny is not quite the same as a mouse, but still probably close enough to make an impressionable person uncomfortable. And Ron used to have a pet rat, which *is* pretty close.) And while Snape threw "idiot boy" at Neville, she called Lavender silly girl for being squeamish. I suppose `idiot' is somewhat worse than `silly', but that's a kind of difference without much distinction, really. (It may even be a gender thing: Snape calls Hermione silly, rather than idiot.) Does she *have* to pick on Parvati? Does she *have* to denigrate her students' mental abilities? Does she *have* to make Neville suffer for something that is so obviously out of his control – bad memory? Quite the contrary – she has to absolutely make sure that certain adjustments are made to make things easier for him. Instead, she goes out of her way to make life difficult for him and misses no opportunity to draw everyone's attention to his condition. Oh, and by the way, if she had done her duty the situation with the stolen passwords wouldn't have occurred. So not only her punishment was abusive, she was actually scapegoating Neville.
> A_svirn:
> Not that McGonagall wasn't occasionally creative when it came
> to punishments. That night's outing to the Forbidden Forest? Not only it
> literally put her students' lives in jeopardy – I mean, there was someone out
> there desperate enough to kill Unicorns! – but just imagine how utterly scared
> Draco must have been! In the Forest at night with his worst enemies and a
> gigantic gamekeeper who is not known for his love of Slytherins, and who had
> moreover a grievance against Draco. I think he was every bit as scared as
> Neville was when Snape threatened to poison his toad.
>
> Alla:
>
> I bet Draco was scared! I however do not remember canon supporting the idea that McGonagall enjoyed him being scared.
>
a_svirn:
No? But what was the point of this punishment in your opinion? You'll agree, I am sure, that it was quite extraordinary thing for her to do. Someone/-thing in the Forest was killing Unicorns – a kind of wizarding analogue of ritual killing of virgins or Christian babies – obviously that someone was not just evil and dangerous, but exceptionally so. And what does the deputy Headmistress do when this superevil lurking in the Forest? (To say nothing of other not really human-friendly forest residents.) She sends there three eleven year-olds accompanied buy one adult, who has only three years of magical education under his belt. Quite remarkable really. No one can possibly say that she *had* to do it. By rights, she should have been sacked for doing it. So why *did* she do it? Did she expect them to investigate the case? Apprehend the culprit? Hardly. She wanted to scare them senseless. And it defies belief that someone who had invested so much ingenuity into devising the punishment and was willing to take so much risk while doing so did not find satisfaction at the thought of three children scared out of their wits.
More information about the HPforGrownups
archive