Unspeakable, pt 1: Horror (Feb Potterdelphia talk)
Unspeakables. Secret-Keepers. The Forbidden Forest. Taboos. There is power in things that cannot be named or spoken. The Potter books undertake a gloriously multifaceted exploration of this concept, a series of thematic variations that run the gamut from mischief to dread to the sublime. Today, we take a hard look at unspeakable horror.
“He Who Shall Not Be Named.” One of the central lessons of the series comes when Dumbledore teaches Harry to speak Voldemort’s name aloud, with the famous explanation, “Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself” (SS 298). Sometimes I just close my eyes and enjoy my immense gratitude to Rowling for teaching this concept to a generation of children. But the emphasis on this idea leads to an interesting situation in which the things that Rowling left intentionally unnamed or unmentioned in her series, believing them too frightening to include, grow powerfully fearsome in our imaginations, like boggarts or dementors that are fed by human doubt.
Rowling directly addressed these omissions in a 2007 interview
: “I don't even know if I want to say it out loud. I know that sounds funny, but I did really think it through. There are two things I think that are too horrible, actually, to go into detail about. (laughs) One of them is how Pettigrew brought Voldemort back into a rudimentary body. 'Cause I told my editor what I thought happened there and she looked as though she was gonna vomit. And then the other thing is how you make a Horcrux. And I don't even like- I don't know. Will it be in the encyclopedia? I don't know if I can bring myself to- I don't know.”
This led me to think of other horrors that Rowling leaves unnamed. What did pre-teen Tom Riddle do to those children in the cave? What did Mulciber try to do to Mary Macdonald as fifth-years that was just for “a laugh” (DH 673)? What did the centaurs do to Umbridge? What did those three Muggle boys do to Ariana Dumbledore?
Some of these answers we can guess or piece together. One recurring theme in the series is that we are most frightened by our own minds - boggart forms, dementor-induced flashbacks, visions triggered by Horcruxes and poisons. Rowling considers this to be such an important point to teach young readers that she spells it out in an uncharacteristically clunky manner after Ron fights off brains in the Department of Mysteries: “[…]according to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scarring than almost anything else” (OotP 847). I thought of these things when wondering how Tom Riddle tortured his fellow orphans so that they “were never quite right afterwards, and all we ever got out of them was that they’d gone into a cave with Tom Riddle” (HBP 268). I’m guessing he turned their own minds against them, using his skill at Legilimency. It fits; to paraphrase Dumbledore, we can recognize his style.
I thought this, and then I felt a sense of relief. It hadn’t been sexual, then.
What a curious response to have, and yet it feels the same to me every time. Phew. Just mind control, or torture, or genocide, thank goodness! Not rape.
Ah. That would be my literary boggart, I see.
What Snape’s friend did to Lily’s friend might not have been sexual, although it definitely raises anxiety in the reader, to know that it was a boy doing something Dark to a girl. The question of the centaurs gained some publicity in September 2008, when MTV reported a SwarthmoreCollege professor’s confident statement that they raped Umbridge
. Certainly in Greek mythology, a herd of centaurs carrying off a woman is an unequivocal signifier of rape. The evidence in Rowling’s text doesn’t conclusively confirm or preclude. And Ariana? Oh, the child. Rowling doesn’t say. She doesn’t say. What needed avenging so badly that Percival Dumbledore broke the code of secrecy, attacked three children, and accepted life in prison?
This is the point at which someone always says, “Aren’t we reading a little too much into a children’s series?”
Well? Were we meant to wonder along these lines?
What does the Ministry have to say about this? “There is nothing waiting out there, Mr. Potter.”
Let’s see what Rowling has to say about reading between the lines
, in this case about Dumbledore’s attraction to Grindelwald: "I think a child will see a friendship and I think a sensitive adult may well understand that it was an infatuation.”
The conversation goes on at the Burrow, whether the children are old enough to hear it or not. Maybe Rowling puts an Imperturbable Charm on the door so her younger readers’ Extendable Ears won’t work, but for those of us old enough to cross the age line - yeah, I think we’re meant to wonder.
So, did the centaurs rape Umbridge?
On the whole, as Dumbledore would say, I think not. Let’s scrutinize the evidence in the last three books.
Umbridge claims the centaurs live in the Forest because the Ministry “permits you certain areas of land,” and calls them half-breeds, beasts, and uncontrolled animals. The outraged centaurs reply, “We are a race apart and proud to be so!” and “Perhaps you thought us pretty talking horses? We are an ancient people who will not stand wizard invasions and insults!” The comment about being “a race apart” suggests that the male centaurs would not want to mate with human females; that’s not where more centaurs come from. The argument between Umbridge and the centaurs is over racial subjugation, not sexual politics. When the centaurs turn on Harry and Hermione, they say, “They came here unasked, they must pay the consequences! They can join the woman!” This suggests that whatever they’re planning to do to Umbridge is standard according to their laws, and can apply equally to “foals,” as they call children (OotP 754-757). Firenze the Divination teacher was about to be executed for betraying the centaur code of conduct; when Magorian lets Hagrid pass because he’s accompanied by Hermione and Harry on their way to meet Grawp, Magorian says “the slaughter of foals is a terrible crime” (OotP 699). It seems likeliest to me that the centaurs intend execution rather than rape for Umbridge.
Although…the narration in the Hospital Wing sounds a little more like rape:
Dumbledore had strode alone into the forest to rescue her from the centaurs. How he had done it - how he had emerged from the trees supporting Professor Umbridge without so much as a scratch on him - nobody knew, and Umbridge was certainly not telling. Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her either. Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were bits of twig and leaf in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed.
“Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,” whispered Hermione (OotP 848-849)
.
Then Ron taunts her with clip-clopping noises, she sits bolt upright, and Hermione and Ginny laugh at her.
Presumably, Madam Pomfrey would have been able to detect signs of rape. She wouldn’t lie, right? It’s just shock and not sexual assault-induced muteness? Hermione was described the same way, untidy with bits of twig and leaf, scratched but unharmed (OotP 700), just from walking in the forest. By book 7, Umbridge is up to her old tricks again, extorting lockets from petty criminals and persecuting Muggle-borns. It can’t be said of Umbridge that “she was never right again,” or whatever the equivalent would be for a totalitarian sadistic bureaucrat. Whatever the centaurs did, they didn’t break her.
Then there’s this exchange at the beginning of book six:
Slughorn: “…some funny rumors have reached me since Dolores Umbridge left! If that’s how you treat teachers these days -“
“Professor Umbridge ran afoul of our centaur herd,” said Dumbledore. “I think you, Horace, would have known better than to stride into the forest and call a horde of angry centaurs ‘filthy half-breeds.’”
“That’s what she did, did she?” said Slughorn. “Idiotic woman. Never liked her.”
Harry chuckled and both Dumbledore and Slughorn looked round at him.
“Sorry,” Harry said hastily. “It’s just - I didn’t like her either” (HBP 68-69).
So…is what “how you treat teachers these days”? What do the rumors say? Nothing about centaurs, apparently. Whatever it was, it was something that Slughorn suggests might happen to him, too. Dumbledore’s reply reinforces that Umbridge was at fault.
If it was rape, the punishment wouldn’t have fit the crime.
If it was rape, the message would be: you can be as powerful as you want, but in the end, you’re nothing but a woman, and we are men.
I can’t believe that Hermione would have led her into rape and then gloated about it. The text says that “nobody” knows what happened in the forest; I don’t believe that Hermione, Ginny, Ron, and Harry would be enjoying Umbridge’s comeuppance if they thought or feared that it was rape.
We are all meant to laugh at her. In 2005, Rowling said Umbridge would appear in the final book
: “Yeah, it's too much fun to torture her not to have another little bit more before I finish.” That sounds like an author who only wanted to give Umbridge a scare on Umbridge’s own terms. An author who unequivocally wrote these passages as Umbridge asking for it and getting what she deserved. I cannot believe that Rowling would have written it that way had sexual violence been involved.
Rape doesn’t fit the polemical purpose of the character, or of most of the series -- because Rowling doesn’t go there, studiously avoids it, possibly in the same boggart-fearing fashion that I do. Only girls give love potions to boys in her story; the other way around, they would be more baldly recognized for the date rape drugs that they are. Only Hermione, a girl, defeats Umbridge and Skeeter. There is no suggestion of sexual violence in Muggle torture; the closest we get is the humiliating sight of the Muggle mother’s underwear at the Quidditch World Cup, echoed by the sight of Snape’s gray underwear in the Pensieve. When I worry that the Death Eaters might have used rape as a tactic and that, therefore, Snape may have done so, I find comfort in Bellatrix’s accusation that Snape is all talk - “The usual empty words, the usual slithering out of action” (HBP 35) -- phew, he has not raped. The one time Rowling writes sexual harassment into a scene, it pointedly comes from Muggle men; no wizard is shown with such behavior. When Amycus Carrow spits on McGonagall, Harry actually performs Cruciatus on him. We see Snape’s father shouting and his mother “cowering” (OotP 591), but later Rowling has pre-teen Snape tell Lily “they’re arguing” (DH 667), making it sound mutual, not that one is abusing the other.
Male aggression against women is the great Unspeakable of the series.
And it’s not that Rowling has constructed a society in which sexual assault or sexism is likely to be less common. As has been noted, her wizarding world is as patriarchal as ours, sometimes more so, or at least more unquestioningly. For example, take patronymics. The only married woman not to be called by her husband’s surname is Tonks, and for all we know, she changed her name to Nymphadora Lupin. Other than that, the only instance in which this issue is even acknowledged is Snape saying “He thinks it means Lily Evans” after she had become Lily Potter, and Dumbledore invoking Lily’s maiden name to manipulate him (DH 677-678). Are we really to believe that Hermione, who hyperventilates at the very thought of inequality, will take Ron’s surname without a murmur? No, I’m going to assume that patriarchy, sexism, and sexual violence against women are facts of life in the Potterverse “directly parallel to our world,” as Rowling said about wizarding attitudes toward homosexuality
.
There was definitely male aggression against Ariana.
We don’t know how old the boys were. We don’t know what they did. Sexual assault? It is certainly possible. What else might it have been? Well, suspected witches were tortured. Set on fire. Killed. It’s dangerous to have magic. The fact is that witches, girls, women, are under greater danger than the men.
Aberforth’s account: “When my sister was six years old, she was attacked, set upon, by three Muggle boys. What they saw scared them, I expect. They forced their way through the hedge, and when she couldn’t show them the trick, they got a bit carried away trying to stop the little freak doing it. It destroyed her, what they did: She was never right again. She wouldn’t use magic, but she couldn’t get rid of it; it turned inward and drove her mad” (DH 564). Albus referred only to “what those Muggles did, what she became” (DH 715).
The unspeakable is the witch hunts and the very real women who were killed.
The one time for me that Rowling’s equanimity fails her, the notable instance when knowledge of evil becomes so unendurable that she turns away and indulges in wishful thinking that verges on denial, is on the opening page of book 3. Harry must write an essay: “Witch Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless - discuss.” He consults a passage from A History of Magic by our future friend, Bathilda Bagshot:
…burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burned so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than forty-seven times in various disguises. (PoA 2)
I didn’t realize until this reading that this desperate fantasy even attempted to reduce witch-hunting’s body count by forty-six.
Even more unspeakable in the historical witch burnings was that beauty and ugliness had something to do with it, too. Umberto Eco, in his witchcraft chapter from On Ugliness, wrote, “[I]n most cases the many victims of the stake were accused of witchcraft because they were ugly” (Eco 212). And we flash back to Umbridge in the forest, the exceptionally unattractive, absurdly frilly toad thrown into sudden perspective as a woman, vulnerable to attack.
And here is one of the motivations behind Rowling’s construction of the feminized Snape, he of the girly Patronus and the girly handwriting, who was set on fire in the very first book and did not enjoy it, whom we are all meant to laugh at when he is shown wearing Augusta Longbottom’s vulture hat. He looks like his mother; she was the archetypal witch who would have been burned at the stake. And it would have been too awful to write about that, I think, the mortal danger of being an ugly woman. Rowling mitigates it by embodying it in a man. Is it not as bad if it happens to a man? Does that make things personal, deserved, justified, rather than simply sexist? We see through Snape how sexual violence happens against men as well as women. We don’t know what happened after “Who wants to see me take off Snivelly’s pants?” (OotP 649). Rowling won’t tell us, or perhaps Snape threatened to hex her if she did. We know that James continued to harass Snape after dating Lily, and that she didn’t know about it; we don’t know what he did, only that he did it with his gang behind him, which is unspeakable enough in itself.
Whatever the boys did to Ariana, Dumbledore went into the forest to prevent the centaurs from doing it to Umbridge.
There it goes again, in my head. I can reason it out all I like that rape was improbable in Umbridge’s case and not definite in Ariana’s case, but I can’t quiet the anxiety of the possibility.
Dumbledore rescued Umbridge; Rowling doesn’t say exactly when. The reading I seem to need, the moment I think it happened, was during the time between the Order’s arrival at the Ministry battle and Dumbledore’s thunderous, god-like appearance, when Harry thought, “they were saved” (OotP 805). Even in the mortal urgency of Harry Potter fighting Death Eaters, perhaps Dumbledore would have found it important to rescue someone from Ariana’s fate before Apparating to the Ministry. And Umbridge was granted that miracle, that grace, that deus ex machina, just like the innocent schoolchildren were, no matter how much reason she had given Dumbledore to hold a personal grudge against her, no matter how much she brought things on herself and deserved them. Perhaps that was the reason she was speechless in the Hospital Wing. Perhaps she had no words for the feeling of seeing her salvation striding toward her, her desperate desire and need for his help, her absolute knowledge of his power, and his steadily burning intent to provide it, even after everything she had done to cut him down.
The next time one of you runs into J.K. Rowling, can you ask her for me if she intended us to read rape into the centaur episode?
But I do think it was entirely intentional that she left Ariana’s trauma undefined. She gives no evidence either way. It’s meant to be too dreadful to talk about. The Dumbledores didn’t. Maybe it’s like thestrals. Maybe once you lose your innocence about sexual violence in the world, you see things differently thereafter. Maybe I feel anxiety and fear about this when actually, if I look at it up close, there is something beautiful about what Rowling has done.
Why won’t she rule out rape? It’s a children’s series.
For years now, therapists and counselors worldwide have written about how their young clients use the Harry Potter series to start talking about bereavement, grief, loss of parents, abuse or neglect. There’s even a book, The Children Who Lived
, with exercises for this purpose. We know such things happen to children; all children know. But what about the child who has survived sexual assault? We do not talk about such things in front of children. Such crimes are unspeakable; even learning they exist is a sort of damage. But the survivors -- because of what happened to them, have they themselves become Unspeakable? Are they beyond help and comfort?
No. Because of the careful way Rowling worded Ariana’s story, their stories are in the series, too, although in a non-sensationalistic fashion that is, in a masterpiece of subtle layering, more legible to those who need this reading and less legible, or entirely absent, to those who need other readings.
Because rape happens. It can happen to anyone, Umbridge or Slughorn, boy or girl. And Rowling is writing for those readers, too, not setting them apart from other children whose traumas are less taboo. If even Umbridge is helped out of the forest by Dumbledore, anybody can be.
Then if Rowling is such a realist, why did she choose to place sexual harassment, possible sexual assault, and gaybashing (“Who’s Cedric -- your boyfriend?”, OotP 15) squarely in the Muggle world? I don’t think she was positing a wizarding world free of such ills. I think it was just because she was keeping Hogwarts open for everybody, an escapist fantasy that belongs to all children no matter what they’re escaping, a home.
Next month: we find the joy in the unspeakable, following this theme to the mischievous and the sublime.
“He Who Shall Not Be Named.” One of the central lessons of the series comes when Dumbledore teaches Harry to speak Voldemort’s name aloud, with the famous explanation, “Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself” (SS 298). Sometimes I just close my eyes and enjoy my immense gratitude to Rowling for teaching this concept to a generation of children. But the emphasis on this idea leads to an interesting situation in which the things that Rowling left intentionally unnamed or unmentioned in her series, believing them too frightening to include, grow powerfully fearsome in our imaginations, like boggarts or dementors that are fed by human doubt.
Rowling directly addressed these omissions in a 2007 interview
: “I don't even know if I want to say it out loud. I know that sounds funny, but I did really think it through. There are two things I think that are too horrible, actually, to go into detail about. (laughs) One of them is how Pettigrew brought Voldemort back into a rudimentary body. 'Cause I told my editor what I thought happened there and she looked as though she was gonna vomit. And then the other thing is how you make a Horcrux. And I don't even like- I don't know. Will it be in the encyclopedia? I don't know if I can bring myself to- I don't know.”
This led me to think of other horrors that Rowling leaves unnamed. What did pre-teen Tom Riddle do to those children in the cave? What did Mulciber try to do to Mary Macdonald as fifth-years that was just for “a laugh” (DH 673)? What did the centaurs do to Umbridge? What did those three Muggle boys do to Ariana Dumbledore?
Some of these answers we can guess or piece together. One recurring theme in the series is that we are most frightened by our own minds - boggart forms, dementor-induced flashbacks, visions triggered by Horcruxes and poisons. Rowling considers this to be such an important point to teach young readers that she spells it out in an uncharacteristically clunky manner after Ron fights off brains in the Department of Mysteries: “[…]according to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scarring than almost anything else” (OotP 847). I thought of these things when wondering how Tom Riddle tortured his fellow orphans so that they “were never quite right afterwards, and all we ever got out of them was that they’d gone into a cave with Tom Riddle” (HBP 268). I’m guessing he turned their own minds against them, using his skill at Legilimency. It fits; to paraphrase Dumbledore, we can recognize his style.
I thought this, and then I felt a sense of relief. It hadn’t been sexual, then.
What a curious response to have, and yet it feels the same to me every time. Phew. Just mind control, or torture, or genocide, thank goodness! Not rape.
Ah. That would be my literary boggart, I see.
What Snape’s friend did to Lily’s friend might not have been sexual, although it definitely raises anxiety in the reader, to know that it was a boy doing something Dark to a girl. The question of the centaurs gained some publicity in September 2008, when MTV reported a SwarthmoreCollege professor’s confident statement that they raped Umbridge
. Certainly in Greek mythology, a herd of centaurs carrying off a woman is an unequivocal signifier of rape. The evidence in Rowling’s text doesn’t conclusively confirm or preclude. And Ariana? Oh, the child. Rowling doesn’t say. She doesn’t say. What needed avenging so badly that Percival Dumbledore broke the code of secrecy, attacked three children, and accepted life in prison?
This is the point at which someone always says, “Aren’t we reading a little too much into a children’s series?”
Well? Were we meant to wonder along these lines?
What does the Ministry have to say about this? “There is nothing waiting out there, Mr. Potter.”
Let’s see what Rowling has to say about reading between the lines
, in this case about Dumbledore’s attraction to Grindelwald: "I think a child will see a friendship and I think a sensitive adult may well understand that it was an infatuation.”
The conversation goes on at the Burrow, whether the children are old enough to hear it or not. Maybe Rowling puts an Imperturbable Charm on the door so her younger readers’ Extendable Ears won’t work, but for those of us old enough to cross the age line - yeah, I think we’re meant to wonder.
So, did the centaurs rape Umbridge?
On the whole, as Dumbledore would say, I think not. Let’s scrutinize the evidence in the last three books.
Umbridge claims the centaurs live in the Forest because the Ministry “permits you certain areas of land,” and calls them half-breeds, beasts, and uncontrolled animals. The outraged centaurs reply, “We are a race apart and proud to be so!” and “Perhaps you thought us pretty talking horses? We are an ancient people who will not stand wizard invasions and insults!” The comment about being “a race apart” suggests that the male centaurs would not want to mate with human females; that’s not where more centaurs come from. The argument between Umbridge and the centaurs is over racial subjugation, not sexual politics. When the centaurs turn on Harry and Hermione, they say, “They came here unasked, they must pay the consequences! They can join the woman!” This suggests that whatever they’re planning to do to Umbridge is standard according to their laws, and can apply equally to “foals,” as they call children (OotP 754-757). Firenze the Divination teacher was about to be executed for betraying the centaur code of conduct; when Magorian lets Hagrid pass because he’s accompanied by Hermione and Harry on their way to meet Grawp, Magorian says “the slaughter of foals is a terrible crime” (OotP 699). It seems likeliest to me that the centaurs intend execution rather than rape for Umbridge.
Although…the narration in the Hospital Wing sounds a little more like rape:
Dumbledore had strode alone into the forest to rescue her from the centaurs. How he had done it - how he had emerged from the trees supporting Professor Umbridge without so much as a scratch on him - nobody knew, and Umbridge was certainly not telling. Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her either. Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were bits of twig and leaf in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed.
“Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,” whispered Hermione (OotP 848-849)
.
Then Ron taunts her with clip-clopping noises, she sits bolt upright, and Hermione and Ginny laugh at her.
Presumably, Madam Pomfrey would have been able to detect signs of rape. She wouldn’t lie, right? It’s just shock and not sexual assault-induced muteness? Hermione was described the same way, untidy with bits of twig and leaf, scratched but unharmed (OotP 700), just from walking in the forest. By book 7, Umbridge is up to her old tricks again, extorting lockets from petty criminals and persecuting Muggle-borns. It can’t be said of Umbridge that “she was never right again,” or whatever the equivalent would be for a totalitarian sadistic bureaucrat. Whatever the centaurs did, they didn’t break her.
Then there’s this exchange at the beginning of book six:
Slughorn: “…some funny rumors have reached me since Dolores Umbridge left! If that’s how you treat teachers these days -“
“Professor Umbridge ran afoul of our centaur herd,” said Dumbledore. “I think you, Horace, would have known better than to stride into the forest and call a horde of angry centaurs ‘filthy half-breeds.’”
“That’s what she did, did she?” said Slughorn. “Idiotic woman. Never liked her.”
Harry chuckled and both Dumbledore and Slughorn looked round at him.
“Sorry,” Harry said hastily. “It’s just - I didn’t like her either” (HBP 68-69).
So…is what “how you treat teachers these days”? What do the rumors say? Nothing about centaurs, apparently. Whatever it was, it was something that Slughorn suggests might happen to him, too. Dumbledore’s reply reinforces that Umbridge was at fault.
If it was rape, the punishment wouldn’t have fit the crime.
If it was rape, the message would be: you can be as powerful as you want, but in the end, you’re nothing but a woman, and we are men.
I can’t believe that Hermione would have led her into rape and then gloated about it. The text says that “nobody” knows what happened in the forest; I don’t believe that Hermione, Ginny, Ron, and Harry would be enjoying Umbridge’s comeuppance if they thought or feared that it was rape.
We are all meant to laugh at her. In 2005, Rowling said Umbridge would appear in the final book
: “Yeah, it's too much fun to torture her not to have another little bit more before I finish.” That sounds like an author who only wanted to give Umbridge a scare on Umbridge’s own terms. An author who unequivocally wrote these passages as Umbridge asking for it and getting what she deserved. I cannot believe that Rowling would have written it that way had sexual violence been involved.
Rape doesn’t fit the polemical purpose of the character, or of most of the series -- because Rowling doesn’t go there, studiously avoids it, possibly in the same boggart-fearing fashion that I do. Only girls give love potions to boys in her story; the other way around, they would be more baldly recognized for the date rape drugs that they are. Only Hermione, a girl, defeats Umbridge and Skeeter. There is no suggestion of sexual violence in Muggle torture; the closest we get is the humiliating sight of the Muggle mother’s underwear at the Quidditch World Cup, echoed by the sight of Snape’s gray underwear in the Pensieve. When I worry that the Death Eaters might have used rape as a tactic and that, therefore, Snape may have done so, I find comfort in Bellatrix’s accusation that Snape is all talk - “The usual empty words, the usual slithering out of action” (HBP 35) -- phew, he has not raped. The one time Rowling writes sexual harassment into a scene, it pointedly comes from Muggle men; no wizard is shown with such behavior. When Amycus Carrow spits on McGonagall, Harry actually performs Cruciatus on him. We see Snape’s father shouting and his mother “cowering” (OotP 591), but later Rowling has pre-teen Snape tell Lily “they’re arguing” (DH 667), making it sound mutual, not that one is abusing the other.
Male aggression against women is the great Unspeakable of the series.
And it’s not that Rowling has constructed a society in which sexual assault or sexism is likely to be less common. As has been noted, her wizarding world is as patriarchal as ours, sometimes more so, or at least more unquestioningly. For example, take patronymics. The only married woman not to be called by her husband’s surname is Tonks, and for all we know, she changed her name to Nymphadora Lupin. Other than that, the only instance in which this issue is even acknowledged is Snape saying “He thinks it means Lily Evans” after she had become Lily Potter, and Dumbledore invoking Lily’s maiden name to manipulate him (DH 677-678). Are we really to believe that Hermione, who hyperventilates at the very thought of inequality, will take Ron’s surname without a murmur? No, I’m going to assume that patriarchy, sexism, and sexual violence against women are facts of life in the Potterverse “directly parallel to our world,” as Rowling said about wizarding attitudes toward homosexuality
.
There was definitely male aggression against Ariana.
We don’t know how old the boys were. We don’t know what they did. Sexual assault? It is certainly possible. What else might it have been? Well, suspected witches were tortured. Set on fire. Killed. It’s dangerous to have magic. The fact is that witches, girls, women, are under greater danger than the men.
Aberforth’s account: “When my sister was six years old, she was attacked, set upon, by three Muggle boys. What they saw scared them, I expect. They forced their way through the hedge, and when she couldn’t show them the trick, they got a bit carried away trying to stop the little freak doing it. It destroyed her, what they did: She was never right again. She wouldn’t use magic, but she couldn’t get rid of it; it turned inward and drove her mad” (DH 564). Albus referred only to “what those Muggles did, what she became” (DH 715).
The unspeakable is the witch hunts and the very real women who were killed.
The one time for me that Rowling’s equanimity fails her, the notable instance when knowledge of evil becomes so unendurable that she turns away and indulges in wishful thinking that verges on denial, is on the opening page of book 3. Harry must write an essay: “Witch Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless - discuss.” He consults a passage from A History of Magic by our future friend, Bathilda Bagshot:
…burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burned so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than forty-seven times in various disguises. (PoA 2)
I didn’t realize until this reading that this desperate fantasy even attempted to reduce witch-hunting’s body count by forty-six.
Even more unspeakable in the historical witch burnings was that beauty and ugliness had something to do with it, too. Umberto Eco, in his witchcraft chapter from On Ugliness, wrote, “[I]n most cases the many victims of the stake were accused of witchcraft because they were ugly” (Eco 212). And we flash back to Umbridge in the forest, the exceptionally unattractive, absurdly frilly toad thrown into sudden perspective as a woman, vulnerable to attack.
And here is one of the motivations behind Rowling’s construction of the feminized Snape, he of the girly Patronus and the girly handwriting, who was set on fire in the very first book and did not enjoy it, whom we are all meant to laugh at when he is shown wearing Augusta Longbottom’s vulture hat. He looks like his mother; she was the archetypal witch who would have been burned at the stake. And it would have been too awful to write about that, I think, the mortal danger of being an ugly woman. Rowling mitigates it by embodying it in a man. Is it not as bad if it happens to a man? Does that make things personal, deserved, justified, rather than simply sexist? We see through Snape how sexual violence happens against men as well as women. We don’t know what happened after “Who wants to see me take off Snivelly’s pants?” (OotP 649). Rowling won’t tell us, or perhaps Snape threatened to hex her if she did. We know that James continued to harass Snape after dating Lily, and that she didn’t know about it; we don’t know what he did, only that he did it with his gang behind him, which is unspeakable enough in itself.
Whatever the boys did to Ariana, Dumbledore went into the forest to prevent the centaurs from doing it to Umbridge.
There it goes again, in my head. I can reason it out all I like that rape was improbable in Umbridge’s case and not definite in Ariana’s case, but I can’t quiet the anxiety of the possibility.
Dumbledore rescued Umbridge; Rowling doesn’t say exactly when. The reading I seem to need, the moment I think it happened, was during the time between the Order’s arrival at the Ministry battle and Dumbledore’s thunderous, god-like appearance, when Harry thought, “they were saved” (OotP 805). Even in the mortal urgency of Harry Potter fighting Death Eaters, perhaps Dumbledore would have found it important to rescue someone from Ariana’s fate before Apparating to the Ministry. And Umbridge was granted that miracle, that grace, that deus ex machina, just like the innocent schoolchildren were, no matter how much reason she had given Dumbledore to hold a personal grudge against her, no matter how much she brought things on herself and deserved them. Perhaps that was the reason she was speechless in the Hospital Wing. Perhaps she had no words for the feeling of seeing her salvation striding toward her, her desperate desire and need for his help, her absolute knowledge of his power, and his steadily burning intent to provide it, even after everything she had done to cut him down.
The next time one of you runs into J.K. Rowling, can you ask her for me if she intended us to read rape into the centaur episode?
But I do think it was entirely intentional that she left Ariana’s trauma undefined. She gives no evidence either way. It’s meant to be too dreadful to talk about. The Dumbledores didn’t. Maybe it’s like thestrals. Maybe once you lose your innocence about sexual violence in the world, you see things differently thereafter. Maybe I feel anxiety and fear about this when actually, if I look at it up close, there is something beautiful about what Rowling has done.
Why won’t she rule out rape? It’s a children’s series.
For years now, therapists and counselors worldwide have written about how their young clients use the Harry Potter series to start talking about bereavement, grief, loss of parents, abuse or neglect. There’s even a book, The Children Who Lived
, with exercises for this purpose. We know such things happen to children; all children know. But what about the child who has survived sexual assault? We do not talk about such things in front of children. Such crimes are unspeakable; even learning they exist is a sort of damage. But the survivors -- because of what happened to them, have they themselves become Unspeakable? Are they beyond help and comfort?
No. Because of the careful way Rowling worded Ariana’s story, their stories are in the series, too, although in a non-sensationalistic fashion that is, in a masterpiece of subtle layering, more legible to those who need this reading and less legible, or entirely absent, to those who need other readings.
Because rape happens. It can happen to anyone, Umbridge or Slughorn, boy or girl. And Rowling is writing for those readers, too, not setting them apart from other children whose traumas are less taboo. If even Umbridge is helped out of the forest by Dumbledore, anybody can be.
Then if Rowling is such a realist, why did she choose to place sexual harassment, possible sexual assault, and gaybashing (“Who’s Cedric -- your boyfriend?”, OotP 15) squarely in the Muggle world? I don’t think she was positing a wizarding world free of such ills. I think it was just because she was keeping Hogwarts open for everybody, an escapist fantasy that belongs to all children no matter what they’re escaping, a home.
Next month: we find the joy in the unspeakable, following this theme to the mischievous and the sublime.