Marrying In: My Take on the R/H Ship
Marrying In: Pureblood Wizards’ Attraction for Muggleborn Witches
This is actually a response to the numerous posts about the Hermione/Ron ship in the responses to GoF 10: Mayhem at the Ministry.
Sorry, I’m very slow. But I think this is relevant to that debate.
“…Who will she mar-ry?
Rich man poor man beggarman thief
Doctor lawyer Indian chief!”
Jump rope chant, Minnesota, mid-nineteen-sixties.
*
Jane Austen’s classic novel Mansfield Park opens with a Tale of Three Sisters which is, in its way, as exemplary a cautionary tale as Beedle’s fraternal fable.
“About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it. She had two sisters to be benefited by her elevation: and such of their acquaintance as thought Miss Ward and Miss Frances quite as handsome as Miss Maria, did not scruple to predict their marrying with almost equal advantage. But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them. Miss Ward, at the end of half a dozen years, found herself obliged to be attached to the Rev. Mr. Norris, a friend of her brother-in-law, with scarcely any private fortune, and Miss Frances fared yet worse. Miss Ward’s match, indeed, when it came to the point, was not contemptible, Sir Thomas being happily able to give his friend an income in the living of Mansfield, and Mr. and Mrs. Norris began their career of conjugal felicity with very little less than a thousand a year. But Miss France married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connection, did it very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more untoward choice.
“… an absolute breach between the sisters had taken place. It was the natural result of the conduct of each party, and such as a very imprudent marriage almost always produces….
“By the end of eleven years, however, Mrs. Price could no longer afford to cherish pride or resentment, or to lose one connections that might possibly assist her. A large and still increasing family, an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and strong liquor, and a very small income to supply their wants, made her eager to regain the friends she had so carelessly sacrificed: and she addressed Lady Bertram in a letter which spoke so much contrition and despondence, such a superfluity of children, and such a want of almost every thing else, as could not but dispose them all to a reconciliation.”
Marriage is socioeconomic destiny.
For women.
Lady Bertram, rich, lazy, and exalted; Mrs. Norris, respectable and parsimonious; and the slatternly and dependent Mrs. Price. The three sisters started life the same, nearly equal in beauty and talents. (Indeed, Mrs. Norris was clearly the most intelligent, competent, and ambitious of the three.) What sealed their grossly disparate fates was solely their choice of mates (or who chose them).
It is our choices that show who we truly are, right?
*
“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart. ‘Tis a woman’s whole existence.” Pope, if I recall correctly.
This quote was meant, I believe, to be a psychological evaluation (and sexist bs) about men’s values and needs versus women’s. But substitute “marriage” for love, and it’s a firm sociological observation about cultures in which men had an assortment of possible careers open to them, and women essentially one (with wide variants): wife to some man. In any era in which women had few ways to earn an income (and no respectable way to earn a high income), a woman’s marriage, more than her birth family or native talents, determined her social status and economic standing.
Indeed, in Jo’s U.K. and my U.S., until only about a century and a half ago, even a woman’s family money and/or her personal earnings were legally the full property of her husband, so her marriage trumped ALL considerations of birth and personal qualities. Everything else mattered, in establishing a woman’s adult place in the social world, only insofar as they helped to determine whom she might be able to ‘captivate.’
Laws in the western world have changed, making divorce possible and even moderately easy; women are now allowed to own property and to earn and keep our own money; but the echo of this sordid reality is part of the sexual politics underlying romance, and one of the reasons why romance has been so important for women: for generations we were raised that the choice of who to marry was the single choice determining our future. It was the choice, not merely of who we had sex or children with, but of our social status and possible career. (In medieval times, women often married not only within their class but within their family’s Guild, where that was applicable.)
In the wake of the feminist movement, of course, we’ve been making social and cultural changes reflecting the changed economic reality that women may now have jobs independent of their husbands (if any). It seems to me (perhaps optimistically) that my niece and my younger colleagues expect both to date and to marry, but that these younger women don’t assume automatically that they will form their social identities and careers around their (assumed to be single/ lifelong) sexual partner.
I, however, born at the beginning of the sixties, did so assume.
Hermione the character may have been born in a fictional 1980, but she was conceived by an author born in 1965. My generation.
And I noticed eventually, belatedly, how my sexual attractions had been conditioned by my childhood training: that I assumed without question that in choosing a mate, I would be choosing to enter his/her world. And, of course, the converse: that if I earnestly wanted to enter a different world, the natural way for me (as a woman) to do so was to find a mate who belonged firmly to that other world.
Now, I became a fiery feminist when I was sixteen and repudiated large parts of my upbringing-such as the idea that, if I went to college at all, I should, like my mother, attend in hopes of attaining my MRS degree.
But I did not then see my idolization of Marie Curie and her marriage to her lab partner, or later my admiration of Will and Ariel Durant, as indicating any kind of problem with my sexual imagination.
Nor did I, in college, then earnestly yearning to belong to the academic world, find anything strange about the fact that my closest friends, the people with whom I could most easily relate, were other students whose origins, like my own, were firmly outside academia… but the people whom I found romantically intriguing were the scientist’s son, the professor’s grandson, the scions of alumni who had courted in grad school and sent their children to private schools to be raised erudite.
Those who had been reared, in short, to inhabit naturally the world I then aspired to join.
It was only in retrospect (and with the benefit of watching my tastes change as I wanted different things in my life, different worlds, as it were, to join) that I realized that my romantic pattern seemed to be, not that I fall for blonds or tall men or Asian women, but that rather-whatever world, whatever subculture, I currently yearn to join, I tend to fall for someone who seems to me to belong-no, to embody-that world.
My mother, my two grandmothers, my great aunt-all lived in different worlds (as a barely-middle-class public servant’s wife, a rich executive’s wife, a hardscrabble farmer’s wife, a university researcher’s wife) , and the world each lived in was determined by her husband. (Though my mother, who like Mrs. Price had married ‘beneath’ her, was like her somewhat buffered from the fullest effects of her choice by her birth family.) In my family, reality mirrored Austen’s fiction. I was raised conditioned to expect the same, and these expectations influenced me even after I’d consciously renounced the idea that a woman must or should base her life on being her husband’s partner.
Had I entered Hogwarts (a year after Lily), I would surely have fallen desperately for some old-family Pureblood male. Because I would have bought into wanting to prove myself a true witch, and I’d been raised to believe that how a woman truly joins another world/ class/ subculture is: by marrying its purest representative. Not by her own talents and exertions, though those might be what attract her preferred mate.
And it would not have been a calculated choice on my part; if I’d fallen for a Black or a Potter or a Malfoy, it would not have been because I was gold-digging. It would have been the effect of social conditioning on my radar for potential mates.
(I often like to imagine that had I then attended Hogwarts, I would have had the taste to have fallen for Snape-but the reality was, in real-life college, I had friends whom I admired greatly among ambitious and brilliant men from non-academic backgrounds, but I never crushed on them. I was an outsider myself, I didn’t need another outsider! I wanted an insider. Now, if ever Snape had proven himself-in my eyes-to have a secure and unassailable place ON THE INSIDE to offer me, then he might have seemed more eligible…. Trusted and valued lieutenant of the supreme leader of the WW’s Pureblood faction might, of course, have seemed such a place.)
Jo seems to follow very traditional patterns in her portrayals of marriages. Molly’s portrayed as a powerful witch, arguably more so au fait du pouvoir than her husband (Arthur killing Bellatrix in single combat? He couldn’t handle Nagini.…) but her family is poor because her husband makes a salary inadequate to their needs-and her sole job, even after all her children are away (but still financially dependent), is to hold house on what he makes. Merope Gaunt and Eileen Prince both live (or die) and struggle in the mundane world after their marriage to Muggles. (Mrs. Price, again.) Andromeda, too, has married “down” and lives at her husband’s level, not her birth family’s. (In contrast, her similarly blasted-off-the-family-tree male cousin Sirius inherits first a decent, and then an indecent, fortune-and the family residence.) Lily, conversely, is elevated by her marriage. Petunia belongs both spiritually and by marriage to Little Whinging, Kendra and her children to Percival’s rank in life, Tonks is to be “pruned” by her aunt for Lupin’s sake even more than her own….
I have always felt that almost all of Ron’s attraction for Hermione (and arguably some of James’s for Lily) was that in winning that wizard, she wins (or so she feels) a firm place in his world. The more so in that it is canon that Ron is the first Pureblood wizard to scorn Hermione, and James-and-Sirius the first to snub Lily. So winning HIS hand, the hand of he who scorned her, means she’s won final acceptance….
(Sorry, Draco, Ron nipped in first with the insults. You never stood a real chance with Hermione….)
Note too that the only other man Hermione’s ever let court her with any degree of seriousness is Victor Krum. Another Pureblood, and an international Quidditch star and Triwizard Champion to boot-how much more centrally placed in the WW can you get? (And isn’t even decoy-Cormac a Pureblood? At least he’s certainly very well-connected at the Ministry as well as another Quidditch player…. ) There’s a reason why someone with no interest in sport would choose only Quidditch stars-they are notables within the WW.
The fact that Hermione’s smarter than Ron, much harder-working and more ambitious, that her aptitudes and tastes make her perfect to become a high-powered career woman while Ron is laid-back, likes comfort more than work, and seems to expect/want the woman in his life to become another Molly… all irrelevant, to Hermione’s attraction.
He’s the one who can prove she really IS a witch, she really DOES belong. By wanting her. And if, in her relationship with him, she might have to carve off pieces of herself like Cinderella’s sisters to fit into the shoes of Ron’s Wife, she’ll probably do so.
At least for a while.
Note, finally, that to me Hermione’s attraction to Ron despite their obvious incompatibility did seem natural. I could imagine myself as an outsider swot crushing desperately on the lazy, careless (but also brave and worthy) insider who had previously snubbed me, craving his approval as sign of my full acceptance in his world. If I finally convert him, gain him, marry him, that proves that I ultimately DO belong.
(In fact his carelessness, his laziness, however it might irk, is to an extent a proof of his belonging-Ron doesn’t, in his heart, expect he’ll have to succeed only on his own merit. Or he would try harder. In a world ruled by nepotism, under ordinary circumstances, just being Arthur Weasley’s son is enough to get some job at the Ministry. Ludo’s third assistant?)
And Ron’s attraction to Hermione is equally obvious: if he marries the outsider Hermione, he gets a much more talented and intelligent wife and mother for his children than his own exertions merit. (Hermione’s spiritual twin among the Purebloods is Percy: can you imagine Percy accepting a wife as lazy and lacking in ambition as Ron?)
Even if Hermione shares none of Ron’s tastes, and even if they’ll spend their marriage with her nagging him about his laziness and carelessness while he resents her for not being happy to play the role of his ministering mother.
But then, Molly nags endlessly anyhow, so that part is nothing new to Ron.
But I can see why someone a generation or more younger, who might not be conditioned to expect the Muggleborn woman to need to be validated by marrying the Pureblood-who-snubbed-her, might not “buy” Hermione’s attraction to Ron.
Or, at least, I hope I can.
Because, if so, it will show that something substantial has changed between the conditioning I received as a child about what to find attractive, and the conditioning you younger women have.
This is actually a response to the numerous posts about the Hermione/Ron ship in the responses to GoF 10: Mayhem at the Ministry.
Sorry, I’m very slow. But I think this is relevant to that debate.
“…Who will she mar-ry?
Rich man poor man beggarman thief
Doctor lawyer Indian chief!”
Jump rope chant, Minnesota, mid-nineteen-sixties.
*
Jane Austen’s classic novel Mansfield Park opens with a Tale of Three Sisters which is, in its way, as exemplary a cautionary tale as Beedle’s fraternal fable.
“About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it. She had two sisters to be benefited by her elevation: and such of their acquaintance as thought Miss Ward and Miss Frances quite as handsome as Miss Maria, did not scruple to predict their marrying with almost equal advantage. But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them. Miss Ward, at the end of half a dozen years, found herself obliged to be attached to the Rev. Mr. Norris, a friend of her brother-in-law, with scarcely any private fortune, and Miss Frances fared yet worse. Miss Ward’s match, indeed, when it came to the point, was not contemptible, Sir Thomas being happily able to give his friend an income in the living of Mansfield, and Mr. and Mrs. Norris began their career of conjugal felicity with very little less than a thousand a year. But Miss France married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connection, did it very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more untoward choice.
“… an absolute breach between the sisters had taken place. It was the natural result of the conduct of each party, and such as a very imprudent marriage almost always produces….
“By the end of eleven years, however, Mrs. Price could no longer afford to cherish pride or resentment, or to lose one connections that might possibly assist her. A large and still increasing family, an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and strong liquor, and a very small income to supply their wants, made her eager to regain the friends she had so carelessly sacrificed: and she addressed Lady Bertram in a letter which spoke so much contrition and despondence, such a superfluity of children, and such a want of almost every thing else, as could not but dispose them all to a reconciliation.”
Marriage is socioeconomic destiny.
For women.
Lady Bertram, rich, lazy, and exalted; Mrs. Norris, respectable and parsimonious; and the slatternly and dependent Mrs. Price. The three sisters started life the same, nearly equal in beauty and talents. (Indeed, Mrs. Norris was clearly the most intelligent, competent, and ambitious of the three.) What sealed their grossly disparate fates was solely their choice of mates (or who chose them).
It is our choices that show who we truly are, right?
*
“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart. ‘Tis a woman’s whole existence.” Pope, if I recall correctly.
This quote was meant, I believe, to be a psychological evaluation (and sexist bs) about men’s values and needs versus women’s. But substitute “marriage” for love, and it’s a firm sociological observation about cultures in which men had an assortment of possible careers open to them, and women essentially one (with wide variants): wife to some man. In any era in which women had few ways to earn an income (and no respectable way to earn a high income), a woman’s marriage, more than her birth family or native talents, determined her social status and economic standing.
Indeed, in Jo’s U.K. and my U.S., until only about a century and a half ago, even a woman’s family money and/or her personal earnings were legally the full property of her husband, so her marriage trumped ALL considerations of birth and personal qualities. Everything else mattered, in establishing a woman’s adult place in the social world, only insofar as they helped to determine whom she might be able to ‘captivate.’
Laws in the western world have changed, making divorce possible and even moderately easy; women are now allowed to own property and to earn and keep our own money; but the echo of this sordid reality is part of the sexual politics underlying romance, and one of the reasons why romance has been so important for women: for generations we were raised that the choice of who to marry was the single choice determining our future. It was the choice, not merely of who we had sex or children with, but of our social status and possible career. (In medieval times, women often married not only within their class but within their family’s Guild, where that was applicable.)
In the wake of the feminist movement, of course, we’ve been making social and cultural changes reflecting the changed economic reality that women may now have jobs independent of their husbands (if any). It seems to me (perhaps optimistically) that my niece and my younger colleagues expect both to date and to marry, but that these younger women don’t assume automatically that they will form their social identities and careers around their (assumed to be single/ lifelong) sexual partner.
I, however, born at the beginning of the sixties, did so assume.
Hermione the character may have been born in a fictional 1980, but she was conceived by an author born in 1965. My generation.
And I noticed eventually, belatedly, how my sexual attractions had been conditioned by my childhood training: that I assumed without question that in choosing a mate, I would be choosing to enter his/her world. And, of course, the converse: that if I earnestly wanted to enter a different world, the natural way for me (as a woman) to do so was to find a mate who belonged firmly to that other world.
Now, I became a fiery feminist when I was sixteen and repudiated large parts of my upbringing-such as the idea that, if I went to college at all, I should, like my mother, attend in hopes of attaining my MRS degree.
But I did not then see my idolization of Marie Curie and her marriage to her lab partner, or later my admiration of Will and Ariel Durant, as indicating any kind of problem with my sexual imagination.
Nor did I, in college, then earnestly yearning to belong to the academic world, find anything strange about the fact that my closest friends, the people with whom I could most easily relate, were other students whose origins, like my own, were firmly outside academia… but the people whom I found romantically intriguing were the scientist’s son, the professor’s grandson, the scions of alumni who had courted in grad school and sent their children to private schools to be raised erudite.
Those who had been reared, in short, to inhabit naturally the world I then aspired to join.
It was only in retrospect (and with the benefit of watching my tastes change as I wanted different things in my life, different worlds, as it were, to join) that I realized that my romantic pattern seemed to be, not that I fall for blonds or tall men or Asian women, but that rather-whatever world, whatever subculture, I currently yearn to join, I tend to fall for someone who seems to me to belong-no, to embody-that world.
My mother, my two grandmothers, my great aunt-all lived in different worlds (as a barely-middle-class public servant’s wife, a rich executive’s wife, a hardscrabble farmer’s wife, a university researcher’s wife) , and the world each lived in was determined by her husband. (Though my mother, who like Mrs. Price had married ‘beneath’ her, was like her somewhat buffered from the fullest effects of her choice by her birth family.) In my family, reality mirrored Austen’s fiction. I was raised conditioned to expect the same, and these expectations influenced me even after I’d consciously renounced the idea that a woman must or should base her life on being her husband’s partner.
Had I entered Hogwarts (a year after Lily), I would surely have fallen desperately for some old-family Pureblood male. Because I would have bought into wanting to prove myself a true witch, and I’d been raised to believe that how a woman truly joins another world/ class/ subculture is: by marrying its purest representative. Not by her own talents and exertions, though those might be what attract her preferred mate.
And it would not have been a calculated choice on my part; if I’d fallen for a Black or a Potter or a Malfoy, it would not have been because I was gold-digging. It would have been the effect of social conditioning on my radar for potential mates.
(I often like to imagine that had I then attended Hogwarts, I would have had the taste to have fallen for Snape-but the reality was, in real-life college, I had friends whom I admired greatly among ambitious and brilliant men from non-academic backgrounds, but I never crushed on them. I was an outsider myself, I didn’t need another outsider! I wanted an insider. Now, if ever Snape had proven himself-in my eyes-to have a secure and unassailable place ON THE INSIDE to offer me, then he might have seemed more eligible…. Trusted and valued lieutenant of the supreme leader of the WW’s Pureblood faction might, of course, have seemed such a place.)
Jo seems to follow very traditional patterns in her portrayals of marriages. Molly’s portrayed as a powerful witch, arguably more so au fait du pouvoir than her husband (Arthur killing Bellatrix in single combat? He couldn’t handle Nagini.…) but her family is poor because her husband makes a salary inadequate to their needs-and her sole job, even after all her children are away (but still financially dependent), is to hold house on what he makes. Merope Gaunt and Eileen Prince both live (or die) and struggle in the mundane world after their marriage to Muggles. (Mrs. Price, again.) Andromeda, too, has married “down” and lives at her husband’s level, not her birth family’s. (In contrast, her similarly blasted-off-the-family-tree male cousin Sirius inherits first a decent, and then an indecent, fortune-and the family residence.) Lily, conversely, is elevated by her marriage. Petunia belongs both spiritually and by marriage to Little Whinging, Kendra and her children to Percival’s rank in life, Tonks is to be “pruned” by her aunt for Lupin’s sake even more than her own….
I have always felt that almost all of Ron’s attraction for Hermione (and arguably some of James’s for Lily) was that in winning that wizard, she wins (or so she feels) a firm place in his world. The more so in that it is canon that Ron is the first Pureblood wizard to scorn Hermione, and James-and-Sirius the first to snub Lily. So winning HIS hand, the hand of he who scorned her, means she’s won final acceptance….
(Sorry, Draco, Ron nipped in first with the insults. You never stood a real chance with Hermione….)
Note too that the only other man Hermione’s ever let court her with any degree of seriousness is Victor Krum. Another Pureblood, and an international Quidditch star and Triwizard Champion to boot-how much more centrally placed in the WW can you get? (And isn’t even decoy-Cormac a Pureblood? At least he’s certainly very well-connected at the Ministry as well as another Quidditch player…. ) There’s a reason why someone with no interest in sport would choose only Quidditch stars-they are notables within the WW.
The fact that Hermione’s smarter than Ron, much harder-working and more ambitious, that her aptitudes and tastes make her perfect to become a high-powered career woman while Ron is laid-back, likes comfort more than work, and seems to expect/want the woman in his life to become another Molly… all irrelevant, to Hermione’s attraction.
He’s the one who can prove she really IS a witch, she really DOES belong. By wanting her. And if, in her relationship with him, she might have to carve off pieces of herself like Cinderella’s sisters to fit into the shoes of Ron’s Wife, she’ll probably do so.
At least for a while.
Note, finally, that to me Hermione’s attraction to Ron despite their obvious incompatibility did seem natural. I could imagine myself as an outsider swot crushing desperately on the lazy, careless (but also brave and worthy) insider who had previously snubbed me, craving his approval as sign of my full acceptance in his world. If I finally convert him, gain him, marry him, that proves that I ultimately DO belong.
(In fact his carelessness, his laziness, however it might irk, is to an extent a proof of his belonging-Ron doesn’t, in his heart, expect he’ll have to succeed only on his own merit. Or he would try harder. In a world ruled by nepotism, under ordinary circumstances, just being Arthur Weasley’s son is enough to get some job at the Ministry. Ludo’s third assistant?)
And Ron’s attraction to Hermione is equally obvious: if he marries the outsider Hermione, he gets a much more talented and intelligent wife and mother for his children than his own exertions merit. (Hermione’s spiritual twin among the Purebloods is Percy: can you imagine Percy accepting a wife as lazy and lacking in ambition as Ron?)
Even if Hermione shares none of Ron’s tastes, and even if they’ll spend their marriage with her nagging him about his laziness and carelessness while he resents her for not being happy to play the role of his ministering mother.
But then, Molly nags endlessly anyhow, so that part is nothing new to Ron.
But I can see why someone a generation or more younger, who might not be conditioned to expect the Muggleborn woman to need to be validated by marrying the Pureblood-who-snubbed-her, might not “buy” Hermione’s attraction to Ron.
Or, at least, I hope I can.
Because, if so, it will show that something substantial has changed between the conditioning I received as a child about what to find attractive, and the conditioning you younger women have.