The Fall of the House of ______
This thread turned out to be so interesting, it's gotten me thinking even more about incest in literature and what it stands for. Unfortunately I really haven't read any lit crit on the subject. I have a feeling I'll be surfing around today looking for some. The weird thing, too, is that the subject seems to tie in with other recent subjects on
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I wasn't sure exactly what to make of Tonks. On the one hand she's a Black, but otoh she seems to not be someone who could really be said to represent the "Pureblood ways." The interesting thing about canon is that while characters who care too much about blood being pure are racist, blood itself is an obsession of the whole narrative--particularly in this next book, apparently! Sometimes it seems like the mixture of the two--the halfbloods--are subtly seen to be the best way to go. And that works symbolically if you're saying it's better for the two sides to meet in the middle but if you take it literally it's just as bad as the idea that Purebloods are better.
So with Tonks I feel like she may be a Black by blood but she's been raised outside of the culture, really. So it's a bit like any child of any ethnic or cultural group raised by "others." Does she feel any connection to the Blacks outside of her mother and Sirius who both share her views? So she's more healthy, but at the same time represents the same destruction of family Mrs. Black shrieks about, because she doesn't care about all the stuff they care about, you know?
It was weird in that scene looking at the tapestry when whoever it was was talking about Narcissa marrying a "good Pureblood" or whatever because it reminded me of, say, a Jewish mother wanting her daughter to marry a Jew. Is it snobbery or is it the way the culture's been preserved for thousands of years? I mean, there was only one person in that house who unashamedly did love the Blacks and lived by the values they did, and that was Kreacher. He wasn't understood by anyone, but I'm sure any one of the Malfoys would have thought he made perfect sense.
Anyway, incredibly compelling post. I do distinguish between the incest occurring among Weasleys (and also, to be truthful, the Malfoys as we know them) from what is likely to have occurred amongst the Blacks, who are the epitome of Gothic.
Definitely-oh, and thanks! I think that's why I wonder about what JKR would do with Draco, because while he comes from this line and is "one of" these people in terms of beliefs and all that, he's not a crazy, over the top, Gothic creation. He's also just a regular kid. So it's hard to imagine him being tossed on the pyre as just part of a rotton family.
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