Merope's Plight and Dumbledore's Analyses Revisited
So I was originally going to save this for my abridged series, but since I’m afraid I’ll forget if I leave it for that long, here it is now.
I know much has been made of the fact that Dumbledore essentially blames Merope for the whole Voldemort drama and says that she’s a coward just because she died. For her child. Uh-huh.
But anyway, Dumbledore most infamously declares Merope a coward because she happens to die in childbirth. As someone who abuses that trope (dying in childbirth, I mean) like a horribly addictive drug, especially in fanfic, I have a few thoughts on that.
What it really seems to boil down to is that Dumbledore thinks Merope should be blamed for even allowing Voldie to exist (whether this has any basis in Rowling’s head or if it’s entirely Dumbledore’s opinion is up for debate here). This actually kind-of reminds me of a headcanon I worked out for a particularly nasty villain I took a shine to awhile back. In my headcanon (which is neither confirmed nor denied by the original movie) this character has a mother who dies in childbirth much like Merope. The backstory is that her boyfriend/husband/whatever is dead and she wants to have a child to keep around in his memory. But she has a really difficult pregnancy and it kills her. If you were feeling philosophical, you could raise questions about whether she was in the right to go through with something which she had good reason to suspect would kill her, all for the sake of a child who ultimately grows up to be an evil jerk whom only a small proportion of the fandom even likes.
This of course assuming she could have known the last part (which she wouldn’t have, especially since in my stories I almost always shy away from determinism of any sort-psychology comes first in explaining a villain’s behavior).
So, where does Merope fit in with all this? Merope decides to have a child which ends up not only killing her, but growing up to be an evil jerk who kills a lot of people for no reason and loses his soul until his personality is that of a cardboard box. Here’s the thing, though: logically she could have had no idea what her child would go on to do. Assuming, that is, the determinism which the Harry Potter world just reeks of is something known only to Dumbledore and a few others.
What if determinism is common knowledge, though? What if, in reality, everyone has some inkling that things like moral virtue are inherited and your family really will determine what you act like for all eternity? If that’s the case then Merope might possibly have a clue that any children she had would be evil just because she was ugly, had a bad family, and was related to Salazar Slytherin. If, that is, she even had the intelligence to grasp the concept of determinism, fully believed in it and did not dismiss it as coincidence, and that she knew the scope of what Voldie would eventually do.
But whatever. Even assuming that all that is true and she clearly knew that her child, which she felt so compelled to die for, would do morally reprehensible things, then that might make her stupid, and it might make her selfish too (“my own heir is so much more important to me than the lives of all the innocent victims he’ll ultimately slaughter”) but it doesn’t make her cowardly. Not if she had any inkling that she might die (again, contrary to Rowling’s simplistic portrayal of things, bravery is not always good. It’s perfectly possible to be brave and evil).
This is one reason why TVTropes’ portrayal of Harry Potter makes me so furious. Voldemort is clearly who he is because of how evil his family supposedly was, yet they still insist that his behavior is traceable to nurture when it’s clearly meant to be nature!
Anyway, Dumbledore’s comments about Merope are not only mean-spirited; they just plain make no sense! But since he puts it out there that women who die in childbirth are cowardly, think about what that says about maternal mortality statistics worldwide.
Oh, and I apologize in advance if I offend anyone with anything below. It’s meant to be satire and I know very well that a high rate of dying in childbirth is a very bad thing.
Women in Afghanistan must be, in large part, Slytherins or otherwise cowardly, since they have the highest rate of maternal mortality in the sample.
Also, Africa is primarily comprised of Slytherins and cowards. Betcha didn’t know that (well there was a special magic snake Rowling makes mention of in “Fantastic Beasts,” which is originally from Burkina Faso; stay tuned, BTW)!
In addition, while American women are on the whole braver and more Gryffindorish than women in most developing nations, they still have an embarrassingly high rate of evil cowards and Slytherins compared to women in the majority of developed nations, including most of Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
But you wanna know some pure, brave, and true-hearted good countries? One such country is Greece! Women rarely die in childbirth there at all. I guess you’d have to be brave to live in Greece with all the Chimaeras and Manticores lurking around. Iceland is another one, so it looks like I’ll be well protected and looked after when I visit Iceland this summer, yes/yes?
Then again, I said I like Slytherins so maybe not. Fortunately I myself am extremely unlikely to die in childbirth since I don’t plan to ever have kids.
Note: most of this information is based on statistics that the CIA world factbook published in 2008, so I don’t know how reliable it is now. But it seemed to work well enough for my purposes.