Chapter Discussion: Prisoner of Azkaban Ch 16: Professor Trelawney's prediction

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 190216

Bart wrote:
>      What I see is a running joke: Trelawny's methods do work, but she
lacks confidence in her own abilities, and often makes the wrong  interpretation, and apparently due to timidity. When she is going through the cards while unaware that Harry is listening, or even in her first appearance, where she sees Sirius in Harry's tea leaves and treats it as a Grim.

Carol responds:

It's a rather sad joke, then. She really does see a black dog in the crystal ball and assumes, based on the standard interpretation of such figures in the WW, that it really is a Grim and therefore really means that Harry is in danger of dying (which, of course, being Harry, he is). Trelawney also knows that an ordinary black dog wouldn't appear in a crystal ball--but then Sirius as an Animagus isn't an ordinary black dog, and he *is* closely connected to Harry's fate. There's no way, really, that Trelawney could have interpreted the black dog correctly. Possibly, similar incidents have occurred before, leading others to suspect that Trelawney is a fraud. On some level, she would begin to doubt her own abilities even though on another level, she knows that she sees things, so she withdraws into her own misty and mysterious world with as little contact with the "mundane" (and skeptics like McGonagall) as possible. Later, as she's going through the cards in HBP, she knows what they say but doubts her own reading (especially after she's informed Dumbledore, who knows perfectly well that she's right--calamity *is* coming to Hogwarts and it involves his own death). So poor Trelawney doesn't know what to think. I wonder if, on some level, she feels vindicated when tragedy does come to Hogwarts. But, of course, that's an instance in which she doesn't want to be right.

Carol, who thinks that Trelawney is rather like Neville: a bit more confidence in her abilities from those around her (even perhaps Great-Grandma Cassandra when Sibyl was a child) might have gone a long way to helping her develop her abilities and interpret her own predictions without having to fudge some of them along the way