Dumbledore is Gay?
By now, you Potter fans have heard the odd news that Harry's headmaster Albus Dumbledore has been pronounced gay by author J.K. Rowling.
This announcement about a character at a public reading after the books have been completed feels like a bit of a cheat. And it gives the news a whiff of fan fiction, even if it's coming from the author. What's next? "Oh, and Harry had six toes! And, Hermione -- she smoked a lot of weed. Did I not mention that?"
After reading an excerpt from the seventh installment of her series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," one young fan asked if Dumbledore had ever loved anyone.Does this strike anyone else as odd? Of course, an author can do whatever she wants with the characters of her own story. I don't begrudge Rowling for deciding that Dubledore is gay, extraterrestrial or made completely of banana pudding, if she likes. It's her book. What bothers me is that if that's an important element of Dumbledore's character, she should have put it in the books. It's not like she was trying to keep the word count down.
"Dumbledore is gay, actually," replied Rowling.
She was initially met with a surprised silence but ultimately the audience erupted in cheers for several minutes prompting Rowling to add, "I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy."
This announcement about a character at a public reading after the books have been completed feels like a bit of a cheat. And it gives the news a whiff of fan fiction, even if it's coming from the author. What's next? "Oh, and Harry had six toes! And, Hermione -- she smoked a lot of weed. Did I not mention that?"
4 Comments:
Half the fun of fiction is that we get to imagine what the author does not include. Shame on you for critisizing Rowling for having her own imagination that no doubt added to her original writing within the piece. I hope you didn't spend much time writing this, not very intellectual, even from a Christian point of view.
Thanks for your comment. And I see where you're coming from to a point. I don't blame Rowling for having her own backstory for the characters -- just for keeping such a major cultural issue out of the books for so long and then casually tossing it out once the books are done.
Here's a Time magazine writer who has a similar perspective about Rowling's post-textual revelation though he's coming from a very different point of view.
What I don't understand is that you said "What bothers me is that if that's an important element of Dumbledore's character, she should have put it in the books. It's not like she was trying to keep the word count down." But I don't see anywhere where she said that it was important character trait. Since she so far hasn't mentioned it, it obviously isn't that important. In fact it makes the character seem more realistic- there's probably people you know in real life that you don't know is homosexual, and when someone tells you, you're like "oh really?" because their being homosexual isn't an important part of their personality because it's something they keep private.
If that makes any sense.
Good comment, CM, and I would agree with you if this were not a work of fiction. The writer isn't the only person who matters. She makes her careful choices about what to include and what not to -- then she releases the book to the readers. We get to respond to all her characters from our own perspective. That's what makes reading fiction a unique experience for each person. By changing Dumbledore's character after the fact in a way that matters to me (or to the gay writer from Time magazine), I think she has fundamentally violated the reader's experience of her work.
But I'll quit trying to explain myself and let this editorial from the Dallas Morning News do it for me. It makes the point much better than I did.
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