January Challenge Entry: Death Eating, or Why Merope Died, and Why her Son Refuses Death.
A speculation on why Merope died where she did, and the effect it had on her son. Warning-- some details of childbirth. And many apologies for not using a cut at first-- I truely didn't know how, so thanks for the information.
In the last hour of the last day of 1926, a young woman in labor staggered up the stairs of a certain orphanage in London. Within an hour she gave birth to a son, within another hour she was dead.
The boy was Tom Marvolo Riddle. He would grow up in the orphanage, adequately if unenthusiastically fed and clothed, housed and educated. His upbringing would be by Muggle women who could not understand, distrusted, and were understandably afraid of his emerging magical powers. Naturally they failed to supervise and discipline him. His attitude toward others was most marked by contempt. And he feared death so dreadfully that he would not only commit great crimes, but endure terrible weakness and discomfort, merely to remain living. Some of this may have come from an hereditary disposition-after all, neither his mother’s father nor his mother’s brother are known to have ever had or wanted friends. Some might hold that the wizarding world should have taken an interest in him earlier than at the Hogwart’s age of eleven. But surely his mother’s death also made him the Great Death Eater.
What did she die of? Of giving birth. But by what physical process? Here we can make a pretty sure guess. There were, and are, three ways in which childbirth is likely to lead to the mother’s death.
The first is obstructed labor. This means that the child cannot leave the mother’s body because it is too large, because it is turned wrong-headfirst is usual and safest, feet first will do in a pinch--or because the mother’s pelvis is too small or badly shaped to let the child through. But in obstructed labor the child would not have been born in an hour-it would not have been born at all without surgery.
The second cause is puerperal fever, a bacterial infection acquired through the torn tissues of the birth tract. In the nineteen twenties there were no drugs that could wipe out such an infection-sulfa drugs came in the nineteen thirties, and antibiotics were first used in the forties. Thorough cleaning of the hands and instruments of health card workers had reduced the risk, but not eliminated it. But it took days or even weeks for the bacteria to grow and the infection to spread so as to become fatal. So Merope would not have died of puerperal fever within an hour of giving birth.
The third hazard, post-partum hemorrhage, fits the pattern of birth quickly followed by death. Normally after the child is born, the uterus involutes, clenches like a fist. This returns it to closer to it pre-pregnancy size, peels the afterbirth from the wall of the womb, and clamps down on the veins and arteries of the uterus, allowing the blood to clot and the normal light bleeding to stop. If the uterus does not contract, the mother may literally bleed to death.
And so, it is almost certain, did Merope bleed to death.
Now, I ask, where have we heard of motherhood, death, and blood as part of a pattern? Harry Potter’s mother protected him from Lord Voldemort by her death, and the magic required that he live with his (and her) only blood relatives, her sister Petunia and Petunia’s son Dudley. Blood in the sense of genetic inheritance, and blood as in bloodshed, are not the same thing in the Muggle world, but the vocabulary of the Wizarding world confuses the terms. Mudblood, halfblood, pureblood are terms in which all wizards see some importance, and the pureblood wizards, like Marvolo Gaunt, find great significance.
I intend to argue that, by giving birth, bleeding, and dying in an orphanage, in that particular orphanage, Merope invoked the same ancient and little understood protective magic that Lily Evans Potter invoked for Harry. She sealed him into a Muggle orphanage, and paid for it with her life.
Let us first consider whether the apparently powerless witch from the Ogden pensieve could have handled such a powerful spell. Merope fumbles two first-year spells, but we must consider her state of mind as she does this. State of mind is necessary for some spells-concentration to apparate, happiness, or at least the memory of great happiness, to Patronus, a sense of the ridiculous to defeating boggarts. Merope has exactly two living people who are a part of her everyday life, her father and her brother. They treat her badly, but what will she do if the strange wizard from the Ministry finds against them? And there is the man she has dreamed about, and the pretty, well cared for girl who might be her rival, except at this point there is no contest-Celia is winning hands down. No wonder, behind what looks like sullen apathy--defeat-Merope is not paying attention to that pot.
When the Ministry does take away her father and brother, with no one to break her concentration or jostle her elbow, with only what information and supplies she can find in the homestead, Merope produces an effective love potion-and gets Tom Riddle to swallow the first dose. This is not the work of a squib, whatever her father has told her.
The blood magic that protects children, Dumbledore tells Harry, is ancient and little understood. That miserable shack in Little Hangleton holds the very last direct descendants of Salazar Slytherin. And continues to hold them, despite the best efforts of the most wealthy and powerful man in the district, Tom’s father, to buy the Gaunts out. Very likely they do not understand the magic they use, but use it they have. And deathbed blessings and curses, by long tradition, are especially potent. Perhaps it is not exactly difficult-if you are willing to fuel it with your life.
Well and good, but why would she seal her child in an orphanage, and a Muggle orphanage at that? Well, it’s not such a bad place, Harry thinks. Tom’s bare but private room is better than the cupboard under the stairs Harry slept in, and much better than the three tiny rooms in the Gaunt cottage. (Where did Merope sleep? With her father, with her brother, or in the kitchen? I hope it was in the kitchen.) The other children have little treasures, and even pets. They get holidays to the seaside or the country. (Did Merope ever leave Little Hangleton before she ran off with Tom Riddle? I doubt it.) There are other children to be friends with, did Tom ever want friends. As it happened, he did not, but perhaps Merope always wanted friends and never had any.
But why a Muggle orphanage? Easy enough. Given what little she knew about it, Merope expected that her child would be a squib. And she knew (or thought she did) how wizards treated squibs. Her child was the product of a mating between a near squib and an absolute Muggle, a halfblood doomed by parentage. Her child would not go back to Little Hangleton, for her father to scorn and disparage, and her brother to tease and torment. That child would grow up with others just as powerless, never aware that power existed, but only for others.
Of course she was wrong. Of course halfbloods could be more powerful than their witch or wizard parent. But how would Merope know this? If her father-would you take her brother’s word for anything?-knew about hybrid vigor, he was not about to admit it to himself, let alone to her.
So the baby was sealed away from the Wizarding world until he was eleven, when the equally potent magic of Hqgwart’s came into play. Merope, victim that she was, never imagined her child becoming a petty tyrant with little but contempt for either the other children or the adults around him. Pity him, yes, but also pity Mrs. Cole, who knew he was a danger to others, but had no idea what to do about it. No wonder she looked anxious, or took to knocking back straight gin. Maybe that improved once he came of age and left for good, or maybe he went back to do just a little more damage to the place his mother choose for him. Maybe we’ll find out in book seven.
Because “all you need is love” can’t be the whole story. Mrs. Crouch gave the rest of her life, such as it was, to save her son from Azkaban. The result was that he lived in frustration and deprivation, until Voldemort recruited him. And in the end, he lost his soul to a dementor’s kiss.
Narcissa risked a great deal to protect Draco, and the result so far is that Dumbledore is dead and Snape a murderer.
Love is necessary, if not a mother’s then a father’s (like Hagrid’s or Luna’s), or a godfather’s, or a teacher’s. or a brother’s, or a friend’s. But love is not enough. The power of love must be channeled by the right choices, or it can be disastrous. Lily, loved by parents who were proud of her and a husband who became a better person in response to her challenge, educated by great teachers, brave enough to defy the Dark Lord even before she became a mother, made the right choices. Merope, disparaged and hopeless, could not imagine what her child would really need. She gave him what she would have wished for herself. That is one of the hardest things about being a parent or a teacher-to give the child what the child needs, and not, at least at times, what the parent or teacher wants to give. And that’s part of the trouble of dying for love-if it goes wrong, the one who dies isn’t around to help fix it.
And what went wrong? Something we can hardly blame Merope for not foreseeing. Not only did young Riddle grow up knowing that he could exploit others by mysterious means, not only did he learn to hold people in general and women in particular in contempt, he failed to learn what most children know, at least intellectually, by the time they are ten or eleven. He never realized that death is universal. He never admitted that he, himself, must die.
Some interesting research indicates that quite young children normally put a good deal of energy into understanding death. Between the ages of three and five many believe that death is partial or temporary-that the person who has gone away might come back. Between six and nine, on the average, children learn that death is complete and final, but often believe that it is avoidable. Why not? Many things that can kill young children are avoidable. Don’t play in traffic, or you’ll get hit by a car. Don’t swim without a lifeguard, or you’ll drown. Don’t eat bad food, or it’ll block up your heart. (A childish perception of cholesterol and heart attacks.)
At nine or ten children know, even if they do not really come to terms with it, that they themselves will die. All but Tom Riddle, Jr. He believed he was different from the other children. He was different from anyone he knew. And he concluded that he, and he alone, could escape death, but only through the death of others. We don’t know, and won’t, unless Rowling chooses to tell us in book seven, what Tom learned about his mother’s death before he came to Hogwart’s. He was raised in an orphanage, where every child had a backstory of death or abandonment (for foundlings, that is to say abandoned children, could also end up in orphanages). But few would have had one that started so young, or was so dramatic. The orphanage staff would have gossiped among themselves, if not to the children. Those children who were older when Merope died would have guessed at what happened, and passed their guesses down to the younger children as they grew, until they reached Tom himself.
Voldemort’s followers are called Death Eaters. Now, in a sense we are all death eaters, for even absolute vegetarians eat dead plants. But Voldemort “ate” magical lives, and encouraged his followers to believe that he would share this secret with them. From whatever he took from the orphans in the sea cave, to releasing the Basilisk, to killing at one blow his father and his father’s parents (and condemning his last relative to death by despair in Azkaban), to embedding portions of his soul into inanimate objects, to killing Harry’s parents and almost killing Harry, to living on unicorn blood, snake venom, and the unhealthy allegiance of “Wormtail”, to the ghastly parody of rebirth at the end of “The Goblet of Fire”, everything he did made him less human, and his continued existence less like living.
Hagrid says to Harry, early on, that he, Hagrid, doubts that Voldemort is “human enough to die.” And we have been told that it is through love that Harry will have the power to vanquish Voldemort. I predict-and here I admit that Im deep indeed into guess work--that Harry must make Voldemort human by realizing him as human. That, in the context of Christian charity and mercy, Harry will have to love, not only the people, living and dead, that he already loves, but Voldemort himself. Love Tom Riddle that was, the man who killed his parents and made him an orphan.. Perhaps Harry will find his way to compassion through their common orphanhood. It’s asking a great deal of a seventeen year old, a great deal of anyone, really. If it happens, I doubt if it will last longer than just long enough.
But I think of Harry and Cedric at the center of the maze, looking at the Goblet of Fire. I think of Harry saying “Together?” And I can imagine Harry saying “Together, Tom” and leading the way. And perhaps Harry will come back, while Tom Riddle that was goes on. Of all the things that could happen to Voldemort, that is the most merciful I can imagine.
References:
Loudon, I. Deaths in childbed from the eighteenth century to 1935. Medical History 1986 Jan;30(1):1-41.
Kastenbaum, Robert. Death, society, and human experience. 6th ed. Boston : Allyn and
Bacon, 1998. ISBN 0205264778 (pbk.)
In the last hour of the last day of 1926, a young woman in labor staggered up the stairs of a certain orphanage in London. Within an hour she gave birth to a son, within another hour she was dead.
The boy was Tom Marvolo Riddle. He would grow up in the orphanage, adequately if unenthusiastically fed and clothed, housed and educated. His upbringing would be by Muggle women who could not understand, distrusted, and were understandably afraid of his emerging magical powers. Naturally they failed to supervise and discipline him. His attitude toward others was most marked by contempt. And he feared death so dreadfully that he would not only commit great crimes, but endure terrible weakness and discomfort, merely to remain living. Some of this may have come from an hereditary disposition-after all, neither his mother’s father nor his mother’s brother are known to have ever had or wanted friends. Some might hold that the wizarding world should have taken an interest in him earlier than at the Hogwart’s age of eleven. But surely his mother’s death also made him the Great Death Eater.
What did she die of? Of giving birth. But by what physical process? Here we can make a pretty sure guess. There were, and are, three ways in which childbirth is likely to lead to the mother’s death.
The first is obstructed labor. This means that the child cannot leave the mother’s body because it is too large, because it is turned wrong-headfirst is usual and safest, feet first will do in a pinch--or because the mother’s pelvis is too small or badly shaped to let the child through. But in obstructed labor the child would not have been born in an hour-it would not have been born at all without surgery.
The second cause is puerperal fever, a bacterial infection acquired through the torn tissues of the birth tract. In the nineteen twenties there were no drugs that could wipe out such an infection-sulfa drugs came in the nineteen thirties, and antibiotics were first used in the forties. Thorough cleaning of the hands and instruments of health card workers had reduced the risk, but not eliminated it. But it took days or even weeks for the bacteria to grow and the infection to spread so as to become fatal. So Merope would not have died of puerperal fever within an hour of giving birth.
The third hazard, post-partum hemorrhage, fits the pattern of birth quickly followed by death. Normally after the child is born, the uterus involutes, clenches like a fist. This returns it to closer to it pre-pregnancy size, peels the afterbirth from the wall of the womb, and clamps down on the veins and arteries of the uterus, allowing the blood to clot and the normal light bleeding to stop. If the uterus does not contract, the mother may literally bleed to death.
And so, it is almost certain, did Merope bleed to death.
Now, I ask, where have we heard of motherhood, death, and blood as part of a pattern? Harry Potter’s mother protected him from Lord Voldemort by her death, and the magic required that he live with his (and her) only blood relatives, her sister Petunia and Petunia’s son Dudley. Blood in the sense of genetic inheritance, and blood as in bloodshed, are not the same thing in the Muggle world, but the vocabulary of the Wizarding world confuses the terms. Mudblood, halfblood, pureblood are terms in which all wizards see some importance, and the pureblood wizards, like Marvolo Gaunt, find great significance.
I intend to argue that, by giving birth, bleeding, and dying in an orphanage, in that particular orphanage, Merope invoked the same ancient and little understood protective magic that Lily Evans Potter invoked for Harry. She sealed him into a Muggle orphanage, and paid for it with her life.
Let us first consider whether the apparently powerless witch from the Ogden pensieve could have handled such a powerful spell. Merope fumbles two first-year spells, but we must consider her state of mind as she does this. State of mind is necessary for some spells-concentration to apparate, happiness, or at least the memory of great happiness, to Patronus, a sense of the ridiculous to defeating boggarts. Merope has exactly two living people who are a part of her everyday life, her father and her brother. They treat her badly, but what will she do if the strange wizard from the Ministry finds against them? And there is the man she has dreamed about, and the pretty, well cared for girl who might be her rival, except at this point there is no contest-Celia is winning hands down. No wonder, behind what looks like sullen apathy--defeat-Merope is not paying attention to that pot.
When the Ministry does take away her father and brother, with no one to break her concentration or jostle her elbow, with only what information and supplies she can find in the homestead, Merope produces an effective love potion-and gets Tom Riddle to swallow the first dose. This is not the work of a squib, whatever her father has told her.
The blood magic that protects children, Dumbledore tells Harry, is ancient and little understood. That miserable shack in Little Hangleton holds the very last direct descendants of Salazar Slytherin. And continues to hold them, despite the best efforts of the most wealthy and powerful man in the district, Tom’s father, to buy the Gaunts out. Very likely they do not understand the magic they use, but use it they have. And deathbed blessings and curses, by long tradition, are especially potent. Perhaps it is not exactly difficult-if you are willing to fuel it with your life.
Well and good, but why would she seal her child in an orphanage, and a Muggle orphanage at that? Well, it’s not such a bad place, Harry thinks. Tom’s bare but private room is better than the cupboard under the stairs Harry slept in, and much better than the three tiny rooms in the Gaunt cottage. (Where did Merope sleep? With her father, with her brother, or in the kitchen? I hope it was in the kitchen.) The other children have little treasures, and even pets. They get holidays to the seaside or the country. (Did Merope ever leave Little Hangleton before she ran off with Tom Riddle? I doubt it.) There are other children to be friends with, did Tom ever want friends. As it happened, he did not, but perhaps Merope always wanted friends and never had any.
But why a Muggle orphanage? Easy enough. Given what little she knew about it, Merope expected that her child would be a squib. And she knew (or thought she did) how wizards treated squibs. Her child was the product of a mating between a near squib and an absolute Muggle, a halfblood doomed by parentage. Her child would not go back to Little Hangleton, for her father to scorn and disparage, and her brother to tease and torment. That child would grow up with others just as powerless, never aware that power existed, but only for others.
Of course she was wrong. Of course halfbloods could be more powerful than their witch or wizard parent. But how would Merope know this? If her father-would you take her brother’s word for anything?-knew about hybrid vigor, he was not about to admit it to himself, let alone to her.
So the baby was sealed away from the Wizarding world until he was eleven, when the equally potent magic of Hqgwart’s came into play. Merope, victim that she was, never imagined her child becoming a petty tyrant with little but contempt for either the other children or the adults around him. Pity him, yes, but also pity Mrs. Cole, who knew he was a danger to others, but had no idea what to do about it. No wonder she looked anxious, or took to knocking back straight gin. Maybe that improved once he came of age and left for good, or maybe he went back to do just a little more damage to the place his mother choose for him. Maybe we’ll find out in book seven.
Because “all you need is love” can’t be the whole story. Mrs. Crouch gave the rest of her life, such as it was, to save her son from Azkaban. The result was that he lived in frustration and deprivation, until Voldemort recruited him. And in the end, he lost his soul to a dementor’s kiss.
Narcissa risked a great deal to protect Draco, and the result so far is that Dumbledore is dead and Snape a murderer.
Love is necessary, if not a mother’s then a father’s (like Hagrid’s or Luna’s), or a godfather’s, or a teacher’s. or a brother’s, or a friend’s. But love is not enough. The power of love must be channeled by the right choices, or it can be disastrous. Lily, loved by parents who were proud of her and a husband who became a better person in response to her challenge, educated by great teachers, brave enough to defy the Dark Lord even before she became a mother, made the right choices. Merope, disparaged and hopeless, could not imagine what her child would really need. She gave him what she would have wished for herself. That is one of the hardest things about being a parent or a teacher-to give the child what the child needs, and not, at least at times, what the parent or teacher wants to give. And that’s part of the trouble of dying for love-if it goes wrong, the one who dies isn’t around to help fix it.
And what went wrong? Something we can hardly blame Merope for not foreseeing. Not only did young Riddle grow up knowing that he could exploit others by mysterious means, not only did he learn to hold people in general and women in particular in contempt, he failed to learn what most children know, at least intellectually, by the time they are ten or eleven. He never realized that death is universal. He never admitted that he, himself, must die.
Some interesting research indicates that quite young children normally put a good deal of energy into understanding death. Between the ages of three and five many believe that death is partial or temporary-that the person who has gone away might come back. Between six and nine, on the average, children learn that death is complete and final, but often believe that it is avoidable. Why not? Many things that can kill young children are avoidable. Don’t play in traffic, or you’ll get hit by a car. Don’t swim without a lifeguard, or you’ll drown. Don’t eat bad food, or it’ll block up your heart. (A childish perception of cholesterol and heart attacks.)
At nine or ten children know, even if they do not really come to terms with it, that they themselves will die. All but Tom Riddle, Jr. He believed he was different from the other children. He was different from anyone he knew. And he concluded that he, and he alone, could escape death, but only through the death of others. We don’t know, and won’t, unless Rowling chooses to tell us in book seven, what Tom learned about his mother’s death before he came to Hogwart’s. He was raised in an orphanage, where every child had a backstory of death or abandonment (for foundlings, that is to say abandoned children, could also end up in orphanages). But few would have had one that started so young, or was so dramatic. The orphanage staff would have gossiped among themselves, if not to the children. Those children who were older when Merope died would have guessed at what happened, and passed their guesses down to the younger children as they grew, until they reached Tom himself.
Voldemort’s followers are called Death Eaters. Now, in a sense we are all death eaters, for even absolute vegetarians eat dead plants. But Voldemort “ate” magical lives, and encouraged his followers to believe that he would share this secret with them. From whatever he took from the orphans in the sea cave, to releasing the Basilisk, to killing at one blow his father and his father’s parents (and condemning his last relative to death by despair in Azkaban), to embedding portions of his soul into inanimate objects, to killing Harry’s parents and almost killing Harry, to living on unicorn blood, snake venom, and the unhealthy allegiance of “Wormtail”, to the ghastly parody of rebirth at the end of “The Goblet of Fire”, everything he did made him less human, and his continued existence less like living.
Hagrid says to Harry, early on, that he, Hagrid, doubts that Voldemort is “human enough to die.” And we have been told that it is through love that Harry will have the power to vanquish Voldemort. I predict-and here I admit that Im deep indeed into guess work--that Harry must make Voldemort human by realizing him as human. That, in the context of Christian charity and mercy, Harry will have to love, not only the people, living and dead, that he already loves, but Voldemort himself. Love Tom Riddle that was, the man who killed his parents and made him an orphan.. Perhaps Harry will find his way to compassion through their common orphanhood. It’s asking a great deal of a seventeen year old, a great deal of anyone, really. If it happens, I doubt if it will last longer than just long enough.
But I think of Harry and Cedric at the center of the maze, looking at the Goblet of Fire. I think of Harry saying “Together?” And I can imagine Harry saying “Together, Tom” and leading the way. And perhaps Harry will come back, while Tom Riddle that was goes on. Of all the things that could happen to Voldemort, that is the most merciful I can imagine.
References:
Loudon, I. Deaths in childbed from the eighteenth century to 1935. Medical History 1986 Jan;30(1):1-41.
Kastenbaum, Robert. Death, society, and human experience. 6th ed. Boston : Allyn and
Bacon, 1998. ISBN 0205264778 (pbk.)