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In message #41413, Pippin wrote:
I think Adams' analysis misses the point Rowling is making.
She then went on to post an excellent class analysis of the wizarding world, one which seems to me to be essentially in agreement with Pierre Bruno's Marxist-structuralist critique, which Adams cited and summarized in his article.
This, for example, is Pippin's analysis:
In the wizarding world, as in medieval Europe, the new system of trade is replacing the old economy based on personal holdings. . .Slytherin, who did not want the authority of all-magical families destroyed, represents a subversive conservative element within Hogwarts. . . . Voldemort, Heir of Slytherin, is trying to re-establish the old system...
And this is Adams' summary of Bruno's analysis:
Slytherin—named after the aristocratic Salazar—represents the propertied-classes and Gryffindor—Harry's house—the ascendant class of the bourgeoisie. The whole series is therefore not about the traditional struggle of Good and Evil but "the conflict between established and rising classes."
This is certainly a compelling reading, and it has a good deal of merit. Like Adams, though, I see a number of problems with this analysis. In the end, the reading of the struggle within the wizarding world as one between a landed gentry and an emergent middle class just doesn't hold up very well for me.
For one thing, I feel that the text draws such strong parallels between the larger scale political struggle and the Gryffindor/Slytherin rivalry that it is virtually impossible not to read the two as inextricably connected. But surely it is Slytherin, and not Gryffindor, whose values more accurately reflect those of an emergent trade economy, is it not?
Ruthlessness, ambition, cunning, a certain willingness to cut corners, a penchant for "cheating," which is to say, for breaking the traditional rules of engagement in order to ensure personal victory -- those aren't the values of a land-based aristocracy at all. They're the values of the city-state, the polis. They are "Machiavellian," which is to say, the values of the trade-dependent Renaissance states. They are also the values of those who hold power within an education-dependent beaurocracy. They're the values of the urban or the palace politician, rather than those of the rural land-holding aristocracy.
No, if any of the Houses seems to me to represent the ancient land-holding aristocracy, then that would have to be House Gryffindor. Even the language in which the Sorting Hat phrases Gryffindor values—"chivalry" rather than, say, "generosity," "bravery" rather than "courage"—is suggestive of a feudal conception of honor. The values that House Gryffindor represents aren't the values of an ascendant middle class at all, nor are they the values of the literati. They are the values of a warrior caste.
Furthermore, they are the values which seem to prevail within the wizarding world as a whole. It is not only the members of House Gryffindor, but the entire wizarding culture which places a high value on bravery and daring, while holding Slytherinesque strategies in low regard. Draco Malfoy is not proud of himself when he is accused of having bought his way onto the Quidditch team. He is shamed and angered. And he doesn't like being accused of cowardice either.
Pippin wrote:
Voldemort, Heir of Slytherin, is trying to re-establish the old system: his followers are sworn personally to him, and are rewarded in kind rather than in cash. His politics are those of feud and vendetta. His preferred contest is the duel.
I hardly see these values espoused only by members of House Slytherin. They seem to me to be the values of the wizarding world as a whole. The Pensieve mob at Crouch Jr's trial in GoF exemplifies the politics of feud and vendetta, as do Lupin and Black in the Shrieking Shack, where it takes the Muggle-raised Harry to prevail upon them to abandon this aesthetic in favor of a more contemporary notion of judicial due process. In CoS, students from all four houses are sufficiently interested in learning to duel to show up for Lockhart's duelling club, and in the first book, Draco plays off of Harry and Ron's presumably "Gryffindorish" preference for the duel as a ploy to try to get them in trouble. Harry receives aid from Fawkes and the Sorting Hat at the end of CoS by means of his personal devotion to Dumbledore: it is not his fidelity to an abstraction that helps to save him, but rather, his loyalty to Dumbledore as a person, as an individual leader.
If this is the "old system" (and I agree with Pippin that it is), then the "new system" against which I think it must be compared is not the value system of House Gryffindor, but rather the value system of the muggle world itself. House Gryffindor is indeed more sympathetic to and welcoming of this population, and it has been ever since the days of the founders. But the values of the muggle world are nonetheless not at all, as I see it, really the same as those of House Gryffindor.
When it comes to the class basis of the Gryffindor/Slytherin rivalry, I tend to agree more with Richard Adams, who writes:
...the distinguishing characteristic of the Gryffindor house is bravery -- a more noble image than the competing Dursley representation of the middle class world, with its company cars and televisions. More importantly, it is Voldemort who is reacting against the status quo acceptance of Muggle blood. The conflict between them is not between a rising middle class and a declining gentry; rather it is a civil war among a ruling class over how it treats its members, whom it admits into the ruling class, and how it treats a lower form of life, the non-magician Muggles.
Even more specifically, I tend to view this conflict as one between an increasingly dispossessed and resentful beaurocratic aristocracy (Slytherin), and a far more socially mobile warrior class (Gryffindor), which managed to wrest control away from the earlier aristocracy some thousand years ago and whose values have since come to predominate within wizarding society as a whole.
The real world historical analogy that I always see here (and I admit that this is very likely due to my own educational background) is not eleventh century Europe, but the late Roman Empire, in which the older aristocratic Senatorial orders had been superceded by the military class, in large part due to the military's meritocratic nature and its ready acceptance of "new blood" in the form of provincials, freemen and "barbarians."
Like the subversive reactionaries of House Slytherin, members of the old Senatorial class enjoyed hearkening back to a nostalgic view of their own past status as a warrior elite, while simultaneously opposing the actual warrior values of the real warrior caste which had come to supercede them. Also like Rowling's "pure-bloods," the Roman Senatorial class was crippled in part by a declining birthrate (In CoS, Ron makes the claim that if wizards hadn't married muggles, they would have all died out), exacerbated by an unwillingness to admit "new men" into its ranks.
The ascendant Roman military, on the other hand, gained power and vibrancy in part due to its inclusive policies and emphasis on skill and ability, rather than on blood. In this respect, they were like House Gryffindor, which while it may not be doing too well in that House Cup competition at the time of the series' opening, is nonetheless clearly in control: House Slytherin is mistrusted by all of the other houses, Dumbledore is the headmaster of Hogwarts, McGonagall is his lieutenant, and as a newcomer to the entire culture, Hermione immediately identifies Gryffindor as the "best" of the Houses. (Presumably she received this impression from _Hogwart's: A History,_ which would seem to be THE history text available to students within the culture -- and which would also seem to have been written by the cultural winners.)
Pippin wrote:
What Rowling seems nostalgic for is not the old ruling class per se, but the virtue it once espoused: nobility of spirit, the desire to protect the weak without exploitation.
Rowling's ideal seems to be a synthesis of the two systems, ancient and modern. She would like to see the idealism of the old chivalric system as represented by Gryffindor House preserved as a shelter for those who need it, but combined with the mobility and meritocracy of the new.
I would agree with this statement (although I'm afraid that I'm just cynical enough to find it impossible to believe that the ruling classes have ever truly exemplified those ideal virtues. Historical record does tend to suggest otherwise).
I also, however, see a good deal of nostalgia for the late nineteenth century in JKR's writing, and I don't see this nostalgia as limited only to the idealized notion of the past as a country where people have a strong sense of noblesse oblige. ;-)
Much of it seems to me to be a far less intellectualized form of nostalgia than the ethical idealism described by Pippin's excellent and well-reasoned essay. To my mind, JKR's nostalgia seems to represent more of a kind of inchoate yearning for the stability of relatively recently departed social structures and hierarchies. I view it as kissing cousin to the "frontier nostalgia" of the aesthetic that we often refer to as "Americana," or to the nostalgia many people in this country feel for a softened and idealized vision of the Old South. And like both of these forms of nostalgia, it comes complete with some rather unsettling political and social implications which even the best-intentioned often find difficult to remove.
I am reminded here of Daniel Harris' essay "Quaintness," which is to be found in his quirky collection of cultural essays, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism.
Harris wrote:
If historians seek to know the past intellectually, those who revel in that most ahistorical of aesthetics, quaintness, seek to know it sensually, not through knowledge but through atmosphere, stripping it of facts and mining it for sensations. Quaintness focuses squarely on the physicality of Olden Times, on their creature comforts, and is therefore set more often in the nineteenth century than the Middle Ages, which bring to mind cold flagstone floors and drafty, smoke-filled dining halls draped in mildewed tapestries, whereas the nineteenth century conjures up images of toasty Christmas interiors, brisk sleigh rides, and cups of piping hot cocoa. Quaintness reproduces the past selectively, editing out its discomfort, inconvenience, misery, stench, and filth and concentrating instead on its carnal pleasures, its 'warm and homey feelings.'
That, to my mind, is a very apt description of the type of archaism we see in the izarding world, particularly at Hogwarts. Intellectually, it may represent an authorial yearning for idealized myths of departed ruling aristocracies, but on a far more visceral level, I tend to view it as mainly a yearning for a combination of social stability, coziness, and security that we may think of as a more generalized nostalgia, a yearning for the quaint, for "past-ness."
Just as the nostalgia of quaintness seeks to edit out physical discomfort, it also seeks to gloss over those political realities which are part and parcel of that image, that sense of "atmosphere," that feeling of "past-ness" which we define as "quaint" and which nostalgic writing like JKR's seeks to reproduce.
Harris wrote:
Quaintness is also an aesthetic of clutter because it represents different periods simultaneously. Its chaotic style...is the outcome of its historical fallaciousness, its scrambled sense of chronology, which mixes together disparate epochs and cultures, collapsing time like an accordian.
Sounds like Hogwarts to me.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on July 26, 2002 4:11 PM
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