Presented by “Harry Potter and the Reread Project”
So it’s been a while since I’ve published the last Harry Potter Reread piece, as unfortunately other obligations kept my away from my favourite book series. To recap quickly, the last reread post essentially took a longer look at most of the Trio’s camping trip: Ron majorly freaked out, abandoning his friends, returning to save Harry’s life and earning the right to destroy a Horcurx in the process, Dumbledore’s goodness was questioned more and more and Harry hit what’s probably his lowest point in the books so far. Ultimately, the Trio decides to visit Xenophilius Lovegood, is tricked and trapped by him and only escapes by the skin of their teeth.
A Dangerous Dream
The fallout of the visit in Ottery St. Catchpole seems, at first look, to be much smaller than the fallout from being trapped in Godric’s Hollow. Godric’s Hollow cost Harry his wand, which he thought of as his most powerful weapon against Voldemort. Visiting Xenophilius Lovegood, on the other hand, shows Harry a way to beat Voldemort: becoming the master of the Deathly Hallows and thus, supposedly, death himself. Unfortunately, Harry learning about the Hallows spectacularly backfires. Much like Dumbledore himself, he becomes so obsessed with the idea of the Hallows that he loses track of everything else for a while and starts to neglect his actual mission-
That’s, however, entirely understandable. When the Trio goes to visit Xenophilius, they are entirely out of other ideas, as Hermione admits. Dumbledore left the Trio with a monumental task and, as has been pointed out continuously ever since the seventh book was published, with very little pointers as to how to accomplish said task.
Additionally, Harry has been doubting Dumbledore more and more since his death, especially because of how little help and preparation he has actually received. Believing that Dumbledore actually did place all of the pieces to saving himself in front of him restores at least some of the faith in his mentor, maybe even in the most crucial aspect of his relationship with Dumbledore. Assuming that the Hallows are real and Dumbledore meant for Harry to find them means that Dumbledore didn’t leave him entirely unprepared and is thus proof that Dumbledore cared about him.
That this leads to a fairly massive conflict between Harry and Hermione is about as unsurprising as Harry’s obsession with the Hallows. After all, Hermione’s narrative job is to be the voice of reason and to balance out Harry’s – and sometimes, Ron’s – hotheadedness. Considering that hotheadedness, it’s also no surprise that Harry messes up and uses Voldemort’s name when he’s fighting with Hermione. The Trio then gets captured and taken to Malfoy Manor, where Bellatrix tortures Hermione and reveals the location of the next Horcrux by chance. After their escape and Dobby’s death, this is what Harry chooses to focus on, rather than continuing his quest for the Hallows.
While JKR leads up to this choice quite interestingly, there are a two aspects of the chapters surrounding that decision that annoy me. For one, we never really get Harry’s actual reasoning for why he decides to give up on the Elder Wand. Until the end of the chapter, JKR doesn’t even make it explicitly clear that this is what Harry decided and just alludes to an important decision having been made instead. Then, when she does make it clear that Harry has decided to prioritize information about the next Horcrux over keeping Voldemort from taking the Elder Wand from Dumbledore’s grave, Harry simply justifies it by saying that Dumbledore didn’t want him to have the Elder Wand. Later on, JKR lets Harry think that he can’t satisfactorily explain what lead to this decision because the internal arguments that lead to this decision – that JKR never actually put on the page – sound feeble to him in the aftermath of the decision.
Additionally, Hermione had to get tortured for Harry to arrive at the decision that Hermione had been arguing for for weeks. There’s a very “woman in the refrigerator” dynamic about this, though she does survive. But making female characters suffer to further the character growth of male characters is an age old dynamic, and it’s not especially enjoyable to read.
The Goblin issue
What also isn’t especially enjoyable to read is the portrayal of Griphook and goblins in general. Creating a fantasy race that is obsessed with wealth, untrustworthy, cunning, hooked-nosed, and then having them decide to take a neutral standpoint in the war against, well, Wizarding fascism comes with its own host of unfortunate implications.
There’s a very good essay on JStor called “Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines” pointing out the connection between “knockers”, folklore creatures that goblins can be said to be based upon, were explicitly connected to the ghosts of Jewish people. The idea of the goblin as a fantasy creature developed from this point onwards, and essentially became a staple of fantasy literature, much like dwarves, dragons, unicorns, werewolves and giants. According to Ronald James’s essay, the belief that the Knockers were Jewish ghosts was lost when the folklore migrated to the American colonies. However, folk creatures linked to the knockers and goblins especially retained the attributes stereotypically associated with antisemitic caricatures of Jews: greed and untrustworthiness.
The fact that a classic fantasy creature that she uses in her writing is clearly influenced by antisemitic stereotypes is, of course, not at all JKR’s fault. But the way she handles it is. And she does handle it fairly badly, especially considering that with other fantasy creatures, she tries to subvert their typical portrayal. I’ve already written about how successful that endeavor is with giants and werewolves, but with goblins, it seems like she barely even tried. Harry is told not to trust goblins in the very first book already, and although Hermione points out that wizards have marginalised goblins for centuries, that distrust ultimately seems to have been justified.
At the same time, there’s a certain irony to the Trio aiming to deceive a goblin, who is used to deception by wizards and thus inherently doesn’t trust them, and being outsmarted by him. One could, of course, argue – like Harry does himself – that promising Griphook Gryffindor’s sword but never specifying when he’d get it and then keeping it until the Horcruxes are destroyed is technically not a deception. Griphook would have gotten the sword at some point, after all. But it’s still a dishonest way of treating an ally and Griphook taking the sword is just him making sure that he got what was promised to him.
Turning Cruel?
One thing I liked about the interactions between the Trio and Griphook was Hermione passionately telling Griphook about fighting not just for wizards, but against all injustice in the wizarding world. It’s essentially a plea for an universally respectful and fair approach to politics that doesn’t fight against the marginalisation of just one group. The contradiction between that appeal and the Trio’s actual way of treating Griphook is pretty obvious, however.
I do get why Harry decides to act the way he does. I also get why he uses the Imperius curse when breaking into Gringotts. It’s essentially a “the end justify the means”-situation. In Harry’s opinion, fighting Voldemort justifies acting in ways that he would normally condemn. Considering what Voldemort is meant to represent, I don’t have a problem with that.
What I do have a problem with is the narrative framing of Harry’s usage of the Unforgivable Curses: there is no moment in which Harry struggles with having used the Imperius curse and when he tortures Amycus Carrow, it’s present as a moment of strength and victory. McGonagall even calls it “gallant”. And while Harry using the Imperius curse in Gringotts can be read as either seeming like an absolute necessity to finish the mission in the moment when he uses it or as something that Griphook manipulated him into, there’s no excuse or reason behind him using the Cruciatus on Carrow.
Considering how much effort JKR put into showing how horrible both the Cruciatus curse and the Carrows are, this could have easily been framed as a moment that Harry breaks, repays the cruelty the Wizarding World has shown him with cruelty, and actually emotionally struggles with. It would have even been fairly easy to include a short scene in which Harry, on the way back to the Room of Requirement from the Great Hall, doubts his actions. There is, after all, a scene in which Harry doubts whether he is turning into Dumbledore, who doesn’t trust anyone, when he is faced with the choice of letting the other DA members help. And how great would it have been if Harry had wondered for a moment what the war was doing to him, realised the risk of it turning him cruel and angry and decided to make a conscious effort to never be cruel? But unfortunately, that’s not the route JKR goes.
Familiar developments
The trio breaking into the Ministry to steal Slytherin’s locket on from Umbridge is, as I already discussed, one of my favourite parts of Deathly Hallows. It’s a perfectly executed “undercover mission gone wrong”-plot but with the darker twist of showing what a turn for the worse the Ministry has taken. Something similar is true of the break-in at Gringotts: while it doesn’t go as in depth with its description of the horribleness as the Ministry scenes, there’s the gut-wrenching scene of a man attacking Bellatrix, Voldemort’s right hand, for taking away his children. It’s an act of complete desperation, underlined by the fact that people without wands are treated as less than human.
The break-in at Gringotts has the same basic structure as the break-in into the Ministry: there is a long period of planning, of which the readers see fairly little, there are unforeseen complications during the very first stage of the operation that force the heroes to improvise: splitting up in the Ministry, Imperiusing Travers and Bogrod, which are mostly caused by the heroes own unpreparedness – not doing more research on the ministry workers they are impersonating, not realising that the goblins know that Bellatrix’ wand was stolen. This ultimately forces them into heroic acts to escape, like freeing the Muggleborns who are awaiting trial and the imprisoned dragon. That’s not really surprising: it’s essentially the classic heist-movie plot. Additionally, while both break-ins allow the heroes to accomplish their goal of retrieving a Horcrux, they also set them back.
What’s interesting is that although the basic structure of the chapters is the same and they both work with very similar premises, the break-in at the Ministry feels a lot less triumphant than the break-in at Gringotts. One the one hand, I think it’s because the Ministry chapter explores the dynamics of a Voldemort-ruled Wizarding world much more in depth than the Gringotts break-in. On the other hand, I think it’s because it’s clearer what the break-in at Gringotts is leading up to. The goal of destroying Voldemort is no longer in the far-off distance. Of course, it’s entirely possible that that’s an impression I have based on the fact that I’m reading the books for the hundredth time and that first-time readers perceive it entirely differently.
And Familiar Faces
The second-to-last part of Deathly Hallows brings back a whole bunch of characters that have essentially disappeared for either most of the book or even most of the series. Griphook and Ollivander, for example, were both introduced in Philosopher’s Stone but essentially became completely irrelevant afterwards. That they returned and became crucial in driving the plot forward in the final book is a fairly classic JKR move and, as I’ve mentioned before, one of my favourite aspects of the series.
Then there’s, of course, Dobby. Another thing I’ve already mentioned earlier during this project is that I never really got the love many fans of the series have for him and instead have been rather torn about him. That’s probably why his death isn’t especially high on my list of sad scenes in Deathly Hallows, even though I’m able to see why it’s an objectively sad scene. After all, Dobby engages in the ultimate act of rebellion for a house-elf, turning against his (former) masters, and pays for it with his life. And Dobby is set up to just be an unequivocally morally good being: he is loyal to the point of blindness, he has no intention to harm anyone, he is willing to make sacrifices and push past his own fears to achieve his goals. At the same time, I find his portrayal rather ambiguous. It’s clear that his admiration of Harry is based more on the way Harry treats him than on believing in the values Harry represents and Dobby’s always shown to be rather child-like intellectually, to the point of being incapable of thinking his actions through logically. Looking at the series and his role in it as a whole, his death seems like the logical conclusion of the way his character is set up.
Another character development that seems like the logical endpoint of a journey is Neville, though that could and should have been better executed, in my opinion. As much as Neville is shy, awkward and clumsy at the beginning of the series, the seeds for his great entrance in Deathly Hallows as leader of Dumbledore’s Army at Hogwarts have been there ever since he confronted the Trio in the common room. That he had it in him to be a fierce fighter if necessary became clear when he insisted to go to the Ministry to rescue Sirius and held his ground against the Death Eaters.
Unfortunately, he fades into the background for most of The Half-Blood Prince and is essentially irrelevant in Deathly Hallows until he reappears. That means that his development from a guy who’s usually shy but good under pressure to a complete badass who stands up to violent Death Eaters to the point where they consider murdering him happens entirely off-page. It’s not unbelievable for him to develop in this direction, but it would have been better writing to actually see more of this development.
Which is a statement that is true of the entire Hogwarts-subplot. Other people have suggested in the comments that Deathly Hallows would have been better if it had been split between the narrator accompanying Harry and someone who’s at Hogwarts, but I disagree. I think moving away from the classic school setting into a underground resistance setting as well as splitting the narrative focus between settings for more than one chapter would have been a too radical break from the established style of the series. However, JKR finding a way to keep Harry in touch with people in Hogwarts – Aberforth giving a piece of the two-way mirror to one of the members of Dumbledore’s Army, for example – would have made it possible for the readers and Harry to be up to date on what is happening at Hogwarts without creating the narrative split. Additionally, Harry knowing what was going on at Hogwarts and being torn between his actual mission and wanting to help his friends would have been amazing and heart-breaking to read about.
The next piece of the “Harry Potter Reread Project” takes on the final bit of Deathly Hallows, as Voldemort returns to Hogwarts, “possessed f that cold, cruel sense of purpose that preceded murder”.
