Of Jo Rowling, Gryffindor tyranny, and Huffleclaw self-defense
Note: The previous entry’s warnings about offensive house generalizations and rank self-justification go double here. Also, I've probably been more American-centric than is seemly; sorry 'bout that, but the U.S. is the only country I know well enough to feel comfortable making offensive generalizations about.
One of the things I found most interesting when I first started gabbing to other Potter fans about the Potterverse is that not only do most readers voluntarily sort themselves into Hogwarts houses, they are, to a remarkable degree, not only honest but downright unapologetic about it if their personal Sorting Hats have placed them somewhere other than Gryffindor. This despite the series’ overwhelming insistence that good people who matter are all Gryffindors, bad people who matter are all Slytherins, and the rest of us are either onlookers or cannon fodder. People sometimes get pissed at Jo Rowling, a flaming Gryffindor herself, for the Snape-like favoritism she shows to her own house. But it's of limited use to blame Jo when the entire Muggle world is pretty much the same way.
When, in the "Year in the Life" documentary, Jo answered "Courage" to the question "What's your favorite virtue?", I was like, "Man, what a fucking Gryffindor answer! You know, Jo, suicide bombers are brave." But then, I'm a Ravenclaw: it's my job to qualify and equivocate like that.
The quick way of explaining Gryffindors is that they're leaders with moral fiber; the quick way of explaining Slytherins is that they're leaders without it. Within this schema, a wide variety of personality types are theoretically possible: introverted Gryffindors like Neville Longbottom, benign if brownnosing Slytherins like Slughorn. What unites people in these two houses, however, is that they are not only willing but able to directly impact other people's lives. In practice, this more often than not translates to social extroversion, although the famous Slytherin deviousness and cunning are good complements to a seemingly quiet disposition. It also means that, by hook or by crook, these two houses tend to dominate any social context they enter into.
In the working world, meanwhile, Slytherindors comprise the majority of the the "proactive," innovative people that corporations love to reward; in the public sphere, they account for the largest number of our politicians, media personalities (Glenn Beck! Hello!) and celebrities. (Reality TV is a possible exception to this rule; while the affinity that Slytherins potentially possess with this subculture is obvious, I think the other house chiefly involved in it must be Hufflepuffs - regular Joes who've already figured out that their hard work will not be rewarded by the American system, and who don't see why they shouldn't make an end run around that system to grab a bit of glory for themselves. Many of them are the same people who buy lottery tickets on the regular.)
Her Hufflepuff streak, which she tries to pass off as her whole identity, isn't a complete fiction. But anyone whose career was built to this extent on sleight of hand is Slytherin by definition.
Elsewhere in America, Hufflepuffs are disproportionately represented on the lower and middle rungs of corporate and administrative ladders and in service industries. They are not unknown in positions of leadership, though usually not the very top ones. When a highly competent, much-loved middle manager gets a pink slip, and everyone who worked under him or her walks around decrying the absence of corporate justice and testifying to their boss' wronged integrity, chances are good that that boss was a Hufflepuff.
Ravenclaws, similarly, may rise to positions of fairly high-level leadership if our vaunted cleverness is the right, usable kind of cleverness; more often, however, we spend our working lives struggling to get credit for our contributions and watching our backs so as not to get steamrollered by our less thoughtful, less scrupulous peers. In theory, there is one arena in American life that ought to be a haven for Ravenclaws: academia. Indeed, there are plenty of Ravenclaws in the academic world, and the mere fact that its powers-that-be are used to introspective types and prepared to accomodate them can be enormously comforting to our kind. In practice, however, academia is guilty of probably the single biggest bait-and-switch perpetrated by any major American subculture: promising a paradise of shared values centered in intellectual endeavor, it is actually just as brutally performance-based as corporate America, since it derives what limited power it has not from Americans' collective respect for the life of the mind but from its role as a gatekeeper of the American class system. And the job of the American class system is to keep some people out, while ensuring that those it does admit are constantly worried about holding onto their places. A hardnosed job like that is too important to be left to some dreamyheaded Ravenclaw or naively fairminded Hufflepuff; thus the upper ranks of colleges and universities are often as full of Gryffindors and Slytherins as the rest of the working world.
Oh, Stephen! Could you be one of my people?
So the Gryffindors and Slytherins continue to run things most of the time; though, since we like to think that good people can be powerful and that powerful people can be good, Gryffindors naturally get the most credit. (In fact, we often prefer to willfully mistake Slytherins for Gryffindors: John Edwards, anyone?) This pro-Gryffindor imbalance would seem to form a basis for alliances between the other three houses. Think what could have happened if, instead of conducting a stupid racist war against Muggles and their contaminated blood, Voldemort had tried to spearhead a civil rights movement for Slytherins, Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws. It still wouldn't have worked: the Slytherins would have taken for granted, or taken advantage of, the Huffleclaws, sowing disillusionment and desertion among our ranks and eventually fracturing the movement. But it might have made for a more geopolitically relevant conflict than the black-and-white one that's in the books.
I'm starting to sound like the Jeremiah Wright of Hogwarts houses here: "God damn Gryffindors!" Seriously, Gryffies, it’s not like that. I'm very fond of many of you brave-at-heart types, and I readily concede that your approach to life is not only more constructive than my own, but healthier and often more admirable. I get along well with most Gryffindors who aren't averse to thinking, and count several Gryffindors among my circle of friends; if truth be told, I've grown to quite like my previously maligned mentioned Gryffindor co-worker "Tracy" in a social context. Also, I retain a certain bedrock affection and respect for the thoughtful Gryffindor who currently occupies the White House, never having thought he'd be able to avoid tarnishing his halo with any number of fuckups and compromises. (Whatever happens, Obama will remain an almost incomprehensibly vast improvement over Dick Cheney, probably the purest Slytherin ever to helm our ship of state.*)
If my lefty brother ever finds out I've placed him and George W. Bush in the same house, he's gonna fuckin' kill me.
Nevertheless, Gryffindors have defined a standard of behavior by which all the rest of us are judged and most often found wanting; those of us in the other houses have no choice but to form our identities partly in response to the fact that we’re not you. Slytherins, of course, come the closest: they're the funhouse mirror reflections of Gryffindors. I nevertheless have a certain sympathy for the Slytherin devils of the world - partly, I admit, because they throw a wrench into the machinery of Gryffindor dominance, and prevent the formation of a Gryffindor monopoly of power that would not be healthy for anyone, including Gryffindors. Then, too, when Slytherins are in leadership positions it's harder for the public to maintain the dangerous illusion that power can be easily separated from the potential for its abuse - a situation that is not without its advantages. With Voldemort the manipulation and abusiveness are right out there, and can thus be guarded against; the same cannot be said of Cornelius Fudge, Rufus Scrimgeour, or Albus Dumbledore, all of whom were probably Gryffindors. Finally, there's the simple fact that I often relate better to my fellow sinners than to people whom the world sets up as my role models: a covetous, vengeful, vainglorious Slytherin, however screwed up, is sometimes easier to empathize with than an overly heroic Gryffindor. As with Voldemort and Snape, too, the Slytherin desire for power over others is often a reaction against an original individual powerlessness. Though its manifestation may be fucked up and abusive, that impulse is deeply human, and in essence sympathetic.
As for Huffleclaws, we don’t even have the consolation of ill-gotten power to soften the fact that we are not really taken seriously by the world, though it absolutely loves to pay our virtues lip service. Consider the treatment of Hufflepuffs in the Harry Potter books: if Snape thinks Harry is a pig being raised for slaughter, he should try sparing a thought for Cedric Diggory, who was conceived for death by his creator and bred for modesty and decency chiefly due to the tear-jerking foil these qualities would present to Voldemort’s power-grabbing heartlessness. The only other Hufflepuff with any significance in the books**, Tonks, meets with a similarly brutal death, and even had she avoided that, her house status would have been submerged via her marriage to a Gryffindor and the subsequent birth of an almost certainly Gryffindor heir (at least, Teddy Lupin's open snogging of his part-Veela cousin sounds more James Potter than Hufflepuff to me). For that matter, Tonks herself is quite Gryffindor-like; her main qualification for Hufflepuff status seems to be that she's working class. I mean, Gryffindors can be clumsy, can’t they?
Where Ravenclaws are concerned, only Cho Chang and Luna Lovegood have any importance at all, and only Luna plays even a supporting role in shaping the story’s outcome. The fact that there are no significant male Ravenclaw students is pretty interesting, given Jo’s, would it be fair to say, less conflicted attitude toward creating powerful male characters than female ones. Among the adult characters, meanwhile, there are no noteworthy Ravenclaws whatsoever unless Flitwick counts, a dubious proposition.*** (I like to think that Ollivander was a Ravenclaw, but that is highly speculative). In light of their lack of dramatic importance, the fact that Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are the two houses whose founders were women also makes me deeply suspicious.
Flitwick: So important he could undergo a dramatic makeover between movies three and four without anyone even noticing.
In Rowling's rendering, Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws don’t seem even to be cognizant of, let alone upset about, the fact that they are mostly abused or ignored by the story’s movers and shakers. But don’t the ruling classes always think, or pretend, that the lower ones are contented? Out here in the Muggle world, all is not quite so rosy among the proletariat. I’ve made a lot of possibly disparaging generalizations about Hufflepuffs in this post, so it should perhaps be noted that I come from a long line of the ‘puffs myself, and have all the simultaneous feelings of pride and shame, exasperation and defensiveness toward them that usually apply in such situations. I think of my own immediate family: my father, a farm kid turned tenured professor who is so tensely balanced between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw that I actually can’t assign him to a house; my mother, who followed my father into the suburbs and spent her entire adult life applying her Hufflepuff sticktoitiveness to a culturally foreign agenda whose masters had no use for her; and my Hufflepuff brother, a thoughtful and decent guy with entrenched feelings of social and professional misuse by the world. I myself have a strong Hufflepuff streak, which manifests itself in things like writing long journal entries that few people will read. (Embarking on quests you know at the outset are doomed: extremely Hufflepuff.) All of my family are more or less furious with the world and our places in it. And we’re hardly the only ones.
Even among Muggles, it's absolutely true that house status tends to run in families. For generations, no one in my family, neither the Hufflepuff majority nor the odd Ravenclaw, has really known anything about how to get on in the world, so how could any of them pass such knowledge down? The question is what people in such positions can do about it.
It's a question I've been thinking about constantly lately - partly because later this year I will turn 40, which really seems a little old to still be this mad at the universe. But it has occurred to me that this milestone, if properly harnessed, may turn out to be the unstoppable force that finally moves a number of previously immovable objects. I’ve long been aware of how grossly inadequate the Huffleclaw approach is to achieving certain ends in life, and have been trying to modify my own behavior for nearly as long. The results so far have been mixed.
For their sakes, I hope it's true.
I’ve had an unattractive Slytherin-style sense of grievance and desire for retaliation since long before the Harry Potter books were published, so naturally the first non-Huffleclaw attributes I attempted to graft onto my personality were Slytherin ones. While I failed embarassingly at the “manipulating others” aspect of the Slytherin character - my life has been notable for its lack of impact, either positive or negative, on others - a couple of other Slytherin characteristics did successfully take and became part of my makeup: self-interest and self-protectiveness. These qualities were in any event what I tried for, though my guess is that they more often presented as selfishness, thus alienating me that much further from other people. This is what comes of trying to co-opt the building blocks of personality types that are foreign to you: you handle them clumsily and without humor or ease, and the result is a jerky, uptight, graceless set of behaviors that, likely as not, will unnerve and alienate those around you.
I’m still here, however, so maybe that injection of Slytherin-ness wasn’t altogether pointless. But it obviously wasn’t enough, and the impasses I’ve now reached on several fronts of life have forced me to the vexing conclusion that there’s nothing else left: I’ve got to try and be more Gryffindor. The very idea makes me groan; if I’d ever known how to do that, wouldn’t I have done it in the first place? Wouldn’t my life have been easier and more enjoyable, wouldn't the world have been my oyster? Not only do I have no fucking idea how to act like a Gryffindor, part of me rejects the very notion as selling out. These are the people who already own the world, and I’m going to make some pathetic attempt to join their ranks and grasp at their power? My Ravenclaw pride revolts at this. I don’t want to be a Gryffindor, OK? I want to be accepted on my own terms, or at the very least to negotiate a new and better set of terms under which to be judged. Ideally, perhaps, I would cultivate just enough of a Gryffindor streak to see my objectives through, but remain essentially Ravenclaw behind the scenes. It would also be satisfying to have a Gryffindor impersonation in my repertoire that is good enough to thoroughly confuse all the people who thought they had my number.
I mean, isn't that one of the reasons we Snapefen admire him so much? He completely fucks with, and fucks up, the stereotype of his house, by incorporating the other houses so thoroughly into his modus operandi that you no longer know what to make of him. He risks his neck to impact the world for good, like a Gryffindor; he's all brainy and nerdy like a Ravenclaw; his doggedness and loyalty are pure Hufflepuff. It would be insulting to say that he transcends his house: he belonged in Slytherin at his Sorting, and Dumbledore’s backhanded compliment aside, he still belongs there at the end of the series. Rather, Snape breaks apart the very idea of Slytherin-ness, and forces that idea to expand so that it can include him. This, in the end, is what I aspire to myself: not to stop being a Ravenclaw, but to fuck with your notion of what a Ravenclaw is.
Speaking of people who don't sit neatly within house categories...quick, which house would you place MJ in? His public career has been Gryffindoresque in motivation, style and impact, while his introversion and ability to live inside his own head are very Ravenclaw; from childhood he worked his ass off Hufflepuff-style, and as for his Slytherin aspect...I don't think I even need to spell that one out.**** A complicated guy indeed - and good on him for that.
In the meantime, I’ll be over here, working on my Gryffindor imitation. If I seem a little crabby over the next few months, it won't only be because I'm pissed off at having to be more assertive; it'll be because anger is my way of being assertive. It's not suave or well-judged or aesthetically appropriate, I'm sure, but at least it's a forward-thrusting emotion that I understand. Meanwhile, it's going to be a bumpy ride, as they say. If you are one of the people I knock up against in my klutzy, angst-ridden desire to move forward, I apologize in advance.
*In spite of his lifelong allergy to hard work, I regard Dubya as a Hufflepuff who fell under an eight-year Imperius Curse. He does seem to be capable of loyalty and even, in a personal context, decency; moreover, Hufflepuff is the house of plodders, and Bush is definitely one of those.
**I could have sworn that somewhere in the books, Hagrid's house was given as, or implied to be, Hufflepuff; I was so sure of this that I actually told someone recently that it was the case. But the Harry Potter Wiki lists Hagrid as a Gryffindor, and cites a Barnes and Noble interview with Jo from 2000 in which she stated this unambiguously. The fact that Hagrid is too nice and/or dim to realize how thoroughly fucked over he has been by the miscarriage of justice that expelled him from Hogwarts and rendered him magically impotent for the rest of his life - his all too ready acceptance of his fate - suggests to me a Hufflepuff, not a Gryffindor; but then again, when Harry and Hagrid are discussing Malfoy's derogatory view of Hufflepuff in book one, and Hagrid says, "Better Hufflepuff than Slytherin," he doesn't seem as personally invested in his defense as an actual Hufflepuff would be. Also, Jo is fond of Hagrid, and - with the exception of Luna and maybe Tonks - Jo doesn't put people she's fond of in the Afterthought Houses.
***Continuing its streak of unnerving house assignments, the Harry Potter Wiki claims that Lockhart was a Ravenclaw. This unlikely assertion is based on an obscure photo included in the bonus features of the Chamber of Secrets DVD in which a student Lockhart is shown wearing Ravenclaw Quidditch robes. But since we're talking here about the most full-of-shit person in wizardkind, my guess is that the photo was staged for the Gadding with Ghouls press kit to enhance its author's literary credibility, and that Lockhart was a Slytherin.
****Just for starters, I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought of MJ while reading Rowling's physical descriptions of Voldemort.
One of the things I found most interesting when I first started gabbing to other Potter fans about the Potterverse is that not only do most readers voluntarily sort themselves into Hogwarts houses, they are, to a remarkable degree, not only honest but downright unapologetic about it if their personal Sorting Hats have placed them somewhere other than Gryffindor. This despite the series’ overwhelming insistence that good people who matter are all Gryffindors, bad people who matter are all Slytherins, and the rest of us are either onlookers or cannon fodder. People sometimes get pissed at Jo Rowling, a flaming Gryffindor herself, for the Snape-like favoritism she shows to her own house. But it's of limited use to blame Jo when the entire Muggle world is pretty much the same way.
When, in the "Year in the Life" documentary, Jo answered "Courage" to the question "What's your favorite virtue?", I was like, "Man, what a fucking Gryffindor answer! You know, Jo, suicide bombers are brave." But then, I'm a Ravenclaw: it's my job to qualify and equivocate like that.
The quick way of explaining Gryffindors is that they're leaders with moral fiber; the quick way of explaining Slytherins is that they're leaders without it. Within this schema, a wide variety of personality types are theoretically possible: introverted Gryffindors like Neville Longbottom, benign if brownnosing Slytherins like Slughorn. What unites people in these two houses, however, is that they are not only willing but able to directly impact other people's lives. In practice, this more often than not translates to social extroversion, although the famous Slytherin deviousness and cunning are good complements to a seemingly quiet disposition. It also means that, by hook or by crook, these two houses tend to dominate any social context they enter into.
In the working world, meanwhile, Slytherindors comprise the majority of the the "proactive," innovative people that corporations love to reward; in the public sphere, they account for the largest number of our politicians, media personalities (Glenn Beck! Hello!) and celebrities. (Reality TV is a possible exception to this rule; while the affinity that Slytherins potentially possess with this subculture is obvious, I think the other house chiefly involved in it must be Hufflepuffs - regular Joes who've already figured out that their hard work will not be rewarded by the American system, and who don't see why they shouldn't make an end run around that system to grab a bit of glory for themselves. Many of them are the same people who buy lottery tickets on the regular.)
Her Hufflepuff streak, which she tries to pass off as her whole identity, isn't a complete fiction. But anyone whose career was built to this extent on sleight of hand is Slytherin by definition.
Elsewhere in America, Hufflepuffs are disproportionately represented on the lower and middle rungs of corporate and administrative ladders and in service industries. They are not unknown in positions of leadership, though usually not the very top ones. When a highly competent, much-loved middle manager gets a pink slip, and everyone who worked under him or her walks around decrying the absence of corporate justice and testifying to their boss' wronged integrity, chances are good that that boss was a Hufflepuff.
Ravenclaws, similarly, may rise to positions of fairly high-level leadership if our vaunted cleverness is the right, usable kind of cleverness; more often, however, we spend our working lives struggling to get credit for our contributions and watching our backs so as not to get steamrollered by our less thoughtful, less scrupulous peers. In theory, there is one arena in American life that ought to be a haven for Ravenclaws: academia. Indeed, there are plenty of Ravenclaws in the academic world, and the mere fact that its powers-that-be are used to introspective types and prepared to accomodate them can be enormously comforting to our kind. In practice, however, academia is guilty of probably the single biggest bait-and-switch perpetrated by any major American subculture: promising a paradise of shared values centered in intellectual endeavor, it is actually just as brutally performance-based as corporate America, since it derives what limited power it has not from Americans' collective respect for the life of the mind but from its role as a gatekeeper of the American class system. And the job of the American class system is to keep some people out, while ensuring that those it does admit are constantly worried about holding onto their places. A hardnosed job like that is too important to be left to some dreamyheaded Ravenclaw or naively fairminded Hufflepuff; thus the upper ranks of colleges and universities are often as full of Gryffindors and Slytherins as the rest of the working world.
Oh, Stephen! Could you be one of my people?
So the Gryffindors and Slytherins continue to run things most of the time; though, since we like to think that good people can be powerful and that powerful people can be good, Gryffindors naturally get the most credit. (In fact, we often prefer to willfully mistake Slytherins for Gryffindors: John Edwards, anyone?) This pro-Gryffindor imbalance would seem to form a basis for alliances between the other three houses. Think what could have happened if, instead of conducting a stupid racist war against Muggles and their contaminated blood, Voldemort had tried to spearhead a civil rights movement for Slytherins, Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws. It still wouldn't have worked: the Slytherins would have taken for granted, or taken advantage of, the Huffleclaws, sowing disillusionment and desertion among our ranks and eventually fracturing the movement. But it might have made for a more geopolitically relevant conflict than the black-and-white one that's in the books.
I'm starting to sound like the Jeremiah Wright of Hogwarts houses here: "God damn Gryffindors!" Seriously, Gryffies, it’s not like that. I'm very fond of many of you brave-at-heart types, and I readily concede that your approach to life is not only more constructive than my own, but healthier and often more admirable. I get along well with most Gryffindors who aren't averse to thinking, and count several Gryffindors among my circle of friends; if truth be told, I've grown to quite like my previously maligned mentioned Gryffindor co-worker "Tracy" in a social context. Also, I retain a certain bedrock affection and respect for the thoughtful Gryffindor who currently occupies the White House, never having thought he'd be able to avoid tarnishing his halo with any number of fuckups and compromises. (Whatever happens, Obama will remain an almost incomprehensibly vast improvement over Dick Cheney, probably the purest Slytherin ever to helm our ship of state.*)
If my lefty brother ever finds out I've placed him and George W. Bush in the same house, he's gonna fuckin' kill me.
Nevertheless, Gryffindors have defined a standard of behavior by which all the rest of us are judged and most often found wanting; those of us in the other houses have no choice but to form our identities partly in response to the fact that we’re not you. Slytherins, of course, come the closest: they're the funhouse mirror reflections of Gryffindors. I nevertheless have a certain sympathy for the Slytherin devils of the world - partly, I admit, because they throw a wrench into the machinery of Gryffindor dominance, and prevent the formation of a Gryffindor monopoly of power that would not be healthy for anyone, including Gryffindors. Then, too, when Slytherins are in leadership positions it's harder for the public to maintain the dangerous illusion that power can be easily separated from the potential for its abuse - a situation that is not without its advantages. With Voldemort the manipulation and abusiveness are right out there, and can thus be guarded against; the same cannot be said of Cornelius Fudge, Rufus Scrimgeour, or Albus Dumbledore, all of whom were probably Gryffindors. Finally, there's the simple fact that I often relate better to my fellow sinners than to people whom the world sets up as my role models: a covetous, vengeful, vainglorious Slytherin, however screwed up, is sometimes easier to empathize with than an overly heroic Gryffindor. As with Voldemort and Snape, too, the Slytherin desire for power over others is often a reaction against an original individual powerlessness. Though its manifestation may be fucked up and abusive, that impulse is deeply human, and in essence sympathetic.
As for Huffleclaws, we don’t even have the consolation of ill-gotten power to soften the fact that we are not really taken seriously by the world, though it absolutely loves to pay our virtues lip service. Consider the treatment of Hufflepuffs in the Harry Potter books: if Snape thinks Harry is a pig being raised for slaughter, he should try sparing a thought for Cedric Diggory, who was conceived for death by his creator and bred for modesty and decency chiefly due to the tear-jerking foil these qualities would present to Voldemort’s power-grabbing heartlessness. The only other Hufflepuff with any significance in the books**, Tonks, meets with a similarly brutal death, and even had she avoided that, her house status would have been submerged via her marriage to a Gryffindor and the subsequent birth of an almost certainly Gryffindor heir (at least, Teddy Lupin's open snogging of his part-Veela cousin sounds more James Potter than Hufflepuff to me). For that matter, Tonks herself is quite Gryffindor-like; her main qualification for Hufflepuff status seems to be that she's working class. I mean, Gryffindors can be clumsy, can’t they?
Where Ravenclaws are concerned, only Cho Chang and Luna Lovegood have any importance at all, and only Luna plays even a supporting role in shaping the story’s outcome. The fact that there are no significant male Ravenclaw students is pretty interesting, given Jo’s, would it be fair to say, less conflicted attitude toward creating powerful male characters than female ones. Among the adult characters, meanwhile, there are no noteworthy Ravenclaws whatsoever unless Flitwick counts, a dubious proposition.*** (I like to think that Ollivander was a Ravenclaw, but that is highly speculative). In light of their lack of dramatic importance, the fact that Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are the two houses whose founders were women also makes me deeply suspicious.
Flitwick: So important he could undergo a dramatic makeover between movies three and four without anyone even noticing.
In Rowling's rendering, Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws don’t seem even to be cognizant of, let alone upset about, the fact that they are mostly abused or ignored by the story’s movers and shakers. But don’t the ruling classes always think, or pretend, that the lower ones are contented? Out here in the Muggle world, all is not quite so rosy among the proletariat. I’ve made a lot of possibly disparaging generalizations about Hufflepuffs in this post, so it should perhaps be noted that I come from a long line of the ‘puffs myself, and have all the simultaneous feelings of pride and shame, exasperation and defensiveness toward them that usually apply in such situations. I think of my own immediate family: my father, a farm kid turned tenured professor who is so tensely balanced between Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw that I actually can’t assign him to a house; my mother, who followed my father into the suburbs and spent her entire adult life applying her Hufflepuff sticktoitiveness to a culturally foreign agenda whose masters had no use for her; and my Hufflepuff brother, a thoughtful and decent guy with entrenched feelings of social and professional misuse by the world. I myself have a strong Hufflepuff streak, which manifests itself in things like writing long journal entries that few people will read. (Embarking on quests you know at the outset are doomed: extremely Hufflepuff.) All of my family are more or less furious with the world and our places in it. And we’re hardly the only ones.
Even among Muggles, it's absolutely true that house status tends to run in families. For generations, no one in my family, neither the Hufflepuff majority nor the odd Ravenclaw, has really known anything about how to get on in the world, so how could any of them pass such knowledge down? The question is what people in such positions can do about it.
It's a question I've been thinking about constantly lately - partly because later this year I will turn 40, which really seems a little old to still be this mad at the universe. But it has occurred to me that this milestone, if properly harnessed, may turn out to be the unstoppable force that finally moves a number of previously immovable objects. I’ve long been aware of how grossly inadequate the Huffleclaw approach is to achieving certain ends in life, and have been trying to modify my own behavior for nearly as long. The results so far have been mixed.
For their sakes, I hope it's true.
I’ve had an unattractive Slytherin-style sense of grievance and desire for retaliation since long before the Harry Potter books were published, so naturally the first non-Huffleclaw attributes I attempted to graft onto my personality were Slytherin ones. While I failed embarassingly at the “manipulating others” aspect of the Slytherin character - my life has been notable for its lack of impact, either positive or negative, on others - a couple of other Slytherin characteristics did successfully take and became part of my makeup: self-interest and self-protectiveness. These qualities were in any event what I tried for, though my guess is that they more often presented as selfishness, thus alienating me that much further from other people. This is what comes of trying to co-opt the building blocks of personality types that are foreign to you: you handle them clumsily and without humor or ease, and the result is a jerky, uptight, graceless set of behaviors that, likely as not, will unnerve and alienate those around you.
I’m still here, however, so maybe that injection of Slytherin-ness wasn’t altogether pointless. But it obviously wasn’t enough, and the impasses I’ve now reached on several fronts of life have forced me to the vexing conclusion that there’s nothing else left: I’ve got to try and be more Gryffindor. The very idea makes me groan; if I’d ever known how to do that, wouldn’t I have done it in the first place? Wouldn’t my life have been easier and more enjoyable, wouldn't the world have been my oyster? Not only do I have no fucking idea how to act like a Gryffindor, part of me rejects the very notion as selling out. These are the people who already own the world, and I’m going to make some pathetic attempt to join their ranks and grasp at their power? My Ravenclaw pride revolts at this. I don’t want to be a Gryffindor, OK? I want to be accepted on my own terms, or at the very least to negotiate a new and better set of terms under which to be judged. Ideally, perhaps, I would cultivate just enough of a Gryffindor streak to see my objectives through, but remain essentially Ravenclaw behind the scenes. It would also be satisfying to have a Gryffindor impersonation in my repertoire that is good enough to thoroughly confuse all the people who thought they had my number.
I mean, isn't that one of the reasons we Snapefen admire him so much? He completely fucks with, and fucks up, the stereotype of his house, by incorporating the other houses so thoroughly into his modus operandi that you no longer know what to make of him. He risks his neck to impact the world for good, like a Gryffindor; he's all brainy and nerdy like a Ravenclaw; his doggedness and loyalty are pure Hufflepuff. It would be insulting to say that he transcends his house: he belonged in Slytherin at his Sorting, and Dumbledore’s backhanded compliment aside, he still belongs there at the end of the series. Rather, Snape breaks apart the very idea of Slytherin-ness, and forces that idea to expand so that it can include him. This, in the end, is what I aspire to myself: not to stop being a Ravenclaw, but to fuck with your notion of what a Ravenclaw is.
Speaking of people who don't sit neatly within house categories...quick, which house would you place MJ in? His public career has been Gryffindoresque in motivation, style and impact, while his introversion and ability to live inside his own head are very Ravenclaw; from childhood he worked his ass off Hufflepuff-style, and as for his Slytherin aspect...I don't think I even need to spell that one out.**** A complicated guy indeed - and good on him for that.
In the meantime, I’ll be over here, working on my Gryffindor imitation. If I seem a little crabby over the next few months, it won't only be because I'm pissed off at having to be more assertive; it'll be because anger is my way of being assertive. It's not suave or well-judged or aesthetically appropriate, I'm sure, but at least it's a forward-thrusting emotion that I understand. Meanwhile, it's going to be a bumpy ride, as they say. If you are one of the people I knock up against in my klutzy, angst-ridden desire to move forward, I apologize in advance.
*In spite of his lifelong allergy to hard work, I regard Dubya as a Hufflepuff who fell under an eight-year Imperius Curse. He does seem to be capable of loyalty and even, in a personal context, decency; moreover, Hufflepuff is the house of plodders, and Bush is definitely one of those.
**I could have sworn that somewhere in the books, Hagrid's house was given as, or implied to be, Hufflepuff; I was so sure of this that I actually told someone recently that it was the case. But the Harry Potter Wiki lists Hagrid as a Gryffindor, and cites a Barnes and Noble interview with Jo from 2000 in which she stated this unambiguously. The fact that Hagrid is too nice and/or dim to realize how thoroughly fucked over he has been by the miscarriage of justice that expelled him from Hogwarts and rendered him magically impotent for the rest of his life - his all too ready acceptance of his fate - suggests to me a Hufflepuff, not a Gryffindor; but then again, when Harry and Hagrid are discussing Malfoy's derogatory view of Hufflepuff in book one, and Hagrid says, "Better Hufflepuff than Slytherin," he doesn't seem as personally invested in his defense as an actual Hufflepuff would be. Also, Jo is fond of Hagrid, and - with the exception of Luna and maybe Tonks - Jo doesn't put people she's fond of in the Afterthought Houses.
***Continuing its streak of unnerving house assignments, the Harry Potter Wiki claims that Lockhart was a Ravenclaw. This unlikely assertion is based on an obscure photo included in the bonus features of the Chamber of Secrets DVD in which a student Lockhart is shown wearing Ravenclaw Quidditch robes. But since we're talking here about the most full-of-shit person in wizardkind, my guess is that the photo was staged for the Gadding with Ghouls press kit to enhance its author's literary credibility, and that Lockhart was a Slytherin.
****Just for starters, I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought of MJ while reading Rowling's physical descriptions of Voldemort.