Extended Rant, Badly Expressed
Mar. 14th, 2004 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muchabstractedFor no very good reason, JK Rowling's Four Houses are irritating me.
I take that back. They're irritating me for a very good reason. I don't think anyone would argue that they're not simplistic; but it's worse than that. They diminish people. (Or fictional characters, if you're going to get technical about it.) Each house represents one single quality that is set up to exist to the exclusion of the three other qualities. They're set up to cause people to identify with the extreme of each quality, to the exclusion of the other qualities. This is reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin's quote: that almost anything carried out to its logical extreme is depressing. Well, any quality carried out to its logical extreme is destructive in some way, particularly when identification with Quality A automatically means dis-identification with Modifying Qualities B-F.
The only benefit of identifying with the extreme of a quality is that, hopefully, one eventually realizes why one should stop.
Now, I just went to a conference on narrative therapy. Good stuff. The speaker, Michael White, spoke about the thinness v. the thickness of conceptions of self-identity. Being Sorted into a single House is thin. Personally -- to get away from the "fictional character" bit -- I've been Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Gryffindor at various points in my life, and the Slytherin is usually a reasonably strong secondary influence.
I don't actually have a concise example of a thick conception of self-identity. Also, I don't believe in attempting to write a nice conclusion to anything, apparently, so I'll just stop now.
I take that back. They're irritating me for a very good reason. I don't think anyone would argue that they're not simplistic; but it's worse than that. They diminish people. (Or fictional characters, if you're going to get technical about it.) Each house represents one single quality that is set up to exist to the exclusion of the three other qualities. They're set up to cause people to identify with the extreme of each quality, to the exclusion of the other qualities. This is reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin's quote: that almost anything carried out to its logical extreme is depressing. Well, any quality carried out to its logical extreme is destructive in some way, particularly when identification with Quality A automatically means dis-identification with Modifying Qualities B-F.
The only benefit of identifying with the extreme of a quality is that, hopefully, one eventually realizes why one should stop.
Now, I just went to a conference on narrative therapy. Good stuff. The speaker, Michael White, spoke about the thinness v. the thickness of conceptions of self-identity. Being Sorted into a single House is thin. Personally -- to get away from the "fictional character" bit -- I've been Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Gryffindor at various points in my life, and the Slytherin is usually a reasonably strong secondary influence.
I don't actually have a concise example of a thick conception of self-identity. Also, I don't believe in attempting to write a nice conclusion to anything, apparently, so I'll just stop now.
