wherein Liz discusses some problems with CoS

[edenfalling]

I think one of the reasons I started writing "Secrets" -- there were several and they were all rather tangled and I was definitely not aware of all of them at the time -- was a nagging dissatisfaction with the ending of CoS. Fundamentally, this dissatisfaction stems from a disjoint between my moral understanding of the universe and Rowling's moral vision as presented in her work, but that's a long, complicated topic for another day. On a more surface level, my problem is that the ending of CoS is simply too trite.

For example, after the big explanation scene in Professor McGonagall's office -- which, interestingly, Rowling does not actually write one word of until we get to the reveal that diary!Tom is a copy of the person who became Voldemort -- Mrs. and Mr. Weasley take Ginny off to the hospital wing. Later, Ron takes Lockhart to the hospital wing.

Presumably Ron sees Ginny while dropping Lockhart off, but we get no mention of this. We also get no mention of Percy, Fred, or George being informed of their sister's rescue. Instead, an hour or two later Ron is down at the feast with Harry, giving no indication of any residual emotional upset. Possibly this is shock, or possibly he's deliberately being cheerful, or possibly Harry skimmed a LOT of details during his explanation so Ron doesn't quite realize how close both Ginny and Harry came to death. I don't know, and Rowling doesn't seem to care enough about Ron to give any explanation.

Ginny may or may not be at the feast; she's not mentioned. Her brothers may or may not have visited her in hospital; we're not informed. Her parents may have stayed the night, or may have gone home after as little as an hour; nobody ever discusses it, and Harry never asks.

In fact, we learn NOTHING of the Weasley family's reaction to events, and Ginny's recovery happens entirely offscreen. We don't meet her again until this paragraph (p. 340 of the SFBC edition):

The rest of the final term passed in a haze of blazing sunshine. Hogwarts was back to normal with only a few, small differences -- Defense Against the Dark Arts classes were canceled ("but we've had plenty of practice at that anyway," Ron told a disgruntled Hermione) and Lucius Malfoy had been sacked as a school governor. Draco was no longer strutting around the school as though he owned the place. On the contrary, he looked resentful and sulky. On the other hand, Ginny Weasley was perfectly happy again.

Perfectly happy? (And blazing sunshine to drive the idea home?) I don't believe it for a second. Nobody can recover that fast from something that devastating.

And it doesn't even make sense for the series arc! See, CoS is apparently supposed to show Ginny's suitability as Harry's match -- they've both faced a version of Voldemort and lived. But Ginny is not a heroine; she's almost entirely passive all through CoS. Her only moments of agency happen offscreen -- throwing the diary into Myrtle's toilet, and stealing it back from Harry -- and they're both reactive rather than proactive. Furthermore, the narrative belittles Ginny's experience -- Rowling dismisses a year of trauma with that one line about 'perfect happiness' -- which seems stupid if she wanted to play up parallels between Ginny and Harry. (Compare this, particularly, with the entire book's worth of post-traumatic stress Harry gets to indulge in during OotP.)

...

I can see how Harry is young enough to still not grasp all the implications of events -- and he can be awfully self-centered at the best of times, though I'm not sure Rowling always understands that -- but I keep thinking that if he could sympathize with Dobby, he ought to have been able to sympathize with Ginny as well. He ought to have been curious about how the Weasleys, a mostly functional family, would deal with the aftermath of a crisis. He ought to have looked beyond his worries about his similarities to Tom Riddle and realized that compared to Ginny, to Hermione, or even to Ron, he got off lightly.

You see, while Harry is the main character of the series, CoS is not really his story. It's Ginny's story. Ginny is the one who suffers most. Until the very end, Ginny is the one whose choices matter most. Ginny is the one all the events turn around.

Yet Rowling marginalizes her, shoves her offscreen, mutes her voice. Rowling allows Harry to ignore Ginny and trivialize her suffering.

Harry is supposed to be a hero. In my mind, a hero is not just someone who saves the day. A hero is someone who cares about other people and genuinely tries to help them, not just defeat monsters and ride off into the sunset without noticing the chaos in his wake.

Harry kills Tom, but he leaves Ginny's life in shambles and never gives her a second thought once her parents take her away.

His failure to care mars the book.

---------------

...I seem to have slid into talking about moral issues despite my resolve to leave them for another post. *sigh* But the point stands. CoS trivializes Ginny's suffering in favor of a trite 'and then they lived happily ever after... at least until next year' ending. That annoys me from a storytelling perspective, because I like to see consequences and an understanding that people do not act or react in isolation; we live in community.

The trite happiness of the ending annoys me even more from a moral perspective, because it dismisses Ginny's trauma (possessed by a sociopath, twisted into thinking she's responsible for his actions, loss of control over her own body and thoughts, metaphor for rape) as just the mcguffin of an adventure plot. I find that especially demeaning after the narrative takes Harry's lesser trauma (OMG, I share some traits with my parents' murderer!) as a serious concern.

But maybe that's just me. Thoughts?

Comments

[elenathehun.livejournal.com]

Well, I mean, yeah. Ginny is a mcguffin. But Rowling's morality isn't exactly what I'd call the most sophisticated and nuanced. She essentially created a world separate from the rest of the world, complete with government and culturally-sponsered segregation, a belief in Great Man theory of history, and the only way for regular people to fight back is to become evil - which is bad, so they have to depend on a pure and untouchable hero to save them instead of saving themselves.

I don't know. I think you'd be better off re-writing the whole series instead of trying to make head or tails of Rowling's in-universe morality.

[edenfalling]

I think the point where my dissatisfaction with her moral vision really crystallized (beyond the whole Slytherin = EVIL!!! trope, which I disliked since PS/SS) was after reading DH. I saw an essay by somebody (details escape me) praising the moral lessons of the story and talking about how Harry makes mistakes but that his impulse is toward love and goodness, and that this is a very hopeful thing to show children.

And I thought, wait a minute. Harry's impulse was to use Cruciatus on someone for the horrible, unforgivable crime of... insulting Professor McGonagall? And after feeling no remorse for that, he then goes on to demand that Voldemort feel remorse?

To which I say, hypocrite! And also, what happened to you, Harry? How did you go from the boy who couldn't cast Cruciatus after watching Bellatrix kill Sirius, to a person who can wish crushing agony on someone for a trivial insult? (Okay, the person in question was a Death Eater and had also been oppressing Hogwarts all year, but still. There is a massive disjoin between provocation and response.)

Rowling lets her 'good guys' get away with murder, literally. They are good not because they're necessarily objectively good, but because they're subjectively good -- i.e., they're 'her side.' She writes against prejudice, but undermines that message constantly by showing prejudice against Slytherins as a good thing. She shows how the broken legal system of the wizarding world can bite her side in the ass, but she doesn't ever let anyone criticize it systematically; they just criticize the choice of 'victim.' (In other words, if the Malfoys got a rigged trial, I don't think Rowling would have batted an eye.)

...

Argh.

[iponly.livejournal.com]

My enjoyment of later Harry Potter books was greatly increased by my reading of Secrets, because I could see Ginny as a proper character. I even said as much to a few of my friends, who lightly scoffed at the idea of quality fanfic and then went on with their lives.

[edenfalling]

I started writing Ginny after GoF but before OotP, which meant I had to do a lot of extrapolation from vanishingly brief canon scenes and from general knowledge about her family and the wizarding world. I think I got a fair amount right -- the direction of her development in OotP and HBP did not surprise me -- but I never much liked the way Rowling did that development. It was terribly clunky and surface-only, and she never seemed to realize that what she saw as spunkiness and charm are really bravado, a potentially dangerous temper, and a degree of social insensitivity.

It goes back to the way that the 'good guys' can get away with murder (literally, in Harry's case; I'm convinced he killed Quirrell, which nobody ever mentions after PS/SS) because they're Rowling's favored side, whereas the 'bad guys' are mercilessly punished for equal infractions. Ginny's behavior in HBP is very nearly a mirror of Draco's non-Dumbledore-related behavior, but Rowling's narrative condemns Draco and praises Ginny.

I strongly dislike that.

Thoughts on Ginny and JKR's writing style in general

[purple-alicorn.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. To be honest I've always had issues with CoS. I read book one before HP took off and loved it - but jsut could not get into book 2.

I have serious misgivings about the whole of JKR's system - esp. the sorting/house system. While this is the Gryffindor point of view, all the main charcters come from this ouse, so it is the only view that is protrayed.

In her world (in general) Slytherin = bad therefore ambition/cunning = bad, Hufflepuff = losers therefore loyalty/hardwork = losers, Ravenclaws don't fair so badly, but Hermione's intellegence is both dismissed and taken for granted, and the only other intellegent characters shown are Percy (a 'prat') and Luna ('looney') so being intellengent = outcast/no social ability.

The concept of love is also not well portrayed. The Serverus/Lily relationship is obsessive on the part of Serverus. We don't really see Tonks/Remus, but it seems a sudden relationship brought on by the war (and her pregnancy). Molly and Arthur, while caring, are depicted in their role as parents first, and Vernon and Petunia as tormenters/Dudley's parents.

As a result the relationships we see are of the whole 'high school sweethearts' type thing to happen (Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione and James/Lily).

This leads me to see Ginny as, unfortunately, a mere plot device - Harry's one twue love - the knight ends up with the girl he rescued from the dragon, whiel the sidekicks pair off. It's almost as if a box has been ticked - the hero gets the girl in the end. In addition, Ginny displays a number of Mary-Sue type qualites.

I think the main issues aries out of confusion on JKR's on what the aim of the books was to be - they try to cross too many 'categories' and as a result fit into none well. She is so focused on getting the plot done and items checked off on the hero's to-do list that unfortunately, characterisation gets lost by the wayside. She 'tells' us what happens, instead of showing us - and as a result emotional nuances get left out. Therefore while we see the heroic deeds, we do not see the emotional aftermath.

Ultimately, I think this is the flaw with the Harry Potter books - they are, at the core, action books where the plot and heroic deeds where everything is either 'good' or 'bad' triumph over the messy, emotional, parts of life that are in shades of grey. JKR created a world, but does not flesh out this world via characterisation, but rather by using architypes and heroic deeds. There is no need to flesh out characters, as they merely exist as a foil for Harry. Ginny serves her purposes as a maiden to be rescued (thereby turning her into a potential love interest), in the 'action'/plot based type of writing it is unnessecary for her to be any further developed. She is something to be won or lost, not a character in her own right.

Re: Thoughts on Ginny and JKR's writing style in general

[edenfalling]

There is no need to flesh out characters, as they merely exist as a foil for Harry.

This. Yes. Exactly.

I even wrote a story incorporating that idea -- that Harry (like Tom) only sees other people in terms of how they affect him, or sometimes how he affects them. He doesn't see how other people affect each other; if they're not in his immediate focus, they might as well not exist.

Which is a very interesting character trait, especially in combination with Harry's genuine ability for empathy (when he's paying attention to somebody), but Rowling never does anything with it. *sigh*

[askerian]

You make a lot of sense. I was somewhat aware of it, but I hadn't really put it in words. And yeah, you're right. *sigh* They're cute stories, and the universe is interesting, but the characters are very two-dimensional and their emotional responses to trauma are often entirely ignored when it doesn't serve the plot.

[edenfalling]

Rowling get a little better about allowing emotional reaction time from the third book onward -- she lets the books breathe a bit more -- but yeah, they're still very surface-oriented.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

I don't have time to give a full reply now, but: yes. You put this case so strongly that I feel ashamed to not have previously noticed just how disgraceful Ginny's sidelining was, how much it diminished such a major part of the story.

I especially feel ashamed that as your beta I never reflected as deeply on the thrust of your story as I should have.

[edenfalling]

To be fair, I wasn't consiously aware of all this when I started writing "Secrets." One reason I write fanfiction is to figure out how I feel about canon; it's often easier for me to think in stories than in essays. :-)

But yeah, I always thought it was odd for CoS to revolve so completely around Ginny when she was so nearly nonexistent onscreen. It's as if the story has a gaping hole where its center should be. And around GoF or OotP, when I figured that Ginny was going to end up as Harry's major love interest, I thought, "Hey, they have a parallel with his connection to Voldemort and her year with Tom; that's cool. ...But wait a minute, all that stuff about the diary was played down so much it's hard to point at it and say Ginny's anything like Harry's equal. That's bad planning."

So the structural awkwardness came first, and was what I was consciously trying to fix -- I wanted to tell the other half of the story. The moral implications didn't hit me until later.

[silverblade219.livejournal.com]

I always disliked CoS out of all of the books, but never really understood why. At first I thought it just creeped me out, but the other books were scarier, so I think it does tie into the ending for me too. It is even more noticeable in the movie version, were they show Ginny as 'all is well' and end it just with everyone capping for Hagrid's return.

Another thing about the way JKR treats Ginny, I think that is way some of my friends hate her and I can't figure out a way to explain why I like her as a character. My friend pretty much just sees her as a Mary Sue and annoying. Somehow I was able get curious about her early and take the small personality that she did actually show and transform that in my head to an actual character.

The moral focus in DH is also odd. All of a sudden, Snape is see as an all-a-round good guy... I mean, I can expect that he is good, working on Dumbledore's side, and made many sacrifices, but that doesn't make him a good person really. His behavior in the earlier books is still horrible, it can't negate that fact and that although he was saying that he would protect Lily's son, he treated him as James' son and as a source of hatred. And that doesn't even get into how he treats Neville. ...and now this is a real tangent. What I was trying to say is that JKR ignores the gray zone, and just focuses on "right and wrong", forgetting sometimes about the characterization.

Another factor maybe is that JKR tries to keep the tone of the earlier books, which is sort of traditional fairy-tail-ish, in the later books and it fails next to the harsh realities of the plot? (sorry for writing so much)

[edenfalling]

To some degree, you get out of books what you put into them. When reading the first four books, I put in the effort to make Ginny a real person (in my mind), which does, I think, give me a different perspective from someone who only sees what's on the page and doesn't try to round the character on her own.

I think that the HP series is at heart a meld between high fantasy quest stories and whimsical British children's boarding school tales. And neither of those genres, in traditional form, allows for much moral complexity or delicate characterization. Rowling does at least attempt some three-dimensionality and shades of gray, but not with anything like the determination needed to transcend the genre boxes she started with.

...

CoS is not my favorite HP book, but it's definitely the one that sticks most in my head.

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

No, it's not just you. Ginny was always just a plot device. Her role in the whole series was to be Harry's prize at the end of the war. Even beyond CoS, her "agency" is almost totally off-screen. JKR did a lousy job of SHOWING that Ginny was Harry's one true love because she didn't bother to develop Ginny's character very much on the page.

[edenfalling]

This is why I make a distinction between liking the IDEA of H/G and liking the EXECUTION of that idea. I started doing that because I'd read so much awful fanfiction. Then I found that I had to say the same thing about canon, which was annoying to say the least. :-)

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

wow. that left me al lmixed and disillusioned about how i enjoyed the books adn hwo i jsut read the mwithotu looking deeper .adn i remember all those other times on mailing lists where everyone analyzed things and allI could do was yammer to myself about what a shallow reader I was. adn then i left lists and stopped writing fic because thinking stufff through mostly turned up plot holes and unanswered questions and i was scared of the whole likability of the books falling apart. and after that i felt like i was sticking my head in the sand and ignoring too much.egh. well.
mostly i always thought there wree many holes and odd things because ofr the first few books she wrote or had to write one each year? and the kind of plot she was playing with alwaysseemd to me like you'd never in your life squeeze that in either one book or in a year's time of writing the book. and part of me hoped she had bigger manuscripts but had to scrap stuff by advice of her editor (which if i were in her shoes i'd say no siree to anyway)
whic reminds me, i need to read the actual uk versions now. ever since i found out here that the us editors liked to cut segments out (oh there is so much wrong inthat feeld also. including the marketing-this-to-kids-only)
so i was glad that she took three years to tackle ootp..and then came the biggest group of psychiatry cases i'd ever seen in one chapter...meep!

[edenfalling]

I think the reason the first two books are so short is that Rowling was still learning to write novels and didn't realize she could let the story breathe a little -- she basically tells what happened, one event after another, and never pauses to let the characters contemplate or react to those events.

I actually liked Harry's portrayal in OotP. Well, let me clarify that. I found him incredibly annoying, but also much more realistic than his previous 'nothing touches me' attitude, so I appreciated being annoyed... if that makes any sense!

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

yeah, i get that. ther were a lto of characters who becamem uch more real later on and i gotthe same reactiosni'd get if they wee standing in front of me. it still doens'ttake away the feeling yo umight get arter gof where she seemsto have bumped into an enormosu plot and said 'who arey o uand what havey ou done with my story?"
oh well. part of me is looking forward to this beedle-the-bard book but another part is completel ytired ofall the skweee!!!newcanon and hype and analysis and well. the best remedy for that is to go and plunge into a new fantasy series. althoug hi hope i won't fal linto a new fando magain. not the whole hooba all over. not now at least.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Word. I was disguisted when I first realized Ginny was going to be Harry's love interest.

Me: I wonder when we're going to meet the girl who Harry will end up with?

Mom: It's Ginny.

Me: *epiphany* Oh, no.

I can still remember wanting to hit the dash.

Ginny was just The Girl, the damsel, and both of the deserved better. (And fyi, giving her a personality transplat between books didn't help the issue.)

[edenfalling]

If you read the first four books very carefully, you can see flashes of the personality Ginny displays in the later three... but they're only blink-and-you-miss-it glimpses, so it's really easy to think her more forward behavior comes out of nowhere. I only noticed the character continuity because I went over the first four books with a fine-tooth comb while I was outlining "Secrets" and trying to extrapolate Ginny's personality from the scant canon evidence.

Which is yet another example of sloppy writing and planning on Rowling's part. *sigh*

And yes, Ginny deserved better treatment than relegation to the Love Interest role, and Harry deserved a better developed relationship with a better developed character. *deeper sigh*

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

If you read the first four books very carefully, you can see flashes of the personality Ginny displays in the later three... but they're only blink-and-you-miss-it glimpses, so it's really easy to think her more forward behavior comes out of nowhere

Wasn't most of it secondary evidence? Like people telling us what Ginny was like, but not the audience seeing it for themselves? Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

And yes, Ginny deserved better treatment than relegation to the Love Interest role, and Harry deserved a better developed relationship with a better developed character. *deeper sigh*

Word.

[edenfalling]

Some, yes, but it's also things like the way Ginny unselfconsciously bugs Mrs. Weasley about wanting to go to Hogwarts (as Harry and Ron are getting on the Hogwarts Express in PS/SS), or the way she clearly wants to laugh at Ron when he asks Fleur Delacour to the Yule Ball in GoF, after which she promptly tells Hermione how Harry and Ron both humiliated themselves. And some of it is just extrapolation based on her family, who are all very strong-willed, in their various ways.

[slowmercury.livejournal.com]

As other people commented, I saw Ginny as a character made solely as a plot device for Harry as well. When I tried to flesh her out mentally, nothing really stuck - there was nothing there for me to really emphasize with so I wrote her off as mobile scenery. This was true right up until the end of Book 6 when Harry dumps her "for her own good" and she says she's got better things to do than wait around for him. But then she does wait around, so so much for that idea.

I think this is why I like the idea of Harry paired off with either Ron or Hermione better than Ginny - they're real, fleshed out people. Or at least, more than Ginny is/was. (Incidentally, I think that's also the real reason that Harry let them come with him on the Horcrux quest and left Ginny behind.)

I too was especially disappointed by the morality in DH, particularly because JKR had almost shown some gray morals earlier. The four big issues I have with DH:

1) Snape's reason for joining the "good" side: throughout the whole series, I thought that Snape was a deeply unpleasant person who was none-the-less doing his best to atone for past mistakes. He was someone who was in many ways a horrible person, but he wasn't evil. I thought it was a good message that just because someone is awful doesn't mean they're evil. Sometimes very unlikeable people are also very good people.

Then in DH, JKR threw all that out. It turns out that Snape's betrayal of Voldemort was all because Snape loved Lily (and way to hold a grudge there, heroine! Your old best friend is getting publicly abused by his worst enemies and when he says one very horrible to you after your [to an adolescent boy] humiliating rescue, you don't let him apologize or explain. Way to drive him right into the arms of evil! Sorry, tangent). My point is that Snape never admitted he was wrong - he just switched sides because Voldemort destroyed something he loved. Almost like Snape had this toy he liked and then Voldemort smashed it so Snape went tattling to Dumbledore to get even. I really thought that Snape had turned against Voldemort because he realized he didn't like torturing people, or he knew it wasn't true that pure bloods were inherently better, or he realized that killing people is wrong or something, not just "You hurt me personally and I'm going to make you sorry!"

2) My friend pointed out that Dolores Umbridge went from being an evil person symptomatic of the problems with wizarding society to being a stooge of the main evil, and therefore dismissible. When she became a Death Eater, she changed from being a representative of the casual abuses of people with power to the sort of ineffable evil of the Death Eaters. That almost absolves the wizarding world of responsibility - she wasn't really an evil petty bureaucrat put into power by an incompetent and occasionally uncaring government, she was a deep evil only waiting for her chance to join Voldemort's team.

3) It would have been easy enough for Harry to ask the goblins if he could keep the sword of Gryffindor until after the quest, but instead the heroes steal it and bolt. I mean, they might not have said yes, but they never even tried. And now that I think about it, that's sort of the same point as and brings us to:

4) Where you already mentioned how Harry cast the Cruciatus and JKR spun it like that was a good thing. Because it's Harry, it's okay.

In spite of all this questionable morality, CoS (and PoA) are probably my favorite HP books. It was a good adventure, if not a very deep one. Cute. Also, I am a huge fan of reptiles and snakes and there was a very big lizard that liked turning things into stone and crawled through pipes. What's not to love?

Ed: Sorry for writing such a long post...

[edenfalling]

No worries, I like long posts!

1) I'm of two minds about Snape, but then, I'm almost always of two minds about Snape -- there's enough ambiguity in his behavior (probably because he's jerked about by plot requirements) to support several interpretations of his motives. Some days I prefer one, some days another, but I definitely see where you're coming from... and while I think it's nicely ironic that a guy who never repented could nonetheless help save the day for the side of good, I do agree that it gives a very different moral spin to the story.

2) WORD on Umbridge. I think Rowling's failure to address the systemic corruption and lack of the rule of law in the wizarding world is one of the most disappointing (and problematic) aspects of the series. Because it gives readers the impression that bad government is either inevitable or not that bad, because 'heroes' will save us despite ourselves. *grumble*

3-4) Yes. Harry gets away with things that, for example, Draco or Snape would be narratively condemned for trying, because Harry is the hero and his motives are pure, or whatever. To which I say, the ends do NOT justify the means -- even in cases where you may have to do something morally reprehensible to prevent a bigger crime/tragedy, you still have to face the consequences afterwards. Yet Harry rarely seems to have to deal with the mess in his wake. (Even his trouble getting people to believe him about Voldemort's return isn't really his fault -- that's fallout from GoF, and Draco, Rita Skeeter, and Polyjuice!Crouch were responsible for most of Harry's growing bad reputation in that book.)

Snakes are cool. :-)

But anyway, something about CoS really snags my attention and imagination. Most of my HP fanfic traces back to that book, more than to any other volume -- even stories overtly sourced in another volume (like "Fixation" is sourced in HBP) have threadroots in CoS. Part of that, I'm sure, is because I wanted to fix it, but I think it's also because CoS is at heart a very dark story -- it's just that Rowling tries very hard to pretend it isn't -- and I find that darkness (Tom Riddle, memory erasure, possession, finding echoes of yourself in a sociopathic killer, witch hunt social paranoia, pureblood prejudices, our first view of the dysfunctional wizarding government) fascinating.