The Slytherin Question: an Essay

[sigune]

Before I took my little hop over the ocean, some of you asked me to post my essay on Slytherin House, so this is me keeping my promise. Although I have worked on it pretty long and treated the subject with great seriousness (that's me!), I still feel that this essay is a WIP, and not just because its questions won't be answered until Book 7 has been well and truly published and devoured. I just have this annoying thirst for thoroughness and getting everything right, but in this case I'm not sure I can manage on my own. I would therefore love to hear any theories, reactions or reflections you might have, so that one day I will be able to adapt this piece and make it something with which I can be really happy.

One thing: I did my best not to judge the wizarding world by Muggle standards, and I tried to stray as little as possible from the information we have been given in books and interviews; I order myself to keep a strict divide between meta and fanfic.

Here goes, then.

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The Slytherin Question

Slytherin House, many readers of the Harry Potter books agree, is a stain on the blazon of Hogwarts. Recruiting and sequestering the cunning, the ambitious, and those of purest blood, it has a singular propensity for producing villains. Nearly all of Harry’s antagonists are Slytherins: Draco and Lucius Malfoy, Severus Snape, and Lord Voldemort himself are the most notable. ‘And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee…’ says the gospel of Saint Mark; and in the now infamous Mugglenet/Leaky Cauldron interview, Emerson Spartz and Melissa Anelli quite understandably ask why Slytherin House is not simply abolished and its residents dispersed over the other three houses, none of which have a bad reputation at all (Part Three). Rowling replies that Slytherin must stay, that it represents the human flaws, and that ‘if only’ they could be embraced, the result would be ‘an unstoppable force’ (ibid.). It is the same message given by the Sorting Hat in Order of the Phoenix (186-7): strength is born of unity. Besides, Rowling says in the same interview, the Slytherins are not all bad.

It seems, however, that the text does not bear out her words. More often than not, Slytherins are described as unattractive or downright ugly; they are also mean, unengaging, and morally suspect on account of their association with Dark Arts and an ideology that discriminates on the basis of blood purity. Though the other Hogwarts houses contain their share of irritating or unpleasant people – Hufflepuff House can boast Zacharias Smith, Ravenclaw has the sneak Marietta Edgecombe, and Cormac McLaggen is a Gryffindor – Slytherin House does not have a single student with whom Harry or his friends are on speaking terms. Then again, there seem to be no depths to which Slytherins will not sink; they even populate the Inquisitorial Squad for the utterly awful Dolores Umbridge. Outside of the books, too, J. K. Rowling uses Slytherin students as denominators for everything young men and women should not be – recently in a rant on her website she dubbed ‘empty-headed, self-obsessed girls’ who care too much about appearances ‘Pansy Parkinsons’ – Pansy being cast as the anti-Hermione (“For Girls Only, Probably”).

With only one more book to go, it is time to wonder whether the reader is to expect anything good from Slytherin after all, or whether we are dealing with another Crookshanks – Hermione’s cat, whose extraordinary intelligence has only ever been explained outside of the novels (World Book Day Chat).

Fandom is divided on the issue. On the one hand, there are those who trust Harry’s judgment and agree with him that the Slytherins are simply ‘an unpleasant lot’ (PS 89). Half-Blood Prince has considerably strengthened their case: Draco Malfoy has apparently joined the Death Eaters; of the Slytherins who do not belong to his gang, Theo Nott has not shown his face, and Blaise Zabini treats Harry with cold contempt; Horace Slughorn is a greedy, hypocritical opportunist; and after five books in which he was accused and acquitted again, Severus Snape, hitherto the poster boy for Death Eater reform, has killed Albus Dumbledore. On the other hand, there are those who scour the text for clues in defence of Slytherin, arguing that, even though the Potter series is marketed primarily for children, Rowling is not opting for black and white. They point out that she took care to bruise the saintly image of James Potter by showing the scene of Snape’s worst memory, imbued Harry’s beloved godfather Sirius with considerable flaws, and gave us a Gryffindor traitor in the shape of Peter Pettigrew. To realise that Slytherin is not a solid block of wickedness is, they say, one of the most important lessons Harry has to learn.

At this point in the narrative, though, it is far from obvious that embracing the Slytherins is at all desirable. Harry, at any rate, defines himself in opposition to Slytherin House and all it stands for. Salazar Slytherin, who takes his first name from a Portuguese dictator and is described by the Sorting Hat as ‘shrewd’ and ‘power-hungry’ (GoF 157), is the dark presence at the heart of the Potter books, and the origin of their basic conflicts. It was he who, very early in Hogwarts’ history, insisted on making a distinction between magical children based on their ancestry: he proposed to teach only those of pure wizarding blood, thus causing the permanent split between the founders. Although he is long dead by the time Harry arrives at Hogwarts, the wizarding world still labours under his ideological – and physical – inheritance. Slytherin’s true heir and last remaining descendant is, after all, none other that Tom Marvolo Riddle, also known as the Dark Lord Voldemort, Harry’s nemesis. Voldemort emphatically invokes his kinship with Slytherin, a source of great pride to him, and styles himself as the one who will continue his famous ancestor’s ‘noble work’ (CoS 230-1). As a teenager, he sets the Basilisk free, killing the Muggle-born Myrtle; and as an adult, he unites under his banner all those who bear a grudge against wizards and witches whose blood is not pure. Slytherin’s legacy to his students, then, is a vicious prejudice and a murderous heir.

In Chamber of Secrets, Harry struggles with his own resemblance to Tom Riddle, and with one fact in particular: on his arrival at Hogwarts, the Sorting Hat seemed much inclined to sort him into Slytherin House. Harry, however, implored the Hat not to do so, and finally got sent to Gryffindor. When Professor Dumbledore asks him whether he thinks he is anything like Riddle, Harry replies, ‘I don’t think I’m like him! I mean, I’m – I’m in Gryffindor […]’ (CoS 244, original emphasis), thus positing Gryffindor’s qualities as the perfect antithesis to Voldemort’s.* Harry’s refusal to be sorted into Slytherin has been seen as his first feat of arms against the forces of evil. ‘It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities,’ Dumbledore says (CoS 245), formulating what has since been identified as the series’ leitmotiv. On more superficial levels Harry makes mistakes, but when it comes to fundamental matters such as the choice between good and evil, or between what is right and what is easy, his heart guides him to do the right thing. These choices are what define him as ‘good’.

One of the main arguments invoked by the Slytherins’ apologists is that of the influence of nurture on matters of behaviour and choice (underlucius, sullensphinx, randomjitter). They will point out that Draco has been brought up to believe himself superior to everybody else on account of his family’s pure blood, money and status, and that if he is a bigot and a snob, his parents are largely to blame. They will say that nobody seems to have stood up for young Snape, bullied ‘just because he exists’ and traumatised by the experience, and that after this, Snape was surely unlikely to join James Potter and crew in fighting anything whatsoever. They will add that Dumbledore’s reaction to little Tom Riddle’s abuse of his magic was to frighten him by setting a wardrobe on fire. Some call it a miracle that after the abuse to which he was exposed, with Dumbledore’s knowledge, Harry is mentally quite intact.

Indeed, a striking aspect of the wizarding world, to us in our Western society full of counsellors, therapists and other special educators, is its strange policy of non-interference. In a community where young people wield powers that can easily cause serious accidents, or even worse, used consciously to harm fellow witches and wizards (not to mention Muggles), society takes matters rather lightly; the dangers are accepted as a fact of magical life, even at school. In Half-Blood Prince, Hagrid comments, ‘I mean, it’s always bin a bit of a risk sendin’ a kid ter Hogwarts, hasn’ it? Yer expect accidents, don’ yeh, with hundreds of under-age wizards all locked up tergether,’ adding, ‘but attempted murder, tha’s diff’rent’ (HBP 379). The wizarding educators draw the line at murderous intentions and Unforgivable Curses, but are fairly tolerant towards anything lesser. Dumbledore and his staff exemplify this attitude: although they know of Draco Malfoy’s fanaticism, they undertake no direct effort to correct him; there are no serious actions towards playground bullies, and no real attempts to encourage house unity. This non-interference allows Malfoy to think himself right and all-mighty, young Snape to cast himself as a victim, and Riddle to assemble his gang of proto-Death Eaters with whom he causes ‘nasty incidents’ (HBP 339).

Absent or ineffectual adults are among the typical features of literature for children and young adults; in books like Roald Dahl’s and Anthony Horowitz’s, with which Rowling’s work shares several characteristics, children are left to educate themselves and sometimes save the world on their own. For Rowling, however, reluctance on the adult characters’ part to meddle with the youngsters’ decisions and actions appears to be more than a convention. Interviews suggest that she personally favours a hands-off approach towards education and dealing with problems:

‘My sister said to me in a moment of frustration, it was when Hagrid was shut up in his house after Rita Skeeter had published that he was a half-breed, and my sister said to me, “Why didn't Dumbledore go down earlier […]?” I said he really had to let Hagrid stew for a while and see if he was going to come out of this on his own because if he had come out on his own he really would have been better. “Well he's too detached, he's too cold, it's like you,” she said! [Laughter] By which she meant that where she would immediately rush in and [sic] I would maybe stand back a little bit and say, “Let's wait and see if he can work this out.”’ (Leaky Cauldron/Mugglenet, Part One)

Rowling points out that her hero Harry is ‘someone who is forced, for such a young person, to make his own choices. He has very limited access to truly caring adults – and he is guided by his conscience’ (Connection, part 18). Characters like Draco Malfoy, Severus Snape and Tom Riddle could have chosen similarly, but did not. Rowling takes care to elucidate this point by providing each of these prominent Slytherins with an equally prominent Gryffindor parallel, suggesting that fandom’s cherished theories about nurture do not really provide an excuse. If Draco Malfoy has been shaped by his family and acts under pressure from them, Sirius Black, who issues from a similar Dark, Slytherin background, has forcefully rejected his family’s ideology. If Severus Snape was an unpopular boy and bullied by his peers, Neville Longbottom, everybody’s favourite target for pranks, displays none of Snape’s selfish bitterness or spite. Tom Riddle’s opposite is, of course, Harry himself.

One central issue dividing Slytherins and Gryffindors is their take on life, death and self-sacrifice. ‘I deeply admire bravery in all its forms,’ Rowling says (Connection); and the house she clearly favours above all others is Gryffindor, whose members seem, more than anybody else, ready to risk their own lives in order to try and save their loved ones. It is better to die than to betray your friends, Rowling posits (Mugglenet/Leaky Cauldron, Part Three). What to think, then, of the Slytherins who, selected on cunning and ambition, use ‘any means to achieve their end’ (PS 7) and will, in the words of Phineas Nigellus, ‘always choose to save [their] own necks’ (OotP 437)? When in similar circumstances, Gryffindors and Slytherins will adopt an opposite course of action, the former motivated by courage, the latter by calculation. Neither Malfoy, Snape, nor Riddle seem to possess the moral courage Rowling so admires, and the existence of their Gryffindor counterparts suggests that the lack of it is implied in, and symbolised by, their membership of Slytherin House. Harry refused to be sorted there; Malfoy, Snape and Riddle did not. Or did they?

The idea of choice, the pro-Slytherin party will argue, is complicated by the fact that Hogwarts house allegiance is predominantly passed on in the family. All the Weasleys, no matter how different their characters, are in Gryffindor. All the Malfoys are in Slytherin. Tom Riddle is sorted into the house founded by his ancestor. And, Rowling says in the Leaky Cauldron/Mugglenet interview, the Sorting Hat is never wrong (Part Two). That does put Harry’s sorting into perspective: if he had really belonged in Slytherin, the Hat would have placed him there no matter what, and instead it sent him to Gryffindor. It cannot be a coincidence that both Harry’s parents were Gryffindors as well – Slughorn says as much (HBP 71), and we are told countless times how much Harry resembles James and Lily in looks as well as character, without even having been brought up by them.

‘I don't believe that anybody was born evil,’ Rowling says in the 2004 World Book Day Chat, referring the reader to Book Six for more about Voldemort’s history. Four years previously, she had told an interviewer,

‘I wanted to create a villain, where you could understand the workings of that person’s mind. And Harry, as you know, from book four, is starting to come to terms with what makes a person turn that way. Because they took wrong choices, and Voldemort took wrong choices from a very early age - he decided young what he wanted to be’ (cBBC Newsround).


Interestingly, Rowling’s answer to her own question of what makes a person evil is, as we can read in Half-Blood Prince, strangely deterministic. The book presents us with a picture of Tom Riddle’s mother, uncle and grandfather as physically and mentally degenerated, sociopathic, violent and unstable – all, it is suggested, a result of inbreeding. The genes they have passed on to Tom Riddle make him into a psychopath who from an early age enjoys treating other children cruelly and gathers trophies of his misdeeds. He is a man who is pathologically incapable of empathy – someone whose brain is on account of hereditary defects wired in such a way that the majority of people still find it quite impossible to understand his actions or motivations. Riddle’s whole set-up makes the denomination of ‘Slytherin’s true heir’ sound rather ironic, as well as making you wonder as to how responsible he is for what he has become, even if he has made himself into a monster.

Harry’s spontaneous antipathy towards Slytherin comes from the fact that he explicitly identifies the house with Voldemort (PS 61-2, 80). But to what extent does Voldemort represent his ancestor’s principles? If Professor Binns’s information is correct – and he appears to be rather strong on facts – Slytherin ‘disliked taking students of Muggle parentage, believing them to be untrustworthy’ (CoS 114) – a prejudice, certainly, but not quite the same as saying that they are in any way inferior or should be destroyed. Moreover, whether or not Slytherin’s bias ever did make sense in an age before the Statute of Secrecy, it has long since been overtaken by time, not least because the pure-bloods die out. The Sorting Hat, for one, has all but let go of the criterion; two of the most prominent Slytherins to which we have been introduced have Muggle fathers: Snape, and ironically, Voldemort himself. Even if Tom Riddle is the exponent – and the victim – of a particularly un-cunning interpretation of his ancestor’s doctrine, there is no justification for saying that he embodies Slytherin House. Maybe, to know what the house is capable of, we should look to that other half-blood Slytherin, Snape.

‘It is the tradition to have four houses, but in this case, I wanted them to correspond roughly to the four elements. So Gryffindor is fire, Ravenclaw is air, Hufflepuff is earth, and Slytherin is water, hence the fact that their common room is under the lake’, Rowling says (Mugglenet/Leaky Cauldron, Part Three). Rowling’s idea of identifying the four houses with the four elements invokes that age-old symbol of magic, the pentangle. Four points of the pentangle stand for earth, fire, water and air, and the fifth point brings them all together: it represents the spirit and the divine. Magic starts where the elements are united. When Voldemort is taken out of the equation, Slytherin and Gryffindor, as water and fire, are still each other’s opposite. But that does not have to mean they cannot function together: cunning and ambition are not inherently negative, and before the blood matter came up, Salazar Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor were great friends (OotP 184-6). It is arguably the case that some resourcefulness and calculation would be highly useful to balance out Harry’s great, but often reckless and foolish courage.

Before he allows Harry to accompany him on the Horcrux hunt, Dumbledore wants to know of Harry, ‘If I tell you to hide, will you do so? […] If I tell you to flee, will you obey? […] If I tell you to leave me, and save yourself, you will do as I tell you?’ (HBP 514). These requests go against Harry’s every instinct, but he has to learn and accept that, as Dumbledore points out, in the war against Voldemort, Harry’s blood – his life – is more valuable than anyone else’s (HBP 522). So he is put through the terrible ordeal of having to force-feed his mentor a poison that causes unbearable anguish, and of having to watch, immobilised, how Dumbledore is trapped and killed. There is nothing noble about war, and at times Gryffindor bravery, chivalry and self-sacrifice must make way for cold Slytherin strategy and self-preservation.

On the Astronomy Tower, if he had not been restrained, Harry would have put his life before Dumbledore’s, even though the headmaster was dying. It would have been a useless sacrifice. Severus Snape, bound by an Unbreakable Vow, followed Slytherin logic and chose his own life over Dumbledore’s. Maybe that does not make him Voldemort’s man, but instead the Order of the Phoenix’s best strategist. A wartime cost-benefit analysis shows that by killing a dying man, he saved a sixteen-year-old from damaging his soul, the Chosen One from being killed, and Dumbledore’s most carefully placed and protected pawn – himself – from being destroyed. Horrible? Yes, but ultimately, Rowling reminds us, she is writing about evil (Mugglenet/Leaky Cauldron, Part Three).

I contend that what Harry witnessed on the Astronomy Tower was not foul murder, but the way in which Slytherin qualities will be instrumental in winning the fight against Voldemort. Half-Blood Prince has finally provided the set-up for a change in the perception of Slytherin House and its emancipation from Voldemort.**


* Note that all the members of the Order of the Phoenix whose house allegiance we have been told are Gryffindors, with the singular exception of Snape.
** I should add that the existence of the (perhaps no longer very) mysterious R. A. B., the appearance of Draco Malfoy’s doubts, and the sheer fact that Blaise Zabini has been given a face and a history are also pretty indicative of a change to come, but I haven’t yet integrated those things into the body of the essay, sorry! ;)



Bibliography

Anelli, Melissa and Emerson Spartz. "The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet interview Joanne Kathleen Rowling: Part One", The Leaky Cauldron, 16 July 2005.
--- “Part Two”.
--- “Part Three”.

The Connection (WBUR Radio), J.K. Rowling interview transcript, 12 October, 1999
(30/05/2006)

JK Rowling's World Book Day Chat, March 4, 2004
(30/05/2006)

Mzimba, Lizo. “JK Rowling Talks About Book Four”, cBBC Newsround, Fall 2000
(30/05/2006)

randomjitter. “Tom Riddle – 11yr old dark wizard?”, Harry Potter Theories, 12 April 2006.

Rowling, J. K. “For Girls Only, Probably…”, J. K. Rowling Official Site. (30/05/2006)
--- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London: Bloomsbury 1998).
--- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (London: Bloomsbury 2005).
--- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (London: Bloomsbury 2003).
--- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury 1997).

sullensphinx. “Draco Malfoy: Sides of an Antagonist”, Harry Potter Essays, 11 April 2006.

underlucius. “Nature and Nurture”, 3 April 2006.

Comments

[darth-kittius.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this... I've printed it out to read on my trip this weekend... it was one of the presentations I wanted to attend, but couldn't.

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Please do let me know any kind of criticism you may have! I know the thing is very flawed, but I have difficulty mending it :/. The version I posted here is better than the one on the CD; I added a few bits to the ending that bring it a little more full circle.

Oh, all those parallel sessions! It was horrible having to make all those choices about which papers to attend X). Will you be posting yours too?