Deathly Hallows, Chapter 17: Bathilda's Secret
Unfortunately for the Hs and us, things don’t stay so peaceful. As they leave the churchyard, Hermione is sure someone’s shadowing them. Harry tries to dismiss it as an animal, but he doesn’t really believe it; he’s just trying to reassure her. In fact, he’s right, but not in the way he means, as we find out later.
As they wander through the town, they come to the ruin of the Potter cottage. It’s invisible to all but the anointed magicals, of course, and includes a commemorative plaque recounting the events of 10/31/81. The plaque has graffiti on it, of the “Go, Harry! We’re on your side” variety.
Suddenly, they notice a stooped, warmly dressed figure approaching them. Even though the Hs are under the invisibility cloak, the person seems to see them anyway and beckons to them. Harry asks if she’s Bathilda, and the figure nods and beckons again. They follow her to her home and go inside.
She’s so small, she only comes to Harry’s chest, and he’s not that tall. She has severe cataracts, which I find strange. Apparently magical medicine can cure anything except the most common eye ailments, such as myopia and cataracts, that lowly “muggle” medicine cures with ease.
She smells like “old age,” which is also odd, since old people don’t smell bad if they’re clean. My 88-year-old mother and I live together, so I’m an expert on this subject. And where does Harry “No Baths” Potter get off complaining about somebody else smelling bad, anyway?
The Horcrux locket wakes up and responds to--something. Harry wonders whether Bathilda has the Sword, and that’s what has aroused the locket.
Bathilda calls them into her living room with the single word, “Come,” where she totters around lighting candles. Harry notices the smell of rotting meat. He also sees several picture frames, some of them empty, and one with the picture of the hot blond young man from both his vision and the Dumbledore bio. He and Hermione question Bagshot, but she just looks at them vaguely and says nothing.
Then Bathilda points to Harry and indicates she wants him to go upstairs with her alone. Showing why she’s “the smart one” in the Trio, Hermione discourages Harry, but he lives up to his “dumb hero” reputation by going off alone with this bad-smelling, strangely-acting, nearly mute old woman who knows who he is, despite his being Polyjuiced and her blind. No, Harry, nothing at all suspicious about that situation. *eye roll* What’s really sad is that Harry’s Dumbitis spreads to Hermione, who agrees to this move. Maybe they’re both so desperate for some progress on their hunt that they can no longer think straight, or are willing to do anything, no matter how ridiculous it seems, rather than nothing. They are Gryffindors, after all. They can only keep from charging into action for so long.
As they climb the steep, narrow stairs, Harry considers putting his hands on Bagshot’s butt to keep her from falling over backwards onto him. Gosh, the hero is thinking about sexually abusing old women now? He really is like his father the sex offender.
When they’re alone in what appears to be her bedroom, she shuts them in and directs him to a pile of clothes in the corner. He gets a brief Voldie-vision and hears/says, “Hold him!” Still playing the gullible Gryffindor, Harry glances at the clothes, and Nagini bursts out of Bagshot’s corpse. Yuck! Well, that explains the bad smell.
It does not, however, explain how an animal with no limbs was able to control a human body’s arms and legs. Maybe Voldemort cast a spell to give Nagini virtual limbs. No, that can’t be right. She still would have no idea how to use appendages she’s never had before. The best explanation I can come up with is that he’s controlling her remotely with his mind and telling her how to move Bathilda’s body that way.
In the Consistency? What Consistency? Department, Nagini was large enough in the first chapter to swallow an adult human being. A few minutes ago, she was so small she was dwarfed by Harry, who’s not very big. Now she’s huge again and attacking Harry.
First she knocks Harry’s wand out of his hand; it would have been a nice touch of humor if she’d used his own favorite spell against him and said, “Expelliarmus!” Then she bites Harry, knocks him to the ground, and holds him down until her soul mate master arrives.
At least, that’s her intention. The interfering know-it-all Hermione intervenes, and Nagini goes after her. Now the snake is big enough to fill the entire room. What is she, a snake or an oversized Slinky?
Hermione fights back and accidentally breaks a window. Realizing Voldemort is coming, Harry grabs his friend and jumps out the window. In true Incompetent Villain fashion, Voldy arrives a second too late, just in time to watch his quarry Disapparate.
Harry is in no state to appreciate his narrow escape, however, as he now has the Ultimate Voldie-vision: the night his parents were killed and he was orphaned. The Dull Lord glides down the street towards the Potters’s home. What’s this gliding business? It makes him sound like a ghost, or the first cousin to a dementor.
He sees the happy family through the window before slipping up the sidewalk and breaking down the door. James dies wandless, and Lily runs upstairs with Harry but without her wand. Voldy thinks, “How stupid they were, and how trusting, thinking that their safety lay in friends, that weapons could be discarded even for moments...” I know we’re supposed to regard everything about Voldy as irredeemably evil and depraved, but when he’s right, he’s right. It was incredibly stupid of the Potters not to have their wands on them always. (Snape-related pun intended.) They should also have had several ways of escaping the house if they were attacked. It would have been even smarter of them to have left the country entirely and returned once Harry was an adult.
In my essay, “Chaos a Hundred Times,” I suggested their being wandless might have been expected from the Potters:
“I think it’s highly likely that one reason James wasn’t carrying his wand when Voldemort attacked was because James had spent his whole life having people protect him from the consequences of his risky actions, so deep down he believed he would always triumph over whatever situation fate put in his way.
“Lily’s attempt to beg Voldemort for Harry’s life illustrates both a similar problem and another way in which she and James were alike: She’d spent her life using her good looks and charm to get her way, so, like James, she subconsciously expected begging prettily to win the day for her because it always had in the past.”
As noted above, Lily tries to beg this supposedly ruthless, genocidal maniac for her son’s life. From the sublimeness of the end of chapter 16, we descend to the supreme ridiculousness of one of the dumbest dialogue passages in the entire series. The gratuitous ellipses are in the original.
He forced the [bedroom] door open, cast aside the chair and boxes hastily piled against it with one lazy wave of his wand...and there she stood, the child in her arms. At the sight of him, she dropped her son into the crib behind her and threw her arms wide, as if this would help, as if in shielding him from sight she hoped to be chosen instead...
“Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry!”
“Stand aside, you silly girl...stand aside, now.”
“Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead--”
“This is my last warning--”
“Not Harry! Please...have mercy...have mercy...Not Harry! Not Harry! Please--I’ll do anything--”
“Stand aside. Stand aside, girl!”
He could have forced her away from the crib, but it seemed more prudent to finish them all....
Gosh, where to begin in analyzing this idiocy? I guess I’ll have to do it line by line. (I accidentally typed lie by lie, which works, too.)
Why did Lily run upstairs to hide? She would have been better off running out the back door and taking her chances outside. Surely there were places to hide and things to throw at her attacker out there. If she ran far enough, she could have passed the anti-Apparition wards they presumably had and escaped that way. And why did she barricade the door with a bunch of junk? Most people could get past that, even without magic.
Look at that dialogue. It’s awful ! Lily was supposed to be a combat-hardened warrior. Did she really think pleading with a man whose entire life was dedicated to wiping out people like her would work? Why did she waste her breath? She would have been far better off emulating those stupid “muggles” by hiding behind the door and cold-cocking Voldemort when he walked in. That would have given her time to get her wand and AK him, leaving one dead Dark Lord, one living child, and one heroic “mudblood.”
The only person who sounds dumber than Lily is Voldemort himself. Where’s this ruthless monster we’re all supposed to be afraid of? I pointed out in a discussion on Snapdeom that he talks to Lily as if he were a loving daddy trying to get his frantic little girl to put her favorite toy in the wash, and she was begging him not to. Imagine Lily as a three-year-old and read this slight rewrite:
“Not Fluffy Bunny, not Bunny, please not Bunny!”
“Stand aside, you silly girl...stand aside, now.”
“Not Bunny, please no, take me, wash me instead--”
“This is my last warning--”
“Not Bunny! Please...have mercy...have mercy...Not Bunny! Not Bunny! Please--I’ll do anything--”
“Now, Lily, look at him. Bunny is filthy. He needs to be washed. He’ll be fine. Soon you’ll get him back, good as new. Stand aside. Stand aside, now.”
As if the conversation weren’t ridiculous enough, he tells her, “This is my last warning--”--and then gives her another warning! What? I know Rowling didn’t care about making this book good, and her editors just wanted their cash cow back mooing for money again, but this takes, not just the cake, but the entire bakery! The most terrifying Dark Lord in a century--well, eighty years, if we count Albus and his boyfriend--can’t even tell the difference between “next to last” and “last”? *moan* It’s a good thing I’m not prone to migraines because this could certainly give me one.
I realize this is supposedly a kid’s book, so the dialogue can’t be too raw--although I notice JKR had nothing against tossing a “bitch” in when it suited her. However, Voldemort can easily be written as a ruthless monster without using dirty words. Lily can also sound like a fierce mother protecting her child without much effort, as in my rewritten example:
“You’ll never get Harry--not as long as I’m alive!”
“Out of my way, mudblood!”
“NO! You can’t have my son! I’ll never give him up!”
“I told you to move, mudblood filth! Do you want me to kill you? Because I’ll be happy to do that!”
“NEVER! I’LL NEVER LET YOU HAVE HARRY!”
“THIS IS MY LAST WARNING! MOVE OR DIE!”
“NOOOOO!”
“AVADA KEDAVRA!”
There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? That took me maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and it was written early in the morning when I hadn’t eaten since the night before. I can’t believe Ms. Rowling couldn’t have come up with something equally good if she’d just put a few minutes of genuine effort into it.
One last point before I leave this subject. It says, “...it seemed more prudent to finish them all....” Rowling apparently didn’t do her research on psychopaths. Nobody familiar with them would have written this. Psychopaths take extraordinary risks with no trepidation because they don’t feel fear. Prudent is defined as “acting with or showing care and thought for the future.” The only reason one takes care about the future is because one is afraid something bad might happen, and one wants to either be prepared or prevent the bad thing from happening altogether. A real psychopath would have killed Lily for the fun of it, to show off his power, just because she was there, or to add to his collection of “mudblood” scalps. Anybody so full of himself he thinks he can, should, and will rule the entire world of 4.5 billion people (the population in 1980) is not going to be so threatened by a single angry, grieving mother that he thinks he’d better kill her to be safe.
Other people have pointed out how bizarrely Harry acts in this scene, watching all this silently, apparently not realizing anything’s wrong until his mother drops in front of him. It surprises me that, as the mother of three, Rowling isn’t more aware of how babies act under stress.
The Voldie-vision continues with this strange line: “The snake rustled on the filthy, cluttered floor, and he had killed the boy, and yet he was the boy...” (Emphasis in the original) This apparently refers to Voldy’s standing in Bathilda’s house after Harry escapes, but even in the context of this badly-written passage, it makes no sense. Voldemort didn’t kill Harry. He tried to kill him, but he didn’t succeed, in either the past or present. Really, Ms. Rowling, how hard would it have been to change the line to, “he had tried to kill the boy”?
Harry finally comes around to find Hermione fussing over him. She tells him she had to use a Hover Charm to get him into bed because he was too heavy to lift. It was 72-3 pages and four chapters ago that Harry and Hermione had to half-carry and half-drag Ron into their tent. Remember? JKR obviously doesn’t.
The Hs recap for each other: Hermione cleaned the bite wound and put dittany on it; the Horcrux got stuck to Harry’s chest, so she couldn’t take it off; his wand is broken, and she thinks she did it by accident when fighting Nagini for his life.
Harry tells her about Nagini hiding in Bagshot’s corpse; his realization he could understand her because she was speaking Parseltonge, and he didn’t know it; his belief Nagini was only supposed to hold him hostage and not kill him (supposedly why her bite wasn’t fatal); and his Voldie-vision.
Question time again: If Harry was standing there in front of Hermione speaking Snakese with Bathilda, why didn’t Hermione notice and say something? For that matter, why didn’t Harry notice he was speaking it? In my experience, when one switches languages, one notices. I guess it’s possible that under extreme stress you might speak a different language and not notice it, but that would probably be the case if you were shifting into your native language rather than a foreign tongue. Is Harry really a snake in disguise? Have we been lied to all along? Was a piece of clothing smarter than every human in the Potterverse when it tried to put Harry in Slytherin?
Also on the snake front, it sure is convenient the way Nagini can bite Arthur and Harry without killing them, but not fellow snake Snape. No doubt Arthur and Harry’s innate Gryffindor superiority accounts for this. Gryffindor’s totem animal should be a mongoose rather than a lion. (Mongooses are immune to snake venom.)
Hermione apologizes profusely for breaking Harry’s wand and tries to fix it without success. Harry takes the first watch and her wand, too, since his doesn’t work. This is how the chapter ends: “Her face glazed with tears, Hermione handed over her wand, and he left her sitting beside his bed, desiring nothing more than to get away from her.”
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of Harry Potter Is an Asshole! Today we’ll feature an examination of what an ungrateful little shit Harry is towards Hermione after their visit to Godric’s Hollow. Let’s run down what she did for him in this chapter alone, shall we?: (1) She stayed on guard when he stupidly went off alone with an extremely suspicious stranger. (2) She charged to his rescue when the stranger attacked him. (3) She treated his wounds and watched over him for several hours while he was unconscious and helpless. (4) She apologized profusely for breaking his wand and tried to fix it.
That’s all she can do. She can’t change the past without a Time-Turner. Correct me if I’m wrong, Harry, but I seem to remember all those got broken in book 5 because of your stupidity in running off half-cocked to the Ministry to “rescue” Sirius. If you had stayed in Hogwarts like a sensible boy, Time-Turners would still exist, and you two could go back and (1) kill Nagini, (2) save your wand, (3) get the picture of the blond wand thief, and (4) lay a trap for and possibly kill Voldemort.
Wow! Just when I think you can’t be a more incompetent and ungracious “hero,” you prove me wrong.
‘Bye, everybody! Until next time, remember: Harry! Potter! Is! An! ASSHOLE!