Parenting in Pureblood Culture: a response to JosephineStone
Thank you for introducing this topic; not only did I read you with interest, but it gave me a nudge to go back and re-read Jodel’s essays on the Weasleys, children, feminism….
and to formulate explicitly some ideas that I’ve been churning for some time.
(Some may, after reading this, argue for more processing. Or less.)
I generally agree with you; I regard the Weasleys as a dysfunctional family rather than exemplars of familial bliss.
Molly and her family embrace Harry enthusiastically, and are in almost every possible regard diametrically opposed to the Dursleys and their values, so it’s obligatory for Harry to regard the family as paragons and their home as an earthly paradise. The reader, however, need not concur. “The opposite of the Dursleys” is not, of itself, sufficient to establish a family as happy. (What did Tolstoi say? “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?)
However, it amuses me to play Devil’s advocate. Arthur and Molly are both Purebloods from old families, firmly part of a culture that separated itself from ours some thirty-three decades ago. What if some of what we criticize in the Weasleys is not unique to them, but simply accepted child-rearing practices among the old Pureblood families?
Part I: Parental Duty
Let’s start with the number of children. YOUR take on the matter is one I myself applaud and agree with-that before bringing children into this world, one should evaluate one’s resources (not just money, but time, attention, and energy), determine how many one can afford to treat properly, and take steps to avoid having more than that number.
But you know perfectly well, Josephine, that there are other approaches to this issue. There are people who believe that it’s utterly immoral to do anything but accept however many children the gods choose to bestow, and muddle through raising that number as best they can.
There are those who believe it their duty to provide their family/caste/cult with heirs. There are those who feel they must produce a lot of babies because they feel that their people are in danger of dying out….
Magical humans in the Potterverse consider themselves incontrovertibly superior to non-magicals. Many Purebloods consider their blood superior to that of other magicals. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if most Pureblood families raised their daughters in the belief that their first career must be marriage, followed by popping out as many magical children as possible.
Espccially given how many old families seem to be dying out in this last century. Consider: Gaunt, Black, Crouch, wiped out; Potter and Dumbledore down to a single representative; Longbottom and Malfoy with a single heir….
It’s worth noting in this context that all seven of the Weasley children were born during Tom Riddle’s first rise-the last, Ginevra, a few months before his first defeat. Molly and Arthur may have thought themselves to be providing either insurance for the Weasley name or the next generation of warriors for the Light-as indeed they did do.
So, “red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford” might not have been simple irresponsibility on Arthur and Molly’s parts; they might have been acting out cultural programming, but found themselves in the unusual position (for two Purebloods) of being strongly fertile together (inbreeding sometimes leading to infertility). That dig, which Draco had from his father, might even have reflected envy on Lucius’s part….
Part II: Budgeting is for Muggle Second Cousins
However, it isn’t strictly true that the Weasleys have “more children than they can afford.” It’s not that they actually lack money, it’s that they apparently can’t budget properly. The family is never in real need. None of them actually goes cold or unclothed or hungry. Indeed, they can entertain house guests for months at a time and press lavish servings of food upon visitors without ever having to thin the soup to stretch it.
But known upcoming lump expenses, such as the once-a-year sticker shock of outfitting four, then five, children simultaneously for Hogwarts, seem to catch the Weasleys utterly unprepared. We watch them squander a windfall on frivolities (700 galleons on a trip to Egypt) rather than conserve any of it for next year’s anticipated expenses.
Indeed, at the QWC, the Weasley boys even have “pocket money” to waste on betting and souvenirs, presumably given them by their parents. Fred and George had saved up 37 galleons between them to place on their bet with Ludo (a brand new wand, remember, such as the Weasleys “couldn’t afford” for Ron in books 1 & 2, cost 7), and even Ron reflects that he would have had enough to buy himself a pair of Omnioculars (10 galleons) had he not (following the family precedent) already splurged on other memorabilia.
Yet even while Arthur and the boys are wasting money on betting and trashy souvenirs, Molly is off in Diagon buying Ron second-hand dress robes because the family “couldn’t afford” better for him.
That’s not lack of money. That’s lack of planning. Or something.
Well, first off, planning requires logic. I have 700 spare galleons in hand this summer; I have five children to outfit for Hogwarts this fall, and will have four next year and the year after, each requiring new clothes, books, and sundry supplies which the family has had trouble affording in the past-how much of the windfall should I save, not even for an unexpected emergency, but for predictable near-future large expenditures?
Only, see, that’s logic, and wizards pride themselves on being pants at logic. Molly and Arthur probably were proud of themselves for remembering to save out seven galleons to buy Ron a working wand before they blued the other 693 galleons on Egypt.
And you and I may think that improvident of them, but a culture that prides itself on eccentricity and ignoring logic might consider that lack of forethought to be perfectly acceptable.
There may also be another issue here. Jodel pointed out that the Weasleys seem to have a cash flow problem, which is different from having no cash.
Now, civil servants in my world get paid biweekly or monthly. Yet even monthly… when I was first starting off in the work force and living paycheck-to-paycheck, I would scrape a little in the last week before the monthly paycheck, and then stock up on essentials when my check came.
But there are people who collect their income at much longer intervals than monthly. In monoculture agriculture, for example, it’s common to collect one’s payoff once a year, at the main harvest. Some old contracts and leases (especially those based on the agricultural cycle), stipulated payments to be made quarterly, semi-annually, or even annually.
In the first book, we saw that THREE of the Weasley boys were sent to Hogwarts in second-hand robes on September 1st. And yet, fifteen weeks later, Arthur and Molly had ample money in hand for travel abroad-the Weasley boys stayed at Hogwarts for the Yule holidays because their parents were off to Romania to visit Charlie. (And we know from the Egypt trip that international travel is costly in the WW, as it is in our own.)
If the Ministry paid its wages quarterly (or worse), then if August happened not to be a pay-month, the Hogwarts expenses would come at a time particularly hard to budget for, for Ministry-wonk families. (Conversely, given that the Ministry seems to be the main WW employer, in such a case the Hogwarts trade would give the WW retail economy a much-needed shot in the arm during what would otherwise be the late summer doldrums.)
In which case we should be congratulating Arthur and Molly for refusing to fall into the hands of loan-sharks every August, rather than castigating them for sending their children off to Hogwarts in second-hand robes….
Part III: Different Strokes
Except. There’s a worse problem than improvidence here, a worse problem than a failure to budget properly followed by last-minute skimping on predictable expenses like school robes.
At least, there is from our point of view.
It’s not just that the Weasleys have a little cash-flow problem every August when it comes to outfitting their children for school. What cash they do have, gets spent unevenly.
Consider. Ron got sent off to Hogwarts with second-hand robes, wand, and pet.
FOR HIS DEBUT AT HOGWARTS, MAKING HIS FIRST IMPRESSION ON THE WIDER WIZARDING WORLD!
(Down, Harry! Sorry, I’ll stop now. But really!) And Ron’s old robes were not merely hand-me-downs, they were visibly too short. I mean, HARRY noticed. How shabby and ill-fitting must they have been? And what must Ron have looked like in June, if they were too short at the beginning of the year?
My mother raised four children on a small budget. She scrimped constantly; she fed us margarine and day-old bread, and she economized on clothing. But she helped set up a multi-family clothing swap-my older brother’s outgrown clothes went to X for her oldest son, who in turn passed on her daughter’s dresses for my mom’s oldest daughter (me). And so forth.
So most of our clothing was used, but it fit us and didn’t embarrass us by being obviously antiquated. Further, my mom made sure that each of us kids had at least one really-new outfit (and sundry other visible new supplies) at the beginning of each school year.
Each of us.
In contrast, three of the four Weasley boys in PS have second-hand robes.
But the fourth has new.
And a brand-new owl, too.
Percy the Prefect.
My parents’ apparent goal was to spread out both the privations and the privileges/ new purchases as equally as possible among all their four children. The Weasleys took the exact opposite approach. Explicitly.
Percy was rewarded for being made a prefect with BOTH new robes AND a new familiar. Ron and the twins were sentenced to hand-me-downs.
And it was a reward, and it was a sentence.
Moreover, it wasn’t just in new robes that Ron was slighted.
Not enough money was an excuse. Not a reason. The Weasley parents just didn’t choose to waste their money on non-performing children. Or, really, much of their time or their attention.
Listen to what Ron said in his first burst of confidences to Harry on the train, “You could say I’ve got a lot to live up to…. Everyone expects me to do as well as the others, but if I do, it’s no big deal, because they did it first. You never get anything new, either, with five brothers. I’ve got Bill’s old robes, Charlie’s old wand, and Percy’s old rat….
“Percy got an owl from my dad for being made a prefect, but they couldn’t aff-I mean, I got Scabbers instead.”
It’s wildly embarrassing to admit that your parents haven’t enough money to outfit you properly for school.
It’s devastating to admit that your own parents simply choose to allocate scarce resources to anyone but you.
And Ron never does. Quite admit that.
It’s not just money, either. Look at the sumptuous picnic that notable cook Molly packed for her youngest son’s delectation on his first-ever trip away from her, and what he said about it. When the trolley came through, Ron pretended disinterest in its contents and brought out the lumpy package.
There were four sandwiches inside. He pulled one of them apart and said, “She always forgets I don’t like corned beef.”
“Swap you for one of these,” said Harry, holding up a pasty. “Go on-“
“You don’t want this, it’s all dry,” said Ron. “She hasn’t got much time,” he added quickly, “you know, with five of us.”
Why does Ron have all hand-me-downs, from clothes to wand to pets, when his Prefect brother got sent off resplendent with all new? Because his family couldn’t aff-I mean, I got Scabbers! Why are Ron’s lunch sandwiches all filled with something Ron dislikes? Because his Mum just, er, forgot (worse, always forgets) his preferences. Why are those all-the-wrong-kind sandwiches DRY to boot, so that even someone who DID like corned beef wouldn’t find them appetizing? Because his Mum hasn’t got much time.
Uh-huh, Ron. You keep on telling yourself that.
But Harry sussed him out immediately, and so did we, really. People who seem loved and cherished by their family show up on Harry’s radar as spoiled brats á la Dudley. That’s how Draco appeared to Harry, as soon as Draco’s evil genius led him to try to show off to the Muggle-dressed stranger in Madam Malkin’s by claiming he could get his dad to buy him a racing broom.
And so Draco’s clumsy attempts to engage the interest of, or to impress, the boy on the next stool, by talking of brooms and Quidditch and Houses, only served to intensify Harry’s inferiority complex and dislike. Whereas Ron’s equally egregious flaunting of his superior knowledge of Quidditch and Hogwarts and the WW, did not.
Because Harry had already seen that Ron, far from being a pampered prince, was, like Harry himself, treated like a poor relation within his own family. His needs, his tastes, his feelings, were considered last if at all.
And the recognition was mutual. Except, of course, Ron could always console himself with the knowledge that his mum might not love him FIRST, but still she did love him. Unlike Harry’s Aunt Petunia.
Thus Harry could let Ron instruct him on Quidditch without feeling (much) patronized. And thus Ron could let Harry buy him candy without feeling (much) patronized. Because both of them recognized that they were fundamentally equals in being neglected and undervalued within their own families.
It gets worse.
Molly actually treats Harry with more consideration than her own youngest son. Someone pointed out how jarring it is that Molly coos at Harry in book 2 immediately after yelling at her own children. Just as in book 1, she spoke “fondly” to and about Percy, but sharply to the others. Listen to her:
“You’re not old enough, Ginny, now be quiet.”…
“Ron, you’ve got something on your nose.”…
“How come Percy gets new robes, anyway?” said one of the twins.
“Because he’s a prefect,” said their mother fondly. “All right, dear, well, have a good term-send me an owl when you get there.”
She kissed Percy on the cheek and he left. Then she turned to the twins.
“Now, you two-this year, you behave yourselves. If I get one more owl telling me you’ve-you’ve blown up a toilet or-“…
“It’s not funny. And look after Ron.”…
Yet the nagging the twins received was still better than what Ron got: nothing.
Molly didn’t bother actually to say good-bye to him, to give him last-minute advice or warnings or good wishes-just snapped “Hurry up” to all three to speed them on the train.
Re-read the scene.
Molly sent her youngest son off for his very first term at school without troubling to interact with him directly except for scolding him for that smut on his nose. Which she didn’t actually pay attention to long enough to remove.
That’s how much attention Ron could expect from his own mother on the biggest day of his young life.
Harry got more, even that first day, even while he was still an utter stranger rather than a nearly-adopted son and the Boy-Who-Lived.
Now jump ahead fifteen weeks to those handknit Christmas jumpers. Ron’s was maroon, or rather, “always maroon…. I hate maroon.” Harry’s was green. Why green? Well, “I thought they’d bring out the color of your eyes, dear,” said Mrs. Weasley fondly (“fondly,” again) of the green dress robes she purchased for Harry in book four.
Moreover, Fred actually commented of the sweaters’ workmanship, “Harry’s is better than ours, though… She obviously makes more of an effort if you’re not family.”
Or if you’re the Boy-Who-Lived-to-be-Toadeaten rather than one of Molly’s three undistinguished younger sons.
And while Arthur and Molly had the money to go off to visit Charlie overseas, they hadn’t any to spare to buy Ron the new wand he needed, or new robes, or a new pet.
Consider in this light Molly’s care package in book 4 when the Dursleys forced Harry to share Dudder’s diet: meat pies and fruitcake, then a “superb” birthday cake. Not a single dry sandwich made an appearance. So Ron’s first lunch did not simply reflect Molly’s ignorance of what food was likely to appeal to a teen-aged boy.
Ditto those dress robes for the Yule Ball. Molly purchased Harry robes that she thought would look well on him. Ron’s were not merely second-hand, but the exact color he’d always hated, so old-fashioned as to look like a girl’s dress to modern eyes, and decorated not merely with lace at the collar and cuffs, but with lace that looked “moldy.” (Which was so utterly awful that Ron-not Molly-finally cut the lace off, because frayed cuffs were a notable improvement to the thing’s looks.)
It must have taken considerable effort to find anything so exactly calculated to push Ron’s every button-obviously used, decades out of date, moldy, girly-looking to top that, and maroon.
One is reminded of nothing so much as the foul-smelling “bits of old elephant skin” we saw Petunia dye grey for Harry’s use at Stonewall High.
So why did Molly purchase that abomination for Ron? “Because… well, I had to get yours secondhand, and there wasn’t a lot of choice!”
While her husband and children were off LITERALLY throwing away money at the QWC.
Right. That’s why Petunia didn’t buy Harry a new Stonewall uniform, too.
Yet the next year, when Arthur’s secure if underpaid job had been endangered by his support of Dumbledore, upon being notified the very day before term started that Ron had been made a prefect, Molly suddenly found enough spare change to buy Ron a new BROOM. The latest Cleansweep, even-not a Firebolt, of course, but quite a decent ‘stick.
Then the following year, for the first time ever, we saw Prefect Ron inside Madam Malkin’s being fitted for new Hogwarts robes. Why? Because his old ones were an inch too short.
LIKE THEY WERE HIS FIRST YEAR.
(Down, girl. Down, I say.)
But the new broom and robes bestowed on Ron for being made Prefect at least make it clear that Molly was never simply neglecting Ron as such, or favoring Percy the way the Dursleys consistently favored Dudley over Harry. It’s more that she was like Slughorn, choosing to bestow her positive attention (and the family money) only on those she deemed worthy.
Hold that thought.
But let’s stop making Molly the heavy here. Ron and the twins saw the inequality as being their mum’s fault for playing favorites. Their dad’s fault, conversely, was in not making enough money to afford new robes, etc., for everybody-a mistake the twins were determined never to repeat. So it seemed that way to us.
But Arthur was in on it too; on giving his children differential access to family resources, both money and attention.
Which parent was it who couldn’t even be bothered to come to King’s Cross to see his little boy off for his first year at Hogwarts, after all?
I mean, seriously!
Harry managed to take off from the Ministry to be there for his second-born’s first trip, and both Ron and Hermione for theirs. Draco was there for Scorpius. I feel sure that Arthur himself had been there for Bill.
But Ron didn’t rate a send-off from Arthur.
Though Ginny (or perhaps Harry), the following year, did.
We have, further, Ron’s statement that Percy’s new owl had been a reward from their dad.
Finally, how often do we see Arthur troubling to talk to his youngest son? Or to any of his kids, really?
So Arthur is a part of it. It’s not just Molly.
It seems that the official Weasley family policy is to give their children careless affection but minimal attention (and expenditure), until and unless a child proves itself to require correction or to deserve a reward.
Which seems abominable to us, because we consider it a parent’s duty to love and support all their children equally, even when the children do (or are) things that disappoint their parents. We consider it old-fashioned, unacceptable, even outrageous, to treat one child with obvious favoritism, or to withhold decent treatment from another.
To, say, entail all of the family wealth on the oldest son and scant the others. To educate the boys but not the girls. To throw the gay sixteen-year-old son out on the street to whore himself or starve. To murder the pregnant-out-of-wedlock daughter. To dump the disabled baby on an institution’s doorstep, or to expose it on a mountain.
These actions seem to us to be unacceptable and extreme. Yet we know that such things have been done, and that some people, in some cultures, would judge (some of) those actions to be perfectly acceptable. Or even, perhaps, obligatory. What one would expect a good parent to do.
We don’t. We consider it to be the parents’ duty to love and support all their children. Unconditionally. But then, we think of having children as a privilege, and that the parents therefore intrinsically owe the child for having indulged themselves in having it. That, at the very least, they owe the child a decent upbringing.
We don’t consider it to be the children’s duty to meet their parents’ every (reasonable, socially-approved) expectation, nor that it’s the parents’ inalienable right (or possibly duty) to withhold or withdraw attention, privileges, even life itself, if those familial expectations are not met.
But Purebloods do, apparently.
Because the Weasleys are not the only family we see doing so.
Look at Neville. First seen receiving his Gran’s sigh of disappointment for losing track of Trevor. Casually mentioning at the first Hogwarts feast that he was repeatedly assaulted, at least twice almost killed, by his Great Uncle Algie’s attempts to “force some magic out of me.” The same family personage (head of the family?) who subsequently bought Neville Trevor (to reward Neville for getting into Hogwarts) and a rare plant (for his fifteenth birthday, after Neville had proven an outstanding Herbology student).
It gets worse when you think about it. Abusive families normally rigorously train their victims to keep the abuse secret. The Longbottoms did not. Neville discussed his family’s attempt to murder him for being “all-Muggle” quite casually. Clearly, no one in his family, or in his family’s circle, saw anything noteworthy in a child from a good Wizarding family being assaulted or killed for seeming non-magical.
Just as in ancient Rome the paterfamilias could legally disown a child, sell it into slavery, or have it killed for not meeting his expectations. Even an adult child.
Consider the Black family tree in this light. Future headmaster Phineas Nigellus’s older brother Sirius died at the age of eight.
The same age Neville would have died at, had he not magically bounced.
And in every generation, we see people stricken from the Black family tree. Phineas’s grandson Marius, for being a Squib. Three daughters of the family, all for marrying against the family’s wishes. Two other sons of the house for untoward politics, and a third for supporting the second.
These are the Blacks, a top-of-the-trees family. It’s utterly acceptable, in their world-the Wizarding World-to cast a child off for non-conformity.
Or for being (magically) powerless. In that case the casting-off seems all but mandatory.
As, apparently, it’s the norm in the WW to lavish admiration on those whose magic is unusually strong. What other reason can there be to appoint Albus Dumbledore headmaster and head of the Wizangamot, and to consider him for Minister for Magic? His own greatest supporters, like Percy when he was toeing the family line in book one, considered him to be “a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes.”
In our world, being a mad genius is not the qualification we look for in our leaders and administrators. But in the WW, being thought the “best wizard in the world” trumps all other considerations and determine that Dumbledore should be offered any honor or position he wants. And that same blind worshipping of power is apparently what enabled Tom Riddle’s rise-even after his crimes were fully acknowledged, people like Ollivander could say that Tom did “great things-terrible, yes, but great.”
While those whose magical power is lacking are scorned, exiled, or killed.
The Prewetts apparently follow the Blacks, not the Longbottoms, in their treatment of Squibs, since Molly’s second cousin, the one the family never talks about (or to), survived to become an accountant.
Though perhaps survival is really a matter of luck, not family choice. Perhaps the protocol is: if the potentially-deadly assault on a suspected Squib child should prove fatal, good riddance to bad rubbish. But if the child survives, but not by using magic, it’s bad form to kill it afterwards. Just turf it out.
Just so long as you get rid of it.
Filch is the only adult Squib we see living in the WW. But we know of two living in the Muggle world. And we know of a third, disowned by his family, and a (suspected) fourth, almost murdered as a child.
Ron told us that Squibs are quite unusual. But maybe what’s really unusual is for them to survive to adulthood, and to stay a part of the WW. And of their own families.
But really, when you examine it closely, Neville’s treatment by his Pureblood family parallels Ron’s by his. Neglected and berated until he’d proven himself; given gifts and praise once he’d measured up. Except that Ron (like Harry) was only assaulted by bigger children within the family (specifically, by the twins: the spider, the puffskein-killing, the Unbreakable Vow), not by older relatives trying to force magic out of him.
And both were sent to school with second-hand wands, even though everyone knows that a wand that hasn’t chosen one is hard to work with….
Stop now and look at Pureblood wand-giving.
I’d argued previously that it was the normal Pureblood practice to send their scions off to Hogwarts with hand-me-down wands-that Draco, too started with a family wand at first-since it was his mother who went off to Ollivander’s to be fitted in PS.
(Possible further evidence: “Charlie’s” wand, passed on to Ron, was so battered and chipped that the unicorn hair was “nearly poking out.” Seen any other wand get that battered in six or seven years of use? Even the twins’? Me neither. I think that wand was elderly when Charlie first used it.)
I’d previously argued that the Purebloods did this to force their scions to learn adaptability-to learn how to make an unchosen wand work for them.
Now I wonder if the reasoning wasn’t much simpler-that a Pureblood child is never given a wand of hir own until s/he’s done something to earn it.
Ron, after all, didn’t get his new one at the beginning of PoA when his old was snapped almost in half in the car crash. He got it, not when the battered used thing was broken beyond use, but instead after he’d helped Harry to save his little sister from the chamber (and been awarded TWO HUNDRED house points by Dumbledore). Neville, similarly, got a wand of his own, after five years of making do with one that didn’t work well for him, as a reward for successfully battling Death Eaters at the Ministry.
We don’t know when Draco got his new wand. But we do know when he got something else that he’d long wanted and argued for.
Harry decided at their first meeting that Draco was as spoiled as Dudley. Because Draco said, “I think I’ll bully father into getting me one [a racing broom] and I’ll smuggle it in somehow.”
Thing is, Harry never re-evaluated the Malfoys’ supposed pampering in light of the fact that Draco DIDN’T show up at Hogwarts with a racing broom. Nor had any strings been pulled to get the first-year a free berth on the Slytherin Quidditch team. Indeed, Lucius and Narcissa not only didn’t break all the rules into pieces for their cherished only child well before the start of term-they didn’t do so even AFTER those rules had already been broken (by Dumbles and Minerva) for the Potter boy.
Draco did not get a racing broom for that first Christmas, nor even for his twelfth birthday. We know that, because he was still broomless in late August when Harry eavesdropped on the Malfoys in Knockturn Alley.
Listen to Lucius in Borgin & Burke, that (according to Harry) blindly doting father who can deny his Draco-kins nothing. First Lucius curtly ordered his son to touch nothing. Then he asserted that he wouldn’t buy him a present in addition to the racing broom he’d already promised (but not purchased). Then he reproved Draco for imprudently admitting to being less than fond of Harry Potter. Then he spoke “coldly” about about his son’s fitness to be “more than a thief or a plunderer,” , with specific reference to his son’s imperfect grades, when Draco begged again for a present, this time specifically a Hand of Glory.
“It’s not my fault,” retorted Draco. “The teachers all have favorites, that Hermione Granger-“
“I would have thought you’d be ashamed that a girl of no wizard family beat you in every exam.”
(Which suggests to me rather strongly that Hermione was the only one who did beat Draco in every class, or even in most classes; if Draco’s grades were like, say, Ron’s, he couldn’t argue that he’d lost the TOP spot merely due to staff favoritism. So Draco must have been nearly at the top of the class, possibly second. And this wasn’t good enough for Lucius; Lucius wanted and expected his son to come in first. )
No, whatever Harry still managed to believe, the Malfoys were not the second Dursleys, blindly favoring their own, insensible of any of his flaws, ascribing any criticism or poor marks received by him to other people’s malice or misunderstanding, and indulging his every whim.
So, when do we finally see Draco with his own new racing broom? Well, the same time we see the other six new Nimbus 2001s-the Saturday after the start of term, when the Slytherin Quidditch team arrived to train their new Seeker.
So it’s possible that the new racing broom was Draco’s reward for making the team. (Which would certainly explain his blind fury at Granger’s slander, subsequently repeated all over the school….)
Or Draco’s belated reward for doing well on his first year exams, even if he did let Granger beat him-though one would expect such a reward at the beginning of the holidays, not after the end.
Or, most likely of all, since Lucius and Draco were talking about it during their end-of-summer trip to the Alleys, the broom might have been Draco’s promised prize for some summer achievement, for accomplishing some magical task set him by his parents to atone for having come in behind Granger on those exams.
(As in, when did Draco learn Serpensortia? That’s a NEWT-level spell, according to the Lexicon-confirmed indirectly by Miss Granger, who only learned to conjure birds in sixth year….)
Note further that Lucius did not purchase one racing broom, but seven. While heavy-handedly emphasizing the Malfoy wealth, this also meant that Lucius did not help Draco to outstrip his teammates (like Harry had). The effect of the Malfoy gift was to give the entire Slytherin TEAM an advantage, not the Malfoy heir. (So to outsiders, this may have obscured the question of whether Draco himself had earned a racing broom as a reward….)
But what’s crucial is to recognize that Harry was in error when he read Draco as being spoiled like Dudley, since Harry passed on that error to all of us readers.
However, the evidence is incontrovertible: unlike the Dursleys, Lucius and Narcissa did NOT give their son everything he asked for, whenever he asked. Draco asked for that broom a full year before he got it; he asked for a Hand of Glory in book two, and only obtained it in book six. Draco must surely have whined for an invisibility cloak once he realized that Potter had one, and he never got that at all.
So it really does seem that the Malfoys, like the Weasleys and the Longbottoms, required their scion to EARN any special privileges and presents. Within the differences imposed by the families’ differing financial situations, Draco was no more spoiled than Ron or Neville. He, like they, had to earn any indulgences. The main difference is that for the Malfoys (and apparently for the Longbottoms, since Neville was never described as shabbily dressed), new school robes instead of hand-me-downs count as a standard expenditure, not as one of the privileges that a child must earn.
Moreover, on this reading of Pureblood parenting rules, Molly and Arthur showing Harry more consideration than they do their own youngest son makes sense. If the Pureblood way is to withhold (most) privileges and attention until a child has proven worthy, well-Harry already has. Any privileges showered on The-Boy-Who-Lived, he’d already earned.
What did Pureblood Ginny flute in that valentine? “…he’s really divine, The hero who conquered the Dark Lord.”
Wanna bet Florean Fortescue was a Pureblood? And that he never indulged his own son with sundaes every hour?
Which is also why Filius was so enthused about Harry’s being gifted with a broom and allowed to play on the Gryffindor team. (If Filius wasn’t a Pureblood, he’d certainly acculturated by then.)
I mean, think about it. Slytherin had had a long streak winning both the Quidditch Cup and the House Cup-for most (all?) of the kids, their entire school career. Of course the students of ALL the other houses would want to see Slytherin’s winning streak broken, and would cheer on anyone who seems to promise to do so.
But why would Filius feel the same? He’d been at Hogwarts a long time (at least since the seventies). More, he’s a Ravenclaw-he’s not going to get that excited about a few-year winning streak. Such things will even out.
So if Filius doesn’t approve of a first year flyer being given a broom BY THE SCHOOL and made Seeker because he’s desperate to break the Slytherin winning streak, he must approve of the flagrant rule-breaking because he considers HARRY to merit such a dispensation.
This is, after all, the wizard who fell off his books with excitement at the honor of speaking Potter’s name.
Another Florean or Dedalus indeed.
Free ice cream sundaes every hour, free brooms, privileges denied all other children?
That’s just how the world is supposed to work-them as gots (unusual magical power), gets.
So Molly and Arthur showing more consideration and attention to Harry than to their younger children is simply another expression of this. He had earned their attention (indeed, their adulation), by being the Boy-Who-Lived; their own younger children hadn’t yet.
But if this is the Pureblood view of parenting-that one’s children might rightly be cast off (or killed) for disappointing family expecations, for turning out a Squib or marrying a Muggle or holding the wrong politics… that it’s acceptable to neglect (or assault) one’s young children until they prove themselves worthy heirs to Pureblood privilege…. but conversely that those who do prove worthy should be rewarded lavishly, if need be at the expense of non-performing siblings or peers….
Well. Purebloods are dominant in Wizarding society and politics, but they are numerically a minority. Three-quarters of the population has been contaminated by Muggle blood. And perhaps by some Mugglish ideas of how good parents should act.
Lavishing adulation on a celebrity, after all, has a thriving Muggle tradition in support, independent of Wizarding rationales. Neglecting or abusing one’s own children-well, okay, that also does have a well-attested history among us Muggles. But it’s not socially approved .
Look at poor Barty Crouch Senior. The populace turned against him when he disowned his only child and sent him to Azkaban. Indeed, they had the nerve to blame him-him!-for Junior’s turning to Voldemort. Said he’d not paid enough attention to the boy before he’d earned those twelve NEWTs.
As though young Barty had previously done anything to earn a father’s care and concern!
Part IV: The Bogeyman in the Family Closet-Squibs
Let’s turn our attention back to Neville and his family. Up until he was eight, his family was terrified he was “all-Muggle”-his grandmother broke out crying in joy when he finally showed some magic.
Note, please, that Neville unhesitatingly interpreted his elders’ happiness at the outcome of Algie’s final test as them being pleased that Neville had managed to prove himself magical. Not as them being pleased that Neville had managed to survive his great uncle’s latest murder attempt.
Think about that. Think about being a little boy, thinking about that.
But the Longbottom elders still thought that Neville might not be magical enough to get into Hogwarts, and so were similarly overjoyed when he got his letter… But then for Neville’s first several years, the boy still seemed inept at magic-subject of teachers’ negative attention/evaluations in (at least) Potions, Charms, and Transfigurations.
As late as fourth year, Minerva was berating Neville in front of the full class for his poor performance, and he was still being treated as a butt by some of his schoolmates (at least by the Weasley twins, although Malfoy seems to have left off by then).
As near as we can tell it was the Lestranges’ escape halfway through his fifth year that shocked Neville into really buckling down and applying himself to mastering wand-using magic; before then his only good subject was Herbology.
But then once Neville did buckle down he got quite good quite rapidly; in the DA, he mastered the Shield Charm second only after Hermione. So he beat out students older than him. When he took the OWLs at the end of that year, he passed at least four-to his O in Herbology were added an A in Transfigurations and E’s in Charms and DADA.
Which means that the kid dismissed as a probable Squib at eight, a near-Squib who barely scraped into school at eleven, and a duffer whose incompetence merited a public rating by his head of house at fourteen, at fifteen took more OWLs than either of the Weasley twins. And did as well as Hermione on at least two of them.
And he did so, unlike Hermione, using a second-hand wand.
How well would Neville have done on the OWLs, if he’d had his own wand to take them? Better, if he’s had his own, compatible, wand, by the time he started seriously training himself in spell-casting, half-way through that last year?
We can never know. We do know that the Longbottom family in 1988, in 1991, would never have predicted for Neville either four (or more) OWLs or a career as a Hogwarts professor.
So one can be a very solid performer, decidedly above average, in late adolescence, without ever having been precocious. Indeed, without ever having had any visible magical outbreaks at ALL as of age eight, and almost none as of age eleven.
Had Great Uncle Algie not dropped Neville out that window (after pushing the child off Blackpool pier and assorted other attacks had failed to elicit magic), perhaps the Longbottoms’ first proof that Neville wasn’t a Squib would have been his Hogwarts letter.
However, most of the WW seems to suffer from a serious misunderstanding of what Squibs are, and what Squibs are capable of doing.
Consider Mrs. Figg’s interrogation in OotP. The Wizengamot asked her if Squibs can see Dementors. Which is to say, they don’t already know. Squibs are apparently so horrific a possibility for the Purebloods that they avoid studying Squibs’ actual natures and capacities--which might in fact vary dramatically between individuals. Mrs. Figg was asked whether Squibs can see Dementors, not whether she could. One size fits all, when it probably doesn’t.
Consider the fact that Argus Filch, longtime Hogwarts caretaker, wasn’t “outed” as a Squib until CoS. How could that even be possible? I mean, in our world, if someone is blind, or unable to walk, polite acquaintances would not go around harping on that fact. But no one simply wouldn’t know!
Well, it seems from the questions asked Arabella that most witches and wizards accept Ron’s simplistic definition: a Squib is someone who was born into a wizarding family but hasn’t got any magic powers. Kind of the opposite of Muggle-born wizards, but Squibs are quite unusual.
Yet Argus Filch can, demonstrably, see and inhabit and clean Hogwarts castle; he can interact (heatedly!) with a non-corporeal being such as Peeves; he can use charmed artifacts like the Probity Probe. People who haven’t got any magic powers, like you and me, couldn’t do any of these things. Ergo, Argus doesn’t completely lack magic. Ergo he’s a weak wizard, not a Squib.
Except he is. A Squib.
The real definition of a Squib seems to be, someone who can’t channel and control magic enough to use a wand consistently.
And most wizards, especially most Purebloods, don’t admit this. They believe, or choose to believe, that Squibs lack magic entirely. Like Muggles do. There’s not a spectrum or range of magic powers with wand-control marking one arbitrary cut-off-a difference in quantity not kind between them and us. No, instead a human must either possess magic, absolutely, or completely lack it. Muggles and Squibs on one side of the line, witches and wizards on the other.
One odd benefit of this blinkered viewpoint is that those Squibs who, like Argus, can make limited use of magic, might have been treated quite decently by their ignorant family until the Hogwarts letter failed to arrive. My little one does too have magic-s/he is not a Squib!
Neville’s trauma, then, came from having a family that wasn’t ignorant.
As in, what do you think it think it does to a proud old Pureblood family’s matrimonial prospects, when the line’s inbreeding makes it start throwing Squibs?
Part V: The Black Family Tree
If you don’t accept the tree as canon, skip this part. But here’s a possible explanation for one of the tree’s weirdest set of dates. Headmaster Phineas’s grandson Pollux was born in 1912. And in 1925, when he was 12 or 13, his wife Irma (nee Crabbe) presented him with his oldest child Walburga. Irma subsequently presented Pollux with two sons, the younger born in 1929.
Interestingly enough, Pollux’s oldest cousin, Arcturus, also had his first child in 1925, and his last in 1929.
And Phineas Nigellus himself died the same year his first great-grandchildren were born, at the shockingly young age (for a wizard) of 78.
Now, of course, there are a lot of ways to connect these dots. Phineas’s illness, say, prompted his oldest grandson to speed up his marriage plans, and Pollux and Irma got caught in the shrubberies during the festivities and had a wandpoint wedding, followed in December by a little girl….
One problem with this reading is the apparent status of the only Crabbes we know. Vince and his dad may be Purebloods, but they seem to be born minions, not at the same social level as the Malfoys and the Blacks. It’s quite shocking in DH when Vince finally disobeys Draco.
Only, sorry, if a twelve-year-old aristocrat tumbles a minion, even if he impregnates her, his family doesn’t respond by making him marry her. And hers can’t. Holding the Blacks responsible for the maintenance of the child, maybe. But marriage??!
But there are two relevant dates on the Black family tree that are hidden from us.
Pollux had two younger sisters, born in 1915 and 1920. And a brother. What was the date that Marius’s name was added to the tree? And when did the family finally burn his name off?
And how long before they did so had they been concerned that he might be a Squib?
Marius’s birth date fell between those of his sisters. Let’s split the difference, and assume that Marius was born in late 1917 or early 1918. And that around 1924, when he was six or seven, his family’s uneasiness about the child’s magical backwardness finally found voice in the dread word, “Squib.”
Especially if his grandfather, Headmaster Black, remembered enough to realize that his own older brother Sirius’s death at age eight might not have been as accidental as his family had claimed at the time.
Well, if the worst were true, if they killed Marius now no outside would ever know of the blight on the family (twice now in three generations!)…. But someone (Phineas himself? Violetta? Cygnus?) refused to countenance that simple solution.
Only, once the boy failed to get his Hogwarts letter (due in the summer of 1929), the scandal would be revealed, and the Blacks would be known to have produced a Squib. Worse, two, if someone thought to reconsider the first Sirius’s early death.
(In fact, even if Sirius HAD died of illness or misadventure, once Marius were known to be a Squib, people would start assuming that the same had been true of his great-uncle, and that the family had killed the child off to hide their shame.)
They were the Blacks, no one of better blood, but who would marry them if they’d started to throw Squibs every other generation?
So the family panicked and pushed through marriages between Marius’s oldest cousin and a MacMillan (with a mere six generations of Wizarding blood), and between Marius’s older brother and a Crabbe. Because the MacMillans and Crabbes would be so flattered at the alliance that they wouldn’t think it through that the family must have been desperate to have invited them, much less to have married off a twelve-year-old….
Phineas Nigellus died shortly after he’d secured his name’s continuation for another generation.
Then in 1929, Marius’s status as a Squib was revealed to the entire WW when he didn’t receive a Hogwarts letter. And the indignant Irma and Melania refused to bear any more possibly-tainted children.
Jodel points out that since witches and wizards seem to have (potentially) a prolonged lifespan, but not an extended youth, witches of childbearing age must be at a premium. Marius’s two male first cousins who were unmarried as of the scandalous revelation never did find mates, nor did Marius’s older sister. His three female first cousins did, though one had to settle for a blood traitor.
As to Marius’s baby sister… We don’t know when precisely Charlus Potter married Dorea, nor whether the pair deliberately put off having children. We do know that by the time Dorea conceived her only child, the Potters had ascertained that Pollux’s and her cousins’ children (ten listed on the tree, plus however many Burkes and Weasleys) were all fine, not a Squib to be found among them.
Still, the Potters were so relieved that their son showed early magical aptitude that they spoiled him rotten.
And this is why the Longbottoms were so worried about Neville-ever since Harfang married Callidora, they’d been afraid that that fatal Black taint might show itself in her descendents…..
Part VI: A Theory of Child Development
Neville was apparently unusual in being such a late bloomer. Note, however, that he was identified, not as being late to develop control, but as being intrinsically weak at magic: by his family, by himself, and by most of his teachers.
(Another person misidentified as “weak” when he must merely have been late to develop, was Peter Pettigrew. Sorry, but anyone who masters the Animagus transformation at all-much less at age fifteen!-is not a weak or talentless wizard. If Peter had buckled down like Neville and set himself to learn five years of spells in a few months, he might have shocked Minerva and his friends by getting an O on his Transfigurations OWL and E’s on several others. But of course Remus was the only Marauder permitted to study openly. Sigh for the road not taken….)
But if Neville was so exceptional that no-one even identified him as a late bloomer rather than “weak,” what’s normal development for child witches and wizards?
Well, at the other extreme to Neville, infants can display inborn powers-Tonks and Teddy, we are told, both started changing their hair color within hours of birth. Completely involuntarily, of course-a newborn isn’t even aware that it has hair (when it does), much less choose to go brunette. Presumably every time the baby had a bowel movement or a tantrum, its hair changed color in response….
Moreover, all those people who went around calling Harry “the hero who conquered the Dark Lord” had to have believed that a fifteen-month-old could have had a burst of uncontrolled magic strong enough to save himself from Voldemort. Even though, once that baby grew old enough to attend Hogwarts, his controlled magic was nothing particularly special.
But of course Harry, as Hagrid pointed out to him when Harry doubted he could be a wizard, had also had other, more predictable outbursts of baby magic-“made things happen when you was scared or angry”.
It was that Neville didn’t that made his family decide he might be a Squib.
Consider what Sev told Lily when she was worried about getting in trouble for having already done magic out of school: “We’re all right. We haven’t got wands yet. They let you off when you’re a kid and you can’t help it. But once you’re eleven,” he nodded importantly, “and they start training you, then you’ve got to go careful.”
(Well, of course, Harry DID get let off in the matter of Aunt Marge. But that was political.)
But Severus seems to be suggesting that the assumption is that children’s pre-Hogwarts, wandless magic must all be uncontrolled (therefore never subject to punishment), but that once training/wand-carrying starts, all accidental magic stops.
Yet although Harry’s magical outbreaks were indeed all involuntary, Lily, Tom, and possibly Severus, had developed some wandless control of their magic pre-Hogwarts.
But this is apparently not expected.
Though among Purebloods, messing around a bit with wand or cauldron before Hogwarts starts is considered normal, just as doing underage magic on one’s family’s property (and presumably under their supervision) is in practice winked at between school terms.
I’d long assumed that Draco’s “perfect” slug-stewing in his first class was due to private tutoring. But indeed Ron told us this explicitly: “I tried to turn him [Scabbers] yellow yesterday to make him more interesting, but the spell didn’t work.”
But it’s not expected that a wandless child could have any control over their magic. And it is expected that such a child might be given to uncontrolled outbursts of magic when angry or frightened.
Let’s look at Harry’s episodes. At Dudley’s birthday outing, Harry vanished the glass after Dudley knocked him to the floor. But a month later, when he and Dudley were pummeling each other and Vernon trying to get those mysterious letters, no magical outburst helped him. One time when Dudley’s gang chased him, Harry found himself flying up to the chimney. Every other time, Harry had to rely on his legs to escape-or did not, and got beaten up. One time Harry shrank a horrible sweater so he didn’t have to wear it-the rest of the time, he resignedly donned Dudley’s awful cast-offs.
Strange things (magical outbreaks) did indeed happen around Harry when he was scared or angry. But by no means every time.
Why not?
If strong emotion triggers the outbreak, why doesn’t it happen every time the magical child feels a sufficiently strong emotion? Why didn’t Harry’s magic automatically intervene to save him every time he felt threatened?
For that matter, Harry’s last involuntary burst happened when he was thirteen. Why didn’t he ever have an outbreak at Hogwarts? If Neville could bounce when dropped from a window, why didn’t Harry bounce when he was knocked from his broom in CoS? (And why didn’t Snape expect Harry to in PS?) If Harry could “blow up” Aunt Marge when she taunted him about his parents, why did he never do so to Professor Snape? If his magic could whisk him away from beating beat up by Dudley, why did it do nothing to help him when he confronted Quirrell!mort or Diary!Tom?
What, Harry just never got scared enough or angry enough at Hogwarts to trigger any episodes?
Right. That works well as an explanation.
So it really does seem to be the case that regular use of controlled magic precludes involuntary outbursts. Which is what Aberforth told us about Ariana-“she wouldn’t use magic, but she couldn’t get rid of it; it turned inward and drove her mad, it exploded out of her when she couldn’t control it…”
Note that we don’t see Lily-Sue or Tom have uncontrolled magical outbursts-and that Lily didn’t believe that Sev would, or Petunia that Lily’s son did. Because both Tom and Lily had taught themselves wandless control (being Muggle-raised and not knowing any better) while magical-raised children (and brainless Harry) were still having accidents.
But let’s think about magical-raised children. It seems to be the case that if you’re capable of channeling magic, if you don’t regularly perform controlled magic you’ll have uncontrolled magical outbursts. The controlled magic must, as it were, bleed off the charge so it doesn’t build up to a dangerous level. But if the magical charge isn’t bled off by continued use, strong emotion can eventually trigger an “explosion” of magic. The strength of which seems to depend both on the strength of the emotion (poor Ariana seems to have been terrified of herself) and on the power that’s accumulated since the last discharge.
So, other things being equal, a child who’s given to fits of temper, like Harry, would be more prone to magical accidents than a more even-tempered child. And a child who uses magic regularly, even if only in a small way, would be far less prone to having accidents than one who has no occasion or opportunity to do so.
So much so, that once children start carrying wands, it’s just assumed that any magic they subsequently perform must be deliberate.
Except… children raised in wizarding families do regularly perform magic in a small way.
Harry was given a broom for his first birthday. However careful parents may be, toddlers do sometimes get hold of Daddy’s wand and swell a slug. And so forth.
Indeed, toy brooms seems to be ubiquitous in the WW-one-year-old Harry had one, five-year-old Fred had one, two two-year-old witches were riding them at the QWC…. Nor is it likely that brooms are the only magical toys.
Which means that children raised in magical families are regularly using small amounts of controlled magic from the time that they are toddlers. Making magical outbursts less common, although they are known to occur. At least with the more hot-tempered kids-though not, perhaps, as often as with Harry.
Only, most magical families wouldn’t worry if their kids didn’t have magical tantrums, because they would take it for granted that of course their children aren’t Squibs. Squibs are quite unusual, you know, and Arabella has magic. Look at how she loves to ride her little broom, and how she gets on with the family Kneazle!
The only people who would worry, would be those who already had a Squib disgracing the family. Who therefore might know that (some) Squibs can use (some) charmed objects, and who have reason to fear the taint might reappear.
You know, like the Longbottoms.
And the Weasleys.
Part VII: The Woes of Mrs. Weasley
Which brings us to another possible explanation for the large size of the Weasley family. And here I do think we might be down to Molly, not to Arthur-and-Molly.
Molly is far from a perfect mother, but she does passionately love her children. All of them. Even the ones she passive-aggressively neglects, even the ones she’s furious with. We see this in her reaction to the Twins after the Death Eater scare at the QWC. We see it in her clock. We see it in her Boggart (which, note, included both Ron-who’d always seemed last and least-and estranged-Percy).
Neville showed us what a nightmare it was to be a Pureblood late-bloomer.
What’s it like to be a parent in that culture?
What must it be like, for a loving mother, to be told by your culture that if your children are defective, it’s your duty to kill or banish them? (Yes, I’m thinking of Bujold’s story “The Mountains of Mourning.” And I feel as sorry for Ma Mattulich as for Harra.)
Only, in the magical world, you can’t usually tell at birth. You might worry, and worry, and desperately love your child, and not know for sure until it is five, or eight, or even eleven, if you might be required ultimately to prune it from the family tree as a diseased branch.
When we first met the Weasley family, Ron gloomily expounded on the burden he faced of living up to his brothers. Only, just because his oldest brothers were all accomplished wizards then, that doesn’t mean they need have been particularly precocious.
Neville proves that.
Molly Prewett has a second cousin who’s a Squib. Arthur has a first cousin once removed who is. The pair had to have worried that their children might be at risk.
Even if-especially if-they never talked about it.
(Some) squibs can use charmed objects. So the fact that most of the children love to fly tells an informed mother nothing.
We only hear Ron mention one outbreak of spontaneous magic among the Weasley children. Fred, age five, got furious when Ron broke his toy broom, and turned Ron’s teddy bear into a spider.
Maybe there hadn’t been any dramatic outbursts noticed among the older children. Only, Molly could not do what Great Uncle Algie did-put the issue to the test by thrusting her boys into life-threatening situations to see if they’d survive by sparking magic.
And indeed, the two oldest Weasley boys both seem sturdy, easy-going sorts-not easily frightened, not easily riled. And neither had a Dudley going after them all the time, like Harry had, to trigger him. (At least not until the twins got old enough to add their distinctive flair for mayhem to the family’s dynamics …. )
Molly had two sons two years apart. And then she stopped for a while, leaving almost a four year gap between Charlie and Percy. Bill had turned five when she got pregnant with Percy. Six when she got pregnant with the twins. Eight when she got pregnant with Ron. Ten when she got pregnant with Ginny.
And then she stopped.
Maybe it took her that long (and many) to be sure that she was safe.
That she could count on having at least one to keep.
and to formulate explicitly some ideas that I’ve been churning for some time.
(Some may, after reading this, argue for more processing. Or less.)
I generally agree with you; I regard the Weasleys as a dysfunctional family rather than exemplars of familial bliss.
Molly and her family embrace Harry enthusiastically, and are in almost every possible regard diametrically opposed to the Dursleys and their values, so it’s obligatory for Harry to regard the family as paragons and their home as an earthly paradise. The reader, however, need not concur. “The opposite of the Dursleys” is not, of itself, sufficient to establish a family as happy. (What did Tolstoi say? “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?)
However, it amuses me to play Devil’s advocate. Arthur and Molly are both Purebloods from old families, firmly part of a culture that separated itself from ours some thirty-three decades ago. What if some of what we criticize in the Weasleys is not unique to them, but simply accepted child-rearing practices among the old Pureblood families?
Part I: Parental Duty
Let’s start with the number of children. YOUR take on the matter is one I myself applaud and agree with-that before bringing children into this world, one should evaluate one’s resources (not just money, but time, attention, and energy), determine how many one can afford to treat properly, and take steps to avoid having more than that number.
But you know perfectly well, Josephine, that there are other approaches to this issue. There are people who believe that it’s utterly immoral to do anything but accept however many children the gods choose to bestow, and muddle through raising that number as best they can.
There are those who believe it their duty to provide their family/caste/cult with heirs. There are those who feel they must produce a lot of babies because they feel that their people are in danger of dying out….
Magical humans in the Potterverse consider themselves incontrovertibly superior to non-magicals. Many Purebloods consider their blood superior to that of other magicals. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if most Pureblood families raised their daughters in the belief that their first career must be marriage, followed by popping out as many magical children as possible.
Espccially given how many old families seem to be dying out in this last century. Consider: Gaunt, Black, Crouch, wiped out; Potter and Dumbledore down to a single representative; Longbottom and Malfoy with a single heir….
It’s worth noting in this context that all seven of the Weasley children were born during Tom Riddle’s first rise-the last, Ginevra, a few months before his first defeat. Molly and Arthur may have thought themselves to be providing either insurance for the Weasley name or the next generation of warriors for the Light-as indeed they did do.
So, “red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford” might not have been simple irresponsibility on Arthur and Molly’s parts; they might have been acting out cultural programming, but found themselves in the unusual position (for two Purebloods) of being strongly fertile together (inbreeding sometimes leading to infertility). That dig, which Draco had from his father, might even have reflected envy on Lucius’s part….
Part II: Budgeting is for Muggle Second Cousins
However, it isn’t strictly true that the Weasleys have “more children than they can afford.” It’s not that they actually lack money, it’s that they apparently can’t budget properly. The family is never in real need. None of them actually goes cold or unclothed or hungry. Indeed, they can entertain house guests for months at a time and press lavish servings of food upon visitors without ever having to thin the soup to stretch it.
But known upcoming lump expenses, such as the once-a-year sticker shock of outfitting four, then five, children simultaneously for Hogwarts, seem to catch the Weasleys utterly unprepared. We watch them squander a windfall on frivolities (700 galleons on a trip to Egypt) rather than conserve any of it for next year’s anticipated expenses.
Indeed, at the QWC, the Weasley boys even have “pocket money” to waste on betting and souvenirs, presumably given them by their parents. Fred and George had saved up 37 galleons between them to place on their bet with Ludo (a brand new wand, remember, such as the Weasleys “couldn’t afford” for Ron in books 1 & 2, cost 7), and even Ron reflects that he would have had enough to buy himself a pair of Omnioculars (10 galleons) had he not (following the family precedent) already splurged on other memorabilia.
Yet even while Arthur and the boys are wasting money on betting and trashy souvenirs, Molly is off in Diagon buying Ron second-hand dress robes because the family “couldn’t afford” better for him.
That’s not lack of money. That’s lack of planning. Or something.
Well, first off, planning requires logic. I have 700 spare galleons in hand this summer; I have five children to outfit for Hogwarts this fall, and will have four next year and the year after, each requiring new clothes, books, and sundry supplies which the family has had trouble affording in the past-how much of the windfall should I save, not even for an unexpected emergency, but for predictable near-future large expenditures?
Only, see, that’s logic, and wizards pride themselves on being pants at logic. Molly and Arthur probably were proud of themselves for remembering to save out seven galleons to buy Ron a working wand before they blued the other 693 galleons on Egypt.
And you and I may think that improvident of them, but a culture that prides itself on eccentricity and ignoring logic might consider that lack of forethought to be perfectly acceptable.
There may also be another issue here. Jodel pointed out that the Weasleys seem to have a cash flow problem, which is different from having no cash.
Now, civil servants in my world get paid biweekly or monthly. Yet even monthly… when I was first starting off in the work force and living paycheck-to-paycheck, I would scrape a little in the last week before the monthly paycheck, and then stock up on essentials when my check came.
But there are people who collect their income at much longer intervals than monthly. In monoculture agriculture, for example, it’s common to collect one’s payoff once a year, at the main harvest. Some old contracts and leases (especially those based on the agricultural cycle), stipulated payments to be made quarterly, semi-annually, or even annually.
In the first book, we saw that THREE of the Weasley boys were sent to Hogwarts in second-hand robes on September 1st. And yet, fifteen weeks later, Arthur and Molly had ample money in hand for travel abroad-the Weasley boys stayed at Hogwarts for the Yule holidays because their parents were off to Romania to visit Charlie. (And we know from the Egypt trip that international travel is costly in the WW, as it is in our own.)
If the Ministry paid its wages quarterly (or worse), then if August happened not to be a pay-month, the Hogwarts expenses would come at a time particularly hard to budget for, for Ministry-wonk families. (Conversely, given that the Ministry seems to be the main WW employer, in such a case the Hogwarts trade would give the WW retail economy a much-needed shot in the arm during what would otherwise be the late summer doldrums.)
In which case we should be congratulating Arthur and Molly for refusing to fall into the hands of loan-sharks every August, rather than castigating them for sending their children off to Hogwarts in second-hand robes….
Part III: Different Strokes
Except. There’s a worse problem than improvidence here, a worse problem than a failure to budget properly followed by last-minute skimping on predictable expenses like school robes.
At least, there is from our point of view.
It’s not just that the Weasleys have a little cash-flow problem every August when it comes to outfitting their children for school. What cash they do have, gets spent unevenly.
Consider. Ron got sent off to Hogwarts with second-hand robes, wand, and pet.
FOR HIS DEBUT AT HOGWARTS, MAKING HIS FIRST IMPRESSION ON THE WIDER WIZARDING WORLD!
(Down, Harry! Sorry, I’ll stop now. But really!) And Ron’s old robes were not merely hand-me-downs, they were visibly too short. I mean, HARRY noticed. How shabby and ill-fitting must they have been? And what must Ron have looked like in June, if they were too short at the beginning of the year?
My mother raised four children on a small budget. She scrimped constantly; she fed us margarine and day-old bread, and she economized on clothing. But she helped set up a multi-family clothing swap-my older brother’s outgrown clothes went to X for her oldest son, who in turn passed on her daughter’s dresses for my mom’s oldest daughter (me). And so forth.
So most of our clothing was used, but it fit us and didn’t embarrass us by being obviously antiquated. Further, my mom made sure that each of us kids had at least one really-new outfit (and sundry other visible new supplies) at the beginning of each school year.
Each of us.
In contrast, three of the four Weasley boys in PS have second-hand robes.
But the fourth has new.
And a brand-new owl, too.
Percy the Prefect.
My parents’ apparent goal was to spread out both the privations and the privileges/ new purchases as equally as possible among all their four children. The Weasleys took the exact opposite approach. Explicitly.
Percy was rewarded for being made a prefect with BOTH new robes AND a new familiar. Ron and the twins were sentenced to hand-me-downs.
And it was a reward, and it was a sentence.
Moreover, it wasn’t just in new robes that Ron was slighted.
Not enough money was an excuse. Not a reason. The Weasley parents just didn’t choose to waste their money on non-performing children. Or, really, much of their time or their attention.
Listen to what Ron said in his first burst of confidences to Harry on the train, “You could say I’ve got a lot to live up to…. Everyone expects me to do as well as the others, but if I do, it’s no big deal, because they did it first. You never get anything new, either, with five brothers. I’ve got Bill’s old robes, Charlie’s old wand, and Percy’s old rat….
“Percy got an owl from my dad for being made a prefect, but they couldn’t aff-I mean, I got Scabbers instead.”
It’s wildly embarrassing to admit that your parents haven’t enough money to outfit you properly for school.
It’s devastating to admit that your own parents simply choose to allocate scarce resources to anyone but you.
And Ron never does. Quite admit that.
It’s not just money, either. Look at the sumptuous picnic that notable cook Molly packed for her youngest son’s delectation on his first-ever trip away from her, and what he said about it. When the trolley came through, Ron pretended disinterest in its contents and brought out the lumpy package.
There were four sandwiches inside. He pulled one of them apart and said, “She always forgets I don’t like corned beef.”
“Swap you for one of these,” said Harry, holding up a pasty. “Go on-“
“You don’t want this, it’s all dry,” said Ron. “She hasn’t got much time,” he added quickly, “you know, with five of us.”
Why does Ron have all hand-me-downs, from clothes to wand to pets, when his Prefect brother got sent off resplendent with all new? Because his family couldn’t aff-I mean, I got Scabbers! Why are Ron’s lunch sandwiches all filled with something Ron dislikes? Because his Mum just, er, forgot (worse, always forgets) his preferences. Why are those all-the-wrong-kind sandwiches DRY to boot, so that even someone who DID like corned beef wouldn’t find them appetizing? Because his Mum hasn’t got much time.
Uh-huh, Ron. You keep on telling yourself that.
But Harry sussed him out immediately, and so did we, really. People who seem loved and cherished by their family show up on Harry’s radar as spoiled brats á la Dudley. That’s how Draco appeared to Harry, as soon as Draco’s evil genius led him to try to show off to the Muggle-dressed stranger in Madam Malkin’s by claiming he could get his dad to buy him a racing broom.
And so Draco’s clumsy attempts to engage the interest of, or to impress, the boy on the next stool, by talking of brooms and Quidditch and Houses, only served to intensify Harry’s inferiority complex and dislike. Whereas Ron’s equally egregious flaunting of his superior knowledge of Quidditch and Hogwarts and the WW, did not.
Because Harry had already seen that Ron, far from being a pampered prince, was, like Harry himself, treated like a poor relation within his own family. His needs, his tastes, his feelings, were considered last if at all.
And the recognition was mutual. Except, of course, Ron could always console himself with the knowledge that his mum might not love him FIRST, but still she did love him. Unlike Harry’s Aunt Petunia.
Thus Harry could let Ron instruct him on Quidditch without feeling (much) patronized. And thus Ron could let Harry buy him candy without feeling (much) patronized. Because both of them recognized that they were fundamentally equals in being neglected and undervalued within their own families.
It gets worse.
Molly actually treats Harry with more consideration than her own youngest son. Someone pointed out how jarring it is that Molly coos at Harry in book 2 immediately after yelling at her own children. Just as in book 1, she spoke “fondly” to and about Percy, but sharply to the others. Listen to her:
“You’re not old enough, Ginny, now be quiet.”…
“Ron, you’ve got something on your nose.”…
“How come Percy gets new robes, anyway?” said one of the twins.
“Because he’s a prefect,” said their mother fondly. “All right, dear, well, have a good term-send me an owl when you get there.”
She kissed Percy on the cheek and he left. Then she turned to the twins.
“Now, you two-this year, you behave yourselves. If I get one more owl telling me you’ve-you’ve blown up a toilet or-“…
“It’s not funny. And look after Ron.”…
Yet the nagging the twins received was still better than what Ron got: nothing.
Molly didn’t bother actually to say good-bye to him, to give him last-minute advice or warnings or good wishes-just snapped “Hurry up” to all three to speed them on the train.
Re-read the scene.
Molly sent her youngest son off for his very first term at school without troubling to interact with him directly except for scolding him for that smut on his nose. Which she didn’t actually pay attention to long enough to remove.
That’s how much attention Ron could expect from his own mother on the biggest day of his young life.
Harry got more, even that first day, even while he was still an utter stranger rather than a nearly-adopted son and the Boy-Who-Lived.
Now jump ahead fifteen weeks to those handknit Christmas jumpers. Ron’s was maroon, or rather, “always maroon…. I hate maroon.” Harry’s was green. Why green? Well, “I thought they’d bring out the color of your eyes, dear,” said Mrs. Weasley fondly (“fondly,” again) of the green dress robes she purchased for Harry in book four.
Moreover, Fred actually commented of the sweaters’ workmanship, “Harry’s is better than ours, though… She obviously makes more of an effort if you’re not family.”
Or if you’re the Boy-Who-Lived-to-be-Toadeaten rather than one of Molly’s three undistinguished younger sons.
And while Arthur and Molly had the money to go off to visit Charlie overseas, they hadn’t any to spare to buy Ron the new wand he needed, or new robes, or a new pet.
Consider in this light Molly’s care package in book 4 when the Dursleys forced Harry to share Dudder’s diet: meat pies and fruitcake, then a “superb” birthday cake. Not a single dry sandwich made an appearance. So Ron’s first lunch did not simply reflect Molly’s ignorance of what food was likely to appeal to a teen-aged boy.
Ditto those dress robes for the Yule Ball. Molly purchased Harry robes that she thought would look well on him. Ron’s were not merely second-hand, but the exact color he’d always hated, so old-fashioned as to look like a girl’s dress to modern eyes, and decorated not merely with lace at the collar and cuffs, but with lace that looked “moldy.” (Which was so utterly awful that Ron-not Molly-finally cut the lace off, because frayed cuffs were a notable improvement to the thing’s looks.)
It must have taken considerable effort to find anything so exactly calculated to push Ron’s every button-obviously used, decades out of date, moldy, girly-looking to top that, and maroon.
One is reminded of nothing so much as the foul-smelling “bits of old elephant skin” we saw Petunia dye grey for Harry’s use at Stonewall High.
So why did Molly purchase that abomination for Ron? “Because… well, I had to get yours secondhand, and there wasn’t a lot of choice!”
While her husband and children were off LITERALLY throwing away money at the QWC.
Right. That’s why Petunia didn’t buy Harry a new Stonewall uniform, too.
Yet the next year, when Arthur’s secure if underpaid job had been endangered by his support of Dumbledore, upon being notified the very day before term started that Ron had been made a prefect, Molly suddenly found enough spare change to buy Ron a new BROOM. The latest Cleansweep, even-not a Firebolt, of course, but quite a decent ‘stick.
Then the following year, for the first time ever, we saw Prefect Ron inside Madam Malkin’s being fitted for new Hogwarts robes. Why? Because his old ones were an inch too short.
LIKE THEY WERE HIS FIRST YEAR.
(Down, girl. Down, I say.)
But the new broom and robes bestowed on Ron for being made Prefect at least make it clear that Molly was never simply neglecting Ron as such, or favoring Percy the way the Dursleys consistently favored Dudley over Harry. It’s more that she was like Slughorn, choosing to bestow her positive attention (and the family money) only on those she deemed worthy.
Hold that thought.
But let’s stop making Molly the heavy here. Ron and the twins saw the inequality as being their mum’s fault for playing favorites. Their dad’s fault, conversely, was in not making enough money to afford new robes, etc., for everybody-a mistake the twins were determined never to repeat. So it seemed that way to us.
But Arthur was in on it too; on giving his children differential access to family resources, both money and attention.
Which parent was it who couldn’t even be bothered to come to King’s Cross to see his little boy off for his first year at Hogwarts, after all?
I mean, seriously!
Harry managed to take off from the Ministry to be there for his second-born’s first trip, and both Ron and Hermione for theirs. Draco was there for Scorpius. I feel sure that Arthur himself had been there for Bill.
But Ron didn’t rate a send-off from Arthur.
Though Ginny (or perhaps Harry), the following year, did.
We have, further, Ron’s statement that Percy’s new owl had been a reward from their dad.
Finally, how often do we see Arthur troubling to talk to his youngest son? Or to any of his kids, really?
So Arthur is a part of it. It’s not just Molly.
It seems that the official Weasley family policy is to give their children careless affection but minimal attention (and expenditure), until and unless a child proves itself to require correction or to deserve a reward.
Which seems abominable to us, because we consider it a parent’s duty to love and support all their children equally, even when the children do (or are) things that disappoint their parents. We consider it old-fashioned, unacceptable, even outrageous, to treat one child with obvious favoritism, or to withhold decent treatment from another.
To, say, entail all of the family wealth on the oldest son and scant the others. To educate the boys but not the girls. To throw the gay sixteen-year-old son out on the street to whore himself or starve. To murder the pregnant-out-of-wedlock daughter. To dump the disabled baby on an institution’s doorstep, or to expose it on a mountain.
These actions seem to us to be unacceptable and extreme. Yet we know that such things have been done, and that some people, in some cultures, would judge (some of) those actions to be perfectly acceptable. Or even, perhaps, obligatory. What one would expect a good parent to do.
We don’t. We consider it to be the parents’ duty to love and support all their children. Unconditionally. But then, we think of having children as a privilege, and that the parents therefore intrinsically owe the child for having indulged themselves in having it. That, at the very least, they owe the child a decent upbringing.
We don’t consider it to be the children’s duty to meet their parents’ every (reasonable, socially-approved) expectation, nor that it’s the parents’ inalienable right (or possibly duty) to withhold or withdraw attention, privileges, even life itself, if those familial expectations are not met.
But Purebloods do, apparently.
Because the Weasleys are not the only family we see doing so.
Look at Neville. First seen receiving his Gran’s sigh of disappointment for losing track of Trevor. Casually mentioning at the first Hogwarts feast that he was repeatedly assaulted, at least twice almost killed, by his Great Uncle Algie’s attempts to “force some magic out of me.” The same family personage (head of the family?) who subsequently bought Neville Trevor (to reward Neville for getting into Hogwarts) and a rare plant (for his fifteenth birthday, after Neville had proven an outstanding Herbology student).
It gets worse when you think about it. Abusive families normally rigorously train their victims to keep the abuse secret. The Longbottoms did not. Neville discussed his family’s attempt to murder him for being “all-Muggle” quite casually. Clearly, no one in his family, or in his family’s circle, saw anything noteworthy in a child from a good Wizarding family being assaulted or killed for seeming non-magical.
Just as in ancient Rome the paterfamilias could legally disown a child, sell it into slavery, or have it killed for not meeting his expectations. Even an adult child.
Consider the Black family tree in this light. Future headmaster Phineas Nigellus’s older brother Sirius died at the age of eight.
The same age Neville would have died at, had he not magically bounced.
And in every generation, we see people stricken from the Black family tree. Phineas’s grandson Marius, for being a Squib. Three daughters of the family, all for marrying against the family’s wishes. Two other sons of the house for untoward politics, and a third for supporting the second.
These are the Blacks, a top-of-the-trees family. It’s utterly acceptable, in their world-the Wizarding World-to cast a child off for non-conformity.
Or for being (magically) powerless. In that case the casting-off seems all but mandatory.
As, apparently, it’s the norm in the WW to lavish admiration on those whose magic is unusually strong. What other reason can there be to appoint Albus Dumbledore headmaster and head of the Wizangamot, and to consider him for Minister for Magic? His own greatest supporters, like Percy when he was toeing the family line in book one, considered him to be “a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes.”
In our world, being a mad genius is not the qualification we look for in our leaders and administrators. But in the WW, being thought the “best wizard in the world” trumps all other considerations and determine that Dumbledore should be offered any honor or position he wants. And that same blind worshipping of power is apparently what enabled Tom Riddle’s rise-even after his crimes were fully acknowledged, people like Ollivander could say that Tom did “great things-terrible, yes, but great.”
While those whose magical power is lacking are scorned, exiled, or killed.
The Prewetts apparently follow the Blacks, not the Longbottoms, in their treatment of Squibs, since Molly’s second cousin, the one the family never talks about (or to), survived to become an accountant.
Though perhaps survival is really a matter of luck, not family choice. Perhaps the protocol is: if the potentially-deadly assault on a suspected Squib child should prove fatal, good riddance to bad rubbish. But if the child survives, but not by using magic, it’s bad form to kill it afterwards. Just turf it out.
Just so long as you get rid of it.
Filch is the only adult Squib we see living in the WW. But we know of two living in the Muggle world. And we know of a third, disowned by his family, and a (suspected) fourth, almost murdered as a child.
Ron told us that Squibs are quite unusual. But maybe what’s really unusual is for them to survive to adulthood, and to stay a part of the WW. And of their own families.
But really, when you examine it closely, Neville’s treatment by his Pureblood family parallels Ron’s by his. Neglected and berated until he’d proven himself; given gifts and praise once he’d measured up. Except that Ron (like Harry) was only assaulted by bigger children within the family (specifically, by the twins: the spider, the puffskein-killing, the Unbreakable Vow), not by older relatives trying to force magic out of him.
And both were sent to school with second-hand wands, even though everyone knows that a wand that hasn’t chosen one is hard to work with….
Stop now and look at Pureblood wand-giving.
I’d argued previously that it was the normal Pureblood practice to send their scions off to Hogwarts with hand-me-down wands-that Draco, too started with a family wand at first-since it was his mother who went off to Ollivander’s to be fitted in PS.
(Possible further evidence: “Charlie’s” wand, passed on to Ron, was so battered and chipped that the unicorn hair was “nearly poking out.” Seen any other wand get that battered in six or seven years of use? Even the twins’? Me neither. I think that wand was elderly when Charlie first used it.)
I’d previously argued that the Purebloods did this to force their scions to learn adaptability-to learn how to make an unchosen wand work for them.
Now I wonder if the reasoning wasn’t much simpler-that a Pureblood child is never given a wand of hir own until s/he’s done something to earn it.
Ron, after all, didn’t get his new one at the beginning of PoA when his old was snapped almost in half in the car crash. He got it, not when the battered used thing was broken beyond use, but instead after he’d helped Harry to save his little sister from the chamber (and been awarded TWO HUNDRED house points by Dumbledore). Neville, similarly, got a wand of his own, after five years of making do with one that didn’t work well for him, as a reward for successfully battling Death Eaters at the Ministry.
We don’t know when Draco got his new wand. But we do know when he got something else that he’d long wanted and argued for.
Harry decided at their first meeting that Draco was as spoiled as Dudley. Because Draco said, “I think I’ll bully father into getting me one [a racing broom] and I’ll smuggle it in somehow.”
Thing is, Harry never re-evaluated the Malfoys’ supposed pampering in light of the fact that Draco DIDN’T show up at Hogwarts with a racing broom. Nor had any strings been pulled to get the first-year a free berth on the Slytherin Quidditch team. Indeed, Lucius and Narcissa not only didn’t break all the rules into pieces for their cherished only child well before the start of term-they didn’t do so even AFTER those rules had already been broken (by Dumbles and Minerva) for the Potter boy.
Draco did not get a racing broom for that first Christmas, nor even for his twelfth birthday. We know that, because he was still broomless in late August when Harry eavesdropped on the Malfoys in Knockturn Alley.
Listen to Lucius in Borgin & Burke, that (according to Harry) blindly doting father who can deny his Draco-kins nothing. First Lucius curtly ordered his son to touch nothing. Then he asserted that he wouldn’t buy him a present in addition to the racing broom he’d already promised (but not purchased). Then he reproved Draco for imprudently admitting to being less than fond of Harry Potter. Then he spoke “coldly” about about his son’s fitness to be “more than a thief or a plunderer,” , with specific reference to his son’s imperfect grades, when Draco begged again for a present, this time specifically a Hand of Glory.
“It’s not my fault,” retorted Draco. “The teachers all have favorites, that Hermione Granger-“
“I would have thought you’d be ashamed that a girl of no wizard family beat you in every exam.”
(Which suggests to me rather strongly that Hermione was the only one who did beat Draco in every class, or even in most classes; if Draco’s grades were like, say, Ron’s, he couldn’t argue that he’d lost the TOP spot merely due to staff favoritism. So Draco must have been nearly at the top of the class, possibly second. And this wasn’t good enough for Lucius; Lucius wanted and expected his son to come in first. )
No, whatever Harry still managed to believe, the Malfoys were not the second Dursleys, blindly favoring their own, insensible of any of his flaws, ascribing any criticism or poor marks received by him to other people’s malice or misunderstanding, and indulging his every whim.
So, when do we finally see Draco with his own new racing broom? Well, the same time we see the other six new Nimbus 2001s-the Saturday after the start of term, when the Slytherin Quidditch team arrived to train their new Seeker.
So it’s possible that the new racing broom was Draco’s reward for making the team. (Which would certainly explain his blind fury at Granger’s slander, subsequently repeated all over the school….)
Or Draco’s belated reward for doing well on his first year exams, even if he did let Granger beat him-though one would expect such a reward at the beginning of the holidays, not after the end.
Or, most likely of all, since Lucius and Draco were talking about it during their end-of-summer trip to the Alleys, the broom might have been Draco’s promised prize for some summer achievement, for accomplishing some magical task set him by his parents to atone for having come in behind Granger on those exams.
(As in, when did Draco learn Serpensortia? That’s a NEWT-level spell, according to the Lexicon-confirmed indirectly by Miss Granger, who only learned to conjure birds in sixth year….)
Note further that Lucius did not purchase one racing broom, but seven. While heavy-handedly emphasizing the Malfoy wealth, this also meant that Lucius did not help Draco to outstrip his teammates (like Harry had). The effect of the Malfoy gift was to give the entire Slytherin TEAM an advantage, not the Malfoy heir. (So to outsiders, this may have obscured the question of whether Draco himself had earned a racing broom as a reward….)
But what’s crucial is to recognize that Harry was in error when he read Draco as being spoiled like Dudley, since Harry passed on that error to all of us readers.
However, the evidence is incontrovertible: unlike the Dursleys, Lucius and Narcissa did NOT give their son everything he asked for, whenever he asked. Draco asked for that broom a full year before he got it; he asked for a Hand of Glory in book two, and only obtained it in book six. Draco must surely have whined for an invisibility cloak once he realized that Potter had one, and he never got that at all.
So it really does seem that the Malfoys, like the Weasleys and the Longbottoms, required their scion to EARN any special privileges and presents. Within the differences imposed by the families’ differing financial situations, Draco was no more spoiled than Ron or Neville. He, like they, had to earn any indulgences. The main difference is that for the Malfoys (and apparently for the Longbottoms, since Neville was never described as shabbily dressed), new school robes instead of hand-me-downs count as a standard expenditure, not as one of the privileges that a child must earn.
Moreover, on this reading of Pureblood parenting rules, Molly and Arthur showing Harry more consideration than they do their own youngest son makes sense. If the Pureblood way is to withhold (most) privileges and attention until a child has proven worthy, well-Harry already has. Any privileges showered on The-Boy-Who-Lived, he’d already earned.
What did Pureblood Ginny flute in that valentine? “…he’s really divine, The hero who conquered the Dark Lord.”
Wanna bet Florean Fortescue was a Pureblood? And that he never indulged his own son with sundaes every hour?
Which is also why Filius was so enthused about Harry’s being gifted with a broom and allowed to play on the Gryffindor team. (If Filius wasn’t a Pureblood, he’d certainly acculturated by then.)
I mean, think about it. Slytherin had had a long streak winning both the Quidditch Cup and the House Cup-for most (all?) of the kids, their entire school career. Of course the students of ALL the other houses would want to see Slytherin’s winning streak broken, and would cheer on anyone who seems to promise to do so.
But why would Filius feel the same? He’d been at Hogwarts a long time (at least since the seventies). More, he’s a Ravenclaw-he’s not going to get that excited about a few-year winning streak. Such things will even out.
So if Filius doesn’t approve of a first year flyer being given a broom BY THE SCHOOL and made Seeker because he’s desperate to break the Slytherin winning streak, he must approve of the flagrant rule-breaking because he considers HARRY to merit such a dispensation.
This is, after all, the wizard who fell off his books with excitement at the honor of speaking Potter’s name.
Another Florean or Dedalus indeed.
Free ice cream sundaes every hour, free brooms, privileges denied all other children?
That’s just how the world is supposed to work-them as gots (unusual magical power), gets.
So Molly and Arthur showing more consideration and attention to Harry than to their younger children is simply another expression of this. He had earned their attention (indeed, their adulation), by being the Boy-Who-Lived; their own younger children hadn’t yet.
But if this is the Pureblood view of parenting-that one’s children might rightly be cast off (or killed) for disappointing family expecations, for turning out a Squib or marrying a Muggle or holding the wrong politics… that it’s acceptable to neglect (or assault) one’s young children until they prove themselves worthy heirs to Pureblood privilege…. but conversely that those who do prove worthy should be rewarded lavishly, if need be at the expense of non-performing siblings or peers….
Well. Purebloods are dominant in Wizarding society and politics, but they are numerically a minority. Three-quarters of the population has been contaminated by Muggle blood. And perhaps by some Mugglish ideas of how good parents should act.
Lavishing adulation on a celebrity, after all, has a thriving Muggle tradition in support, independent of Wizarding rationales. Neglecting or abusing one’s own children-well, okay, that also does have a well-attested history among us Muggles. But it’s not socially approved .
Look at poor Barty Crouch Senior. The populace turned against him when he disowned his only child and sent him to Azkaban. Indeed, they had the nerve to blame him-him!-for Junior’s turning to Voldemort. Said he’d not paid enough attention to the boy before he’d earned those twelve NEWTs.
As though young Barty had previously done anything to earn a father’s care and concern!
Part IV: The Bogeyman in the Family Closet-Squibs
Let’s turn our attention back to Neville and his family. Up until he was eight, his family was terrified he was “all-Muggle”-his grandmother broke out crying in joy when he finally showed some magic.
Note, please, that Neville unhesitatingly interpreted his elders’ happiness at the outcome of Algie’s final test as them being pleased that Neville had managed to prove himself magical. Not as them being pleased that Neville had managed to survive his great uncle’s latest murder attempt.
Think about that. Think about being a little boy, thinking about that.
But the Longbottom elders still thought that Neville might not be magical enough to get into Hogwarts, and so were similarly overjoyed when he got his letter… But then for Neville’s first several years, the boy still seemed inept at magic-subject of teachers’ negative attention/evaluations in (at least) Potions, Charms, and Transfigurations.
As late as fourth year, Minerva was berating Neville in front of the full class for his poor performance, and he was still being treated as a butt by some of his schoolmates (at least by the Weasley twins, although Malfoy seems to have left off by then).
As near as we can tell it was the Lestranges’ escape halfway through his fifth year that shocked Neville into really buckling down and applying himself to mastering wand-using magic; before then his only good subject was Herbology.
But then once Neville did buckle down he got quite good quite rapidly; in the DA, he mastered the Shield Charm second only after Hermione. So he beat out students older than him. When he took the OWLs at the end of that year, he passed at least four-to his O in Herbology were added an A in Transfigurations and E’s in Charms and DADA.
Which means that the kid dismissed as a probable Squib at eight, a near-Squib who barely scraped into school at eleven, and a duffer whose incompetence merited a public rating by his head of house at fourteen, at fifteen took more OWLs than either of the Weasley twins. And did as well as Hermione on at least two of them.
And he did so, unlike Hermione, using a second-hand wand.
How well would Neville have done on the OWLs, if he’d had his own wand to take them? Better, if he’s had his own, compatible, wand, by the time he started seriously training himself in spell-casting, half-way through that last year?
We can never know. We do know that the Longbottom family in 1988, in 1991, would never have predicted for Neville either four (or more) OWLs or a career as a Hogwarts professor.
So one can be a very solid performer, decidedly above average, in late adolescence, without ever having been precocious. Indeed, without ever having had any visible magical outbreaks at ALL as of age eight, and almost none as of age eleven.
Had Great Uncle Algie not dropped Neville out that window (after pushing the child off Blackpool pier and assorted other attacks had failed to elicit magic), perhaps the Longbottoms’ first proof that Neville wasn’t a Squib would have been his Hogwarts letter.
However, most of the WW seems to suffer from a serious misunderstanding of what Squibs are, and what Squibs are capable of doing.
Consider Mrs. Figg’s interrogation in OotP. The Wizengamot asked her if Squibs can see Dementors. Which is to say, they don’t already know. Squibs are apparently so horrific a possibility for the Purebloods that they avoid studying Squibs’ actual natures and capacities--which might in fact vary dramatically between individuals. Mrs. Figg was asked whether Squibs can see Dementors, not whether she could. One size fits all, when it probably doesn’t.
Consider the fact that Argus Filch, longtime Hogwarts caretaker, wasn’t “outed” as a Squib until CoS. How could that even be possible? I mean, in our world, if someone is blind, or unable to walk, polite acquaintances would not go around harping on that fact. But no one simply wouldn’t know!
Well, it seems from the questions asked Arabella that most witches and wizards accept Ron’s simplistic definition: a Squib is someone who was born into a wizarding family but hasn’t got any magic powers. Kind of the opposite of Muggle-born wizards, but Squibs are quite unusual.
Yet Argus Filch can, demonstrably, see and inhabit and clean Hogwarts castle; he can interact (heatedly!) with a non-corporeal being such as Peeves; he can use charmed artifacts like the Probity Probe. People who haven’t got any magic powers, like you and me, couldn’t do any of these things. Ergo, Argus doesn’t completely lack magic. Ergo he’s a weak wizard, not a Squib.
Except he is. A Squib.
The real definition of a Squib seems to be, someone who can’t channel and control magic enough to use a wand consistently.
And most wizards, especially most Purebloods, don’t admit this. They believe, or choose to believe, that Squibs lack magic entirely. Like Muggles do. There’s not a spectrum or range of magic powers with wand-control marking one arbitrary cut-off-a difference in quantity not kind between them and us. No, instead a human must either possess magic, absolutely, or completely lack it. Muggles and Squibs on one side of the line, witches and wizards on the other.
One odd benefit of this blinkered viewpoint is that those Squibs who, like Argus, can make limited use of magic, might have been treated quite decently by their ignorant family until the Hogwarts letter failed to arrive. My little one does too have magic-s/he is not a Squib!
Neville’s trauma, then, came from having a family that wasn’t ignorant.
As in, what do you think it think it does to a proud old Pureblood family’s matrimonial prospects, when the line’s inbreeding makes it start throwing Squibs?
Part V: The Black Family Tree
If you don’t accept the tree as canon, skip this part. But here’s a possible explanation for one of the tree’s weirdest set of dates. Headmaster Phineas’s grandson Pollux was born in 1912. And in 1925, when he was 12 or 13, his wife Irma (nee Crabbe) presented him with his oldest child Walburga. Irma subsequently presented Pollux with two sons, the younger born in 1929.
Interestingly enough, Pollux’s oldest cousin, Arcturus, also had his first child in 1925, and his last in 1929.
And Phineas Nigellus himself died the same year his first great-grandchildren were born, at the shockingly young age (for a wizard) of 78.
Now, of course, there are a lot of ways to connect these dots. Phineas’s illness, say, prompted his oldest grandson to speed up his marriage plans, and Pollux and Irma got caught in the shrubberies during the festivities and had a wandpoint wedding, followed in December by a little girl….
One problem with this reading is the apparent status of the only Crabbes we know. Vince and his dad may be Purebloods, but they seem to be born minions, not at the same social level as the Malfoys and the Blacks. It’s quite shocking in DH when Vince finally disobeys Draco.
Only, sorry, if a twelve-year-old aristocrat tumbles a minion, even if he impregnates her, his family doesn’t respond by making him marry her. And hers can’t. Holding the Blacks responsible for the maintenance of the child, maybe. But marriage??!
But there are two relevant dates on the Black family tree that are hidden from us.
Pollux had two younger sisters, born in 1915 and 1920. And a brother. What was the date that Marius’s name was added to the tree? And when did the family finally burn his name off?
And how long before they did so had they been concerned that he might be a Squib?
Marius’s birth date fell between those of his sisters. Let’s split the difference, and assume that Marius was born in late 1917 or early 1918. And that around 1924, when he was six or seven, his family’s uneasiness about the child’s magical backwardness finally found voice in the dread word, “Squib.”
Especially if his grandfather, Headmaster Black, remembered enough to realize that his own older brother Sirius’s death at age eight might not have been as accidental as his family had claimed at the time.
Well, if the worst were true, if they killed Marius now no outside would ever know of the blight on the family (twice now in three generations!)…. But someone (Phineas himself? Violetta? Cygnus?) refused to countenance that simple solution.
Only, once the boy failed to get his Hogwarts letter (due in the summer of 1929), the scandal would be revealed, and the Blacks would be known to have produced a Squib. Worse, two, if someone thought to reconsider the first Sirius’s early death.
(In fact, even if Sirius HAD died of illness or misadventure, once Marius were known to be a Squib, people would start assuming that the same had been true of his great-uncle, and that the family had killed the child off to hide their shame.)
They were the Blacks, no one of better blood, but who would marry them if they’d started to throw Squibs every other generation?
So the family panicked and pushed through marriages between Marius’s oldest cousin and a MacMillan (with a mere six generations of Wizarding blood), and between Marius’s older brother and a Crabbe. Because the MacMillans and Crabbes would be so flattered at the alliance that they wouldn’t think it through that the family must have been desperate to have invited them, much less to have married off a twelve-year-old….
Phineas Nigellus died shortly after he’d secured his name’s continuation for another generation.
Then in 1929, Marius’s status as a Squib was revealed to the entire WW when he didn’t receive a Hogwarts letter. And the indignant Irma and Melania refused to bear any more possibly-tainted children.
Jodel points out that since witches and wizards seem to have (potentially) a prolonged lifespan, but not an extended youth, witches of childbearing age must be at a premium. Marius’s two male first cousins who were unmarried as of the scandalous revelation never did find mates, nor did Marius’s older sister. His three female first cousins did, though one had to settle for a blood traitor.
As to Marius’s baby sister… We don’t know when precisely Charlus Potter married Dorea, nor whether the pair deliberately put off having children. We do know that by the time Dorea conceived her only child, the Potters had ascertained that Pollux’s and her cousins’ children (ten listed on the tree, plus however many Burkes and Weasleys) were all fine, not a Squib to be found among them.
Still, the Potters were so relieved that their son showed early magical aptitude that they spoiled him rotten.
And this is why the Longbottoms were so worried about Neville-ever since Harfang married Callidora, they’d been afraid that that fatal Black taint might show itself in her descendents…..
Part VI: A Theory of Child Development
Neville was apparently unusual in being such a late bloomer. Note, however, that he was identified, not as being late to develop control, but as being intrinsically weak at magic: by his family, by himself, and by most of his teachers.
(Another person misidentified as “weak” when he must merely have been late to develop, was Peter Pettigrew. Sorry, but anyone who masters the Animagus transformation at all-much less at age fifteen!-is not a weak or talentless wizard. If Peter had buckled down like Neville and set himself to learn five years of spells in a few months, he might have shocked Minerva and his friends by getting an O on his Transfigurations OWL and E’s on several others. But of course Remus was the only Marauder permitted to study openly. Sigh for the road not taken….)
But if Neville was so exceptional that no-one even identified him as a late bloomer rather than “weak,” what’s normal development for child witches and wizards?
Well, at the other extreme to Neville, infants can display inborn powers-Tonks and Teddy, we are told, both started changing their hair color within hours of birth. Completely involuntarily, of course-a newborn isn’t even aware that it has hair (when it does), much less choose to go brunette. Presumably every time the baby had a bowel movement or a tantrum, its hair changed color in response….
Moreover, all those people who went around calling Harry “the hero who conquered the Dark Lord” had to have believed that a fifteen-month-old could have had a burst of uncontrolled magic strong enough to save himself from Voldemort. Even though, once that baby grew old enough to attend Hogwarts, his controlled magic was nothing particularly special.
But of course Harry, as Hagrid pointed out to him when Harry doubted he could be a wizard, had also had other, more predictable outbursts of baby magic-“made things happen when you was scared or angry”.
It was that Neville didn’t that made his family decide he might be a Squib.
Consider what Sev told Lily when she was worried about getting in trouble for having already done magic out of school: “We’re all right. We haven’t got wands yet. They let you off when you’re a kid and you can’t help it. But once you’re eleven,” he nodded importantly, “and they start training you, then you’ve got to go careful.”
(Well, of course, Harry DID get let off in the matter of Aunt Marge. But that was political.)
But Severus seems to be suggesting that the assumption is that children’s pre-Hogwarts, wandless magic must all be uncontrolled (therefore never subject to punishment), but that once training/wand-carrying starts, all accidental magic stops.
Yet although Harry’s magical outbreaks were indeed all involuntary, Lily, Tom, and possibly Severus, had developed some wandless control of their magic pre-Hogwarts.
But this is apparently not expected.
Though among Purebloods, messing around a bit with wand or cauldron before Hogwarts starts is considered normal, just as doing underage magic on one’s family’s property (and presumably under their supervision) is in practice winked at between school terms.
I’d long assumed that Draco’s “perfect” slug-stewing in his first class was due to private tutoring. But indeed Ron told us this explicitly: “I tried to turn him [Scabbers] yellow yesterday to make him more interesting, but the spell didn’t work.”
But it’s not expected that a wandless child could have any control over their magic. And it is expected that such a child might be given to uncontrolled outbursts of magic when angry or frightened.
Let’s look at Harry’s episodes. At Dudley’s birthday outing, Harry vanished the glass after Dudley knocked him to the floor. But a month later, when he and Dudley were pummeling each other and Vernon trying to get those mysterious letters, no magical outburst helped him. One time when Dudley’s gang chased him, Harry found himself flying up to the chimney. Every other time, Harry had to rely on his legs to escape-or did not, and got beaten up. One time Harry shrank a horrible sweater so he didn’t have to wear it-the rest of the time, he resignedly donned Dudley’s awful cast-offs.
Strange things (magical outbreaks) did indeed happen around Harry when he was scared or angry. But by no means every time.
Why not?
If strong emotion triggers the outbreak, why doesn’t it happen every time the magical child feels a sufficiently strong emotion? Why didn’t Harry’s magic automatically intervene to save him every time he felt threatened?
For that matter, Harry’s last involuntary burst happened when he was thirteen. Why didn’t he ever have an outbreak at Hogwarts? If Neville could bounce when dropped from a window, why didn’t Harry bounce when he was knocked from his broom in CoS? (And why didn’t Snape expect Harry to in PS?) If Harry could “blow up” Aunt Marge when she taunted him about his parents, why did he never do so to Professor Snape? If his magic could whisk him away from beating beat up by Dudley, why did it do nothing to help him when he confronted Quirrell!mort or Diary!Tom?
What, Harry just never got scared enough or angry enough at Hogwarts to trigger any episodes?
Right. That works well as an explanation.
So it really does seem to be the case that regular use of controlled magic precludes involuntary outbursts. Which is what Aberforth told us about Ariana-“she wouldn’t use magic, but she couldn’t get rid of it; it turned inward and drove her mad, it exploded out of her when she couldn’t control it…”
Note that we don’t see Lily-Sue or Tom have uncontrolled magical outbursts-and that Lily didn’t believe that Sev would, or Petunia that Lily’s son did. Because both Tom and Lily had taught themselves wandless control (being Muggle-raised and not knowing any better) while magical-raised children (and brainless Harry) were still having accidents.
But let’s think about magical-raised children. It seems to be the case that if you’re capable of channeling magic, if you don’t regularly perform controlled magic you’ll have uncontrolled magical outbursts. The controlled magic must, as it were, bleed off the charge so it doesn’t build up to a dangerous level. But if the magical charge isn’t bled off by continued use, strong emotion can eventually trigger an “explosion” of magic. The strength of which seems to depend both on the strength of the emotion (poor Ariana seems to have been terrified of herself) and on the power that’s accumulated since the last discharge.
So, other things being equal, a child who’s given to fits of temper, like Harry, would be more prone to magical accidents than a more even-tempered child. And a child who uses magic regularly, even if only in a small way, would be far less prone to having accidents than one who has no occasion or opportunity to do so.
So much so, that once children start carrying wands, it’s just assumed that any magic they subsequently perform must be deliberate.
Except… children raised in wizarding families do regularly perform magic in a small way.
Harry was given a broom for his first birthday. However careful parents may be, toddlers do sometimes get hold of Daddy’s wand and swell a slug. And so forth.
Indeed, toy brooms seems to be ubiquitous in the WW-one-year-old Harry had one, five-year-old Fred had one, two two-year-old witches were riding them at the QWC…. Nor is it likely that brooms are the only magical toys.
Which means that children raised in magical families are regularly using small amounts of controlled magic from the time that they are toddlers. Making magical outbursts less common, although they are known to occur. At least with the more hot-tempered kids-though not, perhaps, as often as with Harry.
Only, most magical families wouldn’t worry if their kids didn’t have magical tantrums, because they would take it for granted that of course their children aren’t Squibs. Squibs are quite unusual, you know, and Arabella has magic. Look at how she loves to ride her little broom, and how she gets on with the family Kneazle!
The only people who would worry, would be those who already had a Squib disgracing the family. Who therefore might know that (some) Squibs can use (some) charmed objects, and who have reason to fear the taint might reappear.
You know, like the Longbottoms.
And the Weasleys.
Part VII: The Woes of Mrs. Weasley
Which brings us to another possible explanation for the large size of the Weasley family. And here I do think we might be down to Molly, not to Arthur-and-Molly.
Molly is far from a perfect mother, but she does passionately love her children. All of them. Even the ones she passive-aggressively neglects, even the ones she’s furious with. We see this in her reaction to the Twins after the Death Eater scare at the QWC. We see it in her clock. We see it in her Boggart (which, note, included both Ron-who’d always seemed last and least-and estranged-Percy).
Neville showed us what a nightmare it was to be a Pureblood late-bloomer.
What’s it like to be a parent in that culture?
What must it be like, for a loving mother, to be told by your culture that if your children are defective, it’s your duty to kill or banish them? (Yes, I’m thinking of Bujold’s story “The Mountains of Mourning.” And I feel as sorry for Ma Mattulich as for Harra.)
Only, in the magical world, you can’t usually tell at birth. You might worry, and worry, and desperately love your child, and not know for sure until it is five, or eight, or even eleven, if you might be required ultimately to prune it from the family tree as a diseased branch.
When we first met the Weasley family, Ron gloomily expounded on the burden he faced of living up to his brothers. Only, just because his oldest brothers were all accomplished wizards then, that doesn’t mean they need have been particularly precocious.
Neville proves that.
Molly Prewett has a second cousin who’s a Squib. Arthur has a first cousin once removed who is. The pair had to have worried that their children might be at risk.
Even if-especially if-they never talked about it.
(Some) squibs can use charmed objects. So the fact that most of the children love to fly tells an informed mother nothing.
We only hear Ron mention one outbreak of spontaneous magic among the Weasley children. Fred, age five, got furious when Ron broke his toy broom, and turned Ron’s teddy bear into a spider.
Maybe there hadn’t been any dramatic outbursts noticed among the older children. Only, Molly could not do what Great Uncle Algie did-put the issue to the test by thrusting her boys into life-threatening situations to see if they’d survive by sparking magic.
And indeed, the two oldest Weasley boys both seem sturdy, easy-going sorts-not easily frightened, not easily riled. And neither had a Dudley going after them all the time, like Harry had, to trigger him. (At least not until the twins got old enough to add their distinctive flair for mayhem to the family’s dynamics …. )
Molly had two sons two years apart. And then she stopped for a while, leaving almost a four year gap between Charlie and Percy. Bill had turned five when she got pregnant with Percy. Six when she got pregnant with the twins. Eight when she got pregnant with Ron. Ten when she got pregnant with Ginny.
And then she stopped.
Maybe it took her that long (and many) to be sure that she was safe.
That she could count on having at least one to keep.