The Potterian Nightmare (Part 1: Homosexuals)
...And I had to turn right around and start spewing my venomous hatred toward DH in the very next post to be made on this comm. That's very sad. But the latest influx of fen's thoughts spurred on by JKR's most recent interview (namely here and here) got me thinking, yet again [1], about the message of love and morality perpetrating the HP universe. And I couldn't help but notice some... well, things.
And I think -- while there's actually nothing new about what JKR said in that interview, because that very same message that she voiced [2] has always been there in the book, just not in the text and only ever implied in what she might call subtext, so all she did this time was out it, as she did with her gayness of Dumbledore -- what she told us during the same interview about the thing that she considers to be the fundamental undercurrent of society's homophobia [3] revealed to me a huge piece of the puzzle that is the Potterian Psychology. And you know what? Not to go too meta on you here, but it's just so darn Potterian that the speech of one seemingly-benevolent character (Quirrel, Tom, Moody in GoF, the list goes on up until pre-DH Dumbledore) can never be trustworthy, never sure to be giving us the whole truth that can be swallowed as it is, but very often rather a half-truth whose true meaning you have to figure out on your own -- even when that character happens to be JKR. And you have to look at the entire picture of the speaker's patterns of behavior to figure out what the true meaning of the words are, as well as what your morally integral take-home message should be. What all of the characters say to us in the Potterverse are actually key to understanding (by each of us readers using our own rational thoughts) what might conceivably be wrong with each of them, and in what ways they might be trying to poison their own beautiful universe.
Warning: Unrepentant ickiness. But I'll do my best to try and keep the language civil at least. And let's please all strive to do that, not only making sure to be courteous to fellow fans but also to JKR. I'm questioning JKR's integrity as author and public figure quite unapologetically here, but I believe there's still a way for us to do so, or defend her from people doing so, while employing language that doesn't descend into slurs about other people's personalities or romantic histories. Let's keep our focus on what a person does rather than who they are, since the latter doesn't matter to us nearly as much as the former.
1.1 Intro
So let's start today's discussion by forgetting everything "irrelevant" about the HP fairytale. And I agree with JKR's words, there are at least 20 things more astonishing about Dumbledore than who he might have had sex with. So that's the first thing to go. I'll discard the idea that sexual acts (any sexual acts, hetero, gay, pan, orgy, autoerotic, just all of them) even exist in the universe. Hey, we did sign up for a children's adventure; that's easy! Done. *dusts hands* Sex doesn't exist. And then there's things that do seem to matter somewhat (or quite a lot actually) to the storyline, such as Dumbledore's surprising lack of personal empathy, his own possible motivation (which he seems to have had a-plenty) for flirting with evilness in his foolish youth, etc. etc... But let's put those all aside for now, too, and pretend they don't matter one way or the other. The goal in doing so is to make sure we can look at just the very most relevant thing: the crucial backbone of the story's structural message, as it were.
Or, well, we can stop being pretentious. Just ask any pre-teen kid standing in line for the latest Harry Potter event at your local bookstore: What's the most important thing in the Harry Potter story? "Harry!" Well, yes, Harry, but what's so important about him? "He defeats Voldemort and saves the world!" Wow, he does? That sounds great. Why does he defeat him? How? "Well, he's got the Power that the Dark Lord knows not!" He does? What's that? "Love!" Oh, that's just a wonderful message to read in your adventure story, isn't it? Go on, then, run along and get your copy!
Power that the Darkness Knows Not -- That's the central theme of the whole series. So let's chuck the rest of what does seem to matter to the story. All of them. Just chuck it. Love is what matters most centrally, right? Okay, let's look at that and that alone. So first, let's remind ourselves exactly what this story means by "Power of Love." Namely, what it means when it says that love has "Power" or that it is "Powerful."
1.2 Power of Love
This might get to be a bit too long, but Love and its Powers is important enough a theme that I'm going to try and go back to quote every single instance I can find of a direct reference being made, by any character throughout the seven books, as to what exactly the powerfulness of love means in HP, either as a magical energy source or in the more mundane sense which even we Muggles are regularly familiar with (both of which are inextricably tied to each other in HP anyway). Although, we all know these more or less by heart by now, so you don't have to stick around and read each of them. Just glance through as you scroll down, or jump right here.
"Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign... to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever." --Dumbledore, PS/SS (Ch.17)
"You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him. How else could you produce that particular Patronus? Prongs rode again last night." --Dumbledore, PoA (Ch.22)
"You see that house upon the hillside, Potter? My father lived there. My mother, a witch who lived here in this village, fell in love with him. But he abandoned her when she told him what she was... He didn't like magic, my father..." / "He left her and returned to his Muggle parents before I was even born Potter, and she died giving birth to me, leaving me to be raised in a Muggle orphanage... but I vowed to find him... I revenged myself upon him, that fool who gave me his name... Tom Riddle..." -Voldemort, GoF (Ch.33)
"I cared about you too much, said Dumbledore simply. "I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act." --Dumbledore, OotP (Ch.37)
"Amortentia doesn't really create love, of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love [4]. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room - oh yes," [...] "When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love." --Slughorn, HBP (Ch.9)
"And they ended up married?" Harry said in disbelief, unable to imagine two people less likely to fall in love. / "I think you are forgetting," said Dumbledore, "that Merope was a witch." --Harry and Dumbledore, HBP (Ch.10)
"I believe that Merope, who was deeply in love with her husband, could not bear to continue [forcing him to stay married to her by magical manipulation]." --Dumbledore, HBP (Ch.10)
"But she could do magic!" said Harry impatiently. "She could have got food and everything for herself by magic, couldn't she?" / "Ah," said Dumbledore, "perhaps she could [5]. But it is my belief -- I am guessing again, but I am sure I am right -- that when her husband abandoned her, Merope stopped using magic. I do not think that she wanted to be a witch any longer. Of course, it is also possible that her unrequited love and the attendant despair sapped her of her powers; that can happen. In any case, as you are about to see, Merope refused to raise her wand even to save her own life." / "She wouldn't even stay alive for her son?" --Harry and Dumbledore, HBP (Ch.12)
"The old argument," [Voldemort] said softly. "But nothing I have seen in the world has supported your famous pronouncements that love is more powerful than my kind of magic, Dumbledore." / "Perhaps you have been looking in the wrong places" --Voldemort and Dumbledore, HBP (Ch.20)
"But I haven't got uncommon skill and power," said Harry, before he could stop himself. / "Yes, you have," said Dumbledore firmly. "You have a power that Voldemort has never had. You can --" / "I know!" said Harry impatiently. "I can love!" It was only with difficulty that he stopped himself adding, "Big deal!" / "Yes, Harry, you can love," said Dumbledore, who looked as though he knew perfectly well what Harry had just refrained from saying. "Which, given everything that has happened to you, is a great and remarkable thing. You are still too young to understand how unusual you are, Harry." / "So, when the prophecy says that I'll have 'power the Dark Lord knows not,' it just means -- love?" asked Harry, feeling a little let down. / "Yes -- just love," said Dumbledore. --Harry and Dumbledore, HBP (Ch.23)
"You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!" said Dumbledore loudly. "The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort's! [...] Voldemort should have known then what he was dealing with, but he did not! But he knows it now. You have flitted into Lord Voldemort's mind without damage to yourself, but he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony, as he discovered in the Ministry. I do not think he understands why, Harry, but then, he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the incomparable power of a soul that is untarnished and whole." --Dumbledore again, HBP (Ch.23). Man, does this guy ever shut up? But he's shouting, so let's give him another go at it. I took out the parts where he's not shouting, though, because it was getting way tl;dr
His scar burned, but he was master of the pain, he felt it, yet was apart from it. He had learned control at last, learned to shut his mind to Voldemort, the very thing Dumbledore had wanted him to learn from Snape. Just as Voldemort had not been able to possess Harry while Harry was consumed with grief for Sirius, so his thoughts could not penetrate Harry now while he mourned Dobby. Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out…though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love. --Narrative voice, DH (Ch.24)
Whew. That was quite a lot. Dumbledore just talks on and on about love, which is kind of surprising when you consider the kind of person he is, especially his seeming lack of capacity for any sort of personal love... Somehow he must know a lot about love even though we don't get the impression that he's often doing it. Also, you'll note that there's a glimpse of "narrative voice" in there at the end, though most of the Lessons of Love come from character dialogues. But that narrative voice (not to be confused with author JKR's voice, although in HP those two seldom disagree with each other) is virtually identical to what Dumbledore preaches, so it doesn't really matter all that much that it's coming from the narrative. Just a proof that Harry's really, really got it now. But anyway.
So these are the words from which we are to decipher the truths buried in the HP universe, just like the truth about "Moody" was buried in the comments he made all along about Cruciatus and Death Eaters. That is to say, somebody's words always speak to the truth of the universe, namely the truth of his universe, but it may be coming in a distorted way so that you can't really see the whole picture by just standing face to face with the speaker and listening hard. Step back after you have heard them all, and then you get the real whole truth.
Though actually, it's not that much of a buried truth here, is it? I mean, step back, and it's kind of just obvious. All you have to look at really are what Dumbledore says about Harry's parents' love for him and about what brought about a child that couldn't feel any love and grew into a monster -- the latter, the Merope tale, coming as a concrete example given for what Slughorn has abstractly talked about in his lesson on Amortentia. The rest just all replicate these two love discussions in terms of what is being said about love. So the fundamental thing to know about the Power of Love is:
1. Love can be a powerful source of goodness and protection.
(Which we hear over and over again from the get go.)
2. Love can be a powerful source of danger and destruction.
(Which is an idea introduced to us when Harry turns sixteen.)
Now, while a key fact of HP is that not a single character's speech can be trusted at face-value in this universe, this two-sided bare-essential axiom, at least, seems pretty reliably to be the core truth of the HP world. Because this truth is agreed upon by more than one person: axiom #2 by both Slughorn and Dumbledore, and as for #1, by Dumbledore and practically everybody good in HP's universe. With a heavy overtone of Dumbledore's voice, we hear the story saying: "Love Power can be positive or negative, but either way the important thing to know about it is that it's very powerful."
1.3 Power of Love: Two Types
Then, the obvious next question that anybody would want to ask, I think, is this: So what are the types of love that cause powerful protection, and what are the ones that pose the danger of destruction? I mean. That's a hugely relevant question! We don't want to go strengthening the wrong kind of love hoping to use it as a Powerful Source of Protection and then have it bite us in the ass when it suddenly causes Humanitarian Destruction now, do we?
And this, now, this is where the HP narrative as a whole is very much like Crouch Jr., who outright told Harry during GoF that the "one thing [he] hate[ed]" was "a Death Eater who walked free." The HP tale tells us through very straightforward depictions that the obvious, natural, unmistakably truthful way to answer that question is this:
"The Good love is one like Harry's mom's and dad's love for him, which was protective, warm, unconditional and self-sacrificing; and, although it is hard to tell if a one-year-old infant could be said to be capable of properly "reciprocating" that love before the Love Power incident occurred, this love was certainly resonant between the two happily-married parents. Meanwhile, the most obvious parallel to that Protection of Goodness in Harry, which is Voldemort's arrival in the world and his first step as the sinner who dares create horcruxes (which was his patricide), is directly causally linked to the obsessive, desperate, unrequited love of Merope, and its consummation, which came in the form of her creating in Tom a false love."
You can't get any more obvious than that. How can you find anything wrong in that? Obsessive selfish love is horrible, false love even worse, and unconditional selfless love is just beautiful and great, right? Nobody sane needs any explaining as to why the former might Magically Cause Disasters and the latter would become the Ultimate Power of Salvation.
Except, the thing is... You could never object to Death Eaters being a bad thing either, but the truth of Crouch Jr.'s "Moody" talk was never that he "hated Death Eaters" at all. It was the description of those Death Eaters, as free and escaped, not the very being of them as Death Eaters, that he actually, truthfully, hated. Which nobody could have guessed because it was so obvious that Death Eaters must be hated by an Auror for what they are. So the key to Potterian Truths is, you have to look at the possible differences between what someone is seeming to say and what he is actually saying, both of which are right there in plain words. And yes, even the story is just a voice that says some words. So does the HP story hate, condemn, and fear the outward characteristics of the types of love it seems to hate? Obsessive? Desperate? Are those things what differentiates the Good love and the Bad love in the eye of the HP axioms? Or, although nobody in their right mind would think it a good idea to doubt the narrative voice in a children's novel (slash its patriarchal figure's words, slash what its author says in interviews) and try to take away the flask of pure untainted beverage from the Fighter for the Good Cause's desperately clutching fingers, should we perhaps try and get a better look at his behaviors to see if the other half of his words might be what's closer to his truth? A key to discovering which half is true, of course, is not to go into a staring match with Moody's ever-turning eye, or to pick apart his words with a big fat dictionary. A whole hell of good that would do, because both of the halves are thought of by everyone to be so obviously worthy of hatred, that a whole mountain of dictionaries can't help you with anything new. You have to find out the true target of Moody's hatred by looking at what he does.
So, okay, enough with the meta-textual metaphor. That the loudest message of any fairytale story lies in what it does rather than what it says is nothing new, nothing you need Crouch Jr.'s own mini-fairytale in GoF to figure out. You just usually never imagine that there'd be any need to try and separate it from what it says it's doing, since what it says usually matches what it does without any possibility of contradiction ("Cinderella was virtuous, and when she snuck into the ball, her step-sisters obviously both looked much more beautiful than her to the prince, so of course he married Cinderella!"). So that's the only lesson you have to take home from the HP universe of morality -- sometimes people pretend to say one thing while doing a completely different thing, so you have to be sure you look at both if you don't want them to screw you. So we listened to what HP is saying just now. What, then, is the HP story doing in terms of letting us know something about Good and Evil?
Well, it's setting up a nicely structured battlefield, in which Evil loses to Good. That's the box. And it's showing us how Love is a Powerful Source of moral energy, essentially what makes Evil Evil and what makes Good Good. That's what it's doing, by giving us such detailed accounts of where ultimate Good and Evil came from, or of how those of us mere mortals hanging in between those two extreme ends are affected into turning Evil or into turning back to Good. I mean, it is, right? That's what the story's universe is doing in that box.
1.4 Two Types of Love Power: Explained
Okay, it took us a ridiculous amount of time to get here... But really, all we had to do all along is to look at the skeletal structure that holds up the bare-essential players in the story as they relate to the bare-minimum number of key elements that matter in their battleverse. Any gamer will tell you that that's the first thing you need to know, to understand any game enough to play. That's what each game does. That's why we got rid of Sex, and Personality, and Growth and Education and Willful Choice and everything else that's inconsequential to the essential bone-structure of HP, at the very beginning. Those things don't matter. I mean, they might matter to you, I as a person sincerely hope they matter a lot to you in your life, but it doesn't matter to the fundamental scheme of the Potterverse. What matters the most is Love and its dual potential for Powers. And, of course, Good warring against Evil.
So let's reexamine the four most prominent people we know to be playing key roles in driving the HP story forward (Harry, Voldemort, Snape and Dumbledore) by casting them in these lights that matter the most. Goodness. Love. They're not only doing the battle-game thing which is the obvious surface structure, but that surface structure is closely tied with the fundamental structure of who they are at any given moment, or in other words what they stand for -- i.e. Good, Evil, and switching in between. And we also happen to know what kind of love is influencing each of the characters in virtually every instance of Goodness or Evilness, in most cases in quite a lot of detail, so let's include that in looking at our skeleton, too. After all, love matters, it matters hugely. And we were somehow told of almost each single love that matters to every character at each of their critical moments, as his unmistakable causal motivation.
And here, I have to give a bit of a caveat, because here, for the first time ever, JKR's interview message deviates from the HP narrative voice's textual truths. JKR tells us her truth is the subtextual truth of the HP narrative voice, which may be true... But anybody who's ever set foot in fandom for a day without being flamed to death in a pairing war knows that subtext is firmly in the eyes of the beholder, no matter who happens to be the beholder. We should have no problem chucking JKR's nonsense: "Yes, that's your truth, Authorial Dictator. But unfortunately, once something is not put into the text it becomes something that's, well, not there in the text!" However. We are going to listen to the author for a moment now -- that's my caveat -- and pretend, just for the sake of the argument, that her message is the message of the Potterverse. Because that's how you uncover what speakers of hidden truths are actually saying. By listening, and taking in the parts of the words that hold up to the light of the facts. Just because Voldemort is an unpleasant monster and couldn't possibly be trusted as the spokesperson who knows and tells you the true nature of all the Hogwarts professors (he doesn't, he's totally wrong about Snape while actually being right about which side he's on), he could still draw your attention to something very important that you would miss if you didn't even care to listen ("Moody" is under Voldemort's service). So first we'll take JKR's account of what Dumbledore's love truly is as the provisional truth while we're in Part 1, in order that we might shed an essential light on what's going on in the Potterverse:
Voldemort does not have any kind of love. This fact has made him unsalvageably Evil. The end.
Dumbledore once made the mistake of falling in a gay love, ignoring his blood-family (fraternal) love for his sister. That almost turned him Evil, but when this mistake of his resulted in the death of the object of his familial love (which in turn, simultaneously, destroyed his gay love), he quickly came back to his senses and has been Good forever since.
Snape once turned to the side of the Evil, for no motivation explicitly depicted except for his friendship (companionate love) with people who were all going to become Death Eaters. When push came to shove, he ultimately chose that connection (or connections) over his heterosexual love. But when that Evil he joined turned its jaws on the object of his heterosexual love, he felt such excruciating remorse that this made him mend his ways. It's been seventeen years since his heterosexual love lost its target. But he still has it, True and Powerful, and holds its protective strength close to his heart so he can be guided into doing what's Good rather than what's easy.
Harry has lots and lots of family love (for his parents) and friendship-love (most strongly focused on Ron and Hermione), and he has had three different dates or girlfriends (that inter-exchangeable Parvati girl, Cho, and finally Ginny) through the three books spanning his ages of 14-16. Although only the latter two can be called actual objects of his affection, and only the last is a viable object of his true affection [6]. Oh, and we can't forget he also has huge amounts of love for less obvious targets of affection, such as Sirius, his godfather, and Dumbledore, his teacher. And Hagrid and Neville and even his rival Cedric and... well, virtually everybody in his universe. Anyway, so he has lots of love for people far and near. The only type of love he has never experienced as far as textual or authorial truism goes is gay romantic love. Not that that's significant or anything, if all the other characters haven't either, except for one guy. And so with this innate capacity to love not only his family, friends, and girlfriends, which are easier objects, but also his guardian who once tried to murder a man, and his teacher who he knows to have knowingly locked him up in an abusive household for his whole childhood, Harry is set up with a huge ammunition of Love Power that makes him indestructible. Somehow this capacity for loving all people itself is supposed to have come from his parents' sacrificial protection. Don't ask me how, it just has. And this makes it so he can't conceivably choose a path that leads to Evil, and so he becomes the prophesied savior of the world, whose loving efforts of battle-quest (this time aided significantly by his friends' love for him) and ultimate sacrifice redeems the entire world of all Evil things that has sprung up in it.
So, to recap... I'll again use a chart because I just have an unhealthy obsession for visualizing things this way:
Two Types of Love Power for Each Character
Causes EvilnessRedeems it with GoodnessVoldemortLack of any love(N/A)DumbledoreHomosexual RomanticFamilialSnapeFriendshipHeterosexual RomanticHarry(N/A)Abundance of love
(Notably: Familial, Friendship)
Snape's Evilness Motivation part is kind of iffy, because we aren't really ever explicitly told (at least in the voice of someone who sounds completely reliable as a spokesperson for Snape's motivations) that he held such a strong, loyal love for his Slytherin friends that he couldn't possibly marry Lily instead of joining the Death Eaters. But no other motivation has ever been given, so we will just go with "friendship" here. And the rest are pretty uncontroversial.
So this is the core of what the HP story does. Now that we see what the key components in each character's storyline does, we can step back and look at the overall picture. We see there are very clear parallels drawn between, first of all, homosexual romance and heterosexual romance (the former turns in-between guys to Evil and the latter turns them from Evil to Good), and, second of all, between blood-family-oriented love vs. the lack thereof (Familial Love is a key thing that holds up Goodness in two key instances, Dumbledore and Harry, whereas it never shows up as an Evilness-causing turning point in any of the four key characters: in fact, in the case of Voldemort, even though he lacks all sorts of love, it is his lack of familial, filial love that is what most crucially defines his unique state of utter lovelessness).
And, although we cannot compare different instances of the same type of romantic love, because we only have one case each of heterosexual and homosexual love on this chart, we do have descriptions of the nature of Harry's key family love and Dumbledore's key family love: the former fills Harry with such magnificent amounts of happiness, despite the fact that their loss is a tragedy, that he can use it to produce a full-blown patronus at the tender age of thirteen; while for Dumbledore, his love for his sister is the thing that always fills him with pain -- so much so that this love seems to be his emotion under the influence of the cave's Mental Torture Poison. That's an almost complete opposite as character of love goes, but they are both the same type of love and belong in the same side column. So it's not the "how" of love (protective, devoted, obsessive, desperate, self-centered, or otherwise) that seals the deal, but rather seems to be what kind of love it is that determines its effect ultimately. Obsessive love did no good but cause destruction when it was Merope's, but it surely worked wonders for Snape.
By the way, as a bit of a sidestep, here I have to apologize: this is going to be the end of my touching on the matter of what Merope's love signifies. Those of you who say "Wait, so heterosexual love goes in both columns?" you're absolutely right to get puzzled. Because that love of Merope's was most definitely a highly sexual, heterosexual love, but that was actually the Moste Destructive Love Powere of all time, wasn't it? That's actually a highly important "doing" of the story going on at the level of pre-natal Good/Evil-production, which, by the time we get to this chart the results are already working as their own agents of action -- Voldemort never can be Redeemed, and Harry can never, ever fall into Evil. But that chart is actually a completely different chart, where many heterosexual loves are sorted into Good-inducing and Evil-inducing types... and it happens to reveal one of the highly significant factors to be gender (Cf. my first link from [1] -- not that there's a chart there, it's all text). On the other hand, this chart here has no gender variety that can count in the same way. It's actually a completely male-dominated categorization sheet in terms of who's doing the loving. So from here on through Part 2, we are going to disregard not just the fact that sexual acts exist in this universe, but that women exist, as well, at least as agents of the loving action.
Then the message seems pretty clear:
A man's romantic love:
Will be a Powerful Inducement of Evilness if it is homosexual,
and a Powerful Source of Redemption if it is heterosexual.
A man's familial love:
Always causes Powerful Protection/Redemption and never any sort of Destruction.
In fact, a man's lack of familial love Powerfully Causes Destruction.
1.5 The Potterian Paradox
So that's the fundamental message of the Harry Potter series.
And, erm... Okay.
Am I missing something here? Could there be, perhaps, any other possible way to read the meaning of the Love Powers depicted through the personal journeys of these four main characters? Because these two axioms spoken by the deeds that is the HP story, especially in conjunction with each other, are just so, so in-your-face homophobic that it is almost comical to think that the carriers of this particular message should be: #1. JKR (who clearly and vocally states her bewilderment and distaste for fanatic homophobia, and shows no compunction in publicly announcing the fact that she has put a gay character in a children's novel), or #2. the HP story (which, according to JKR, allows that subtextual message to be embedded within), or, well, #3. the narrative-internal spokesperson whose job it seems to be to talk about the whole Dual Powers of Love message -- Dumbledore (a gay man). That's just... That's just ridiculously bizarre. It sounds like the sort of black humor that Crouch Jr. pulls off by cleverly speaking the truth while not being found out what he's actually saying. "Hah," he will later say as he starts to run out of polijuice, "you thought I meant I hated free-walking Death Eaters, didn't you? You weren't watching me closely enough to figure out I actually love Death Eaters, but only hate the ones that flaunt their free, un-jailed existence! Hee hee, gotcha, didn't I!" If you see my face laughing at that joke, it is an extremely morbid kind of rictus.
The Pope once criticized the Harry Potter series (this was way before DH came out) by saying that he thought its core danger lied in its surreptitious messagery, the way it could deceptively warp the minds of innocent children into un-Christian ways. His exact words to describe the story were: "[S]ubtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort [...] the soul."
I don't know exactly which message he was talking about, since there could be hundreds of messages in HP offensive to the Catholic Church for all I know... But I never thought there would come a day when I would find myself applying the Pope's words to my own sentiments on the issue of sexual minorities. Yet, that's just it, right there. It's not so much that the messages are there that's creeping the hell out of me. Not at all. It's more a question of what kind of a pretty package it tries to come wrapped in. The story does look vaguely Christian (not that I'd know; I have no idea about anything to do with Christianity, sorry). The story certainly sounds LGBT-friendly. That's the locus of its horror.
I mean, the Dr. Doolittle books send abysmal messages to their readers reflecting the author's views on race. But my parents didn't feel any worry in buying them for me when I was ten and leaving me to read them on my own ("devour them" would be a more accurate description). Because they found an edition of the series that had notes from the editors written at the end of each book, in interesting, child-friendly, big-lettered prose that made them enticing enough for the child readers to read, which often touched upon the issue of racial prejudices found in the story. Now, I am not saying that the Harry Potter series should have such an LGBT-friendly edition tomorrow. That would probably be impossible, for not only political but also a variety of realistic reasons. That's simply not the kind of an approach usually taken to mitigate homophobic messages in children's novels, at least in today's society. Alas. But that's fine. Well, not fine, but that's just the kind of a stage our society's at right now. I get that.
What the Dr. Doolittle story does not do, even if you decide your kids can just read it in an edition with no editorial notes whatsoever, is go out of its way to present itself as a story that sends a sound message about racial equality. ("Characters X, Y and Z are infantile morons with less brain than the doctor's pelicans, who just happen to be African and that's greatness," it does not say on the promotional sleeve.) If I were looking for a new exciting series of books to suggest to my child, and a librarian recommended Dr. Doolittle (since its author is dead and gone and can certainly never recommend his books to me), by saying "It'll be a wonderful way for them to expand their view on the issue of race and discrimination," then I -- who happen to know exactly what's in there -- would become very, very wary of that librarian and never trust her with my child's reading list again. If I hadn't read it, and her words made me decide to give it to my child without knowing exactly what kind of a story it is, I would feel deeply betrayed and angered by the way the librarian had decided to present it to me. It's not like if it hadn't been presented with those pleasant words I wouldn't have had my kids reading it. Racism aside, the many adventures of the quirky doc who speaks to animals are wonderfully imaginative (so much so that we modern folks start wanting to redo it with less offensive imagery). Sometimes you encounter a grimace-inducing moment in the books, sometimes a very big such moment, but there's nothing wrong with that, per se, in my opinion; I would be perfectly happy to teach my child to read their books in a way that follows my own example. That's what parental guidance is for (or so I hope I'll still be thinking, if and when I do have a baby). That's the way I would want to have my children reading it, but obviously, if I were Narcissa and John Doolittle was a Pureblood character going into the Muggle world to frolic with animals, I would be smiling along with my son every time he read out aloud a particularly amusing description of how ugly or misguided or whatever else coincidentally horrible things the miserable Muggles are. That would be Narcissa's choice. She wouldn't dare touch, for instance, a children's book that gets headlines in the Daily Prophet for how it sends a utopian message of equality between Muggles and Wizards.
The homophobic extremists are outraged that JKR would dare infest a children's book series with a gay male character, installed, of all places, as a headmaster of a boarding school. JKR smiles and says that their views are sorely mistaken. There is nothing wrong with Dumbledore being gay, of course! How silly of them to think so. They don't even read the books to decide for themselves if they're okay, isn't that just ridiculous? She says Dumbledore being gay is not as important as his innate good nature. She says she doesn't understand why these homophobic people have to be so goddamn nasty.
When she says she doesn't understand it, it seems as though she probably, actually, means it.
Just not in a way that you or I would normally think, or even in a way that she thinks she's meaning it... Or so it sounds to me...
But that's the end of my discussion on the topic of JKR the author. I do care about what she does as creator and recommender of her own beautiful story, the series I have fallen head-over-heals in love with and can't possibly escape. But it's not like her personal political opinions are any of my business. That really doesn't matter to anybody, as she's not our local governor. She's a writer. What matters to us is the story.
In Part 2 of this two-part essay, I will shift my focus onto what the HP universe is saying. I will now discard, as I discarded the idea of sexual intercourse and female agents of love, the fact that an author that wrote the HP story even exists in the universe. *dusts hands happily* That doesn't really even matter to the story, because the story should speak its own truths for itself.
Footnotes and source references (click on the index number again to go back to where you came from)
[1] For me this is actually the third component of my thoughts on this particular issue, fate and love: my first can be read here in a comment I once made on this comm and my second is this little bit I wrote in ani_bester's LJ.
...My, that was unbelievably wankish of me:) But it just seems to me like there's a coherent whole to the sexist/homophobic/prenatal-deterministic axiom of HP, one that says:
"Female heterosexual aggression of love causes irreversibly Evil creatures to be born, whereas male homosexual love of any sort -- even the non-sexual, nay sometimes even non-romantic kind -- causes every living soul but the irreversibly Good to fall for the Evil ways. And it doesn't matter what kind of an environment a child is brought up in, or what he's like, or what he does, or how he decides to do them, in the ultimate end, because no matter what kind of a means to an end you might employ, if you are Good you will have done Good and if you are Evil you will have done Evil. Which side of the fence you ultimately are on is predetermined by the sins/innocence of your parents."
By the way, while I'm linking, I would like to thank not only the authors of all of the posts mentioned but also notably swythyv for her wonderfully imaginative Kings Series and especially New Series. I owe my thoughts here largely to her insight of viewing the HP universe as a puzzle to be solved, or a lock to be picked, by looking at the clues that are hiding in plain sight. If the language I use in my essay happens to sound like hers in some places, that is the reason. My being influenced is an homage and not meant to be a slight or an offense. Although, how the house I broke into ended up being a "nightmare" where the original picklock master has managed to find us such a magnificently coherent, sensible universe lying right behind the same door, I am sad to say I have no idea...
[2] To quote from this interview (or you can get the full text from the interviewer's official website) directly: "He's an innately good man, what would make him" "[flirt] with the idea of racial domination"? -- which was given as JKR's explanation for why Dumbledore became gay in her mind.
[3] To quote (source same) : "I think homophobia is a fear of people loving, more than it is of the sexual act. There seems to be an innate distaste for the love involved, which I find absolutely extraordinary."
[4] In relation with what I briefly said in [1], the only suspected case of Amortentia we ever see in the HP universe tells us that the whole point of this plot device has been to make sure we understand that Merope's love for Tom was "genuine," misguided and obsessive though it was, while Tom's reason for having sex with her was incontrovertibly "false," a non-love, the most importantly distinctive thing from a man's heterosexual love for a woman. If you're still surprised by the fact that the moral message of that tale has never had anything at all to do with "rape," then you weren't reading JKR's words closely enough. Sex doesn't matter. It has never mattered. Nor will nor freedom of choice. It's love that matters, the formidable powers of love, and them alone. But I digress.
[5] Completely OT here, but: ...Wha-!? She could? Food too!? That's what you tell your Knight right before he goes wandering all over wintry Britain in a tent? WTF??
[6] This is also completely OT, but here I can't help but express my disturbance at the racially charged message sent by that particular hop-step-jump story arc. Not to mention the fact that it's paralleled, in Ginny's own hop-step-jumping to her "true" love goal, where she somehow had to date one of the few African British males we ever encounter to get to Harry.