Of tower passwords, Luna Lovegood, and Ravenclaw ambivalence

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Remember how, in Deathly Hallows, Harry paid a token visit to the Ravenclaw common room in search of information on the diadem Horcrux? We saw then the special torture honor that Hogwarts bestows on those students whose wit is their greatest treasure: a system for gaining common room entry that is unique among the houses. While Slytherins,

Comments

[fire_everything]

Your comment inspired such an excess of verbosity on my part that for the first time ever I got slapped on the wrist by the LJ character-limit police! I'll break this monster into two so you don't have to read it all in one go. :(

I love the closeness of your reading and the depth of your thought about the books, always. I’m not always as confident as you are about reading the books through the prism of Jo's personal life (I only really know the basics about her, for one thing), but I’m consistently intrigued by the between-the-lines readings you come up with.

I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of Jo as a raging, dyed-in-the-wool Gryffindor that the notion of her ever having had stronger-than-Hermione Ravenclaw leanings is destabilizing and fascinating to me. If in fact her Ravenclaw skepticism/contempt represents a critique of her younger self, it would mean she managed the sort of shift in outlook (maybe even in House status) that she doesn’t seem to think is necessary/possible for any of her characters. Her apparent comfort with the notion of having an immutable identity assigned to you at age 11 suggests to me that she feels quite secure in her own House status and has done so from the get, but it’s sort of lovely to think that there are pieces of her personality that don’t conform so rigidly to the Gryffindor ideal and that she hasn’t entirely rejected them.

I read both the near-total absence of complex Ravenclaw characters and the Ravenclaw tower riddles as prime examples of “othering,” as they say in identity politics, on Jo’s part - a way of loudly saying, “I am so not one of these people.” During Luna’s and McGonagall’s encounters with the doorknocker I felt like I could practically hear Jo thinking, “I myself would never put up with this shit.” But it’s possible I’m projecting here; I have been known to do that on occasion. ;)

I agree that Jo intends for readers to come away from the series giving both Aberforth and Luna the thumbs-up as people. Her endorsement of Aberforth, especially coupled with her clear critique of the distanced intellectualism of his older brother, seems in a sense less conflicted to me than her endorsement of Luna. I think you’re right that one of the reasons Luna exists (her father, too) is that Jo wanted to provide a foil to Hermione that readers would have to consider seriously - when Xenophilius Lovegood accuses Hermione of being rigid and narrow, one sort of bristles, yet one also has to credit him with a critical acuity toward Hermione which almost no one else in the series has managed. (Except Snape! But in his case it’s considered prejudicial, not insightful.) All this implies that Jo herself takes the Lovegoods seriously - within limits. In the end she can’t get on board with their worldview to the extent of suggesting, for instance, that any of Luna’s favorite creatures might be real. (Then again, maybe Blibbering Humdingers are as real as any creature needs to be, if they manage to provide Harry with some desperately needed downtime after saving the world.)

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Here's part two, with apologies for my long-windedness!

Another interesting case is Harry himself. Maybe it was just savvy audience strategy for Jo to place him where she did on the intelligence spectrum - relatably above-average but not brilliant, uneven academically rather than across-the-board mediocre like Ron. But I’ll bet he also reflects Jo’s own beliefs that 1)if you’ve got one thing you’re really good at, the rest doesn’t matter so much, and 2)ethics are huge. There’s a moment among Snape’s Pensieve memories that’s never followed up on, but which really caught my attention: when Snape is running down the 11-year-old Harry and Dumbledore counters him by describing Harry as “modest, likable and reasonably talented” (italics mine). He’s quoting other people’s opinions, but the fact that he doesn’t contradict this underwhelming assessment of Harry’s talent has always struck me. By the time of the King’s Cross chapter, Dumbledore’s opinion of Harry’s worth, as opposed to his likability, has obviously been revised more than a little upwards, and the biggest part of that seems to be that Dumbledore has come to consider Harry morally superior to himself - it’s certainly not down to his grades going up, and probably not even to stuff like his precocity at Patronus-conjuring.

In the end I don’t value learning above all myself, so in a way I shouldn’t consider myself implicated in Jo’s contempt (if that’s what it is). But I balk on behalf of my fellow riddle-answering Ravenclaws, because I understand why a Ravenclaw might consent to be treated like an intellectual performing seal: so many of us who are smart that way aren’t good at all that much else, so we figure that demonstrating our smarts is the only way we can ever be loved. When adults enable smart kids in this way of thinking - or worse, actually exploit it - I get pissed off.

If you've made it through all that pontificating, thanks for your patience, and I promise in return to comment on the next really long thing you post!