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Judy wrote:
By the way, I re-read the description of Karkaroff, and he is described if ways that could be thought of as stereotypically gay—"fruity" voice, weak chin hidden by a goatee, etc.
I saw Karkaroff as falling very firmly within a (now, thankfully, rather archaic) British literary tradition. He's a variation on a stock that was more popular in the first half of the twentieth century, the Oily and Disreputable Eastern European, given a slightly (but only very slightly) more modern edge by all of the Cold War/Biased Olympics Official stuff.
You see a lot of these guys in Golden Age Whodunnits. Agatha Christie was partial to the type for a while: in her hands, he was often a Jew (up until around 1939, that is, when a dinner conversation with a member of a Foreign Political Party Which Must Not Be Named shocked Christie so badly that she apruptly abandoned much of her earlier anti-semitism).
Anyway, in the tradition of this Type, the effeminacy isn't really a signifier of homosexuality at all. It's a signifier of unwholesome and predatory sexuality. This stock character is often a hostile seducer ("ruiner") of well-born young women; sometimes he's a con man with fraudulent aristocratic credentials, hoping to marry wealth. I've also seen him written as a bigamist.
So, um...yeah. My suspicions about Karkaroff and Krum (::big smile and appreciative wave to Tabouli for K.I.S.S.T.H.I.S.D.U.C.K.::) probably were largely influenced by his effeminacy, but I think that I was reading that far more as a sign of "predatory" than of "gay."
While we're on this topic, I'd just like to add that JKR really knows her classic detective fiction tropes. The Karkaroff character in 1930s Whodunnits is the Designated Red Herring—the one that even the readers are meant to recognize as such. He's the character that nobody trusts, but while he usually does turn out to be No Good in one way or another—he's a jewel thief, or a forger, or a bigamist, or an espionage agent, or a gold-digger, or on the lam for crimes committed elsewhere—he's never the real culprit. He is not the murderer. He usually disappears half-way through Act Three; at the denoument, the detective then reveals his secret and explains that he fled out of fear of exposure, or fear of repercussions deriving from his exposure.
Sound a little familiar?
I don't think that I've ever seen this stock character's probable eventual fate painted quite so darkly as poor Karkaroff's, though. In mysteries, he just slips back into the dubious shadowlands whence he sprung—presumably to resurface at someone else's house party a few months later...
Judy again:
Ugh. I found the thought of Karkaroff being attracted to Krum pretty nauseating; the thought of him wanting Snape is even worse.
Aw. Poor Igor. What's so nauseating about him? At least his standards of personal hygiene seem up to par.
You know, I'm beginning to agree with Cindy? Karkaroff gets nothing around here but disdain.
So that does it. I'm inviting Igor out for a few drinks and to pick up his S.Y.C.O.P.H.A.N.T.S. membership packet. We'll go far over our limits, and sing old songs loudly and off-key, and then get all weepy and bathetic and sentimental before staggering home at dawn.
I'd invite Cindy to join us, but... Well, I fear that the weepy bathetic stuff might prove too much for her. I wouldn't want her to snap and...well, you know. Kill us.
—Elkins, who can become weirdly obsessive about Agatha Christie and who has the Christies on her bookshelf filed in order of original publication date.
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 10, 2002 12:55 PM
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