Parenting in Pureblood Culture: a response to JosephineStone

[terri_testing]

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.

Comments

[oryx_leucoryx]

Brilliant! Connecting dots, following breadcrumbs - whether intentionally placed to mark a path or randomly scattered.

Is Rowling incapable of writing functional families or does she avoid doing so because such a family would be boring? (As Tolstoy said, happy families are all alike, miserable ones are each miserable in its own way.)

So while the Weasleys do have some problem with financial management, the extent of apparent poverty displayed by their choices of purchases for their younger children is exaggerated by a policy of not investing too much in a child that has yet to prove their worth? And as you point out, it isn't just money, it is time, and just any kind of attention. The twins figured out that their way at least gives them plenty of negative attention. Still, we have to consider that Molly bought Ron the awful robes a year after he got his own wand. Was the wand Arthur's idea, to which Molly objected ('I'm sure my great-aunt Muriel still keeps a spare wand or two...')? Or perhaps they really ran out of heritage wands when Ron's broke (didn't Ron say his parents wouldn't be able to get him a new one after buying a wand for Ginny?) and the awful robes were Molly's punishment to Ron for forcing her to buy him a wand he hadn't earned properly?

Another point regarding treatment of squibs - Muriel suspected Ariana of having been a squib based on the fact that she was being hidden from the time she was 6. I think it was she who mentioned that most magical children have their first magical breakthroughs by the age of 7.

Also, while in COS Argus self-identifies as a Squib, in POA the narrative voice calls him 'a failed wizard'.

Thanks for the tale of how Marius Black's squib-status affected the entire Black family and their relatives. I'm wondering about poor Irma. Was she around Pollux's age, and spent what should have been her Hogwarts years pregnant and nursing? Or perhaps she was a few years older and deemed unfit for marriage for some reason, making marriage to the Black boy an offer her family couldn't refuse? Did she do most of the rearing of her children or were they raised predominantly by their grandparents?

The way the Statute of Secrecy is enforced means magical children in Muggle homes cannot regularly perform magic in small ways during school breaks, making them more likely to keep having accidental magic into their teens. Bug or feature?

[terri_testing]

Erg. I wrote a totally brilliant response to your comments,and hit back instead of post. The world will never cease lamenting what we lost in that error.

Re: Ron's wand. Molly-and-Arthur would have agreed to buying a replacement sometime during the summer of 1993. When they were flush with cash, and Ron the hero who'd risked his own life to help Harry rescue Ginny from the Chamber. Only, help Harry, you see. What has he done on his own? And, as of the summer after the end of PoA, Hermione was the heroine who had rescued Sirius and Buckbeak, Harry the Stag-casting hero who'd saved the whole party from the Dementors.... Ron was the chump who'd had to be rescued, whose capture lured Our Heroes into danger, who'd defended the Death Eater Rat. I think it perfectly plausible that the older Weasleys might have reacted to Ron the same way the older, wiser, more experienced Ministry officials reacted to Percy: YOU SHOULD HAVE DETECTED THE SHAM! (that the rat was actually an Animagus; that the stressed superior was actually Imperiused.)

And if so, Molly might well have grossly resented sending Ron to the QWC. He should be being punished, not rewarded! Who SHOULD be rewarded this year were Hermione and Ron. But, realistically, the Weasley family couldn't take Ron's best friends to the QWC without bringing Ron as well...

[terri_testing]

RE Squibs. I think there's a lot of interesting doublethink going on in the WW On the one hand, anyone weak is in danger of being called a Squib. Or even a Muggle, On the other, the whole basis of Seclusion, and thus of wizarding society, is that never the twain shall meet. One is magical, or not.

Lsten to Neville, terrified he'll be killed by Slytherin's monster: "They went for Filch first. And everyone knows I'm almost a Squib." (Confirming, among other things, that for Neville, Argus counts as a Squib>" Listen to Marvolo Gaunt, screaming at his daughter for grubbing "on the floor like some filthy Muggle, what's your wand for, you uselss sack of muck... ditry Squibs!" even while said daughter performs unmistakable (if terrified and incompetent) magic.

But. The whole basis of Seclusion, the basis of Pureblood society, is that human magic-users can be strictly, utterly, completely, seprated for all time, from those humans utterly lacking magic.

It strikes me as Levitican The need to separate. And anything that insists on confounding boundaries, becomes at once UNCLEAN.

The beast that cleaveth the hoof, but cheweth not the cud. The child magic-born, whose magic is too weak to do hir any good. The base-born child whose magic is incontestably powerful!

The wrong such things do is the wrong of mere existence--by simply being, by recurring, by enduring, they question the categories.

Filthy Mudblood. Dirty Squib. The very existence of intermediate beings is unclean. Is the definition of Uncleanliness.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Based on Rowling's interviews, she intended to introduce a character who never did any magic before arriving at Hogwarts. (Fans often interpreted the hints to mean that one of the adult Muggles or Squibs would turn out to be magical, but when asked, this was how she explained it.) She also says somewhere that there is no minimal level of magic required to attend Hogwarts. Yet she shows us 2 Squibs clearly interacting with the magical world in ways Muggles cannot.

[vermouth1991]

Your very use of the term "doublethink" won me over immediately, terri. The WW is a terrifying place to live in, and no citizen so much as calls it out...

[terri_testing]

The way the Staute of Secrecy is enforced... well, that provoked my next post, above. Thanks!

[oryx_leucoryx]

Correction: It wasn't Muriel but Rita Skeeter in her article who made the connection between Ariana's age at the time Kendra started hiding her and the possibility she was a Squib.