Sunday morning HP pondering

[prillalar]

Today's Harry Potter Topic of Great Significance is...hair.

JKR spends a fair amount of time on Harry's hair, particularly on how unruly it is. Once, when Petunia cuts it all off, it grows back overnight. Hermione's "bushy" hair is similarly hard to control, except when she uses immense amounts of Sleekeazy's Hair Potion on it. Snape's hair is perpetually greasy. I read a fic that suggested that his hair was greasy no matter how much he washed it.

So maybe these people just have problem hair. But how boring! Much more interesting to speculate that wizards with strong magical ability are always subconsciously affecting their own appearance.

So, Snape's greasy hair is due to his subconscious making him look as he thinks he deserves, or possibly trying to look unattractive so that no one will want to engage him.

Harry has a subconscious memory of his father's artfully dishevelled locks and wants to be him.

Hermione...well, maybe Hermione just has problem hair.

Also, JKR puts quite a lot of emphasis on hair colour. I find it most interesting that the Dursleys and the Malfoys are all blonds. (I don't think Vernon is definitely stated to be blond, but his resemblance to Dudley, who *is* blond, indicates that he is.)

Riddle, of course, has "jet-black" hair, just like Harry.

The Weasleys and their red hair have got to be significant somehow. I'd like to read a study of redheads in fiction. Are they usually sidekicks? Tricksters? Villains?

You know what would be cool? A character guide to HP that had little coloured boxes for everyone's hair colours. Then we could more easily engage in this sort of vital in-depth analysis.

Comments

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Well, according to John Granger'salchemical theory of Harry Potter (http://www.touchstonemag.com/docs/issues/16.9docs/16-9pg34.html), the colors black, white, and red are a major organizing principle in the books.

[prillalar]

That was quite a weird article! Thanks for linking to it. I think he's really reaching in ascribing purposeful alchemical symbology to JKR, but it certainly an interesting interpretation. And there was quite a lot of good general stuff about alchemy.

[ellensmithee.livejournal.com]

I found this article on hair and magic (http://pub26.ezboard.com/fstgermainefrm14.showMessage?topicID=59.topic).

[prillalar]

That was cool. Lots of good ideas to keep in mind for fic.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine and I have a theory that Snape is under orders from Dumbledore to keep his hair greasy, lest chaos break out when no one can do a damn thing but perve on him.

Dumbledore knew to do this, because he knows his history: it worked for Aragorn.

[prillalar]

Hee! But I thought it was Aragorn's greasy, stringy hair that made him so irresistable.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

And then the Wizarding World discovered Clairol, and all hell broke loose.

[prillalar]

Such possibilities! Hmm...

[ursulakohl.livejournal.com]

Pettigrew was blond too!

[prillalar]

Good point. Luna was blonde too, I think.

[ursulakohl.livejournal.com]

So in JKR's world, being blond puts your looks somewhere between "unsettling" and "physically repellent."

As a person with frizzy brown hair, I sympathize strongly with this viewpoint.

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

This is why I think that, going by that "how to tell if your character is a Mary Sue" guide (which I can't find right now) most of the HP characters are Mary Sues. Spending a lot of time commenting on unusual hair earns you tons of points, compounded greatly by eye color, especially unusual eye colors.

Don't forget Remus's prematurely gray hair, or Sirius' skanky Azkaban hair, or the unusual nearly silver hair of the Malfoy males.

Like Ellen Fremedon said, John Granger will tell you about why the Weasleys have red hair (sulfur... earth principle.)

I've been thinking lately about why Hedwig is white, and how important she is to Harry in OotP. I think she's got a bit of Holy Spirit (the snow white dove and all that) in her.

[prillalar]

Hee! You're right about the Mary Sues. She's always on about people's hair and eyes and all.

I wouldn't be surprised if Hedwig turns out to be more than she seems. Other animals seem to have a guardian role: Crookshanks, Fawkes. Maybe she's watching over Harry.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Dude, black hair, blond hair--it's Hitler hair, man. *g* Aryan supreme. Bushy, tangled, messy, red--these are the hair of the postcolonial nations, aren't they? There are huge serious academic ethnographies of hair--black hair and Jewish hair (the famous "white man's fro") in particular, but also the hair of other postcolonial subjects. (The Weasley's red hair--they're Irish, man, the first best nation colonized by the Brits.)

Rowling's a lot of things, but subtle, not so much. *g*

[prillalar]

This makes a *lot* of sense. Thank you, smart girl. :)

[wickedcherub.livejournal.com]

Also, the state of Sirius' hair tends to show how well he is. If it's short and clean, then he's healthy. If it's long, then he's hungry and sick.

She tends to harp on that a lot..

[prillalar]

It's like a mood ring!

[predatrix.livejournal.com]

I use, in several of my stories, the idea that a wizard's hair finds the length/consistency/curl it wants to be, and bloody-mindedly stays there.

I have, curiously enough, used "hair and magic" in my story Blood Donor, where Snape becomes a vampire:

He could almost smell and taste the stuff, fizzing in Potter’s blood with sparks of unused energy. Now he could see what made Potter’s hair such an insubordinate mess: a medusa-tangle of magic coursing to the ends, whizzing back and forth, looking for a way out. Snape had been a wizard for nearly forty years, but he’d never been a creature made of magic before now.

It was giving him an unexpected insight into Potter. A Muggle for eleven years, then thrown into a world where he was a hero, a wizard. Small wonder that he was usually to be found at the centre of a small whirlpool of utter chaos, looking blank. Magic hadn’t been the grinding fierce search for knowledge that Snape had grown up with. It hadn’t been there, and then all too much of it had. Now Snape could understand that, because now Snape could see it. This was what natural magic was like unmediated by intellect.