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HPfGU Message #34362:
Dehumanizing Language-Sirius' Prank


Eileen, who is a Canadian, wrote:

Actually, I'm not an American, but a Canadian...

[Elkins winces, then bangs her head three times hard against the wall, exclaiming: "BAD American! BAD American!"]

Oh, I was so afraid of that! From your diction, I was pretty sure that you were North American, but...

::very small voice::

sorry.

...and capital punishment has not been a legal penalty for murder for quite a number of years either....Even so, it [Vernon's pro-capital punishment stance in PoA] struck me as unduly political.

::nods:: Okay. So maybe it could read as highly politically-charged to a Brit as well. I don't know. Certainly here where I live, it's absolutely not a topic about which people can be counted to keep their tempers under control.



On the subject of Granting Slack To Characters We Like, I wrote:

For an example of this phenomenon, I might cite my own vehement condemnation of Moody for using nasty language to describe Karkaroff in the Pensieve scene of GoF, while noting my own utter lack of dismay over Sirius' use of similarly unkind and degrading language to refer to Pettigrew in PoA.

Eileen said:

That's a funny example, b/c I find it hard to stomach Sirius's attitude in that scene, even though I can offer up a million justifications for it. There's something about its dehumanization of Pettigrew that just sickens me.

Well, yes. It is sickening. It has to be, I think, for the scene to work. All of the adult characters allow themselves to become distressingly dehumanized there; IMO, that's precisely what makes that entire sequence so very effective.

"Lack of dismay" was a poor choice of words, as I certainly did find Sirius' behavior dismaying. But not nearly so much as Lupin's, which made me surprised to hear you say:

And on what appears to be a third hand,(/me looks down at her hands in amazement), I don't feel the same way towards Lupin, whom I very much love, even though he was right with Sirius in that scene.

Funny, because I found Lupin's reaction to the situation more upsetting by far. Sirius' snarling rage was only mildly painful to me because really, that was just about the only emotional state I'd ever seen him in at that point in the book anyway. Lupin, on the other hand, I'd had an entire novel to get to know and love, so his cold-bloodedness—he totters perilously close to the borders of outright sadism in that scene, IMO—was pretty devestating. It really brought home the extent to which the entire situation was corrupting and dehumanizing everyone that it touched.

By 'lack of dismay,' I suppose I really meant 'inability to inspire me to pass harsh judgment on the character.' Sirius' use of the dehumanizing language there didn't make me think of him as someone who regularly dehumanizes people, mainly because the situation is so obviously extraordinary—and because his use of the language is not in the least bit casual. He's furious, and he's been personally betrayed, and he's slightly deranged; and he's working himself up to murder in cold-blood someone who is grovelling for his life—and someone he used, at one time, to care about, at that. His dehumanization of Pettigrew is deliberate, and it is personal, and it is directed at its target: even when he's ostensibly addressing Harry, Sirius' language is aimed dead straight at Pettigrew himself. There's nothing in the least bit casual or off-hand about what he is doing.

Moody, on the other hand, isn't even addressing Karkaroff in the Pensieve scene, nor can Karkaroff even hear him. He's talking to a third party, in a fairly relaxed way, and it doesn't even seem particularly personal. It's a generalization of type: the use of dementors is okay for "scum like this." It seems casual, off-hand, automatic, just a reflection of how the man thinks: "Men like Karkaroff are filth and scum: they are not fully human and therefore do not warrant the considerations we accord to other people."

It makes a big difference to me. It's a bit like the difference between hearing a man fling an extremely offensive gender-based epithet directly into the face of a woman who has betrayed him while they are having a screaming argument, and then hearing some guy on the street casually chatting to his friend about how he feels about "[precise term deleted]'s like that."

The first man is certainly not using nice language, but I don't automatically assume that he regularly dehumanizes women as a class. The second fellow, on the other hand, is going to have to work very hard indeed if he wants to convince me that he is not, in fact, a misogynist.

Hmmm. I did say before that I had decided to just chalk this issue down to one of personal dislike and move on, didn't I? Yes, I seem to remember that I did indeed say that. Oh, well. I guess I lied.



Eileen wrote:

I also find it difficult to see Sirius's POV in the Black/Snape debate.

Oh, you don't want to get me started on the prank. You really don't. You...

Oh. But you just did. Okay, then.

Well. On the one hand, it did happen twenty years ago, so I suppose that one could argue that it's really long past time for Snape to just let it go.

On the other hand, I don't feel much sympathy when the grown-up incarnation of the popular, good-looking and academically brilliant teenager's take on the affair is still: "Well, he was this oily, greasy, slimy kid, see, and we didn't like him, and he was always trying to get us in trouble, and besides, his hair was always dirty, and so it served him right." That doesn't win any affection points from me. I expect a man in his thirties to at the very least be able to admit that it was an incredibly stupid thing to do, that it really could have got Snape killed, and that if nothing else, that would have been absolutely disastrous for poor Remus. At the very least.

Then, I'm not at all rational on this subject. This one is intensely personal for me, because...well...

[apologies for anecdotal digression]

The year I turned twelve, a group of girls at the summer camp I'd been shipped off to (and believe me, you don't want to get me started on the subject of summer camps, either!) decided that it would be highly amusing to pour kerosene over my head and chase me around with a Bic lighter. As far as I can tell, this struck them as appropriate because (a) they didn't like me, (b) they thought that I was oily and creepy and weird and nasty, and (c) I didn't wash my hair often enough for their tastes, and so the idea of burning it off struck them as somehow apropos.

And, no. I'm not making this up. Not even the part about the hair.

Moreover, it didn't even seem to occur to the beastly little troglodytes (oops! was that offensively dehumanizing language? so sorry!) that the fact that they were actually flicking the lighter and making sparks fly out and big flames appear while I had kerosene dripping all over my face and down my neck really did mean that they could hurt me. I could have been badly burned; I could have been blinded; I could even have been killed; and maybe they didn't realize that fact, but I certainly did. I was absolutely terrified, which they all seemed to think was hysterically funny, and...well, and ugh. It was not only frightening; it was humiliating. Humiliating in the extreme.

And you know what happened to them when the Powers In Charge found out what had occurred?

Nothing. Nothing. They got a little talking to about how very reckless they had been, and how they really could have killed me. I, on the other hand, got a lecture on how maybe these sorts of things wouldn't happen to me quite so often, if only I would try to work harder on "learning to get along with my peers."

[Elkins, noticing that her lips have now drawn back into an actual snarl, takes a few long deep cleansing breaths]

Yes. Well. Like I said, my feelings about the prank, and my identification with Snape in that conflict, are not so much canonical as deeply and intensely personal. And while I do recognize that Snape's grudge-holding is a problem, well...

I was twelve then. I am thirty-five now. Am I still angry about it?

Oooooh, you bet. Oh, yes. Yes, I am. Haven't let that one go. Not by a long shot. Doubt I ever will.

Angry enough that I might relish the thought of the ringleader of that little group being given the Dementor's Kiss?

::long, long, long silence::

::very slow exhale::

No. No.

At least, I hope not.

But still. I can't say I have any sympathy for Sirius at all when it comes to the prank, or place much blame on Snape for feeling the way he does about it. Some schoolboy grudges have more bite than others.

—Elkins, who still sometimes has nightmares about summer camp.


Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 30, 2002 5:26 PM

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