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Part 1... blpurdom September 11 2006, 22:58:31 UTC
You have some good points here about love being a driving force in the series and the Vatican rather spectacularly missing that point, but I have more than one problem with this analysis. First, I don't believe that it is useful at all to go on ad infinitum about the different types of love in the HP series. JK Rowling has never shown that she cares at all about distinctions between types of love and there is no evidence that this sort of analysis adds anything to understanding the books.

Second, I think this went seriously off the rails when you got to the part about erotic love. Calling what Merope Gaunt felt for Tom Riddle "erotic love" is not supported in the text. It is possible that one may INFER that she was acting on lust, but even Dumbledore, the author of the theory that Merope used a love potion to get Tom Riddle, does not seem to be of the opinion that lust was the driving motivation for Merope. If this were so, she would never have stopped giving Tom Riddle the love potion. She would have felt that having his body was enough.

But no; if Dumbledore is correct in his theory about Merope and the love potion, then she wanted his heart, not just his body, and she wanted it to be freely given. When that did not happen she clearly took no action to give him the potion again, put him under Imperius, or otherwise try to get him to continue to live with her as her husband. Unrequited love was evidently involved in the Merope/Tom fiasco, but it's a leap to conclude that it was lust when she had ample opportunity to continue to assuage her supposed lust and did not; she wanted Tom Riddle's heart.

To understand the role of love in the books one must also understand the role of power. We have seen repeatedly in the series that those who try to grasp power and prevent others from accessing their power are on one side of a divide while those who--like Harry and Dumbledore--share their power with others and attempt to empower others by teaching them (as Dumbledore does as the headmaster and Harry has done many times, especially as the head of the DA) are on the other side of that divide. Power itself is not judged evil by JK Rowling; she puts a very important statement in the mouth of a villain in the first book: "There is no good or evil, only power..." We see many, many times that power itself is beside the point; what is important is what one does with one's power. In the sixth book, Fudge points out to the Muggle Prime Minister that the wizards they are fighting can do magic, too; it is not enough merely to have power.

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