Fannish 5: Five Unfortunate Uses of Pregnancy

[gehayi]

From fannish5: Five unfortunate uses of pregnancy as a plot device.

CAUTION: HERE BE SPOILERS. A lot of them, really.

In no particular order:

1) Phoebe Halliwell's pregnancies on Charmed.

Comments

[ravenclaw_eric]

Merope Gaunt is described as being, frankly, ill-favored, and Tom Riddle, Sr. already _had_ a nice girlfriend. TR dumping his GF to take up with someone who was apparently considered lower than dirt by everybody in the area, and with whom he only had a species in common, is explicable only when you remember that Merope G. was a witch.

I'm a guy myself, and I've watched guy behavior for decades, and I can't think of a single case of anybody doing anything like that.

That said, it is unlikely that Merope could have brewed a love potion...could she have used the Imperius Curse? With her charming relatives gone, she might have been able to lay hands on one of their wands, if she didn't have one herself. And she wouldn't give one toss about the rights of any mere Muggle...she was a Gaunt, and a pureblood, and that alone made her far better than any Muggle.

I tend to equate Merope with the equally-tragic Mayella Ewell, in To Kill a Mockingbird...while I feel terribly sorry for both of them, their actions caused irreparable harm to innocent other people. Tom Riddle's family may have been snobbish, at least as seen by the people in the village, but that didn't make him fair game for Merope, any more than Tom Robinson's black skin made him fair game for Mayella Ewell's unwanted advances and then lies about him raping her.

Part 1

[gehayi]

Merope may have been a witch. However:

1) We never see her cast a single spell successfully. She can't even fix a broken pot, and Reparo is pretty basic.

2) It's canon that magic tends to emerge in times of stress. Children can fall from great heights without being hurt. Harry ended up Apparating away from some bullies and inadvertently made the glass in a snake's cage disappear. Yet even when Merope is being choked by her father, she doesn't do any magic--on purpose or inadvertently. And there really isn't a way to prevent inadvertent magic.

3) Marvolo Gaunt calls Merope a "dirty Squib." It's pretty clear, too, that to his mind, this is the worst thing that he could call her. That argues that he had reason to do so.

4) Marvolo Gaunt never opened mail; indeed, he told a young wizard from the Ministry of Magic this quite proudly. If he never opened mail, I'd say his kids never opened their Hogwarts letters...if, indeed, Merope ever got one at all.

5) Morfin may have received some training; the Ministry of Magic regarded him as a wizard. But its representative seemed surprised that Marvolo had a daughter.

6) Marvolo and Morfin display snobbish contempt not only for Muggles but for other wizards. We never see Merope do either; she displays no arrogance or hatred, and her father is outraged that she would deign to look at a good-looking young Muggle.

TR dumping his GF to take up with someone who was apparently considered lower than dirt by everybody in the area, and with whom he only had a species in common

I'm a guy myself, and I've watched guy behavior for decades, and I can't think of a single case of anybody doing anything like that.

I can.

We're not really approaching this from the same angle. You're taking it as given that Tom Riddle, Sr. spent a lot of time with Merope, perhaps seemed to have a real relationship/marriage with her. I think that a rich, good-looking guy who's accustomed to getting his way might take a look at an ugly, odd, shy young woman who adored him and see just how far he could push her. He might even find it entertaining...for week or two. Until he got bored with the game.

The kinder people in town wouldn't understand such behavior. They'd find it bizarre and inexplicable and would say so. The crueler ones--his cronies, perhaps--would have no problem accepting why he was doing this, but they certainly wouldn't talk about it. That would mean admitting that they'd known what was going on and could have stopped it. People are very good at denying that the guy next door can be a wife-beater, a child abuser or a criminal. And leading a girl on in order to have sex with her isn't a crime by any stretch of the imagination. Most people would pass that off as "Well, guys will be guys." Some people would even argue that he was doing her a favor--after all, who would want to screw someone that ugly and stupid?

Re: Part 1

[ravenclaw_eric]

As far as Merope's relationship with her father and brother goes, I don't think you understand psychological dominance...what Modesty Blaise's right-hand man Willie Garvin called "the old P.D." in A Taste for Death.

If Marvolo and Morfin had bullied and dominated Merope from her earliest memories, it wouldn't matter how powerful a witch she might potentially be...she'd have it burned into her brain that they were stronger and there was nothing she could do. This is also called "learned helplessness." When my Mom was going for her Master's in child psychology, I read a lot of her texts, and I read about tests on dogs, using electric shocks. Once the dogs got it into their heads that there was nothing they could do, they would just endure the shocks, even if escape was perfectly possible.

This is how many animals are trained. You may have been to a circus and seen an elephant quietly submitting to being tied to a stake it could pull up easily. This starts when the elephant is a calf; they tie it to a stake it can't pull up, and the elephant gets the idea that it can't pull a stake up, and never loses it...even when it's full-grown and more than strong enough to do so.

Part 2

[gehayi]

Could she have cast Imperio? She probably knew it; I can't picture her father and brother not casting it on her. But magic in the Potterverse takes confidence, strength of will and training. It's doubtful if Merope had had the training, and when we saw her in the Pensieve, she hid her face, spoke indistinctly, scuttled away from her father and only admired Tom, Sr. from a distance. Such behavior doesn't scream willful self-confidence to me.

We do know that she ended up in London and alone. We also know that she ended up ragged, wretched, half-starved and on the doorstep of a Muggle orphanage. This seems to argue that she knew no one in the wizarding community who could have helped--and, if she was like most purebloods, she was completely out of her element. Think of the purebloods we've seen in the series--no idea how telephones or electricity or stamps work. She would never have heard of doctors, surgeons or psychiatrists. She wouldn't have known how to drive or how to use the Underground. She wouldn't have understood Muggle money, or had anything approaching enough education to get even the simplest job. She wouldn't even have been able to afford a place to live.

If she had the skill and the power to cast Imperio and the inclination to use it against Muggles, then why wouldn't she have used it to survive? She could have used to to command Muggles to provide her with food, clothing, shelter, heat and income. For that matter, why wouldn't she have used Imperio to stop her father and brother from bullying her? Both uses would have been helpful--and they would have saved her a lot of anguish.

I can see Bellatrix Lestrange, Walburga Black, Narcissa Malfoy--even Molly Weasley--casting such a spell. But not Merope. She doesn't appear to have the skill, the knowledge, the will, the training or the confidence. That seems like a lot to be lacking.

Re: Part 2

[zelda_queen]

Regarding Merope's ability to use magic, I suspect that that's why the love potion was speculated as the thing that was used on Riddle Sr. From what I understood of the HP universe, you don't actually *need* magic to brew potions, so long as you can acquire the ingredients and keep everything going properly.

Actually, while the book is never certain, I believe Rowling did confirm the love potion thing in an interview. She said that the fact that Voldemort was conceived under a love potion contributed the tiniest bit to his inability to feel or care for love, though she also said that it really didn't excuse or cover any of the horrible things he did, or his hatred and inability to feel love.

Still, I see what you're saying. Very interesting to think about.

Re: Part 2

[gehayi]

From what I understood of the HP universe, you don't actually *need* magic to brew potions, so long as you can acquire the ingredients and keep everything going properly.

That's popular fanon--it makes sense to everyone but the author. Rowling says that a Muggle couldn't possibly brew a potion successfully, even if she had the right ingredients and prepared it properly.

Actually, while the book is never certain, I believe Rowling did confirm the love potion thing in an interview.

I do tend to ignore interviews; Rowling has been known to contradict both other interviews and her own canon in interviews. Once the last book came out and Hermione's middle name was stated to be Jean (not Jane, as Rowling had said in interview after interview), I figured that was confirmation--interviews are not canon and should not be taken as such.

That said, I'm sure that Rowling intended the readers to take Dumbledore at his word; he is always her spokesman in the books. And most readers DO take Dumbledore's word for it. The problem is, Rowling didn't write the potion scene, or any other scene in which Merope was cunning and manipulative and Tom, Sr. was her innocent victim. We only see Merope being shy, insecure and terrified and Tom and his girlfriend laughing at her.

I have a feeling that Rowling had envisioned the scene so thoroughly that it didn't occur to her that she'd left anything out of the manuscript.

Re: Part 2

[zelda_queen]

Really? When was that ever in the books? O_o I know that The Tales of Beedle the Bard confirmed that Muggles couldn't use magic even if they had a proper wand, but nothing on potions.

Actually, I forgot this when I first posted, but Merope *does* do magic once in the memory. She does a spell that ought to lift the pot she dropped off of the ground, but because she's scared and was just yelled at by her father, the spell doesn't work properly and the pot flies across the room and hits the wall hard enough to break in half.

Now see, when I read about that, I never really got the impression that Merope was supposed to be some cunning planner. Rather, I saw it as her having no one hurting or scaring her for the first time in her life, so she thinks "Tom Riddle will surely love me if only I had a chance to prove it to him!" And then she thinks that if she just gets things started with a love potion, she can get him to love her for real. Now obviously that was just my interpretation of it, but given how the views on love potions seem to be like they're something cute and romantic to get a guy to like you, it doesn't seem so far-fetched, especially since again I got the impression that Merope was a girl who was desperate for genuine love and because of a lifetime of abuse went for it in the wrong places. And while Dumbledore never actually said she was powerful (he just said that without her brother and father terrorizing her, she was able to work to the extent of her abilities), I never got the impressions that love potions were particularly difficult to brew.

Incidentally, and again this is just my reading of it, but I never did get the impression that Merope was treated as the bad guy and Riddle Sr as a blameless victim. All the books did was hammer in how Riddle Sr. and his family were total bastards and I generally got the impression that him abandoning his pregnant wife and unborn child was just further proof of that. At the very least, I never really got the impression that Merope was meant to be seen as someone evil or meant to be hated.

Anyway, that's all just how I saw it. ^^;;;

Re: Part 2

[ravenclaw_eric]

You have a good point about Imperio. However, potion-making might have been one of Merope's many, many chores...charmers like her sweet brother and loving daddy would likely see potions as "women's work" and beneath their male dignity.

*pausing to imagine Severus Snape's reaction to that sort of attitude...and giggling*