Harry is the hero.
Right?
He’s the guy the story is all about, after all. He’s the Boy Who Lived. He has the scar and the prophecy. He has the sidekicks and the invisibility cloak. He has the mentor. He has the tragic backstory. He faces down the villain.
Harry is the hero. It’s his face on the covers of the books. They’re called Harry Potter and the… for a reason.
Right?
Ron is a sidekick. You can’t deny it. He can’t even deny it. He trips over things and he makes faces and he provides Harry with a Normal Friend. He explains things but doesn’t always get them right. He supports. He humanizes. He gripes sometimes but other times, he’s there. He’s there when Harry needs him, mostly. He holds the team together until he goes off in a snit to explore his options, and when he does, Harry spirals for a while until he comes back.
Ron is a symbiote. He doesn’t get his own story that’s separate from Harry, not really. And sometimes he hates it, but also, he knows that it’s all there is for him. When he’s not with Harry or near Harry, his edges start to fade and people start calling him by the wrong name and he finds himself in a state of hibernation, not-quite-frozen but unable to really move until Harry comes back.
We aren’t discussing Ron right now. He’ll wait. He’ll be there when it’s time for us to get to him. He’ll be there once he’s needed.
He always is.
Hermione, though.
What are you, Hermione?
Are you a heroine? Or are you a sidekick?
Here’s the thing with Hermione: she’s always there. She’s always performing the ceaseless emotional labor that Harry and Ron require. She does the heavy emotional lifting so that Harry can continue to Hero all over the place and Ron can continue to sidekick. She is always there, even when she’s angry, even when she’s being horribly mistreated. She’s loyal to a fault, unwavering, unflinching. She’s patient.
That’s sidekick behavior.
But then.
When Harry’s not there, Hermione is busy. She’s not waiting for him. She decided at some point that it wasn’t Harry’s story, it was everyone’s story, and she acts accordingly. She’s not along for the ride.
This is something that the Harry Potter fan community has been discussing for years: Hermione drives the story because she has her own story. No one in their right mind would trust 13-year-old Harry Potter with a Time Turner, but Hermione gets one and she deserves it. She dates a celebrity, and she outsmarts Rita Skeeter, and she does those things in the background of Harry’s story. She convinces Harry to be a figurehead in the fight against Voldemort, and she creates Dumbledore’s Army. She schedules the DA meetings, she creates the consequences for DA defectors, she creates the galleons that allow the DA to communicate in code. She researches horcruxes and how to destroy them. She rereads all of Hogwarts: A History. She shows up with the tools and the knowledge and prevents Harry and Ron from standing around looking perplexed while the world ends around them. She saves everyone’s bacon all the time by being smarter and better-prepared than anyone else. Those two boys would be dead a thousand times over without her intervention.
She gets her own story, if you know how to look for it. She has her own narrative that’s completely separate from Harry’s. But does that make her a hero?
Harry is the hero, right? He stands in opposition to Voldemort. He’s suffered loss at the hands of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Unimaginable loss.
Except.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hermione does too. She makes the same sacrifice that Harry did—losing her parents—but instead of losing them to the Avada Kedavra curse, she loses them to her own wand. She erases their memories of her. She hides them in Australia, tucks them away to make sure that they aren’t tortured for information. To make sure they aren’t tortured the same way she’s tortured later in the book.
But everyone has lost people. Everyone has missing relatives, dead brothers, inaccessible parents.
That doesn’t make someone into The Hero. Everyone’s the hero of their own story, but not everyone gets to be the hero of this story. Too many people have died in the Harry Potter universe for loss alone to bestow heroism. Too many people have lost everything. Have sacrificed everything.
Sidekicks can suffer, too.
So, what are you, Hermione?
Does anyone in the Harry Potter universe stand in more direct opposition to Voldemort than Hermione Granger does?
Voldemort stands for oppression. He stands for the fundamental superiority of blood-purity. He stands for status, not achievement. He stands for alignment, not friendship. He stands for fealty, not loyalty. He stands for a wizard’s foot on the neck of a house-elf. He stands for the sacrifice of one’s humanity in pursuit of one’s ambition.
Hermione Granger is his antithesis. She’s a muggle-born witch who arrives at Hogwarts prepared to dominate magic. She’s enormously ambitious, but consistently seeks to elevate others when she could easily let them fail. She walks beside Harry even when doing so means putting up with relentless scorn from the people who waver between hating him and worshiping him—even when that scorn is piled on top of the blood-status slurs she weathers continuously throughout the series. She stands up against a centuries-long institution of interspecies slavery, even when doing so means that everyone she cares about will laugh at her. She skips her final year of school in order to help Harry and Ron find the horcruxes, even though it could mean losing every opportunity she’s spent the previous six years working for. She chooses her causes over her ambitions every time, and she swallows the consequences because they’re worth it to her.
What is Hermione?
She’s relatable. She’s an overachiever who consistently stands in the shadow of The Hero. She pursues victory without ever receiving credit. She accomplishes and innovates constantly without recognition. She is expected to have the answers, and to provide emotional support, and to weather the foibles of others with maturity and grace. She is shouted at for daring to have her own pursuits and interests. She is shouted down for disagreeing with the person who has designated himself In Charge. She is never allowed to be tired or sad because everyone always needs something from her. She must be the best at all times, and she must never demand a reward for her efforts. She is a cypher for every ass-busting girl who has been shunted to the side of the stage while a man who yells at everyone receives a medal from the mentor who’s never seen fit to so much as meet with her.
Hermione is where women and people of color and especially, too often, women of color so frequently find themselves: pushed to the side and asked for patience.
To Harry, she is a sidekick.
To us, she is a heroine.
Top image by Frida Lundqvist.
Sarah Gailey’s fiction has appeared in Mothership Zeta and Fireside Fiction; her nonfiction has been published by Mashable and Fantasy Literature Magazine. You can see pictures of her puppy and get updates on her work by clicking here. She tweets @gaileyfrey. Watch for her debut novella, River of Teeth, from Tor.com in 2017.
Good character analysis. I LOVE all of the images.
And she… MAJOR SPOILER FOR CURSED CHILD HERE… takes the highest office in the magical world, not our hero.
I think it was always part of the text in the books that Harry only ended up in the “hero” role because it was what everyone expected of him and pushed him into, despite him being nothing intrinsically special. The fact that he survived Voldemort’s death curse — as the result of his mother’s loving sacrifice rather than anything specific to him — made Voldemort think he was a destined enemy, and that meant Dumbledore had to make him into a hero just so that he’d have a chance of surviving when Voldemort returned and came after him. The whole narrative is a subversion of the idea of a predestined Chosen One, because it’s only the preconceptions and expectations people have about Harry that put him in a special role despite his own lack of specialness.
Which, really, makes a pretty good allegory for gender, racial, or class privilege. Harry was handed his role as an accident of his birth, while Hermione earned her achievements. He never could’ve gotten where he did without her support, but he still got the credit, because of people’s expectations. Nominally the books present him as the hero — they’re named after him and told from his perspective — but that’s because that’s what we in the real world expect too, and the way the story is told does a lot to subvert that. Sure, it would’ve been more fair to make Hermione the hero all along, but maybe it’s our recognition of that unfairness that’s the whole point. Hermione is the Rosalind Franklin of the wizarding world.
Hermione is JK Rowling.
This is a great look at a great character. And the art, oh my! Excellent!
Unfortunately, Christopher, you have to get through all the books to get there. If you just read the first book, as I did, all you see is a hero who is wholly passive and does nothing actually heroic, is constantly told he’s the chosen one, and meanwhile there’s this girl who’s way more interesting and why isn’t the book about her?
It’s one of the many reasons why I never got past the first book, honestly.
And the real tragedy is that, if Rowling had tried to sell Hermione Granger and the Philosopher’s Stone, she’d just have a pile of rejection letters. *sigh*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Objection. Hermione does not hide her parents, mindwiped, in Australia to stop them being tortured. She does it so if they are found and tortured they cannot give her and Harry up. Hiding them in Australia does help mitigate against the risk of discovery and torture, the mindwipe only means if they are found then they will be tortured for longer because they cannot give up the information that would make the torture stop. It is certainly the sort of dirty thinking the Hero cannot do (and in fact does not, even with his far less fondly thought of family and far more high value targets Harry just packs them off into regular hiding), but it is far more than a sidekick would be required to do. Hermione is Harry’s Snape.
Fascinating analysis. I enjoyed this article very much.
@6/krad: Actually the truth about Harry comes out much earlier than that. I think the explanation for how his mother saved him is at the end of the very first book, so we see very early on that Harry doesn’t have the special abilities that everyone assumes he must have. And the idea that Dumbledore is grooming Harry for a role that was imposed on him by others’ expectations was seeded fairly early on, even if the full story didn’t come out until book 5. I always had the sense that the books were drawing an allegory with how children in general are often at the mercy of adults’ expectations and plans for them.
And a case can be made that a story about a relatively ordinary protagonist with a really brilliant and gifted partner is more accessible than a story told from the brilliant and gifted person’s POV. Star Trek centered on Kirk instead of Spock and Picard instead of Data. SG-1 is led by O’Neill instead of Carter. Buffy was the star instead of Giles. We had Gilligan’s Island instead of Professor’s Island. Billy was the Blue Ranger instead of the Red Ranger. And so on. Yes, there are works where the most brilliant person in the room is the lead character, like Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Who or CSI or The Fantastic Four (indeed, an impressive number of Stan Lee’s heroic leads are supergeniuses), but I think genius sidekicks are at least as common as genius leads. I’m not denying that there’s an added gendered element in this case, but in general, I don’t think it’s an invalid construction to tell the story from the more average character’s viewpoint.
Great article and kudos to all of the art on this page. Really fantastic depictions!
This was excellent and makes me want to finish reading my Philosopher’s Stone illustrated edition this weekend.
Christopher: I don’t think that’s an apt analogy, because Harry isn’t ordinary. Or at least isn’t portrayed as ordinary, he’s written as if he’s supposed to be the chosen one. Yes, it turns out to be nonsense, but you don’t get that in the first book, you just get (to me, anyhow, and I admit this is my particular problem with Philosopher’s Stone and not necessarily anyone else’s….) the title character being the least interesting person in the book and one I had no interest in reading any more about. Jim Kirk, Jack O’Neill, Buffy Summers, and Jean-Luc Picard are all interesting characters in their own right, which is more than can be said for Harry (or, for that matter, Gilligan). And since the books were all titled Harry Potter and…, I figured he was like to continue to be the focus, and I didn’t care enough to find out if he got more interesting.
But that’s just me.
Also I second all the effusive praise for the artwork accompanying this article!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@12/krad: I dunno, I always got the impression that Harry was a “normal kid” by wizarding standards, unusual only because he was a newcomer to the culture. Yes, everyone expected great things of him, but he always struggled to live up to those expectations and doubted his ability to do so. And Hermione being so much better at everything was part of that.
As for the lead character being less interesting than the supporting cast, I guess I’m used to that from decades of American TV and movies. There’s a long tradition of casting a bland, whitebread male with limited acting range as the star and surrounding him with more diverse and charismatic supporting players. Lead characters are often comparatively boring because they’re supposed to be the “normal,” relatable ones, the blank slates the audience can project themselves onto. Although that often does assume that the target audience consists of white males.
Although I can relate to Harry because I was full of self-doubt as a child, thanks to being a perennial victim of bullying, so I had a hard time believing I could live up to the potential that my father and teachers kept telling me I had. For that matter, I could relate to Gilligan, because I often felt (or was made to feel) like a screw-up who couldn’t do anything right, and it was very comforting to me that Gilligan’s fellow castaways continued to accept and care for him no matter how badly he messed up. So we all have our own standards of what makes a character relatable.
Interesting article!
I’ve thought of Hermione as the integral team member who’s got the insight and the get-it-done-ness to implement what’s needed when it’s needed. And she doesn’t wait to ask–she has a question and goes to find the answer.
Dumbledore tells McGonagal that one reason he left Harry with Muggles, and such appalling Muggles, is that he wouldn’t grow up spoiled. And he doesn’t.
@ChristopherLBennett — yes, totally, about the heroes–usually all-of-a-piece, with less subtlety . . . which is the difference between Boromir and Faramir, perhaps. And feeling like a screw up . . . I totally get it. I mean, I still can’t grocery shop correctly . . . according to one person. When you see “In the Name of the Father” and listening to Gerry’s speech about the medal is a cathartic experience . . . .
I’d love more backstory on Hermoine–her childhood, how magic manifested itself, how her parents reacted, what is was like at the school she attended, the research she did before arriving at Hogwarts (she knew it was supposed to be the best school), etc.
“To Harry, she is a sidekick.”
I doubt that. Did the author ask Harry for his opinion?
Hermione is the Best!
I loved this article!
Trying to enjoy the article but…my inner canon-obsessed nerdiness is trying hard to resist all these attempts recently to retcon Hermione into being a black person. Laudable—a very laudable retcon—but she is, canonically, white (no matter how JK tries to spin it. There’s too many descriptions that contradict Rowling’s assertion that she never defined her race). Note: I couldn’t care less what race she was initially chosen to be. Her being black from the beginning would not phase me one bit.
Anyways, great article!
@17/Austin: As far as I know, the one and only line that suggests Hermione is white is a reference to Harry seeing her “white face” in the moonlight, in a context where it could mean that she’s ashen with shock. Otherwise, the description is ambiguous and people have just read whiteness into it because that’s their unconscious default.
And canon is always mutable, and creators themselves are always among the most willing to change it. After all, stories don’t spring into being complete and perfect from the aether. They’re the end result of a lengthy process of trial and error and revision, and the revisions only stop because a deadline is reached, not because the work is utterly perfect. Every creator ends up wishing they’d done some things differently in an earlier work, and sometimes they make changes when they get the chance. A lot of prose authors revise their stories and novels when they get reissued. Filmmakers do directors’ cuts or special editions. And so on. So just because earlier “canon” said something, that doesn’t make it absolute gospel carved in stone. That’s taking the use of the religious term “canon” as a nickname for a body of stories way too literally.
@18 – There’s the description of Hermoine being described as “very brown (i.e. tanned)” after the summer in the beginning of PoA. There’s numerous descriptions of her blushing red. And then there’s JK Rowling’s sketch of the kids, where Dean Thomas is black and Hermoine is white. Again, this is just my canon-OCD kicking in, rather than a commentary on race.
@19 – A “very brown” complexion suggests that a person isn’t white. White people wind up, at best, slightly browned by tan. It takes a fairly dark complexion to start with to reach “very brown” even at the end of summer.
Likewise, “bushy” hair is a way that African hair is frequently described.
@18, if that’s how you want to interact with art, that’s fine. But art is deeply subjective, personal, and interactive. You can’t invalidate someone else’s relationship with something because it isn’t the same as yours. No one is retconning Hermione. I saw tons of black Hermione art well, well, well before Noma Dumezweni was cast or TCC was even a blip on the radar. People like it because it means something to them, and maybe that’s why the author chose those pieces. Ms. Dumezweni was chosen because she was the best fit for the character, and Hermione’s race was negotiable because it has literally no effect on the story being told. Also, theater casting is usually way more flexible.
Seriously, if you made Hermione’s skin brown or black in the books and kept literally everything else the same (i.e., her actions, words, attitudes, the plot, the way other people react to her), it wouldn’t make one iota of difference. If you handed the edited book to someone who’d never read HP before, they’d never know.
Again, it’s cool that you choose to interact with the books in your way; that’s everyone’s right. Though I can only imagine how much you hate the movies, lol. Harry’s eyes, Hermione’s hair and teeth, Snape’s personality, Harry and Ginny’s relationship, Ron’s loss of everything that made him useful, etc.
Hermione has a passing issue with being muggle-born. She overcomes the paralysis of it early on, and doesn’t allow anyone to define her potential by the circumstances of her birth.
Once she gets out of her own way and lives into her own potential, not living under any victim or persecution complex, she accomplishes great things based on her own talent that has nothing to do with her gender or birth circumstances.
If anything makes her a heroine, it’s avoiding a victim complex and just getting on with her life. And how sad, that is all it takes to earn “heroine” these days.
@21/DFT: “@18, if that’s how you want to interact with art, that’s fine. But art is deeply subjective, personal, and interactive. You can’t invalidate someone else’s relationship with something because it isn’t the same as yours.”
I think you intended this for #17, not my comment.
“Also, theater casting is usually way more flexible.”
Yeah. I remember the time in high school when my English class went to a production of Hamlet featuring a white actor as Hamlet and a black actor as his biological uncle King Claudius. And no attempt was made to tweak the script to acknowledge or explain this. After all, in theater, you can clearly see that the characters aren’t actually in the setting they’re pretending to be in, but just standing right there in the same room with you. So it’s a medium that requires active suspension of disbelief by the audience.
Hermione is where women and people of color and especially, too often, women of color so frequently find themselves: pushed to the side and asked for patience.
Yeah, I was about to say, “So, she’s a woman, basically.”
Hermione is amazing and awesome.
She chooses her causes over her ambitions every time, and she swallows the consequences because they’re worth it to her.
And that’s what makes her Gryffindor instead of Ravenclaw. (High-fives to my fellow Gryffindors in the thread, heeeey.)
Different people will always filter a work of art differently, and shouldn’t bother anyone. If something happens to reinforce one’s interpretation, good for them!
I sympathized with Hermione’s bushy hair. I tried to grow mine long, like a rocker, but it would only dry into a big poofball with maybe curls depending on humidity and speed of drying.
I really love this article (and its artwork!).
Regarding Hermione – overall I agree with CLB here about the mutability of canon for people in their heads (and the ability of the author to say now that she thinks about it, she likes this idea better). I mean, yes, in the original sketches Hermione was white and probably written as white but that doesn’t mean that’s the only way we can think of her, as she is a fictional character.
@20 – I have to disagree with you on that though. I’m white (Mediterranean descent, so ‘olive skinned’ is the most non-white descriptor that could be applied to me) and I get very brown when I tan and also have very bushy hair. And buck teeth, actually. That said, I always pictured Hermione as looking a bit like Mallory Pike from the BSC books, haha (who is decidedly white).
I really wish I had more to add to the awesomeness here, but Hermione has always been my favorite character and I like now you have pointed out that she really does have her own story and stuff going on outside of the main story; while of course she is completely devoted to her friends and the cause of bringing down Voldemort, she doesn’t just exist in Harry’s orbit where every single thing she does has something to do with him. You get the impression that ‘off screen’ she IS doing stuff and living her life. (Somewhat interesting that when you think about it, Ron really DOES seem a bit more fuzzy of a character and a little more overshadowed, which is kind of the story of his life, really…)
@krad, I would certainly encourage you to read them. I would love a Hermione centric book, but like CLB says, part of the point IS in fact that Harry is ‘nothing special’ and part of the story is mainly him dealing with that (both he and Voldemort angst over it at verious times) and the situation he has been thrust in, as well as various paralells between him and Voldemort and the choices they each make. And I think it IS pretty common in a narrative to tell from the PoV of the ‘ordinary’ character; the first book is pretty straight wish fulfillment; neglected, unloved, bullied kid finds out he’s got all these extraordinary abilities and can escape to a magical world where everybody loves him. But for all that, it works, and the rest of the books really do go beyond that.
Oh, and I was going to add that I’m fine with the skin color change anyway because we change so many other physical aspects of characters when we cast them anyway. It would be one thing if Hermione’s race actually had something to do thematically with the story (if anything, changing Harry’s eye color bothers me a lot more because that’s a bit of a plot point!). But since it doesn’t…eh.
Then I saw this comment at @21 and burst out laughing, especially at the last item ;) “Though I can only imagine how much you hate the movies, lol. Harry’s eyes, Hermione’s hair and teeth, Snape’s personality, Harry and Ginny’s relationship, Ron’s loss of everything that made him useful, etc.”
I know next to nothing about Harry Potter, but like Lisamarie I can tell you that being very very white does not make it impossible for someone to get very very tanned (particularly back in the 80s, where UV radiation and skin cancer were not “a thing”).
@27/lisamarie: To your recommendation of the book series, I would add the point that the first book is not at all representative of the rest of the series. IIRC, Rowling wrote them with the expectation that their target audience would be growing up along with the characters, so the books get deeper and more sophisticated as they go. (Also a hell of a lot longer, sometimes to the point of self-indulgence. Several of the later movies improve on the pacing a bit, although they also leave out some valuable stuff, notably Hermione’s quest to free the house elves from servitude — an arc which fits very, very well with Hermione herself being a member of an ethnic group that’s experienced oppression.) The first book is quite elementary compared to what comes later. That doesn’t guarantee that KRAD or anyone else would like the later books, but it would definitely be wrong to assume that the later books are just like the first. (Similarly, the first two movies are by far the weakest of the film series, though that’s as much because of Chris Columbus’s prosaic, soullessly literal interpretation of the texts as because of the relative simplicity of the texts themselves compared to the later volumes.)
And yes, @28, a lot does change in casting. In the films, both Hermione and Neville grew up to be far better-looking than their book counterparts did, or than the people who cast them as preteens probably expected. And of course characters can change within a series — when Richard Harris died, they didn’t try to cast a lookalike or soundalike, but let Michael Gambon define his own distinct look and voice for Dumbledore.
Great points made by everybody! Though I just like to add that, with the “very brown” sentence I mentioned, there would be no reason to describe someone by their skin color. It said Ron looked very freckled (freckly people only seem to get more freckled rather than tanned lol) and Hermione very brown. In that context, it would make no sense if that was her natural skin color.
Ron already is very freckled, isn’t he?
@32 – I don’t know if Ron was ever described as very freckled, but the actual quote I was paraphrasing is: “They were there, both of them, sitting outside of Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlor — Ron looking incredibly freckly, Hermione very brown, both waving frantically at him.”
Same goes for Ron. It would make no sense to describe him as “looking incredibly freckly,” if that was his natural…freckleness?
@33/Austin: Black people do get suntans. The line could just mean that Hermione is a darker brown than usual.
When my daughter and I came out of the first movie, her first comment was to the effect that they should not have made Hermione so beautiful. So I don’t think Emma Watson can have surprised anyone as she grew up.
@27 – I guess it depends on what you think of as “very brown.” My mother is from the south of India, and quite dark to begin with, and grew even darker as she tanned in the summer, living in Rochester NY. She considered herself to be rather lighter than she was used to growing up in southern India with sun year round as intense as the hottest part of a Rochester summer. So that’s my standard for “very brown.” Likewise my cousin, whose mother is from Indian and whose father is African American, who is even darker. By contrast I wind up, at the most, light-to-medium brown. (Mother from India, father from Germany.)
To my eye, Hermione would not wind up “very brown” unless she was of African, south Indian, or similar background. Even friends from the northern parts of India aren’t that dark.
Only the very darkest of the art above strikes me as showing Hermione as “very brown.” Most seem just medium-toned.
I don’t get out in the sun nearly as much anymore, but in high school I used to be friends with several people of Indian (as in the country), Filipino and Nepali descent and there are pictures of us where I blend right in during the summer; I’ve occasionally been mistaken for various ethnicities of color as well. I mean – I agree ultimately it’s all subjective anyway and I don’t begrudge anybody their particular image of Hermione and I like the idea (I was also thinking it might make the SPEW plot more relevant, but on the other hand, I don’t know what the experience of black people in Britain is and if slavery is as much of a part of the cultural baggage as it is here). But for me I also took the tack that describing her as ‘very brown’ was mean to highlight a difference in her normal complexion, although I guess you could interpret that as going from brown to very brown and emphasizing her already-brownness ;)
@35/eggertcoby: As a child, Emma Watson didn’t strike me as unusually good-looking compared to your typical child actress. Pleasant-looking, but still a child, still kind of gawky and not quite grown into her features. I was definitely surprised by how sublimely, extraordinarily beautiful she grew up to become. I mean, we’re not just talking generally attractive, we’re talking one of the most beautiful women on the planet. That, I did not see coming.
Beauty is clearly in the eye of the beholder. Of course she was a child, but a child with mature-looking features is peculiar, not beautiful.
@39/eggertcoby: I have no idea what point you’re trying to make there. Who the hell was talking about “a child with mature-looking features?” I’m just saying that I couldn’t tell in advance what she’d look like when she grew up. Is that so unusual?
Nope. I’m just saying [ETA my adult daughter and I thought] she was an exquisite-looking child, and my eye must be different from yours. “Mature-looking features” was a reference to “not quite grown into her features,” which is how a child is expected to look.
I loved the description (albeit I think it also has to do with our somewhat limited ideas of what a sidekicker should be/do). But I’m a little surprised at the apparent implicit binary of some of the commenters on Hermione’s race/skin color. Perhaps especially given the long history of both racism and mixed-race families in England. There are almost infinite gradations of color/ancestry from pure saxon to pure african or south or east asian. (And infinite gradations of prejudice, thinking of my cousins who were taunted as children because their mother was spanish…) But would it fit too patly with the obvious aryanism of the wizarding world and “mudblood”?
The art. The art is wonderful.
She was always the hero to me.
1. Every CO needs an XO who runs down the details… or to put it into medieval UK terms, every Queen needs a Prime Minister to run things. Harry’s the Queen – the figurehead to whom everyone looks while Hermione is the Prime Minister who gets stuff done. CAN the Queen do stuff: absolutely, but that’s the big gun for the desperate times.
2. I find is ironic that everyone is discussing Hermione’s supposed ethnicity. People of african descent can be light skinned and tan. People of caucasian descent can have frizzy hair. The point isn’t that she’s black or white: the point is she’s an extremely capable girl who can get important work done.
Ignoring the contentious issue of Hermione’s ethnicity, I agree it was a great analysis of her character and her role in the books.
As far as Harry being forced into the role of hero due entirely to social pressure… I’d say this is true to an extent. On the other hand, he *chose* to follow that pressure to a large extent. Remember Dumbledore told Harry once that it was our *choices* that define us.
No one was expecting him to try defending the Philosopher’s Stone. Indeed he was specifically told it was not his responsibility. Likewise, I didn’t see any expectations that he should go down into the Chamber of Secrets to rescue Ginny. I see a lot of his actions due not to social pressures but to his family situation. He risks his life for other people because its been beaten into him that he is worth less than other people. This allows him to sacrifice himself to save his friends in the Forbidden Forest.
He steps up and does things himself because time and again he has had it beaten into him that he can’t trust authority figures to do the right thing. This is one reason why he flies off to the Ministry to try and save Sirius, because he has no reason to trust Snape and indeed numerous reasons not to.
@20 — I strongly suspect Hermione was originally given bushy hair because she was supposed to be vaguely Jewish. (Without having a Jewish name or failing to celebrate Christmas, because Christmas is universal right?! See also, my childhood full of trying to insert my Jewish self into various British fantasy novels.) She’s also muggle-born, and there are WWII/Nazi/Shoah overtones to everything to do with Voldemort and the Death Eaters. It’s a lazy analogy, as are most allusions to Nazism, but it’s a popular one.
I really like all the Hermione-isn’t-white art, though, and the other work where people are playing off that theory. Also, death of the author. :)
@47/Akiva: That’s the cool thing about fictional characters — they’re symbols, and so they can symbolize more than one thing. The X-Men and Marvel mutants were created just as a convenient way to avoid coming up with supehero origin stories by saying they were born that way, but then Lee and Kirby started to bring in some of their own experience with anti-Semitism, and then in the ’70s and ’80s they became an allegory for racism, and from Bryan Singer onward they’ve been an LGBT allegory. Similarly, as a “mudblood” facing persecution by purists and standing up for other persecuted groups, Hermione can be easily mapped onto a number of ethnic groups, and people can choose to see themselves reflected in her. That’s the power of allegory. She doesn’t have to be white, doesn’t have to be black, doesn’t have to be Jewish, etc. — but she can be. She’s an aspirational figure to many different kinds of people, and that’s good.
While I agree about everything good that has been said about Hermione, I have to disagree with the article. First, because it could have been far more illuminating to ask Rowling (who is definitely a woman, and who is definitely alive and usually willing to answer questions) why she didn’t make Hermione into the main character instead of Harry. Everything else is speculation and/or (shudder) fan fiction.
Second, because the whole hero/sidekick thing is a very limited, absurdly stereotypical way to approach fiction. Hermione is definitely one of the most interesting characters in the Harry Potter universe, she is definitely a Hero (with a capital H) and she is most likely Rowling’s sort of stand-in, for what I know of both of them and for what Rowling herself has said about the subject. She is just not the title character.
And third, because Harry’s story arch is one of the most wonderful underdog stories I have ever read. Most people seem to gloss over the fact that Harry is a victim of war, child abuse, gaslighting, bullying, and almost every horrible thing you can inflict on a child except for sexual abuse. And he is later tempted by power in he same ways that Voldemort was, until he ends up the owner of the Elder Wand, and he destroys it, for crying out loud. I highly doubt Rowling just slapped testes on him to make him marketable; that’s NOT the way a real writer works.
Oh, and the argument that Canon Hermione simply cannot be of African descent because “black people don’t tan or blush” is incredibly ignorant at so many levels, one can hardly know where to begin. I’ll just point out that here is no such thing as a “black” person, and no such thing as a “white” person, either. (Or a “yellow” or “red” one for that matter.) Those absurdly misguided labels are nothing but colonial fiction.
Great post! I agree that she is far more than a sidekick. The question is, could a nerd like Hermione capture young readers’ interest as the protagonist of a novel? As a sidekick, she has plenty of admirers, but kids want a bit more of the main character than the ability to be prepared and look it up. If anything, they might be irritated by a hero/heroine who rarely makes mistakes and saves everyone’s lives every other chapter. Harry may be the Chosen One, but he can be a right idiot, who makes plenty of mistakes, including behaving dreadfully to his friends, before working it out, and that makes him relatable. Trust me, I’m a teacher-librarian!
I really can’t get into the whole Hermione-is-isn’t black thing. My only reason for surprise(apart from white film-Hermione) was that in the novels, when someone was black, such as Lee Jordan, Kingsley Shacklebolt and Angelina Johnson, the author said so. So why not Hermione, if that was the original intention? I think it’s just because they happened to choose a black actress for the stage show, something that happens all the time, a good thing, because otherwise talented black actors – eg Josette Simon, who was a beautiful Isabella in the RSC’s Measure For Measure – would miss out, and so would we viewers. Big deal. It wasn’t canon, now it is. Let’s live with it. :-)
@51/sbursztynski: Hey, if Nick Fury could do it, why not Hermione?
Like Austin I have to roll my eyes at the extreme effort the author seemed to make here to shoehorn Hermione into the canon as a black girl. She’s inarguably white in the books – three times described literally as having a white face, blushing pink umpteen times, etc.
Anyway. Putting the author’s herculean efforts to re-badge Hermione as black to one side – difficult, because the art/intent is pretty blatant, isn’t it?! – I have to agree 1000% that Hermione is much more than a sidekick, and is in fact the true heroine of the books. I was just remarking the other day on one of the perfect examples of this, viz the difference between her and Harry.
At the end of OotP, when the ‘Ministry Six’ fly off to save Sirius at the Ministry, Hermione is *frantic* in trying to stop Harry, tell him he should wait, that it could be a trap. But Harry is impatient, stupid, reacting on instinct – just like he is throughout the series. All the kids who went to the Ministry were brave … but the girl who had the brains to work out that it was very likely a trap? And who *went anyway*? To support her friends?
She’s the heroine.
@52 – Chris: Just to be pedantic, and I’m sure you know all this, the black Nick Fury (who predates the movies) is from a different universe than the main Nick Fury; and while that original white Nick Fury has been replaced by a black son who took his name, he still existed as white and is still canon.
Also evergreen
Hermione Granger and the Goddamned Patriarchy
@55/MaGnUs: None of that matters. It’s all just a means to the end of increasing representation and ending generations of racial exclusion. That’s a real-life concern that’s infinitely more important than any kind of canon nitpick. And any means of achieving it is equally worth doing.
I agree with what you say, Chris, and I do not oppose having a black Nick Fury or any ethnicity or gender switched character at all. But it seemed like you were responding to “It wasn’t canon, now it is.” and I just wanted to add that info in case some people thought it was the same situation, which it’s not.
Is achieving representation more important than keeping canon intact? Yes. Can we still point out how it happened and how it changes or doesn’t change canon? Of course.
I don’t think JK Rowling actually said it is canon now (someone correct me if I’m wrong). It was more, “You know what, I never did explicitly state what race Hermione is. So I’m all for any ethnicity choices.” After all, this is not her books we’re talking about (I refuse to acknowledge the play as canon!). Not that I think JK cares about what race her characters are portrayed as. Pretty much any character in the books can be race-swapped in an adaptation (except perhaps the Weasleys because of the red hair).
@58/MaGnUs: Except that there are some who use the pretense of defending canon as an excuse for defending white privilege. So it’s important to focus on what the real priority is.
Honestly, I wish the word “canon” had never been adopted as a slang term for a body of fictional works. Since it originally comes from religious doctrine, it creates the impression that the contents of a fictional universe are holy writ, carved in stone and immutable, and that it’s heretical to change them. But that’s not how fiction works. Fiction is an exercise in pretending. It’s pretending something is real when everyone knows it isn’t. So even if a story originally pretended that one thing is the case, there’s no reason we can’t pretend it actually pretended something else. It’s contradictory and silly to say that, in the course of pretending that these characters and ideas are real, we’re somehow in the wrong if we pretend they’re a little different than the original pretense. “Canon” is a poorly chosen word for fictional continuity, because fictional continuity is intrinsically mutable and negotiable.
Christopher – you’re wrong. Canon is immutable, regardless of how you’d personally like things to be. Of course, you don’t have to accept the canon. Or worry about it. Or hold it as of greater importance than real-world DIVERSITY! concerns. But, my friend, you can’t close your eyes, pretend the dictionary definition (‘works of an author that have been accepted as authentic’) doesn’t exist or decide that you or your righteous causes can override it just! because!.
Hermione was written in the books as white. That’s the canon.
“It’s contradictory and silly to say that, in the course of pretending that these characters and ideas are real, we’re somehow in the wrong if we pretend they’re a little different than the original pretense.” — no, it isn’t. It’s arrogant and incorrect for you to pretend that the books were written differently, just to fit in with your ideas of how the world should work … *and then tell everyone else that your imaginary slant is ‘canon’*. You can’t do that. There’s one ‘canon’, which works for all of us … the text in the books.
If you don’t like that canon … just ignore it. Like the producers of the play did in casting the role of Hermione. But don’t try and pretend you’re being consistent with the canon in doing so … or pretend that the definition is other than what it is.
Austin, Rowling did both things – she stated that she’d never specified Hermione’s skin colour – which was false, a lazy cop-out, and an attempt to pretend that she’d been more ‘clever’ with her books than she’d actually been – but she’s also said that the play is canon. You might not like that – I don’t! It’s a bad story IMO – but we don’t have a say in the matter. Rowling’s the only person on the planet who can create new HP canon, and she’s done that with the play.
So … the producers of the play could have gone with an actress whose appearance was consistent with the canon. Just like they found an actor who looks like Harry, and, from what I’ve read, have the actor playing Ron dying his hair ginger for the role. Instead they appointed an actress who doesn’t look like the canon’s Hermione at all. Because she’s the best actress in the United Kingdom? Because DIVERSITY!? Their call.
@61/madbrad: If canon were immutable, then we would’ve spent the past 50 years talking about Captain James R. Kirk of the United Earth Space Probe Agency starship Enterprise and his part-Vulcanian science officer with a proclivity for hyperactive shouting. If canon were immutable, then The Six Million Dollar Man would’ve been about civilian astronaut Steve Austin and his boss Oliver Spencer. If canon were immutable, then we wouldn’t have all the hundreds of cases where prose authors rewrote their novels or stories for new releases (something I’ve done myself), or all the directors’ cuts of movies. Audiences experience works of fiction as singular things that emerge in “complete” form, so they’re inclined to see them as fixed constructs; but to creators, those works are the end result of a long process of trial, error, and change, and the changes usually only stop because a deadline is reached rather than because the work has achieved some kind of “perfection.” That’s why authors are almost always happy to revise their works and correct their mistakes when they get the chance.
And of course, this is as true of Harry Potter canon as everything else. The books had quite a few continuity errors and inconsistencies, many of which were corrected in later editions. So Harry Potter canon has been changed by Rowling before. Because fiction is not perfect. It’s invented by fallible human beings, and so it can be flawed and inconsistent and have elements in it that the creators later rethink and rework.
And it’s rather silly to say that Noma Dumezweni looks less like the books’ Hermione than Emma Watson does. They’re both significantly different from the book’s version.
@62 – I didn’t like how the movies changed up Emma’s look just because she turned out to be gorgeous. In the first movie, they did a good job of having her hair bushy (but no large front teeth. That would probably look ridiculous, so that’s cool). But after that, she started wearing fashionable Muggle clothes and generally looking hot. That kinda ruined the whole Cinderella thing when she gets dressed up for the Yule Ball, as we’ve already seen Emma look beautiful before that.
@63/Austin: I don’t mind the movies making changes, because adaptations aren’t supposed to be exact copies, they’re supposed to be new works that offer a new angle on the original stories. The first two HP movies were slavishly literal to the text and completely devoid of the spirit and wonder of the books. The later movies were freer to change the details but did a better job of capturing the feel and essence of the story.
I mean, given that Watson did turn out so gorgeous, any attempt to keep her looking frumpy would’ve been as unconvincing as any other movie’s attempt to make a beautiful actress look “plain” through her hairstyle and wardrobe. Better just to accept that movie Hermione is a parallel entity to book Hermione rather than the same entity, and go with what works for that version of the character.
Granted, it’s entirely possible that a girl who happens to be beautiful might also be unconcerned with emphasizing her looks and might not go to any trouble to put on makeup or do her hair or whatever. That seems like it would be in character for Hermione. Still, I had a friend in college who was exactly that casual about her looks, who never really did anything to doll herself up, and I thought she was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever met.
I love Hermione with all of my stupid pathetic heart and this made me cry a little bit.
I think this is reading too much that isn’t really there or perhaps missing out on other things. Obviously I defer to Rowling on what she meant to be present as agenda, commentary, etc. I don’t think she intended this angle though, except perhaps to convey that she is of at least equal worth to anyone else and to give at least one female character a meaningful role in the story.
However I think the more reasonable thing to say is that Hermione is a much more developed, well-rounded character than many of the others. It’s probably even be fair to say she’s less stereotypical, but she’s also one of the few muggle-born wizards that gets much of the limelight. We don’t get to see much of many of the other characters and they are often defined by stereotypes, hogwarts house, and family, etc and left at that. For instance, Ron Weasley is a /Weasley/. By virtue of belonging to a minor wizarding family, he is simply just another wizard who happens to have some inherited ticks, habit, personality. His brothers have largely stolen the spotlight and left poor mediocre him (like his father much?) on the sidelines with nothing special that anyone really cares about. What is there for him to aspire to?
I also think it’s important and fairer to say that Harry isn’t actually the hero here even though he’s the central focus of the books. Mostly he gets tossed around by fate and handled with white gloves. While others get to have a say in their own lives, Harry’s is dictated by circumstances from before he was born and events that he has little control over. He’s stuck with family members that he hates simply because of rules of magic that protect him. Harry can’t even really vacation, it’s either enjoyable school and miserable existence for him for most of the books. There’s so much to be miserable about in his life. That’s not to say that he’s ‘nothing special’ per se. He chose to embrace the life he got rather than seriously trying to escape it. He probably could have joined Voldemort’s cause or spent his whole live fleeing from pursuit. What’s more is that he made it through the challenges in the first book, with help granted, but ultimately he is the one who was at risk of being killed by Voldemort/Quirrel (and probably would have been minus Dumbledore’s intervention). It was also necessary for him to trust Hermione on which bottle to drink despite 3/7 being fatal. There was no requirement for him to have resolved the challenges in the various books with or without help. It’s probably meaningful that Harry was basically a Gryffindor (courage, chivalry, determination) through and through, excluding Voldemort’s influence, whereas Hermione would have been in Ravenclaw (Intelligence, Wit, Wisdom, Creativity, Originality, Individuality, Acceptance) except for preferring to be in Gryffindor (to be with Harry and Ron?).
It’s hard to find an eloquent way to say things and I would have to spend a lot more time thinking for a better analysis, but I think it’s important to realize that the three main characters sort of build on each other. The sum is more than the parts and being with them makes Hermione more than a smart-ass with drive, it gives her a purpose to work toward. She is actually able to apply her talents to something more than schoolwork. The circumstances give her room to shine. In a way you might argue she represents the hard-working otherwise invisible part. She also does what she thinks is right regardless of how it looks to others.
TL;DR It seems far too simplistic to label characters as sidelines, sidekick, or hero. That leaves no room for being individual and different with differing roles to play. Nor does it address the way environment, etc shape characters.
To someone’s comment about Emma Watson being pretty attractive as an adult, I think one way of looking at that is that a good portion of that comes from the fact that she seems to be everything that Hermione, the character is, on top of being prettier than average. That’s a pretty awesome combination. IMO, it’s less about physical beauty than being exemplary in certain ways.
On the question of who’s the hero and who’s the sidekick… I’m reminded of Big Trouble in Little China. Jack Burton is the main character, but he’s not actually the hero — the film’s running joke is that he’s a sidekick who thinks he’s the hero. (Which is perhaps a deliberate subversion of the “white savior” trope. Although he does achieve a key heroic goal at the climax.)
Come to think of it, there’s also the Daffy Duck/Porky Pig dynamic in Chuck Jones cartoons like Duck Dodgers, The Scarlet Pumpernickel, and the like.
Hermione can’t have chosen Griffindor to be with Harry and Ron because she only became their friend later after the troll attack.
I do enjoy this article a lot and I agree with the admirable qualities listed about Hermione. In some ways it is rather sad that Hermione had to be shunted to the sidelines when Harry was off saving the world and sometimes take credit for the things she did (think of the end-of-year adventures in PS, CoS, Harry’s rant about what he has done to his best friends in OotP, and the situation with Dumbledore’s Army and the Horcruxes research). However, like some others have said it is probably because Rowling was simply following a literary convention and maybe people are more interested in reading about male heroes. However, even so I cannot see why it is not possible to include a few scenes from her point of view as well. Rowling tried this in PS and it worked out fine.
Ron actually did get his own story such as his struggles with self-confidence in the form of his Quidditch games and prefect duty in OotP and HBP. He also had to struggle with his jealousy of the famous Harry Potter who kept stealing the show even though it is clear that other than flying and DADA he was no more skilful than Ron. There is also the story of his romance with Hermione that ran through the seven books which is a pretty noticeable sub-plot.
I totally agree with the point made by many posters here that Hermione, as presented in canon, is extremely likely to be a white girl and the evidence given about her face, blushes etc. It is rather puzzling why she could be a black girl when it is the norm to describe far less important characters who are non-white as black or whatever. Therefore I am not sure why is it that all of the Hermione fanarts have to be black here.
Rowling could have just said she thought Hermione is a white girl/woman but a black actress playing her is fine because race is an irrelevant issue in the HP world. It’s perfectly normal for actors to play characters who are not physically alike like how child characters are played by adults or female characters played by males and it is not really that a big deal but she was being rather coy about it.
She does the heavy emotional lifting so that Harry can continue to Hero all over the place and Ron can continue to sidekick.
She’s patient.
I am not sure I can completely agree with this. While she certainly always tried to emotionally connect with Harry and to offer him correct advice, she does not always succeed. Think about the times she has angered and annoyed Harry even though her advice is correct because she delivered it in a way that tuned him off. Of course, this is not entirely her fault, Harry is to blame just as much because he just couldn’t seem to recognise that her naggings were well worth listening to. There are also all those times where Harry decided to confide his feelings to other people like Sirius and Remus instead of Hermione because Hermione seem to lack the patience to listen silently to Harry.
I would not say that Hermione was entirely unsupported during the books by others. Ron, for example, seem to have provided a lot of support and care to her as well even though he had some bad moments. The Weasley family in general seem to have provided her with a second home considering how much time she spent with them over the holidays.
I totally agree that Hermione perhaps even more than Harry stands in direct contrast to what Voldemort is trying to achieve. However, the opposite point is that it makes the pure-bloods who resist Voldemort’s regime even more heroic because they made the choice to put their life in danger to fight for what is right even though they could have had a relatively comfortable life under Voldemort.
She does have a rather serious issue that is problematic in battles which is her tendency to panic and freeze up in dangerous situations like during the Devil’s Snare scene in PS or after the café battle in DH but it actually makes me like her more as it makes her a more rounded character..
To Harry, she is a sidekick.
Yes, and it amazes me how little Harry cared about Hermione’s personal life or even her wellbeing when she was not in physical danger. He will save her because he has a saving-people thing but would not really care about what she is doing in everyday life and would instead be constantly thinking about his own problems.
Great article – I love Hermione. am surprised, in the discussion of her being “brown”, that no one pointed out that brown is often used in Britain where Americans would say tanned. So if I want to work on my tan (in vain) I would say “I’m trying to get brown.” A white person with a great sun tan is described as “very brown.” It has nothing to do with ethnicity. That said, I don’t really care about Hermione’s race – I’m fine with whatever anyone wants to see.
@67: I’m all for more references to Big Trouble in Little China and Duck Dodgers in the world, but I’m not sure they’re quite apt here. LotR is a much more appropriate analogy: the protagonist’s path is cleared by more knowledgeable and powerful allies, and the Big Bad eventually falls to a large degree because he underestimates the inherent power of the protagonist’s “mundane” abilities and compassionate choices.
@69: Totally agree that it is incorrect to view Hermione as providing the main emotional support. Indeed, many commenters, on this site and elsewhere, have pointed out that one of the most notable aspects of her characterization in the early books is that the girl provides the brains, not the feelings. Ron’s the emotional core through at least the fifth book; that dynamic is illustrated pretty well (via the problems caused by Ron’s snit) in the preparation for the first task in GoF. Hermione does step up in that area by HBP and DH, but at three critical times when Harry is in dire need of emotional support to keep on mission—after Dumbledore’s death, after Ron’s horcrux-induced absence, and facing death in the Forbidden Forest—he draws his strength from Ginny, not Hermione.
However, I challenge the notion that Hermione is more the anti-Voldemort than is Harry. In fact, she shares with Voldy a desire for order in the wizarding wold and the ambition to help shape it. Her goals are more altruistic, of course, but her ‘For the Greater Good’ attitude still carries a risk of temptation towards a dark path that Harry is unlikely to face.
While I think this article does a great job highlighting how rich Hermione is as a character, I think it suffers the same fundamental flaw as Emily A-P’s similar take on Neville and many other attempts to declare someone other than the published protagonist as the True Hero of a story: in well-written stories of this ilk, the collaborative nature of the Good Guys’ win is an essential part of the story so the idea of a single MVP is nonsense. Harry is the hero not because he’s the most powerful, but because (like Frodo and Katniss and hundreds of others through the centuries) there are certain essential plot points that only he can accomplish. Without a doubt, no one apart from perhaps Dumbledore or Snape does more than Hermione to help get Harry into position to achieve victory. Yet, the sequence of events in the climactic chapters of DH have several other characters playing absolutely critical roles. Without Luna, maybe they don’t escape Malfoy Manor, or they succumb to the Dementors during the battle. Without Ron, they don’t get to the safety of Shell Cottage, and maybe they don’t destroy the cup horcrux. Without Neville, they don’t have a place or army to rally, or Nagini is still a problem. Without Ginny, maybe Harry succumbs to despair during his exile, or he doesn’t have the focal point necessary to repeat Lily’s sacrificial counterspell. And so on. Trying to single out a single person as The Most Important is not only difficult, it repeats Voldemort’s fundamental error and sort of misses an important point of the whole story.
@71 – It isn’t so much that Hermione provided emotional support as that she was the one doing the emotional work.
She’s paying attention to what the other two are feeling, and smoothing things over so the group can work. (For example, explaining to Harry why Ron compulsively listened to the lists of wounded and killed on the radio.) The horcrux locket is shown to be emotionally overwhelming to both Harry and Ron, but Hermione carries it and still keeps functioning – she can’t just experience her emotions, she has to control them and keep it together because the other two can’t/won’t. She’s even the one who winds up with the most delicate emotional work of all, doing the magical memory wipes as needed. Earlier, she explains to Harry and Ron Cho’s mixed feelings about dating Harry after Cedric’s death. She gets the brunt of Ron’s jealousy. When Ron gets mad at Harry during the Tri-Wizard Tournament, it is Hermione who is running between them, trying to be friends to both, and to get them to reconcile.
Time after time, Harry or Ron or both let their emotions run out of control, and Hermione is caught in the middle, trying to be a peacemaker.
In general, Hermione gets stuck with all the “woman’s work” tasks that the other two take for granted. She’s the one who considers that they will need food and shelter, and provides it. She’s the one whom Ron blames when their food/shelter options aren’t to his perfect liking, even though he does nothing to provide. If people need to be organized, Hermione does the organizational work, while Harry gets credit as the leader. (E.g., Dumbledore’s Army.)
Hermione was slated for Ravenclaw. But much like Harry, she deliberately chose Gryffindor instead. In the very first book, we first see Hermione aboard the train, and she is blathering about how she read from some history book on Hogwarts that Gryffindor was the best house. In the later books, OotP, she is cornered by some Ravenclaws, demanding to know why she was not put into Ravenclaw rather than Gryffindor. She blushes and stammers, and finally concedes that the Sorting Hat considered it, but *we* ultimately thought that Gryffindor would be the best, i.e. she overrode the Sorting Hat’s decision, much like Harry did with Gryffindor v. Slytherin. It is probably a major reason why she is so miserable during the first book, she doesn’t really belong in that house, and rather than appreciating her intellectual talents, she is reviled for it. Not until she becomes part of the trio does she get a measure of acceptance, probably as part of the “halo effect” of being friends with the famous Harry Potter.
I think one could probably draw a rough analogy between Harry/Hermione/Ron and Kirk/Spock/McCoy — though it’d be more like the Kirk of the Kelvin Timeline movies, starting out as an underqualified kid having leadership handed to him before he’d earned it, thanks largely to the indulgence of an older authority figure, and having to grow into the role.
@74: Yep, I totally buy that analogy, especially if you consider the way the two trios’ personalities transfer/blend over time.
@72: Totally agree that Hermione carried more than her share, even in the emotional/interpersonal realm, and she never got the deserved credit from the other characters (and maybe as a result of latent prejudices regarding gender roles). But that doesn’t change the fact that, in the published text, Harry obtained key support from other characters at critical points of the story. Whether or not Hermione was capable of providing such support herself, or deserving of credit based on her efforts, is beside the point. My intent in pointing out other characters’ importance was not to disparage Hermione; far from it, in fact I think acknowledging the limitations of her influence—whether they were inherent or imposed by male chauvinism/muggle-born prejudice/whatever—makes her character that much more compelling and relatable. Rather, I’m pushing back against hagiography. If nothing else, it would be boring to interpret Hermione as a superwoman who could do it all rather than as a key member of an ensemble whose efforts were most powerful when combined together. JKR developed more than a dozen compelling characters who worked with Harry to defeat Voldemort, let’s not overemphasize the contributions of just one.
@ian Barton
“Ron’s the emotional core through at least the fifth book”
Yes, it is normally Ron who steps in as the mediator between Harry and Hermione like when Hermione is nagging Harry to do something that Harry does not want to. It happens a lot in the first five books. The fact that both Harry and Hermione were miserable when Ron was not around speaks volumes about his importance as well.
I didn’t think there was much emotional work required of Hermione in HBP, as Harry was basically spending lots of time with Dumbledore discussing Voldemort’s past and when he wasn’t he was busy with Quidditch and Ginny or what Malfoy was up to. There wasn’t many times where he needed emotional support in that book.
Sorry let me make my point clearer. I am saying that Hermione’s blood status and her desire to fit into the wizarding world makes her a much more hated person to the Death Eaters than Harry if he didn’t have his mission thrust upon him by fate.
You raised interesting points about Hermione and how her desire to establish world order even with selfless intentions and she could be rather ruthless about it. However, I believe Harry has been tempted and obsessed by things plenty of times. For example, by the Mirror of Erised in PS (compare this with Ron’s recognition that going back to the mirror was a bad idea) or by the Deathly Hallows where he abandoned the Hocruxes quests for 3 months and would have been longer if the Malfoy Manor incident did not happen. Is this temptation stronger than the one faced by Hermione? I guess it is difficult to measure.
I totally agree with you about a very important point being the good characters working TOGETHER to achieve victory and everyone who played a part is important for a reason regardless of how much contribution they were perceived to have made. Unfortunately though it is an easy exercise for haters to bash on characters they don’t like (maybe for shipping reasons) by downplaying everything those characters did in the story.
@Ursula
Yes, I found it unusual why there were no description as to what the Horcrux did to Hermione. I would have really liked to see what horrible scenes did the cup show to Hermione similar what the locket showed Ron.
“She’s paying attention to what the other two are feeling, and smoothing things over so the group can work.”
Ron was did his part in the earlier books. It seems that Ron was the one who showed the most understanding of Harry like how much Harry needs fun and humour in his life. I agree Hermione is very perceptive of what Harry and Ron were feeling and tends to explain other people’s feelings to them even though she might not always say the right words.
“Time after time, Harry or Ron or both let their emotions run out of control, and Hermione is caught in the middle, trying to be a peacemaker.”
I agree that Hermione tried to be peacemaker when Harry and Ron were estranged from each other. However, I think it really only happened twice over the whole entire 7 books; once during GoF and another in DH during the locket-induced fight. At times she also required other people to comfort her like Ron at the beginning of DH or for someone to confide in like Ginny. Ron also had to step in quite a few times to meditate between Harry and Hermione when she was nagging Harry about one thing or the other.
I thought the Horcrux issue could have been easily avoided if Harry had been more competent and recognised that it is unlikely the Hocrux will be more exposed if it is stored somewhere in the tent.
I think Ron should be cut some slack when he complained about food because 1) He was splinched and almost killed when they escaped from the Ministry and 2) Unfortunately being a tall, lanky boy means he require more food than someone like Hermione. The Horcrux probably did not help at all.
“If people need to be organized, Hermione does the organizational work, while Harry gets credit as the leader. (E.g., Dumbledore’s Army.)”
Yes, Harry seems to have a tendency to pretend he did all the work like in the first 4 books when he wouldn’t have functioned at all without his best friends. Other examples would include the Horcruxes research or Horcruxes quest.
@D
Yes, Hermione did chose Gryffindor over Ravenclaw herself as seen in her train speech to Harry and Ron in PS. I don’t think Hermione was reviled at the beginning of PS because of her amazing intelligence though this may be part of it, but rather she lacks the social skills to make friends and came across as someone very stuck-up and arrogant. Other intelligent girls with better social skills may have realised it is probably not helpful to boast about one’s intelligence to other kids if they want to make friends. I am not sure if she would have fared any better in Ravenclaw.
@ian
Yes it’s definitely much more interesting to read about many interesting good characters rather than one super character who does everything himself/herself which would be exceedingly boring to me.
@62/Christopher: Okay, I need to revise/change my ‘immutable’ statement slightly – the HP canon is ‘immutable’ to you, me and anyone else not called J. Rowling. If you’re J. Rowling then you can change the canon by making new editions or adding new canon. And those changes or new additions might be inconsistent with the old canon. Which is nothing new; there were plenty of errors within Rowling’s original book series, after all (and thank you for that link!).
But for people like you and me the HP canon is ‘immutable’. We can’t change it. Even if we’d like to. For whatever reason.
So when you say “there’s no reason we can’t pretend it actually pretended something else” you’re simply wrong – we don’t have that right to ‘pretend’ the words in the book say anything but what Rowling wrote. Not for other people. If you want to make up your own pretend version of HP which fits into your own ideals as to how HP and the real world should function to best satisfy Christopher L. Bennett, that’s fine. But your pretend world isn’t ‘canon’; it isn’t shared by anyone else. And you can’t foist it on us to justify DIVERSITY! or attack assumed ‘excuse for defending white privilege’ or any other righteous reason. Because your pretend canon doesn’t exist outside your head. The real HP canon continues to be what it always was – the works of J. Rowling that exist identically for us all.
Likewise, you can’t state that “it’s contradictory and silly to say that … we’re somehow in the wrong if we pretend they’re a little different than the original pretense.”. Of course you’re in the wrong. Book canon/words say one thing. Christopher pretends they’re something different. Pretence is pretence. Saying the words on the page aren’t actually the words on the page is, simply, wrong, regardless of your personal conviction of the worthiness of the goal you’d like to achieve in your little masquerade.
Reading this article was, for me, akin to witnessing a schizoid event; it was as if two separate, somewhat antagonist issues were being discussed. Here’s some evidence from the canon proving that Hermione is the heroine of the series // and here’s a picture of a non-canon Hermione // here’s some more hard, concrete evidence from the literal canon about Hermione and her indispensability to Harry // whups, another course-change back to a Hermione who is blatantly different from the canon // and now back to the real canon again …
It was hard for me to take the Hermione-more-than-the-sidekick argument seriously when the author was continually interrupting her argument by throwing non-canon Hermione in our faces. I think her goals would have been better served by writing separate articles for both issues – one with the proof that Hermione is the heroine of the series … and a separate effort pushing the black-Hermoine-because-I’m-pretending-she’s-black thing. They’re a poor fit when mashed together.
@76: “However, I believe Harry has been tempted and obsessed by things plenty of times. … Is this temptation stronger than the one faced by Hermione?”
Harry was traumatized by his involvement with the Triwizard Tournament which led to Cedric Diggory’s death, and even more so by his reckless choice to ‘save’ Sirius which actually results in the latter’s death. He then agrees to do the right thing by following Dumbledore’s orders, only to see that result in another death (pre-arranged, of course, but it took months for Harry to learn that). Harry is thus justifiably leery when he learns of Dumbledore & Grindlewald’s so-called ‘For the Greater Good’ plans. By late in DH he’s quite cynical about any save-the-world plans apart from his appointed showdown with Voldemort. He’d much rather just go someplace quiet with Ginny, emerging occasionally to help the downtrodden when necessary.
Throughout the novels, Hermione sorts through the options and provides advice, but she never once faces the ‘command responsibility’ of those choices; Harry isn’t merely a figurehead, he bears the moral burden of those choices, whereas Hermione’s involvement with the consequences is more abstract. Presumably she has dealt with such responsibilities by the time of Cursed Child, but it’s never described in canon.
@78/madbrad: “But for people like you and me the HP canon is ‘immutable’. We can’t change it. Even if we’d like to. For whatever reason.”
That’s not true. The readers of a work of fiction change it every time they read it, because every reader imagines the characters and events in a different way. That’s how it’s supposed to work — you’re supposed to bring your own imagination and perspective to it, to make it your own personal experience. You’re not supposed to be a passive receptacle. You’re allowed to imagine for yourself how the characters look and sound in your mind’s eye, what the settings look like, what the aliens or monsters look like, how the characters deliver their lines, whatever. Every reader draws on their own personal experience, and every reader has different experiences to draw on, so we all create our own individualized versions in our minds.
And if that means choosing to disregard a few words here and there in the text because you have your own idea that you like better, you’re allowed to do that. No thought police is going to break into your house and punish you for being creative. It’s your book, your own personal copy. And reading it is your own personal experience within your own head. Nobody but you has the right to decide what happens in there. I have such pity for people like you who think that experiencing fiction is about being a slave of some nonexistent authority that you have to obey mindlessly. That is missing the entire point of reading. The words on the page are not supposed to be a prison for your imagination, they’re supposed to be a launchpad for it.
@80/Christopher, re ‘immutable canon’: “The readers of a work of fiction change it every time they read it, because every reader imagines the characters and events in a different way.”
No, that’s nonsense. You’re trying to get away with that claim by trotting our your own definition of the word ‘canon’ (or carefully sidestepping around it). Sorry, Christopher, but you can’t do that. Not in a discussion with other people. When you’re in a debate with people who don’t share your head you have to use words and definitions that are common to us all. Not your imaginary standards.
Go look up the definition of ‘canon’; on dictionary.com it is ‘works of the author accepted as authentic’. So, *by definition*, Christopher – the definition common to us all, not one you might like to substitute as more convenient for yourself – that canon is immutable. It cannot be changed by anyone accept the author. In this case, J. Rowling.
I think you’re muddled, confusing the fandom concept of ‘personal head canon’ with ‘canon’. The rest of your #80 comment is correspondingly incorrect. If you’re substituting “one’s personal imaginary world” for “the real work of the author” then, duh, of course everything you say is true. Just as it’s completely false when using the real definition of ‘canon’.
I think I see the root cause of your confusion with your message #60 – “I wish the word “canon” had never been adopted as a slang term for a body of fictional works”. That was your error. It isn’t a ‘slang term’ that was arbitrarily adopted especially for fiction. It may have had its roots in describing ecclesiastical law but today it now applies to more general types of work. Deal with it. :) If you still insist that ‘canon’ cannot properly describe the works of J. Rowling then please prove to us why the accepted definition “works of the author accepted as authentic” doesn’t apply. Because your message #60 doesn’t cut it. In that sentence you *wish* it hadn’t been adopted for fictional works – but it was – you then state that it was adopted *as slang* – which, clearly, it isn’t (not being listed as such on dictionary.com) – and then you hop from the real world straight into your fantasy kingdom where a word (‘canon’) has to share the ‘fictional’ character of the work it classifies – an erroneous and unjustified assertion on your part. Message #60 is logical nonsense, and that’s where your current confusion has its roots.
So, reality check #1 – do you still maintain that “the readers of a work of fiction change the canon every time they read it”? Yes or no, please. If yes, please tell us how, every time I pick up and read Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone, I’m changing the work of J. Rowling. If you can only do this by talking about how “every reader imagines the characters and events in a different way” or how the reader can substitute “your own ideas that you like better” then you must accept you’re not addressing the HP canon (i.e. the work of J. Rowling) at all. And I personally don’t care about the corrupted version of Rowling’s work that is in your head, because that has no authority when discussing the Harry Potter common to us all.
And back to my own basic sense of unease with this article – the Hermione of the HP canon (the work of J. Rowling) is not black. Pictures of black Hermione do not depict the girl from the canon. Thus the jarring nature of this article, juxtaposing a scholarly work based on literary analysis of the HP canon with pictures of a Hermione which is inconsistent with that canon. Commentary about the ‘real’ Hermione interposed with pictures of an imaginary version.
@ian
I asked the question because I cannot be 100% sure about the answer myself based on what we saw in the books. I guess my main point in the previous post is that under different circumstances he could have been tempted and swayed by the Mirror or the Deathly Hallows as it took an external shock in both cases for him to snap out of it.
I agree with what you said about Harry’s past traumatic experience and how he seems to want a quiet life even if his career as an Auror seems to contradict to an extent.
“Harry is thus justifiably leery when he learns of Dumbledore & Grindlewald’s so-called ‘For the Greater Good’ plans. By late in DH he’s quite cynical about any save-the-world plans apart from his appointed showdown with Voldemort.”
Are you trying to explain his obsession with the Deathly Hallows in the quote above by saying he didn’t trust Dumbledore anymore here? I understood why he would do that especially as they didn’t have many leads as to how continue the Horcrux quest. What he did was also very unimpressive considering he essentially left his two friends to continue with the Hocrux quest by themselves for over 3 months and contributed nothing positive to the team during this time.
“whereas Hermione’s involvement with the consequences is more abstract.”
Yes, I agree. The closest examples I can think of is the campaign to free house-elves where she is told repeatedly by others like the Weasleys and Hagrid what she was doing was not the right but the only noticeable consequence is that Dobby had to clean the Gryffindor Tower all by himself and the other elves were all offended by her. Eventually she did learn the need to back-off and campaign for the elves rights in another way.
There are also those examples of Hermione kidnapping Skeeter, luring Umbridge to be mauled by centaurs or scarring Marietta and Ron and the morality behind these actions were never explored.
@madbrad Yes, it appears the article’s author is trying to push the idea of black Hermione to readers as she only showed pictures of black Hermione among the character analysis. If she had included pictures of both white and black Hermione that would have been different. Even Rowling only claimed Hermione is racially ambiguous which I also find difficult to believe in for all the reasons listed here in this thread.
@82: My intent was a fairly narrow illustration of the Harry/Hermione/Voldemort comparisons. Basically, within the novels Harry has more direct experience than Hermione of the consequences of temptation and choice. By DH, Harry has seen good intentions go fatally wrong more than once, so he actively seeks a narrow path. He goes into exile and later surrenders himself in attempts to limit the collateral damage. He becomes master of the Elder Wand but refuses to use it. In contrast, Hermione has demonstrated the willingness to make utilitarian, but ethically gray, choices to advance their goals, yet the worst consequences she’s seen are an overworked house elf, a traumatized teacher, and a broken wand. From this it seems plausible that in pursuit of her goals she might choose (or at least consider) authoritarian paths that Harry would flatly reject. This makes her most similar to the young Dumbledore, but that still places her outlook a bit closer to Voldemort’s than Harry’s is.
@83 I like the idea that Hermione is more like Dumbledore than Harry, because she is likely to find herself in a similar position.
In the Muggle world, if you find yourself in trouble in a lawless environment, you can’t call the police. If there were any point in that, it would not be a lawless environment. You call on your friends. You call on your young adult male friends, because their threats carry more weight than anyone else’s.
But in the Wizarding world, you should call on the most powerful wizard or witch you know. So what do you do if you are Dumbledore, and YOU are the most powerful wizard you know? You can’t call for the Big Guns when you are the Big Guns. What happens is: You have to be the person that Voldemort fears to face.
Hermione isn’t quite in that position, but she spends a lot of time closer to it than Harry. It is probably just as well that she can be, as Ron puts it, “scary sometimes”.
@ian
In contrast, Hermione has demonstrated the willingness to make utilitarian, but ethically gray,
I agree that Harry had more experiences of temptation and choice by the end of the books than Hermione even though he was not always dealt with it the best.
“choices to advance their goals, yet the worst consequences she’s seen are an overworked house elf, a traumatized teacher, and a broken wand.”
Don’t forget how she scarred Marietta (for life!) in the face and Ron as well.
On the other hand, Hermione was against tricking Griphook when they were trying to break into Gringotts even though Griphook was pretty vicious and bloodthirsty while the other two were happy to do it. Harry was also casted the Crucio on Carrow without feeling any remorse for it at all.
Overall though I agree that Hermione probably has more Slytherin traits in her than Harry.
Terrific discussion!
Jeremy: “being with them makes Hermione more than a smart-ass with drive, it gives her a purpose to work toward. She is actually able to apply her talents to something more than schoolwork.”
It is amusing to imagine an alternative Hermione who never falls in with Harry and Ron, and instead becomes the perfect grind, giving her teachers exactly what they want, plus doing chores for them (the magical equivalent of photocopying); and eventually ending up the token muggleborn at the Ministry of Magic, regardless of who wins the civil war in the magic world.
It would have taken a lot of chutzpa for Rowling to try a major black character in her first novel. Hermione is obviously the Watson; i.e., the author’s POV. But it is thought-provoking: imagine a black Hermione escaping from racism into the magic world, and discovering she faces a completely different racism, at right angles to the racism of the muggle world. Of course, in such a case, she would have said something rueful about it!
In part, this discussion shows the tension between two different ideas of what constitutes good art: telling the truth vs. political correctness or propaganda for a good cause. In real life, boys get in trouble a hell of a lot more than girls do: Harry and Hermione and Ron behave like real kids.
Actually, Rowling’s novel, A Casual Vacancy, makes the same point: the underclass females try to better themselves, while the underclass men drag them back.
I really enjoyed the article, specially the last two lines “To Harry, she is a sidekick.To us, she is a heroine.” It makes me think if for Harry she was a sidekick? It looks like it in the books, because I can’t recall any -or very few- appreciation or acknowledgement to what Hermione does for the Wizarding World. She seems to be the next Minerva McGonagall -having in mind the duo Dumbledore/McGonagall and Potter/Granger- (however J.K. Rowling has given her THE highest position someone can imagine in The Cursed Child or has she?) It could be interesting to research further what can be found on the glass roof issue in Rowling’s books. It seems to me that quite a few super brilliant women are sidekicks of not so brilliant men. However those men look much more human than those women -McGonagall and Hermione have something in them that makes them look almost cold- It was J.K. Rowling intention that the public read the books that way? Or it was just the ingrained patriarchal system exposed unintentionally? Interesting article, definitely.
@@@@@ 15: I don’t think we even need to ask the question of Harry. He didn’t think *Ron* was a “sidekick” and said so in the books. To him the two of them were nothing more or less than his best friends who he envied at times. He certainly never thought of himself in any way as superior to either of them.
I think there is no doubt that Harry never would have succeeded without Hermione’s help. But just because of that I don’t think its fair to dismiss Harry’s contribution. To say it another way, I don’t think Hermione could have succeeded on her own, either. While Harry survived as a child because of his mother, by the time reached the final confrontation with Voldemort he had don’t things not many adult wizards or witches could have done.
@@@@@ 21: As far as Hermione’s teeth and Harry’s eyes in the movie, look carefully at the last scene of the first movie where Hagrid is saying goodbye to the trio as they board the train to return home for the summer. According the commentary in the special edition DVD that was actually the first scene shot and in it Daniel is wearing green contacts and Emma is wearing a dental appliance. Unfortunately, after that first scene they found out that Daniel was allergic to his contacts and could not wear them for the rest of the movie, and Emma had problems speaking clearly wearing her fake buck teeth. So, the movies lost both features for the rest of the series.
Hermione is almost ‘heroine’ respelled, right? I always thought that was intentional. (Sorry if someone else pointed that out, but there are lots of comments, so I couldn’t read them all.)
Actually Ursula my family are white and go so brown they can easily pass as mixed race in the sun. It depends on your heritages, you can be as white as a sheet but if you indigenous/latino or some other grandparents you tan very dark. And afro isn’t bushy. Afro is just….AFRO. Rowlings just agreeing with the casting of the Cursed Child because it suits her, if Hermione were really black, JK would of had her cast as black in the movies. Because Rowling was on set and chose the actors.
@90/Claire Lloyd: Writers can change their minds. That’s a large part of what writing is; stories don’t emerge fully formed, but are the end result of a lengthy process of trial, error, revision, and rethinking. And that process often continues in the writer’s mind after the story comes out — “Oh, I wish I’d done that instead, it would’ve been better” or “Oh, the readers caught a mistake I missed, I wish I’d seen it in time.” That’s why writers often revise their books or stories on re-release, why filmmakers do director’s cuts on DVD, etc. All fiction is imperfect and has room for improvement. It’s not holy writ.
Besides, what I believe Rowling said was that Hermione could be interpreted as white or black depending on the reader’s preferences, that it works either way. All fiction is interpreted by the reader’s imagination, so there doesn’t have to be a single monolithic “right” answer; every reader makes it their own. Ditto for films and plays — these are interpretations of the source, not the source itself. All interpretations make changes, and that’s the whole reason for doing them, to offer a different perspective.
This is brilliant <3
I’m slightly confused as to why this article has been re-published. Is it simply to fix the title so that it fits the “Women of Harry Potter” series better? I can’t see any other changes: am I missing something?
@NotACat
I completely agree. Even the comments in the new article is pretty much rehashing the same issues brought up in this comment section already.
I really liked the analasys so thanks for a good post.
98, sometimes the moderators turn on “approval” mode I think, and since there was a spam outbreak yesterday morning, they might have done it today too.
Good thoughts about Hermione, but you know what I’ve always wondered? How the story would look from HER perspective, the second part of a trinity, and the one who actually comes up with most of the stuff. Think of it like how OSC told the story of Bean in Ender’s Shadow.
@99/LordVorless: Regarding Hermione’s perspective, someone has already got ya covered (for Ron, too)! :-)
100, ah beauty is never tarnished, now is it?
81. madbrad – reading your argument with christopher I tend to see it your way. Well put.
@102, sorry but that sad attempt to justify his personal racism with a veneer of literary criticism utterly fails.
@103 – ahh, did I miss something while reading quickly the posts? racism? how come? I meant that your personal interpretation is yours, and to tell everyone that that’s canon is not right. What’s racist about that?
@104: The problem is that too many people pretend they’re arguing about canon when they’re actually motivated by a resistance to diversity.
Also, nobody is trying to claim that their personal interpretation is canon. That’s a contradiction in terms. The point is that canon doesn’t matter to the individual reader’s experience of the work. Canon is just a way of classifying which stories are by the original author or property owner and which ones are derivative works by other creators. Many fans have imbued the word with a wealth of ridiculous misunderstandings and brainwashed themselves into believing that reading fiction is an oppressive experience where they’re required to submit to some outside authority telling them what they’re allowed to imagine, which is a tragic and awful misinterpretation of what fiction is for. It’s supposed to stimulate the reader’s own imagination, to be a starting point for it, not a straitjacket. As a reader, of course you’re going to interpret everything you read in your own way — visualize the characters and the settings based on your own experiences and memories, interpret the meaning of the story in a way that’s relevant to you. Naturally, no two people reading a book are going to visualize its characters or mentally act out their dialogue in exactly the same way or take exactly the same message from it. It’s bound to be different for everyone. And that has nothing whatsoever to do with “canon,” because it’s about your own personal experience and nobody else’s.
Hermione isn’t really white or black. She isn’t really anything. Clearly she was imagined by Rowling as white but there is no particular reason that a reader can’t imagine her as black, or more likely mixed race. But don’t play the diversity card to demand we all imagine her as black.
@106/roxana: “But don’t play the diversity card to demand we all imagine her as black.”
You realize that sentence is a complete contradiction in terms, right? People who value diversity, by definition, would not demand that everyone think the same way.
You would think that, yes. But oddly they often do demand uniformity.
By the way, in the prisoner of Azkaban J. K. Rowling mentioned that Hermione was sun-tanned after vacations, which means that she was pale-skinned before, doesn’t it?
@109/Wigilda: It means nothing of the sort. All human beings’ skin works the same way; no matter how light or dark your complexion is to start with, your skin will form more melanin and grow darker in response to sun exposure. In short, yes, black people get suntans.