Quote from Naaga on April 18, 2023, 3:16 pm

Source: Harry and Voldemort: Parents, Love and Death

Harry and Voldemort: Parents, Love and Death

Discussion

 

Ever since I re-read HBP earlier this month, I wanted to explore parental rejection/abandonment as concepts related to Voldemort and his subsequent relationship with death vs Harry's. It was also sparked off by Ralph Fiennes saying he wanted to play Voldemort as a very "human evil" with "rage against the world" as opposed to an idea of evil. Fiennes also noted that when his nephew took the role of young Voldemort, he sensed a "loneliness" about him and he wanted to be able to play that. So to tap into the humanity of Voldemort, I wanted to chart his idea of his parents vs Harry's.

Infancy - Voldemort's mother died an hour after she gave birth to him. His father obviously neither knew nor cared what happened to him. The child who is born is essentially abandoned and rejected by both his parents. In stark contrast, Harry spends a year fiercely loved not only by his parents who died for him, but their friends too. All of this affects your brain development.

At age 11 - While Voldemort is conscious of his powers and has, for his age, immense control over them, Harry is usually on spot for accidental magic. Voldemort shows instincts for power, control, and uses his powers to bully and terrify other kids in orphanage. He has no trouble believing he is "special". Harry, on the other hand, is almost always using powers for self preservation and quite accidentally. Aunt Petunia gave him a bad haircut? Hair grows back. Aunt Petunia giving him a horrible jumper? It magically shrinks until it no longer fits him. Dudley chasing him? He is somehow on the school roof. Dudley elbows him aside in zoo? The glass vanishes and boa constrictor is free. In fact, I believe Harry's instinct for fighting his way out of tight corners, as Snape puts it, comes from here - a decade of escaping or hiding from his cousin, his uncle, and being quick to react to protect himself (because no one else will). Therefore, Voldemort's response to his environment is to seek wider control, while Harry's is for simple self preservation. Harry, of course, can't believe he is a wizard so quickly.

Belonging and Friends - Harry points out in DH that Voldemort would have seen having an account in Gringotts as a "symbol of belonging to wizarding world". This is something Voldemort covets. Him coveting trophies with magical histories and hiding them in places like this is a sign he understands desire. His own personal history is a vast disappointment, so he will create his own. Again, in contrast, Harry's sense of belonging is validated with the gold his parents left him. They both think of Hogwarts as home. Harry immediately makes friends, while Voldemort, a self hating bully, would attract people because of his immense power.

Fascination with parentage - Both Voldemort and Harry are fascinated with their parentage as teenagers. Harry's is, of course, fueled by the knowledge that his parents died protecting him whereas Voldemort has no idea about his father and believes his mother can't possibly be a witch because she died. Voldemort keeps his father's name, even though he dislikes it because it's too common, until he finds out that his father was a Muggle. This comes after a lot of painstaking search for his father in school records. After accepting that his father may not be the magical one, he finally looks into the ancestry of the woman he thought was weak - his mother. I think these are the beginnings of his relationship and understanding of death. As a child, I wonder if his mother's death constituted as rejection for him. I wonder if his fear of death and his painstaking steps for immortality is also a way to make himself different from his "weak" mother. Both of his parents disappointed him in different ways and Voldemort sought himself to make himself different from both : rejecting his father by shedding his name, playing up his mother's ancestry and rejecting his mother by attempting and "going further than anybody" for immortality.

This is, again, huge contrast to Harry who is repeatedly shown to have longing to meet his dead parents. Harry has the knowledge he is loved, and Voldemort doesn't and I wonder if it contributes to his inability to understand it. Harry expresses desire for Resurrection Stone and scared Hermione and Ron with his talk of living with dead people. He has a guilty desire in Book 3 to hear his parents voices and he has to really get a grip on himself to learn Patronuses. He visits Mirror of Erised until Dumbledore stops him. He and Luna were also among the few who could hear voices beyond the Veil in Book 5 - and I wonder if it means that Harry believes he will see the people he loved again, or believes in a certain kind of afterlife. It seems to be why he was comforted by Luna at end of Book 5 saying that "they were just hiding, lurking out of sight, you heard them". At his parents grave, he is close to "wishing he was under the snow with them". This is why, when Harry drops the Resurrection Stone in the forest - his biggest longing and temptation - it's a huge deal for his character who is haunted by the loss of people he loves. Harry is not only accepting his own death, but also of the people who died defending and loving him the most. Voldemort rejects and fears death. It also plays into his instinct for control - the unknown beyond death, he has no way of controlling.

The fathers - both Harry and Voldemort looked to their fathers first, as young orphans looking for a masculine ideal to emulate in life. However, when Harry's ideal of his father is dashed, Harry , through his father's friends and his father's own death to protect him, is able to reconcile with the idea that his father is imperfect. Most of Harry's father and mentor figures are put off their pedestals and Harry learns to reconcile their humanity with his own projections of them. In short, he grows up. Voldemort, on the other hand, learns more of his father from his uncle. And whatever version of the story his uncle told him, Voldemort seems to have believed. As he says to Harry in GOF - he believes his father abandoned his mother after he found out that she was a witch ("He doesn't like magic, my father"). Which, as we know, is not the true story. For Voldemort, however, coupled with his rage of being abandoned and rejected, his father essentially left him - a "special" boy - to rot in an orphanage. His Muggle ancestry is just one strike too many. He killed his father and his family, his source of rage and shame. He sheds his father's name, and becomes someone else, only known by his "special" magical lineage - cutting off that undesirable part of himself. Harry, in contrast, finds his father "inside himself" through his Patronus. ("Prongs rode again last night" as Dumbledore eloquently put it).

Tom sought inanimate objects and notorious titles in wizarding history in order to reject his "ordinary" self and magnify his self importance while Harry sought connections in friends, and created found families with his father's friends to connect with his own personal history and move forward.

Anyway, I thought it was fit to explore their idea of parents and love. If there are other interesting thoughts about two of them - perhaps with their idea of trust and secrecy, feel free to add below.