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the Dumbledore reorientation
Oct. 20th, 2007 | 11:09 pm
I foresee numerous Internet flamewars in the days ahead, for according to J.K. Rowling, Dumbledore was in fact gay.
Do you buy it? I'm not entirely sure that I do.
See, in the books, I can't recall a single indicator that Dumbledore was in fact gay.* Nor did he ever seem to have a romantic relationship of any kind. According to Rowling, he was in love with Grindelwald, but Dumbledore never said so in the books, and their relationship in Book 7 seemed more like the friendship between two talented people who later came to blows with each other, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, perhaps, or Henry II and Thomas Becket.**
But Rowling's the author, right? She wrote the books. If anyone would know, it would be her. If she says Dumbledore was gay, then he was.
Maybe so...but the entire thing seems dishonest to the reader. A cheap trick, if you will. If Rowling had wanted Dumbledore to be gay, she should have written him as gay in the books. It's as if she tried to have it both ways; she wrote a bestselling series that avoided the whole Culture War over homosexuality, and only after the books were done did she come out and say "See! Dumbledore was really gay! I'm ever so politically correct!"
The dishonesty bothers me. Stephen King wrote that one of the keys to writing fiction is to tell the truth within the world of the story. And Rowling wasn't telling the truth.
-JM
*If you argue that Dumbledore was obviously gay because he was unmarried or unattached, you're employing the logical fallacy called "a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid". Look it up.
**And the slashfic possibilities of that are positively horrifying.
Do you buy it? I'm not entirely sure that I do.
See, in the books, I can't recall a single indicator that Dumbledore was in fact gay.* Nor did he ever seem to have a romantic relationship of any kind. According to Rowling, he was in love with Grindelwald, but Dumbledore never said so in the books, and their relationship in Book 7 seemed more like the friendship between two talented people who later came to blows with each other, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, perhaps, or Henry II and Thomas Becket.**
But Rowling's the author, right? She wrote the books. If anyone would know, it would be her. If she says Dumbledore was gay, then he was.
Maybe so...but the entire thing seems dishonest to the reader. A cheap trick, if you will. If Rowling had wanted Dumbledore to be gay, she should have written him as gay in the books. It's as if she tried to have it both ways; she wrote a bestselling series that avoided the whole Culture War over homosexuality, and only after the books were done did she come out and say "See! Dumbledore was really gay! I'm ever so politically correct!"
The dishonesty bothers me. Stephen King wrote that one of the keys to writing fiction is to tell the truth within the world of the story. And Rowling wasn't telling the truth.
-JM
*If you argue that Dumbledore was obviously gay because he was unmarried or unattached, you're employing the logical fallacy called "a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid". Look it up.
**And the slashfic possibilities of that are positively horrifying.