BLOOD THICKER THAN WATER, PART 2

While the concept of Family has always played a significant role in Harry Potter, highlighted by the moment where Harry looks in the Mirror of Erised and sees his extended family looking back at him, in Deathly Hallows Family becomes increasingly important.

And not just to those people with families that they love:

Voldemort and Family Values

Voldemort finds family bonds incredibly important in DH, though in what we might consider an overly... practical way.

For Voldemort, the value of Family lies in the hostage possibilities. One can easily imagine Voldemort seeing the love of family as a tremendous weakness. How simple it is to manipulate people, to get them to do one's bidding merely by threatening their families. Voldemort certainly doesn't share this weakness! No, that's made especially clear by his willingness to kill Snape, his most loyal follower, when it becomes expedient.

We're introduced to this concept almost immediately:

"...The Order is sure Voldemort will target you, whether to torture you to try and find out where I am, or because he thinks by holding you hostage I'd come and try to rescue you."

Uncle Vernon's and Harry's eyes met. Harry was sure that in that instant they were both wondering the same thing...

We'll never know if this tactic would have worked for Harry where the Dursleys were concerned, but the mere fact that the Order is going to such precautions shows that they are aware of Voldemort's potential abuse of family ties.

Ron and Hermione also firmly expect danger to their families resulting from their alliance with Harry, as we see when Hermione modifies her parents' memories to forget about her very existence, and when Ron (with help from his family) creates his ghoulish doppelganger in pajamas, the better to throw the Death Eaters off the track.

And of course, they're right. That's exactly what Voldemort does. We see how his taking Luna hostage gets Xenophilius to stop supporting Harry publicly. And we learn from Neville that this is now a standard tactic when he describes how Voldemort has flipped his usual strategy:

"...That's when they decided there was only one way to stop me, I suppose, and they went for Gran."

"They what?" said Harry, Ron and Hermione together.

"Yeah," said Neville, panting a little now, because the passage was climbing so steeply, " well, you can see their thinking. It had worked really well, kidnapping kids to force their relatives to behave, I s'pose it was only a matter of time before they did it the other way around. Thing was," he faced them, and Harry was astonished to see that he was grinning, "they bit off a bit more they could chew with Gran..."

Neville's words are enough to paint the outlines of a world where parents can no longer trust children, where family members inform on one another, where hostage situations force people to do horrible things. We've already seen, of course, how Voldemort manipulates family members against each other in his treatment of Draco in Half-Blood Prince, setting him an admittedly impossible task merely as revenge for Lucius's screw-ups. Through Neville and Luna, we see how destructive Voldemort continues to be. And we see all the way to the end how Voldemort doesn't change his tactics, threatening to kill every family member of anyone who continues to resist after Harry's "death." Clearly Voldemort's tactics are, for the most part, working quite well.

But there's a presupposition on Voldemort's part that is part of his undoing: The presupposition that people will cringe upon any threat to their families, that they will never choose instead to stand side-by-side with their family members and fight on their behalf.

Voldemort obviously made that mistake with Neville. And it turns out there are many others, more than he could have imagined, willing to stand alongside their family members and fight: All of the Weasleys (of course), especially Molly in defense of her daughter. Tonks and Lupin. Bill and Fleur. Grawp and Hagrid. Even Aberforth, despite his deep estrangement with his brother, still helping carry out Albus Dumbledore's plan.

The importance of these Family Ties come to the forefront at the end of the story:

Family in the Climax of Deathly Hallows

Harry's parents died to save him. His godfather died in coming to Harry's defense. His father figure Dumbledore died protecting Harry rather than himself. You'd think Voldemort would have figured out by now that family doesn't always surrender, cringing. However, You-Know-Who could have, understandably, reasoned that he has already removed all of Harry's family, that there is no one left to stand at his side.

But he's wrong. Perhaps it's because Voldemort is so tied to the idea of "blood" -- purebloods, blood traitors, and the rest. Perhaps that's why he hasn't yet realized that sometimes people choose their families (notice the echo of the theme of choice, one we'll come back to later in these posts).

Ron and Hermione are not related to Harry (yet). But they make it very clear early on that they have lifted Harry to the level of family when they choose to stay with Harry over their own families.

And Ron and Hermione aren't the only non-blood-relatives to treat Harry as family, to stand before him in protection as Lily stood before his crib:

...Every head turned, every eye in the place seemed to have found Harry, to hold him frozen in the glare of thousands of invisible beams. Then a figure rose from the Slytherin table and he recognized Pansy Parkinson as she raised a shaking arm and screamed, "But he's there! Potter's there! Someone grab him!"

Before Harry could speak, there was a massive movement. The Gryffindors in front of him had risen and stood facing, not Harry, but the Slytherins. Then the Hufflepuffs stood, and almost at the same moment, the Ravenclaws, all of them with their backs to Harry, all of them looking toward Pansy instead, and Harry, awestruck and overwhelmed, saw wands emerging everywhere, pulled from beneath cloaks and from under sleeves.

What a marvelous moment! Harry has to feel as if he has hundreds of brothers and sisters at that moment.

And why are all these people standing in his behalf? Why is this war being fought in the first place?

Dumbledore tells us flat out at King's Cross when he urges Harry to return to the world of the living: "...you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart." Notice that, with all the emphasis on the importance of the individual soul, of keeping it whole, throughout the series, Dumbledore here places as equal with it the wholeness of the family as a "worthy goal."

Dumbledore is of course right when he values family so highly. And he's not the only one. Showing an unexpected priority on family wholeness is none other than Narcissa Malfoy:

Hands, softer than he had been expecting, touched Harry's face, pulled back an eyelid, crept beneath his shirt, down to his chest, and felt his heart. He could hear the woman's fast breathing, her long hair tickled his face. He knew that she could feel the steady pounding of life against his ribs.

"Is Draco alive? Is he in the castle?"

The whisper was barely audible; her lips were an inch from his ear, her head bent so low that her long hair shielded his face from the onlookers.

"Yes," he breathed back.

He felt the hand on his chest contract; her nails pierced him. Then it was withdrawn. She had sat up.

"He is dead!" Narcissa Malfoy called to the watchers....

....Still feigning death on the ground, he understood. Narcissa knew that the only way she would be permitted to enter Hogwarts, and find her son, was as part of the conquering army. She no longer cared whether Voldemort won.

Narcissa, in standing between Harry and Voldemort, is really standing between Draco and Voldemort. She is doing exactly what Lily did when Harry was an infant.

Voldemort had a well-thought-out, well-executed plan. But the "Flaw in the Plan" was rooted in the love of a mother for her son, all the way back, 17 years ago. And as Voldemort's plan reaches its well-maneuvered conclusion, again the "Flaw in the Plan" rests on the love of a mother for her son, and her consequent willingness to do whatever she must do to protect him.

What a surprising, yet satisfying playing out of the theme of Family!

What's the conclusion of Harry and Voldemort's long story? Harry looks around the Great Hall to see "families reunited."

And what of Harry himself, the mistreated orphan whose heart's desire was to be part of a family?

As we see in the Epilogue, he got his heart's desire. Not only has he married his "high school sweetheart" in Ginny, but in doing so, he is now truly a member of the clan that has served as his surrogate family for so long, the Weasleys. (Remember all those times Molly hugged him "like a mother"? Remember when she saw Harry's "dead" body among her own family members when confronting the Boggart at Grimmauld Place?)

Not only does Harry end up having a place in a real family, he has a family of his own: Lily and James and Albus Severus.

Yes, I initially wanted the Epilogue to give us more information, to spin through a Dickensian list of where everyone was, what they were doing for a living. But ultimately, none of that matters thematically in the story. Harry Potter has never been about career paths and worldly (or wizardly) success. It has been about family, and we end the story showing that Harry has gotten what he always really wanted.

No wonder Harry can think "all was well" at the end of the story. He indeed has his heart's desire.....

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(Next post, I'll look at how some predictions turned out, then future posts will look at the themes of Choice and Temptation, and of Redemption. Let me know your thoughts!