Women and Love in HBP
No faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could do to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot mid summer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp was drown, and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
Shakespeare As You Like It, Act IV,i (lines 89-102)
Rosalind, the heroine of As You Like It is being wooed by Orlando, her erstwhile suitor (who erm… doesn’t know that he’s wooing her). He does this while she is in admittedly a ‘merry mood’ and beckons him to practice his words of love. At one point, he swears fidelity and upon pain of death if his beloved were to turn him away. Rosalind, ever sharp, dismisses this, by surmising that no man has ever died for love. Men have died for causes of nobility, and honour and glory but never love. In Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, this proves Rosalind’s speech true, that only women have been adversely affected by love. The effects of this malaise runs from the malfunction of the witch's powers to a loss of the will to live.
The men in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince are more concerned with identity and how it affects their choices. The women’s identities in this text are inextricably tied to the men they love, and their actions reinforce this belief.
The definition of death here, in this discussion about Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince will be both literal and figurative for the purposes of this essay. Death is defined as the termination or extinction of something, or the ‘time when something ends’. Death can also be used as the figurative -le petit mort is the euphemism for an orgasm, for example- in order to make a point more meaningful.
In Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, the book is replete with examples of women being adversely affected by love; it is a theme that echoes throughout history, as is seen from Dumbledore’s pensieve to the book’s present day.
Merope, Tom Riddle’s mother, is a case in point. We meet her earlier on in the text when Harry starts to take his history lessons with Dumbledore. She lives in a squalid shack with her brother and father, and is browbeaten by them both. The picture painted of Merope is one of defeat, and in quick time, we see one of the reasons why. It is a muggle called Tom, who is squiring a young woman called Cecilia around Hangelton. He has some affection for Cecilia from the brief snatch of conversation that we are allowed to hear. He calls her ‘darling’, and for him to be with her alone without a duenna in sight (on a horse) in those days actually hints at a serious intent. Tom Riddle is in the midst of his own courtship.
We are made to know of Merope’s wants and pains and Tom Riddle is the embodiment of what she wants. Her brother informs us that Merope hangs out at the window, wanting for him to pass. Morfin teases her about the distance of position, magic, and society that separates them both, but she still yearns. Dumbledore makes it clear to us that Merope cherished a ‘secret burning passion’ for Tom.
After her father and sibling go off to Azkaban, Merope’s powers are strengthened by the purpose of love. To this end, she concocts a love potion for Riddle senior (according to Dumbledore). Under the spell of the love potion Tom Riddle senior whisks her away from the house of Gaunt, and eventually she is heavy with child. Over time, according to Dumbledore, she stops giving Riddle sr. the potion, thinking that he would have been besotted with her in return. Only for Tom to reject her once he is rid of the enchantment, and leaves her alone with child. Merope is devastated by this rejection and only lives long enough to name the child, before she passes on. She is the first woman in HBP from what we have seen to be totally and thoroughly felled by a love cause.
Riddle senior, on the other hand, moves on, his life circumstances unchanged (he goes back to live in his parents’ house). Riddle is eventually killed by his son’s vengeance, but never love.
Eileen Prince, (Severus Snape’s mother) does perplex me. We see various snatches of her in The Order of The Phoenix, with hints of abuse. In The Half Blood Prince, we discover that she is actually the witch in the family, as evidenced by her being on the Gobstones Team at Hogwarts all those years ago. Now, this begs the question, if she’s the witch in the family why did she take Tobias’ abuse? Why did she stay with him, and raise a child (Severus Snape) in that situation? Couldn’t she have rendered him with her powers, or use her powers to at least hold him at bay, and then go back to the wizarding world instead of living at Spinner’s End? I think she does not, because, like most abusers, she finds it hard to leave her husband because there is love and dependence there.
With regards to Narcissa Malfoy, we have only had tantalizing glimpses into her personality in other books leading up to HBP. We hear from Draco that she was the reason why he attended Hogwarts, because his father wanted him to go to another boarding school. In The Goblet of Fire, when we finally see Narcissa close up - she is described as attractive, but with her face twisted into an unpleasant grimace, as if she caught a whiff of something unpleasant. Narcissa Malfoy at best was seen as a glacial figurehead of a wife, but in HBP that façade is irretrievably shattered. In the chapter titled Spinner’s End, Narcissa is hysterical, she throws herself at Snape’s mercy, we see her not as a woman, but as a mother, and a widow of Azkaban pleading for intervention regarding her son. Bellatrix Black isn’t safe from this notion of identity and love either. She is not Bellatrix, feared death eater, nor is she a Black- she’s a woman who exists for the sole purpose of being in service to her Dark Lord. When Narcissa starts to caterwaul over the forthcoming fate of her son, Bellatrix snaps, ‘You should be proud! If I had sons, I would be glad to give them up to the service of the Dark Lord!’ (Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince p. 39 UK Ed.)
Nymphadora Tonks' situation picks up echoes the theme of unrequited love in HBP. It is history given resonance, love causes among women, it doesn't end with Merope or Eileen, but is passed down in the genes of womanhood like magic. As with Merope, it is hinted that the loss of her Metamorphing powers is tied to the fact that the man she loves (Remus Lupin)has rejected her. Throughout the entire book, we see that Tonks has changed from the happy soul that we met in OoTP. There is a war on, and as an Auror, this is the first time that she has been on active duty.
We are first introduced to her state of being in the fifth chapter of HBP. Harry sees a ‘young witch with a pale, heart-shaped face and mousy brown hair…sitting at the table clutching a large mug between her hands’ [HBP p. 81 UK Ed.] and Harry thinks that she looks ‘drawn, even ill’. From then on, what we have seen of Tonks is someone serious, purposeful and managing with the loss of her powers, but there isn’t a light about her anymore, her spark is gone. The traits that made distinctive (the pink hair, the colourful garb, the cheery ‘wotcher’) is gone, disappeared with her ability to change.
Ms. Rowling tries to throw up red herrings with regards to Tonks’ changed behaviour. Tonks’ patronus is described as ‘an immense silvery four legged creature’ (HBP p.150 UK Ed.), and with her response to Snape’s observation regarding her Patronus - ‘a look of shock and anger’- we are lead to believe that she is in mourning over a fallen comrade in arms, and a relative. Tonks’ odd behaviour throughout the book is actually supposed to lead us to believe that she is out of place, that somehow, she doesn’t belong. With the mysterious incidents around Hogwarts, and her brushing off Harry’s attempt to reach out to his godfather’s second cousin -‘I miss him too’ - he says, we are supposed to believe that this isn’t the Tonks we know.
In the chapter The Phoenix Lament however, all is revealed. The reason for Tonks’ odd behaviour is not survivor’s guilt, as is helpfully proposed by Hermione. Nor is it anything to do with the incidents leading to Dumbledore’s death. Tonks’ behaviour and loss of powers is directly connected to the fact that her love was seemingly unrequited. At Bill’s beside, when everyone is taking stock of the events of the evening: Dumbledore’s death, Snape’s perceived hand in his death, also, Snape’s actual hand in the Potters’ demise, the Deatheaters attacking Hogwarts, and Bill is mauled by Fenir. Everyone within the Order (and Hogwarts) is stunned by the blows of that night. Tonks’ major concern however, is the fact that Lupin seeks to reject her love, because of reasons that he has shared.
‘You see!’ She says, as she grabs his robes. ‘I don’t care!’, and in that moment, Harry (who is the author’s voice) tells us the reason for Tonks’ mannerisms throughout the entire book. It is not because her idealism is tainted by the work that she might have been forced to do as an Aurour (such as imprisoning innocents), nor the fact that well, she mourned her cousin for a bit, nor being so desolate to the fact that Lupin had to be speaking to her (like Hermione thought). It is the fact that her personality and powers were felled by a ‘love cause’.
Consider this passage that Ms. Rowling sketches out here:
And the meaning of Tonks’s Patronus and her mouse-coloured hair, and the reason she had come running to find Dumbledore when she had heard a rumour someone had been attacked by Greyback, all suddenly became clear to Harry, it had not been Sirius that Tonks had fallen in love with after all…(HBP, p. 582, UK Ed.)
Fast forward a couple of pages to Dumbledore’s funeral. The Great Man is dead, Dumbledore is a wizard of legend, strength and character, the one that the Wizarding World looked to for leadership, and a sort of moral booster and compass. People have come far and wide to mourn, the merpeople sing songs of despair, the centaurs shoot arrows and people are moved to tears. The members of The Order have come en masse. A sombre, moving funeral filled with gravitas - and the narrator cuts this scene to Tonks, her powers have announced themselves ‘her hair miraculously returned to vividest pink’ (p.597), and unlike Merope, her love is requited, ergo her powers restored. Tonks is not only felled by a love cause, she is ‘reborn’ through the same cause as well.
Ginny Weasley is shown throughout HBP as a spunky, high strung, vivacious young woman who’s popular with the boys, gifted with magic, an ace Quidditch player and seemingly, on the surface the only girl (apart from Hermione) not to be besotted with Harry. In fact, Harry is the one that has to seek her out. Ginny isn’t sexualized in Harry’s eyes until she kisses Dean in front of him, and as a result, the monster in his chest actually sets his heart tumbling into a territory that is uncharted and as such, scary (hey, if Ms. Rowling can have the monster analogy, I can do this, so yeah). The author leads us to believe that Ginny is the only girl for Harry, the one that understands him, the one that has carved her own identity since his second year at Hogwarts, because she is his equal. Whereas Harry seemed to have had a rough patch after his break up with Cho Chang in OoTP, after Ginny’s break up with Dean, she is the ‘life and soul of the team’ (p.485).
Shortly afterwards, they start going out, and then the realities of Harry’s existence and what he is intrudes on their time together. In the chapter The White Tomb he comes to a final and damning conclusion about their relationship. But that is fine, he knows, because they understand each other perfectly. Ginny is his equal. He tells her what the situation is, and Ginny understands, like all good women in HBP do, that the men can’t tarry for love, they have their search for identity and purpose to be going on with. We then find out that our Ginny, the lass with the spunk, the young woman who has forged her own identity separate and apart from her brothers and the other girls, only did it so that Harry would notice her.
‘I never gave up on you,’ she says. ‘Not really. I always hoped…’ So for four years (her first year to her fifth year) she’s always hoped that Harry would notice her. Her actions are dictated by this damnable love cause that Rosalind speaks about. She then continues ‘ Hermione told me to get on with life… And she thought you might take a bit more notice if I was a bit more-myself’.
On various rereads of HBP, love can be seen as a theme of the series, especially on the part of women. The men in this particular text are about chasing their selfhood, and shaping their identity. They are the recipients of love, but do not actively give it, nor or they actively affected by it - not in the way that the women are. Fleur and Bill are an example of man as recipient. Bill is mauled, and Fleur resolves to stand by him, despite the fact that his looks are affected. Ron uses Lavender for physical experience, but doesn’t really return her affections (rather, he hides from them towards the end of that relationship). Men take love, but they are not prone to acting on the whims of it, not like the women do.
Love is in HBP is multifaceted and expressed in various ways. It is obsessive (ergo, the ubiquitous ‘love potions’), requited, unrequited, women die for love, die by love, and are reborn by love. ‘No faith, die by attorney’, Rosalind muses in her meta, ‘men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’. No where is this truer than the women and their predispositions in Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince.