OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

(continued from part eight)

Nine
Winky as Wife and Mother

"You aren't really going to propose this," says Eileen. "Are you, Elkins?"

Elkins glances up to the sky and smiles. The subject line emblazoned across the heavens slowly fades away, to be replaced by a new one:

TBAY/SHIP: Crouch - Winky as Wife and Mother (9 of 9)

Down on the beach, Affective Fallacy pricks up his ears, suddenly at the alert. The Sirius and Snape fans who have been squabbling over the rights to ride him stand back and look up. Several LANDLUBBERS let out shrieks of pure horror and flee inland, wailing and gnashing their teeth.

"Oh, honestly." Elkins rolls her eyes. "They're fine with it when it involves Death Eaters."

"I can't believe you're doing this."

"Well, why on earth not?" Elkins glances up at the CRAB CUSTARD banner. "He is Dead Sexy, isn't he?"

"Well, yes. But—"

"And you said yourself that Winky seems to occupy the role of his wife."

"Well, yes, but—"

"Really, the man must have been very lonely after his wife's death, wouldn't you think? He had no friends. He disappears from his workplace for weeks on end, and the person who actually has the best insight into his condition—which is to say, none at all—is his brand new teenaged assistant. It's really quite pathetic, when you think about it. Charis once suggested that it was part of what made him such an inviting tool. Nobody knew him. Do you really think that he would have been celibate for all that time? Does that really seem in character for Crouch to you?"

"Well..."

"He was hardly geriatric. He was prematurely aged. Still quite vital. And he does seem to have been a man of rather...well, strong passions." Elkins smiles. "As I think you've noticed, Eileen, although I do find it interesting that you've never actually once cited that aspect of his character as a part of your CRAB CUSTARD defense."

"I, er, well..." Eileen shifts from foot to foot.

"Mmm-hmmm." Elkins smirks. "Those fits of apoplectic rage, those suddenly bulging eyes. Sudden and abrupt tumescence, yes? It is suggestive of a rather...passionate nature, that. Rather like the way that the Snapefans can sometimes get about those throbbing veins that poor dear Severus develops whenever he's...oh. Oh my! My, I really am embarrassing you here, aren't I?"

Elkins steps back a few paces and regards Eileen with frank interest.

"Now that is a truly extraordinary color," she says. "How on earth do you manage that?"

"Can we just agree that he must have been lonely and move on?" gasps Eileen.

"All right. We'll drop the tumescence then. Okay, the guy was lonely. For around ten years, he'd had Winky as his only confidante. She was the only person who knew his secret. She was the only person he had to talk to. And we know that he did talk to her, too, and not just about household matters, either. He talked to her about workplace issues. He talked to her about Ludo Bagman. He talked to her about his job. Those aren't things that you normally discuss with the help. They're things you discuss with your wife. Or your mistress."

"Well, yes, but—"

"Crouch allowed Winky to intercede with him on behalf of his son. She played the role of his wife there, too, the role of his son's mother. She occupied the maternal intercessionary role, mitigating his paternal discipline. And she threw the memory of his dead wife against him, just exactly like a second wife might do. Or again, a mistress."

"Well..."

"You've said yourself that he seems to have been unduly influenced by her. Under his control. Didn't you even use the phrase 'under her thumb,' at one point, Eileen?" Elkins shakes her head. "That's a dynamic that usually comes about between a man and a woman that he is sleeping with, isn't it? There's an exceptionally vulgar term for it, actually. Needless to say, I won't use it here."

"Er."

"She even gets described in much the same language as Mrs. Crouch does in her one appearance. You said it yourself: the entire Crouch Sr./Mrs. Crouch dynamic is recreated between Crouch Sr. and Winky."

"Minus that!" says Eileen. "Minus that! I was not suggesting that...errr...there was something going on between the elder Crouch and Winky."

"I know," says Elkins. "I know that you weren't. But I am. It actually was my instinctive reading, you know. Even the very first time I read the book, I was assuming that—"

"That's just because you're BENT, Elkins!"

"She acts like she's in love with him," says Elkins quietly. "Even Ron notices that, and Ron is a fourteen-year-old boy. He says that she seems to love him. He says it without a trace of sniggering or contempt or irony or hyperbole. He says it in dead earnest. 'Love' really isn't a word that laddish fourteen-year-old boys like Ron use all that lightly, is it?"

"Ron also says that Percy loves Crouch," Eileen points out. "And I don't think that he was suggesting that they were having an affair."

"When she hears that he's been at Hogwarts as a Triwizard Judge, she perks up immediately," says Elkins. "She responds to the idea that he might be in the vicinity, that she might be able to see him again 'breathlessly'. Her reaction to having been dismissed from his service is completely neurotic. It's not normal. She doesn't accept her new terms of service. She won't accept the uniform. She won't take on new duties. She sits around in the clothes that he gave her all day long and snivels. She turns to drink. If there really is some form of magical compulsion which drives the house elves, then surely that must be every bit as bad a violation of it as Dobby's iconoclasm, don't you think? It's certainly a violation of their ethos. The other elves are absolutely disgusted by her behavior."

"She's devoted to him," says Eileen.

"Indeed."

"Like Percy is devoted to him. It doesn't mean that they were—"

"The two situations are different. Percy does have a kind of a crush on Crouch, but Crouch can't even remember his name. His relationship with Winky isn't anything like that. He doesn't strike me as the least bit disinterested in her. You've implied yourself that he loved her."

Eileen sighs. "I would be hard pressed to believe that there was no emotional bond between Winky and him," she admits.

"So would I. When I read a character described like Crouch is desribed at the QWC, 'his face somehow sharpened, each line upon it more deeply etched,' I assume that person really is suffering quite badly, no matter how little pity he may have in his gaze. That's a physical description of a man in pain. Seriously, now. Is there any particular reason why we should assume that a relationship which in all other respects seems to replicate a sexual relationship should not have had a sexual component? I mean, is there any reason that we should assume that Winky was not sharing his bed?"

"Well..." Eileen squirms. "Well, it's just sort of...distasteful. Isn't it?"

"Is it? Why?"

"Well, for starters, she's not human. And also she's...well, tiny."

"This is a novel that gave us not one, but two half-giant characters," Elkins reminds her. "And from Fudge's comment about them not all turning out like Hagrid, it would seem that it's not all that an uncommon pairing in the wizarding world, either. I don't get the impression that wizards are too particular about species. Or about size, for that matter."

"I just don't know if I think that it would occur to people in the culture to view the elves as objects of lust," says Eileen. "They're...well, they're really rather disgusting and freakish, aren't they?"

"Harry thinks that they are, but he's not used to them. I don't know if I think that the elves would seem at all freakish or disgusting to someone who was actually a member of one of those fine old pure- blooded families. I mean, you have to figure, don't you, that the elves probably fill the Nanny role in those households? If you'd been raised in one of those famlies, then the elves probably would have been the people who actually took care of you when you were an infant. They're the ones who would have watched over you as a young child; they're the ones who would have cooked your food, and quite likely served it to you as well. Food is important. They'd be your first source of material comfort, your first physical providers. They'd be your very first objects of love, most likely. You'd be used to them: the way they look, the way they sound, the way they—"

"Elkins," says Eileen. "This is—"

"It's not disgusting. It's normal. It would be normal for people who grew up in those households to view the elves as objects of erotic desire. Maybe not appropriate ones. But certainly appealing ones."

Elkins hesitates. She winces.

"Oh, this is bringing us to such a Bad Place, Eileen," she says. "You know that, right?"

"So don't look," suggests Eileen. "Just put the palantir away."

"I can't. Look, let's just come clean here, shall we? We both know why Crouch/Winky is so disturbing, don't we? We know why it's scary to talk about. We know why it's a sensitive topic. And it doesn't really have anything to do with species. Or about size, for that matter."

Eileen looks deeply troubled.

"We are going to get in so much trouble just talking about this," she says.

"I know. I know we are. But someone has to say it sooner or later. The main reason that Crouch/Winky is a disturbing concept is because she is his slave. And that's also what makes it so very convincing. Because...well, there's an awful lot of real life precedent, isn't there? And we already know that Crouch didn't scruple at somewhat, errr...coercive relationships with subordinate members of his household."

Eileen looks away. "I don't like house elves as slaves," she says evasively. "I prefer Pippin's reading of house elves as housewives."

"Right. No sexual undertones there, are there? And no implications of borderline consensuality, either." Elkins smiles. "I like house elves as housewives too, actually," she admits. "But I don't think that it's what makes Crouch/Winky such an upsetting concept. And it is an upsetting concept, isn't it? I mean, even when you weren't proposing a sexual relationship, you still called it 'nasty and twisted' in your subject heading. Well, why? Why is even the implication so nasty? Why is it twisted? Why is it so upsetting? It's because we're not entirely sure how free the elves really are, isn't it? And because without knowing that, we can't evaluate to what extent we should consider such a relationship rapacious. We don't know exactly what rights of refusal she might have had. That's what makes it so troubling."

"Winky seems to genuinely care about Crouch," Eileen points out.

"Yes. She does. Well, there's plenty of real life precedent for that too, isn't there? I don't know if that signifies. People play the hands they're dealt, and all things considered, it's far better to love than to hate. In fact," says Elkins. "Crouch/Winky sort of replicates the troubling ambiguity of the entire SPEW plotline, doesn't it? She clearly really loved him. But did she have a choice? To what extent to the elves really like to serve?"

Elkins takes a deep breath.

"And that's precisely why I believe in this ship," she says. "Not only because it's so strongly suggested by the characters' actions, but also because it just dovetails far too neatly with all of the other thematic foci of the Crouch family subplots for me not to believe that adult readers, at any rate, are meant to read a sexual relationship here."

Eileen stares at her. "You think this ship is authorial intent?" she asks. "You're serious?"

"Yes, I am. Dead serious. By the time she was writing GoF, the author knew that she had a large adult audience, as well as a young readership. I think Crouch/Winky is intentional, and that it's just glossed for younger readers. Of course, there's no way to know for sure. Especially since if I were JKR, I'd deny it if anyone asked me about it."

"Because of the Bad Place?"

"Well, yeah. And also because the woman has enough problems as it is with all those Satanism accusations without having to worry about what people might think about her sticking sexual relationships of dubious consensuality into her kids' books. But at any rate, whether it's intentional or not, it just makes sense to me. See, as I see it, the Crouch family plotline is connected very strongly to certain types of things. The House Elf subplot. The Imperius Curse. Fanaticism. Devotion. Misplaced loyaties. They're things that seem to me to tie into that closing contrast between what is right and what is easy. They're all areas of the story that highlight the difficulties of knowing what is truly your own volition and what is not. The house elves enjoy servitude, so are they really slaves? The Imperius Curse doesn't feel bad; it feels good, it makes you want to obey its dictates. Crouch's son cites as his deepest desire the desire to serve, to prove himself worthy to his substitute father figure. Both Percy and Winky grant Crouch more loyalty than he probably merits; Mrs. Crouch and Winky also give that same sort of loyalty to his son. Was it admirable of them to do that, or was it misguided? Was it a little bit of both?"

"I would have thought you'd call it misguided," says Eileen, smiling slightly. "Given your feelings about Crouch."

"I probably should," admits Elkins. "But I admire loyalty. I've a terrible soft spot for misguided loyalty. And I'm really awfully fond of Percy, you know. But at any rate, to my mind all of these issues are strongly conceptually linked. The Crouch family subplot seems to me to address questions of borderline volition. If you believe yourself to want to serve, then can you truly be said to be under coercion at all? Where does choice end? Where does brainwashing begin?"

Elkins looks both ways. She bites her lip, then takes another deep breath.

"There are questions of sexuality and gender relations that tie closely into that issue," she says quietly. "But they're really rather adult, and perhaps not altogether appropriate for younger readers."

Eileen opens her mouth.

"I don't mean adult in the pornographic sense," amends Elkins quickly. "I don't mean that at all. I just mean adult in the...well, in the grown-up sense. Sexual relationships, even the most healthy and egalitarian ones, always touch just a little bit on the borderlands of volition. They're not really freely chosen in quite the same way as platonic relationships are. But that's a very delicate subject, and it's not something that children really understand. They can't. They don't have the life experiences yet to understand it. Adults do, though, and I think that Crouch/Winky is written into the text in such a way as to provide it as another example of borderline consensuality for the book's adult readers, while still glossing it sufficiently to keep the book appropriate for children. It's there to provide another example of an area of life in which the boundary line between coercion and volition can often become hazy, blurred, indistinct.

"Besides," adds Elkins, after a short pause. "You don't want to talk me out of this ship, you know, Eileen. You really don't."

"Why on earth not?" asks Eileen.

"Because it makes me like Crouch better."

"Elkins! Why? It makes his treatment of Winky all the more abysmal!"

"Does it? Oh, I don't know. Maybe it does. But it also makes it somehow more forgivable. People get weird when it comes to their lovers. Crouch/Winky actually humanizes Crouch a great deal for me. It makes him seem less like a thematic icon, and more like a real person. It makes me find him a lot more sympathetic. Although his poor son..."

Elkins laughs and shakes her head.

"Well!" she says. "And that's another very compelling bit of evidence for Crouch/Winky right there."

"His son?"

"Yes. Do you remember a while back, when you were talking about Winky taking over Mrs. Crouch's function in both the text and the family dynamic? You said:

In her relationship with Barty Jr., Winky also seems to be like Mrs. Crouch.

Eileen nods. "Yes," she says. "She's just like his mother, really. She loves him and wants to let him off the hook, believes the best of him, even though she knows he wants to serve Voldemort."

"Well, yes. That's true. But is it really the same relationship? Is it the same relationship on his end? Crouch Jr. seems to have idolized his mother, or at the very least to have romanticized her a great deal after her death. But how did he feel about Winky? Are there any indications that he felt even the slightest bit of affection for her?"

Eileen thinks this over for a moment.

"Well, it's hard to tell," she says. "We never really see them interacting."

"No. We never do, do we? Which is particularly interesting, don't you think, given that she was actually present for the entirety of his confession? And hardly a silent witness, either. She makes quite a nuisance of herself, really. She literally throws herself on top of him when she thinks that he's been killed. She's utterly distraught. She sobs, she wails, she interrupts, she pleads. And he never even acknowledges her presence. Not once. He digresses all over the place in the course of his interrogation, but he never addresses a single word to her. Not even indirectly. I can think of two reasons why that might have been the case. The first is—"

"Veritaserum," Eileen says.

Elkins nods. "Yes. Dumbledore starts out his interrogation by asking, 'Can you hear me?' That could be more than a formality. It's possible that the stuff focusses your attention on one interrogator and one interrogator only."

"The first person who addresses you," suggests Eileen. "Or maybe the first person who asks you a direct question once you're under its influence."

"Could be. If so, then maybe he honestly couldn't even hear anyone else. He may not have been aware of Winky's presence. Or perhaps he couldn't really digress in that particular manner. But there's another possibility too."

"That he was ignoring her on purpose."

"Yes. And you know, I'm sorry to say that I really do think it's the latter? I see not a trace of affection in how Crouch Jr. speaks of Winky, and a good deal that could be indicative of a tremendous degree of hostility. If you ask me, I'd say that he hated her. For ten years, she was his only companion, yet he doesn't even refer to her by name at first. He refers to her as 'the house-elf.'"

"That's just how wizards talk about elves."

"I think it's more than that. He refers to her as his 'keeper and care-taker.' He never once states that she treated him with kindness, or with compassion. Instead, he says that she 'pitied' him. He refers to whatever privileges she managed to get for him by negotiating with his father on his behalf as 'treats.' He has not a single nice thing to say about her. He exploited her weakness at the QWC, and he seems almost proud of himself for having done so. He shows no signs of sympathy or regret when he talks about his father sacking her. In fact, I think you can almost read a trace of a gloat in that 'she had failed him' comment. That's not the phrasing you'd choose to discuss someone you viewed as a mother, is it? It's the way you'd talk about a villain's lacky getting thrown into the crocodile pit for having failed to conduct some wicked plan successfully." Elkins smiles lazily. "In fact," she says. "It's very much like the way you might describe...oh, let's just say an Evil Overlord feeding his snivelling minion to a giant snake for having failed him in some very important task. Isn't it?"

"That's really a very unkind parallel, Elkins," Eileen tells her reprovingly. "On a number of different levels."

"You think?" Elkins shrugs. "Take it up with the author," she says. "I just call 'em as I see 'em. And what I'm seeing is that while Winky is in many ways marked as Crouch Jr's mother, both textually and in terms of her relationship with Crouch Sr, he himself does not seem to have perceived their relationship that way at all. He seems, in fact, to have resented her a great deal. He doesn't even really credit her with persuading his father to allow him to go to the QWC, does he? Not really. He credits his mother's memory, just like he gives his mother all the credit for rescuing him from prison. It's very much the same thing, really. 'My father didn't save my life; my mother did.' 'Winky didn't persuade my father; my mother's memory did.'" Elkins rolls her eyes. "Barty Junior and his sainted mother."

"That Mrs. Crouch really gets on my nerves," growls Eileen.

"Yes. You know, she's really beginning to get on mine too? But her son seems to have idolized her. And he also seems to have despised Winky. It is rather suggestive, that, Eileen. You have to admit it. And there's something else, you know. One final reason for thinking that perhaps Crouch Sr. wasn't the model of fidelity to his late wife's memory — or indeed, that perhaps he had never been much of a model of marital fidelity."

"More slander, Elkins?"

"Slander? Eileen, you wound me. I am merely trying to look at the family dynamics here. Now, we all seem to agree that whatever else he might have been, Crouch the Elder was a bit of a tyrant when it came to his familial relations. You would think that he must have seemed like rather an ogre to his son, wouldn't you? He sent him off to Azkaban. He bellowed abuse at him while he was pleading for mercy. He held his life in his very hands. He controlled him. He dominated him. He bent him to his will. 'Total control.' And really, Crouch Sr. was a quite impressive man in his day, wasn't he? Forceful. Charismatic. Magnetic. Domineering. He's still rather a striking personality even by the time of canon, when he's become a lame duck. CRAB CUSTARD, you know."

"Yes."

"And his son truly hated him. I think we can agree on that point too. But what does Barty Jr. actually give as his reasoning for hating his father so much? What does he tell Harry? That his father was a bloody tyrant? That his father was a monster? That his father was Ever So Evil?"

Elkins shakes her head.

"No," she says. "What he says instead is that his father was disappointing. Now, why do you think that he would have chosen that particular word?"

"Well..." Eileen thinks about it. "The author probably chose that particular word," she says. "Because it hearkens back to Voldemort in the graveyard."

"It does do that. Voldemort is 'disappointed' in his Death Eaters. Because they've been unfaithful, isn't it? What is the significance of the fact that Crouch Jr. uses that very same word to describe his father?"

"Oh, well." Eileen shrugs. "I think that could be just...well, you know. Villain talk. Or perhaps referring to the...well..." She squirms uncomfortably. "The 'H Word' thing."

"The 'H Word.'" Elkins smiles. "How many arenas of Crouch's life do you think that word applied to? He was a political hypocrite, certainly. Did that tendency translate into his personal life, do you think? Winky talks about her mother serving the family before her, and her grandmother before that. Did Crouch ever keep any male servants? Was he ever maritally faithful? Isn't 'disappointing' rather a stereotypical word for an aristocratic young man to use to refer to a father who...well, you know. Who cheats on his wife? Who does the help?"

"You are a very sick woman, Elkins."

"Crouch Jr's treatment of his father's body suggests to my mind that to some extent he felt that he was avenging his mother," says Elkins. "The third task guardian is a sphinx. The entire family dynamic seems awfully suggestive to me of some pretty serious Oedipal issues. And I have to say that when I look at a family dynamic in which a son adores his rather sickly mother, absolutely detests his father, seems to loathe his father's female servant in spite of the fact that she has been kind to him, and refers to his father as 'disappointing...' Well, it just gets difficult for me to avoid the suspicion that there are more than political differences underlying the conflict there."

"You are just plain disturbed," Eileen says flatly. "That's all there is to this."

Elkins laughs. "Okay, okay," she says. "Suit yourself. You don't have to board the Crouch/Winky ship if you don't want to. I think it's there, but hey. To each his own. Right? And really, you know, it's not the idea of the ship that I find so disturbing about Winky's role in the Crouch family dynamic at all. I actually find that rather sympathetic, for all parties concerned. It's very human, and it's also really rather sad. No, the thing that I find disturbing about Winky is what I feel that her role conveys about the maternal role in the series as a whole. Or even about the role of women in the series as a whole."

"Oh, Elkins!" exclaims Eileen, looking frightened. "You really are determined to get us in trouble here, aren't you?"

"Looks that way," admits Elkins. "You didn't bring any asbestos suits with you today, did you, Eileen?"

Eileen shakes her head. "No," she says. "And if I had, I certainly wouldn't share with you! Not after that evil political attack back in part four. And not after you knocked over my CRAB CUSTARD table and tried to throttle me. When the flamethrowers come out, I'm just going to duck and cover. You can do what you please. But now that you've raised the issue, you might as well get on with it."

"Okay," says Elkins. "Well, I can't help but feel, you know, that Crouch Jr's respective attitudes towards his mother and Winky reflect to some extent the biases of the authorial voice itself."

"You're going to die for this," Eileen advises her gravely. "You know that."

"Yes, I know. But it has to be said. Really, when you think about it, Winky was every bit as much Barty Jr's mother as Mrs. Crouch was, wasn't she? I mean, can you really imagine Lady of the Manor Crouch changing her son's diapers? I somehow suspect that's house elf work. Along with all of the other gross, tedious and unpleasant chores of child-rearing. This gets into Pippin's preferred reading of the house elves as housewives. The person who actually fulfilled that aspect of the maternal function in Barty Jr's life was probably always Winky. Or perhaps Winky's mother, depending on how the house elf generations work. That's how it works, surely? The elves do the dirty work?"

"I would imagine so."

"And then that the entire dynamic is just replicated when it comes to post-Azkaban Barty. Once again, Mrs. Crouch left all the maternal dirty work for her elf. She up and died, and left Winky to take care of the mess that she'd left behind. She wasn't the one who got stuck looking after her crazed son all the time, and neither was her husband. That was Winky's job. Not an enviable task. Especially since I somehow doubt she was ever consulted about the wisdom of breaking him free from Azkaban in the first place."

"It doesn't seem quite fair, does it?" admits Eileen.

"No. It really doesn't. And really, when you think about it, in many ways Winky sacrificed far more for Barty Jr. than his sainted mother ever did."

"Well," says Eileen. "His mother did die in Azkaban for him."

"Yes," sighs Elkins. "She did. And I'm not saying that wasn't a sacrifice, or that it wasn't a rather brave thing for her to have done. It must have been just awful. I don't know if I would have been willing to do it. But at the same time...well, not to sound brutal here or anything, but the woman was dying anyway, wasn't she? She redeemed her son's life with a week or two of absolute misery, and I'm not saying that was nothing. But it didn't really last all that long, did it? And it wasn't...oh, I don't know quite how to explain this. It wasn't actually work. It wasn't active. It involved suffering, but only of a rather passive nature. It didn't represent a commitment of labor. It wasn't hard; it was merely unpleasant. Am I making the slightest bit of sense here?"

"Some."

"I guess that I just think that in the long run, it's a lot harder, and in some ways a lot braver, to live for someone than to die for them. What Winky gave to Barty Jr. was ten entire years of her life, and not of her own volition, either. And it was active sacrifice. It was hard work. She had to watch over him constantly. It became her job. To some extent, it became the poor creature's existence. I can't imagine that it was a walk in the park, being Barty Jr's jailer, can you? Especially since he seems to have hated her."

Eileen mutters something about ingratitude.

"Well, really," says Elkins. "Even assuming no 'ship, I don't think that I can blame him for that. After all, why should he have felt gratitude to Winky? She had nothing to do with saving his life, and no matter how nice she may have tried to be to him, she was still his jailer. She professed affection for him, and she tried to make his situation more bearable, but when push came to shove, she wasn't really on his side at all. She was his father's creature. She was his father's servant, his father's minion, his father's enforcer. She served as the agent of his bondage, and she carried out his father's edicts even when she didn't herself agree with them. If I'd been Crouch Jr., I think that I would have felt some contempt for her too. I mean, from his rather adolescent point of view, she's just his father in a skirt, isn't she? Just another two-faced liar. Just another hypocrite."

"She didn't have a choice, though," points out Eileen.

"No. She didn't have a choice. But you know, it's a lot easier to sympathize with the plight of people who are 'just obeying orders' when their orders don't happen to concern you. You know how freely my heart always bleeds for minions, but I suspect that I might find that flow starting to slow to a trickle if I were actually the person subject to the orders that they had no choice but to obey.

"Crouch Sr. seems to have felt that Winky was insufficiently loyal to him over his son," continues Elkins. "But Crouch Jr. surely would have felt just the reverse — and with far more cause, really. I can't blame him for not liking her much. But the fact that Winky herself does seem to have felt rather ambivalent about the entire situation just makes it a greater sacrifice, doesn't it? Mrs. Crouch got herself well out of that entire twisted Oedipal triangle, and she left that behind for Winky to deal with as well. She left Winky trapped in an absolutely untenable position, both emotionally and morally. She seems to have genuinely cared about young Crouch. She pitied him, yet she couldn't really help him in any way that had any real significance. She loved him, yet she was put in the position of being his jailer and his overseer. She had to enforce his father's will upon him whether she personally approved of his decisions or not. It put her in an awful position, always trying to walk the line, trying to look out for his interests and his father's simultaneously..."

"She fell off that line at the QWC," says Eileen coldly.

"Man! You really just can't forgive her for the QWC, can you? Yes, I suppose she did fall off that line eventually. But then, it was an impossible line to walk in the first place. And in the end, it utterly destroyed her, didn't it? She's a shattered wreck by the end of the novel. An alcoholic mess."

"So what does this say about the maternal role in the books?" asks Eileen.

"Well, how do you think that we're supposed to read Mrs. Crouch's sacrifice? My feeling is that it's portrayed as rather noble. Perhaps wrong-headed, in that Crouch Jr. really was a Death Eater, but wrong-headed in a manner that I think that we're supposed to read in a fairly sympathetic light. Her one on-screen appearance is rather cartoonish, but I think that we're expected to imagine whatever off-screen suffering her sacrifice entailed as happening in a heroic idiom. She languishes romantically away in prison, and I think that that's set forth in a more or less tragic light."

"I suppose so."

"Well, how about the suffering that Winky accrues from her sacrifices? Is it portrayed as noble? Is it portrayed as in any sense tragic? Is it set forth in a heroic idiom?"

"Errr...no," says Eileen. "I wouldn't quite call it that."

"No. It's totally pathetic, isn't it? Grotesque. To a large extent, her suffering is played for laughs. We're meant to understand that she really is in pain, but at the same time, the actual portrayal is...well, it's Toonish, really. She's utterly revolting. Her nose runs. She throws tantrums like a child, throwing herself down onto the floor and beating her fists against the flagstones and howling. She's filthy. She turns to drink, and she's a rather comedic drunk, too: she hiccups, she dribbles all over herself, her eyes cross, she passes out in a stupor and immediately starts snoring. The other elves wrap her up in a tablecloth. I mean, we're not exactly looking at what I'd call a tragic portrayal of anguish here. The authorial voice accords her very little dignity at all."

"Well, except for maybe in the last scene," points out Eileen.

"When she's playing the Greek Chorus in the great mad scene of 'The Fall of the House of Crouch,' you mean?" Elkins grins. "Maybe. But even there, there are still strong elements of humor and grotesquerie to her portrayal. All that, 'Oh, Barty, you bad boy" stuff. Overall, I'd say that the authorial voice treats her with a good deal of contempt. And of course, her loyalty is misguided, isn't it? She's guilty of having thrown good loyalty after bad. It's portrayed as a failing, wouldn't you say?"

"Absolutely," says Eileen, with conviction.

"Well, what about Mrs. Crouch's loyalty? Winky is no less guilty of misapplied devotion than Mrs. Crouch is, really, but are we encouraged to read them as equally culpable? I don't know if I think that we are. It seems to me that when it comes to Mrs. Crouch, there's an implication that her actions are more forgivable because she was his mother. At the very least, they get a somewhat noble portrayal. But Winky is also marked as his mother, isn't she? She's just the maternal aspect who does all the dirty work. Yet her suffering is grotesque, and her misplaced loyalties, I think, really very strongly condemned by the narrative."

"There are some troubling gender implications there," agrees Eileen. "Aren't there."

"There really are. And it's not helped by the fact that the series is just stuffed to bursting with all of these remote, idealized, nameless, tragic martyr mothers. Sickly Lady of the Manor Crouch. The nameless Mrs. Longbottom, who is not an Auror but merely an Auror's wife, and who therefore can serve as an absolute sacrificial lamb in a way that her husband cannot. Tom Riddle's nameless mother, who dies in childbirth. And of course, Lily Potter, who at least gets a name, but who has to date been given precious little else. She has no backstory, no personality, and no particular character, except that she seems to have been perfect."

"'Lily Was Nice.' But that may change."

"Let's hope so! Right now, though, that's all we've got on her. No friends, no cool legacy items left behind for Harry to play with, no backstory, nothing. We just know that she was pretty and smart, and good with Charms. And that she died for her son. So we have all of these idealized distant martyr mothers, and they seem to stand in a kind of contrast to real mothers. You know, the people who actually do 'women's work.' The ones who get down in the trenches of the actual day-to-day dirty work of mothering, whose sacrifices entail living for their children, rather than just dying for them. That role," says Elkins. "Is filled by the house elves. Who are grotesque and faintly ludicrous.

"And that really does bother me. The implication seems to be..."

"That the only good mother is a dead mother?" suggests Eileen, smiling.

"Well...yes. It does feel that way to me at times. Or even worse: the only good mother is one who doesn't sully her hands with icky feminine stuff. 'Women's work.' It seems to divorce the idealized aspect of the maternal role from the physical and material aspect in a way that strikes me as somewhat misogynist, really. It seems to me to fit in somehow with the contempt that the narrative so often shows towards other stereotypically feminine interests or endeavors: those silly giggling Gryffindor girls, you know, or Lockhart and his appeal to women, or the role of Divination, or those trashy women's magazines. I mean, what does all of that say about women?"

There is a long silence.

"What about Molly Weasley?" asks Eileen.

"Molly?" Elkins thinks, then nods. "Yes, okay. She's a bit flawed, and in some pretty stereotypical ways — the Lockhart crush, the women's magazines. But I think that she's portrayed as admirable."

There is another long silence.

"So thank heavens for Molly Weasley," says Elkins drily.

"Molly won't be enough to protect you from the flames," advises Eileen gravely.

Elkins sighs.

"I know," she says. "Maybe I should have just stuck with politics. Or...hey, I know! Want to talk about the Twins?"

*************

Elkins

who cut her teeth on works of fiction that portrayed 'women's work' with a certain degree of contempt, and who now, as an adult with no children and a rather marked (some might even say pathological) aversion to domestic activities, often finds herself wondering to what extent she might suffer from a bad case of internalized misogyny — and if so, then just where that came from, anyway.