Coming of Age in the Potterverse was Re: Dumbledore as shameless

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 189018

Carol earlier:
> > The inconsistency is that she seems to be regarding Harry's reaction in this instance as righteous anger (justifiable anger at a wicked person for insulting a "very good" person) whereas bellatrix said in OoP, "righteous anger won't hurt me for long." Moreover, enjoyment of torturing someone (which she said was necessary for sustaining the curse and which Harry indeed feels in DH) is inconsistent with righteous anger.
> 
> Pippin:
> Harry himself is inconsistent.  
> 
> I think Harry's inconsistency, the inconsistency of the good guys in general, is what's subversive about the books.  Voldemort is consistently bad, but there's no character who is infallibly good, much as we might have hoped our favorites would qualify by the end.

Carol:
I understand your perspective, but I'm not at all sure that JKR is being deliberately subversive. (As Alla says, she seems to be following the genre conventions pretty closely in terms of the old mentor dying and Harry having to act on his own.) I agree that Harry is inconsistent, and that's as likely to be a flaw in characterization as a deliberate strategy. Yes, a good character should have his faults as well as his virtues, but he should not become more like the bad guys when it comes to Dark magic and Unforgiveable Curses as he grows up. On the contrary, since the novel is also a Bildungsroman, he should learn from his experiences and acquire wisdom. (We do see him learn forgiveness and learn to perceive other characters more clearly, a steady progression in that regard, IMO, but the business of casting Unforgiveables--and regarding Bellatrix as a kind of mentor with regard to them--is a major step in the wrong direction that Harry never openly acknowledges.
> 
Pippin:
> Righteous anger is what a saint would feel, and a saint wouldn't have hurt Amycus for long. Harry has his saintlier moments. But this isn't one of them.   He's let his anger (and his magic) run away with him. That definitely doesn't make him a saint. But it doesn't make him a monster either. 

Carol:
And yet when Bellatrix makes that remark about righteous anger not hurting her for long, Harry is feeling anything but saintlike. He's out to get her back for killing Sirius Black, just as he's out to get Snape back for killing Dumbledore when he tries (and fails) to hit him with a Crucio. In both of those instances, he's hurt and angry and vengeful, but that "righteous anger" fails to inflict any damage. Later, when he's angry on McGonagall's behalf (she calls him "gallant), he's also out for revenge (on a man he doesn't even know and doesn't realize once hit him with a Crucio that Harry at the time blamed on Snape). Is that "righteous anger," too? If so, why does it work? 

I'm not saying that Harry is a monster, but he's seen two people who *are* monsters--Voldemort and Bellatrix--derive pleasure from Crucioing people and has just condemned Crabbe and Goyle for doing that very thing. Monster, no. Hypocrite, yes.

As for JKR, she had a Death Eater posing as a teacher inform us that the curses were Unforgiveable. We saw that Death Eater cast all three Unforgiveables on spiders and one Unforgiveable on his own students, not to mention using one to kill his own father and another to force Krum to Crucio Cedric. And now Harry is following in his footsteps. Oops.

Pippin: 
>  The monster, the basilisk or the werewolf, has no choice but to obey its instincts. But Harry does.  Harry's sin is not in feeling angry but in failing to control his anger, and he does realize, a few moments later, that he's been out of control. "Somehow, her panic steadied him." 

Carol:
The point is not so much that Harry used the Unforgiveables as that he never regretted doing so. The Imperios were, I suppose, a necessary evil. Apparently, Confundus wouldn't have sufficed for Harry though it worked fine for Snape on Mundungus (another inconsistency?), but the Crucio was just plain unnecessary, figurative overkill, like burning a kid with a cigarette for sticking out his tongue. Sure, Amycus was a bad guy, but the specific crime didn't fit the punishment and it wasn't Harry's job to mete out punishment, or even to incapacitate him (which McGonagall accomplished quite easily without his help--herself resorting to an Unforgiveable! If Harry, the hero of the hour, can do it, she, Professor McGonagall, the deputy headmistress of Hogwarts, can do it--in front of a bunch of Ravenclaws to boot, IIRC.

Pippin:
> JKR is not dismissive of the interviewer's shock and disappointment.

Carol:
A matter of opinion, I think. To me she sounds defensive (remember her "How dare you" when someone asked if Lily had ever been a Death Eater?). And, as I said, she didn't answer the question about whether Harry ever regretted his action. She was too busy making the same argument that you're making--Harry is not and never was a saint. The problem is, we know that, but it doesn't answer the question.

The questioner wasn't asking *why* Harry cast the Crucio instead of a more appropriate spell, and even if she had asked that question, "Harry is not a saint" is not a sufficient answer. She's asking whether he ever regretted it, a point that JKR either ignored, glossed over, or forgot about because she was too busy defending her hero against imagined criticism.

 The reader is set up  to be shocked, IMO, as shocked as Harry feels whenever one of his idols crumbles into human clay, though if he were wiser he'd have known it all along.  What's being dismissed is the WW's idea that only a monster who ought to be locked up in Azkaban for life could be capable of such things. 

Pippin: 
> Harry needs to understand what he's capable of so that he can understand what Dumbledore and Snape were capable of and still see them as human and forgivable.

Carol:
Good point. Unfortunately, I don't think it comes across in the books. 

Pippin: 
> I agree that JKR sees more to regret in Harry's foolishness and impulsivity than she does in Amycus suffering a bit more cruelly than he should have, and that's where the emphasis is in the books. Harry acknowledges those at the time.  But Dumbledore's and Snape's stories have yet to teach Harry how dangerous such foolishness and impulsivity can be.  Once anger is in control, it doesn't care whether its victims deserve what they get or what the consequences could be. 

Carol:
Again, I agree that he has yet to see Snape's story and I think that's important. But the lesson he learns from that is never stated. Harry is understandably a bit more concerned with the message about the soul bit and having to choose to die. He does identify with the young Severus as one of the lost or forgotten boys (I've forgotten the term), but he also identifies with Tom Riddle at that point--not as someone capable of evil but choosing good (hardly the case for Tom Riddle) or someone who chooses forgiveness over anger (inapplicable in both cases) but just as someone for whom Hogwarts was home. Forgiveness and forgoing revenge--both central to the final chapters--occur only after the visit to DD in King's Cross, not as a result of Snape's memories in the Pensieve (which, nevertheless, have their effect in Harry's defense of the dead Snape).

But if Harry changes as a result of Snape's memories, it's not in understanding the dangers of impulsivity and anger. It's in learning to forgive. (All to the good, of course.)

Pippin:
> 
> This issue of control is central to the theme of DH, IMO. Harry loses control in all sorts of ways -- even his phoenix feather wand acts of its own accord. His coming of age is not so much about achieving independence but in gaining control of himself.

Carol:
Maybe. But we don't know if he will ever again be tempted to cast an Unforgiveable. We don't know if he'll ever again be uncontrollably angry. True, he casts an Expelliarmus as his "last, best hope," and he's certainly in control during his last confrontation with Voldemort, but we never see the process that led him there. Did it have anything to do with Snape's memories or only with King's Cross? Did he regret his earlier loss of control? We just don't know. 

Carol, snipping the part about Harry and Dumbledore, which is not part of my concern here