Livre d'Or

So melannen has an interestingly provocative single question Sorting Hat game. It's generated a lot of discussion, some of which is the usual fun game of picking holes in JKR's worldbuilding, but also some really interesting stuff about how people interpret the houses and the stories they tell about their own identity. I don't want to hijack Melannen's post too much, so I'm bringing it over here too.

Firstly, a response poll: what do you think of melannen's Sorting Hat trick?



I'm particularly intrigued by the idea that Slytherins tend to be very certain of their place in the world, a strong sense of their own rights and privileges, and to have a deep respect for authority and tradition, and that therefore they know which house they're going to be in even at 11 in a terrifying situation.

That does make a certain amount of sense; it sort of goes along with the coded racism blood purity stuff, and the tendency of many Slytherins, even the 'good' ones, to be bullies. Already confident of their place in the world at an age when most kids are desperately trying to be accepted. As I mentioned to melannen, this conception of Slytherin fitted me pretty well at 11. I was very secure in who I was and that I belonged, and I was ambitious with some tendency to think of myself as better than everybody else.

Now, it happened that my confidence was mainly about my intellectual abilities, which is in the very simplistic sense (the houses are basically protagonists, geeks, fascists and nice people) more Ravenclaw, but. I like the idea that a true Ravenclaw is someone who will approach the world with curiosity, skepticism, and an open mind, and are the most likely to change their opinions based on new information. Not someone who's obsessed with knowing the right answer to win approval. Which is a bit like the difference between people who are fans of science, who were 'good at' school-level science and learning about science; and the people who are actual scientists. If that's right, I've become much more Ravenclaw as I've matured. I've always been curious and a neophile, but willingness to handle uncertainty and feeling positive towards changing my mind in the light of new evidence, that has come with age and experience. Being 'good at' school was a lot about pleasing authority and the satisfaction of being right, and I can see that as more Slytherin, by melannen's argument. I mean, there's a slight paradox where if being certain I'm going to sort Ravenclaw means that I'm in fact Slytherin, then I'm wrong in my confidence.

Of course, melannen correctly points out that the quiz is very skewed by being taken by adults who have spent the last couple of decades with a pretty clear knowledge of which Hogwarts House they belong in. It's difficult to imagine yourself in the shoes of an 11yo who exists within the world of the the book, rather than in reality where the book is a work of fiction you're pondering. I think I was unusually confident and secure for an 11yo, and I can see how that correlates with some Slytherin traits.

melannen very kindly assured me that I'm not saying [...] that means you were a rich overprivileged racist dickhead.. Well, no, but I was quite rich and quite racially privileged (though hopefully not actively racist), and something of a dickhead or at least often selfish and thoughtless. But I was also very conscious of being a minority. I've always identified as an immigrant, an Other, even though I'm third generation born in the UK and have white skin and speak a prestige dialect of English natively. I guess the question is, can we put a Jewish 11yo in the house of fascists? I would have rejected Slytherin if offered by the Sorting Hat, not because I think Slytherin is evil in the abstract, but because if they care about blood purity, then clearly I don't belong there.

I can't remember if there are no canon Jewish characters at all, or if there's a tiny walk-on part for one Jewish kid. And the whole thing with Harry Potter is that the blood purity is supposed to be a proxy, an allegory for racism, which is not about real world ethnic groups. Hogwarts is sort of passively, institutionally racist, in that it's way more white than the general UK population. In theory a character of colour could be a Pureblood and in Slytherin, and we don't see that but we also see very few Black and Asian kids in any house. And there's the retrofitted word-of-god from JKR that Hermione could well have been Black (which was my headcanon for her from the beginning anyway.)

My school was kind of like that too. A day school, not a boarding school, but a fairly posh fee-paying school. And not directly and actively racist, but very very white dominated. I was always the only Jewish kid in my class and if I imagine myself in Hogwarts I assume I'm the only Jewish kid there too. I was quite conscious that most of my peers' parents were materially better off than mine, (not all, a few were academics, though academics more often than not come from money even if they're not themselves earning high salaries). So maybe a bit like the Weasleys, I came from a well-regarded family, and not poor-poor on a global scale, but poor compared to most of the Slytherins.

We had houses but they weren't really the point, they were just a convenient way of organizing sports contests. But I was implicitly sorted into the school's equivalent of Ravenclaw. I came into secondary school with a track record of straight As from three years of prep school (yeah, we had termly grades in each subject, which in hindsight was pedagogically horrific for junior school kids). We didn't explicitly have sets by ability either, but there were a group, everybody knew who they were, who were expected to be outstanding academically, and had close relationships with the more, well Ravenclaw-y teachers and got lots of validation. (Are there any named Ravenclaw teachers in HP canon? Other than McGonagall who was nearly Ravenclaw but turned out to be Gryffindor after all because, protagonist.)

So I can see myself as a Slytherin who happens to be clever (like Hermione is a Gryffindor who happens to be clever), especially as a teenager. Except that most of the Slytherins I know IRL, are not hugely privileged and confident of their place in the world. They identify as Slytherin because they don't fit in well, they feel like if society is going to treat them as somewhere on the scale between weirdos and monsters, they might as well embrace that. They reject the kind of bourgeois proxy morality that is mainly about good manners and not rocking the boat. That's especially true for younger Slytherins for whom it's more of a real identity and less playing ironic games like adults who question the wisdom of dividing everybody into exactly four categories at age 11. I think that's partly again a result of approaching the book as readers, not as characters in-universe.

But still, even in the books, I think many of the Slytherins are people who are insecure and unhappy and desperately looking for an authority to follow and desperately trying to scrape together a sense of self-worth based on having the right ancestry. Which, well, I think melannen and I are both thinking of different aspects of what real-world fascist fellow-travellers are like. She thinks of people who are so privileged that even before they're teenagers they know bone-deep that the world is made for them, and they treat other people badly because most people outside their golden circle aren't real to them. Whereas I think of people who are a mess and don't have strong validation from any positive source, so believing they're the master race is the only thing they've got. The first group are probably more often the leaders, and the second group are the dispensable cannon fodder. (And of course there are privileged people who are not evil fascists and there are outcast, unhappy people who are not fascist thugs.)

Annnnyway, thank you melannen for giving me something to think about. There is lots of Harry Potter in my life at the moment because my partners' kids are super into it, bringing Potterverse into every conversation and every game and dressing up as HP characters at every opportunity. They're almost Talmudic in their interest in discussing every detail of both book and film canon, including the prequels and sequels and any number of fan videos, it's absolutely glorious.

Thinking about melannen's analysis might help me when the children ask me to sort everybody into houses. I mean, I think trying to apply Sorting Hat principles to people who are not fairly simplistically drawn fictional children can be quite futile, but it's made for some interesting discussions. And of course, Hogwarts houses are canonically like gender: people might match the superficial / stereotypical characteristics you associate with a particular house, but ultimately it's how each person chooses to identify.