META: Is Ginny Weasley just a 'beard'?

[ravenna_c_tan]

First off, I'm hoping that my LJ backdating problem is over and that people can actually read this post in their f-lists like normal. If you missed my cross-post of my latest 100 Quills fic, it's a one-shot entitled Captivitas. NC-17, Half-Blood Prince Spoilers. Takes place toward the end of that book. Harry and Draco are both 16 at the time. Warning for rough sex with questionable motives.

And now a bit of meta. Reading calanthe_fics' recent post of chapter nine of "Big Dick, Come Quick" got me to thinking about Ginny Weasley.

Ginny takes a lot of lumps from slash writers who have made her a target because she is a heterosexual love interest of Harry's. I've often thought her role in the books was to provide another strong female character besides Hermione. As a Gryffindor and a Weasley she can be woven into the plot more often than a Ravenclaw like Luna Lovegood, or someone not in Harry's year like bit-player Katie Bell. But looking at Ginny's actual characterization within the canon, and the development of the Harry-Ginny story line, I find some justification for the harpy!ginny so often depicted in fanon.



First, let's look in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at the sequence of events that leads to Harry "going out" with Ginny.

After all the fumbling and excruciating failure Harry goes through in Book 5 with Cho Chang, it's interesting to see how love comes into his life in Book 6, isn't it? Take a look at page 282 (US hc edition), where Hermione and Ron are doing a verbal two-step about Slughorn's Christmas party. (Hermione is basically trying to ask Ron on a date and he's too argumentative to figure it out at first, though he eventually does.)

Harry's thoughts as this scene unfolds are still distinctly uncomfortable with love and pairing up. "He had an inkling that this [between Hermione and Ron] might happen sooner or later. But he was not sure how he felt about it.... He and Cho were now too embarrassed to look at each other, let alone talk to each other; what if Ron and Hermione.... split up? Could their friendship survive it? ... And what if they didn't split up? What if they became like Bill and Fleur, and it became excruciatingly embarrassing to be in their presence...?"

"Excruciatingly embarrassing" is a good description of Harry's whole interaction with Chang.

It is only a few pages later, after naming Dean Thomas to the Quidditch team and then having team practice, that Harry's so-called "chest monster" makes an appearance when he stumbles on Dean and Ginny "kissing fiercely as though glued together."

"It was as though something large and scaly erupted into life in Harry's stomach, clawing at his insides: Hot blood seemed to flood his brain, so that all thought was extinguished, replaced by a savage urge to jinx Dean into a jelly. Wrestling with this sudden madness, he heard Ron's voice as though from a great distance away."

The first time I read this passage, my first thought was that someone had finally succeeded in slipping Harry a love potion. This attack of jealousy comes on so suddenly, "this sudden madness" erupting, that it doesn't seem at all foreshadowed. It comes, also, right after a Quidditch practice in which Ginny is nasty to Ron, and she is quite shrill and harpyish to him in the ensuing scene in which Ron and she face off over her choice of boyfriends.

"I've seen you with Phlegm, hoping she'll kiss you on the cheek every time you see her, it's pathetic!" Ginny taunts Ron with her wand out, ready to hex him. And how about this description? "Ginny screamed with derisive laughter," followed by these choice comments: "Been kissing Pigwidgeon have you? Or have you got a picture of Auntie Muriel stashed under your pillow?"

Well. Given canon evidence like that, it's really not a stretch at all for fan writers to paint her as a pushy, screeching, harpy at all now, is it?

But let's get back to Harry's chest monster. At this point in the story it has literally just been pointed up how uncomfortable Harry is with the whole topic of attraction. Given how Ginny has been working her way through Harry's classmates, and given what we know about her previous deep crush on Harry, it really is not too much of a stretch to suspect at this point in the book that 1) Ginny slipped Harry a potion, 2) She orchestrated the kissing scene with Dean to rile Harry up, and 3) That all her dating different guys is a result of the fact that she isn't really interested in any of them since the true object of her attraction is Harry.

The next plot point comes swiftly--after beating Slytherin in Quidditch, at the postgame party, Ron hooks up with Lavender Brown, and by page 305 we have Hermione telling Harry in the library "I went into the girls' bathroom just before I came in here and there were about a dozen girls in there, including that Romilda Vane, trying to decide how to slip you a love potion."

Aha! cries the sharp-eyed reader. This is typical of J. K. Rowling's style of feeding us clues to what is "really" going on. Not only that but later in the same conversation, Hermione reminds Harry (and the reader) that the love potions were among the things that Fred and George showed Ginny and Hermione during their visit to the joke shop on Diagon Alley. "It was all on the back of the bottles they showed Ginny and me in the summer," she tells him.

Upon their return to the common room that evening, Romilda Vane gives Harry, rather obviously, a box of spiked Chocolate Cauldrons, which later become important when Ron eats them accidentally. That doesn't knock out the possibility of a Ginny-potion already having been administered, though. Ginny, recall, has become a favorite of Potions Master Horace Slughorn's, and it's not hard to imagine her getting some help from old Sluggy as a possibility, too. Ginny breaks up with Dean in Chapter 24, over "something really silly," as Hermione puts it on page 514. "She said he was always trying to help her through the portrait hole, like she couldn't climb in herself." Dean is also then dumped from the Quidditch team when Katie Bell returns from St. Mungo's and, from page 518, "Ginny did not seem at all upset about the breakup with Dean; on the contrary, she was the life and soul of the team" who have two weeks of excellent practices. Harry pins his hopes on a huge Griffyndor Quidditch win to create the festive opportunity to finally get together with Ginny. Page 520: "Somehow, the game had become inextricably linked in Harry's mind with success or failure in his plans for Ginny. He could not help feeling that if they won by more than three hundred points, the scenes of euphoria and a nice loud after-match party might be just as good as a hearty swig of Felix Felicis."

He's right of course. Even though he himself misses the match because of detention with Snape (for nearly killing Draco Malfoy, I might add...), Gryffindor cleans the pitch with Ravenclaw and upon arriving at the party: "Harry looked around; there was Ginny running toward him; she had a hard, blazing look on her face as she threw her arms around him. And without thinking, without planning it, without worrying about the fact that fifty people were watching, Harry kissed her." Ron gives his grudging approval, and Harry and Ginny immediately leave the party for a "long walk on the grounds... during which--if they had time--they might discuss the match." Thus ends chapter 24.

Chapter 25 opens with a summary: "The fact that Harry Potter was going out with Ginny Weasley seemed to interest a great number of people, most of them girls, yet Harry found himself newly and happily impervious to gossip over the next few weeks." Harry and Ginny are immediately depicted as one hundred percent comfortable with each other, none of Harry's usual awkwardness and every bit of reservation he had previously held about going out with someone he'd previously thought of as like a sister is POOF! completely evaporated. "Ginny... sat on the common room floor, leaning against Harry's legs and reading the Daily Prophet."

My first time reading the book, I though, surely there must be a potion involved, then. It just isn't like Harry to boldly drag a girl out of her celebratory party for an obvious snog session on the grounds, and then to just fall into an easy domestic bliss? But, as we know by the end of the book, the other shoe never drops. Ginny and Harry's fling seems free of chemical or nefarious influence.

On the other hand, happy as they are together, their breakup also comes almost as an afterthought in the book. Six pages before the end of the book, after Dumbledore's funeral, as people are getting up to leave, he looks at her. "She had met Harry's gaze with that same hard, blazing look that he had seen when she had hugged him [at the party], and he knew that at that moment they understood each other perfectly." So even breaking up with her isn't awkward.

Less than a page later, it's done. Harry describes the few weeks of their relationship as "like something out of someone else's life." And Ginny's basic response is "I can't say I'm surprised. I knew this would happen in the end. I knew you wouldn't be happy unless you were hunting Voldemort. Maybe that's why I like you so much."

Like, she said like. Not love. Ginny didn't seem to want a "romance." Ginny didn't want Dean to help her through the portrait hole; she probably didn't want Harry to hold her hand at Madam Puddifoot's either. And Harry, as we know, is crap at romance. So how can we describe their relationship? And why was Harry so much more comfortable with her than with Cho, despite the fact that he had a raging chest-monster? Maybe because all they really were was friends with benefits?

And if all they were was friends with benefits, what's the role of that relationship in the story and the arc of Harry's character development? Well, I suppose one can say that, as Dumbledore kept saying, it's Harry's ability to love that sets him apart from Voldemort and gives him the power to defeat him. And maaaaybe, J. K. Rowling decided that after the spectacular failure with Cho, maybe she needed to demonstrate that Harry actually does have an "ability to love" and not just be an awkward mess. But that seems a stretch. If the purpose of the relationship is to demonstrate Harry's ability to love, it does it in a rather lukewarm way.

Perhaps it is an equal stretch, but my theory is that perhaps in the back of her mind Rowling wanted to head off some of the slashing of her characters going on in the fan universe. How many fan fics came out after book 5 that took Harry's utter failure with Cho as a jumping off point to make him gay? The relationship with Ginny turns out not to be a major plot thread in HBP at all. Unlike most passing mentions, which get turned into turning points in the plot, this one is a thread that doesn't really reinforce any of the others. That leaves only one reason for Ginny to hook up with Harry: to be his "beard" as it were. (Beard: a term for a woman a gay man has either a friendship with or relationship with to help maintain his 'cover.')

Given the harpy-ish characterization Rowling saddles her with in book 6, and the lukewarm nature of her relationship with Harry, it's little wonder that fanon!ginny is often portrayed as a scheming shrew. Taking the books as a whole, she is more than that. She is the only girl in a family of boys, so she has learned to be strong and speak up for herself, and is also the youngest and so has learned to be a rebel. She is good in a fight, a good flyer, and has shed the naivete that drew her into Tom Riddle's confidence when she was a child. But she is no saint, and given these investigations I find many negative fanon characterizations of Ginny to be quite legitimate.