"Her desire to control, to punish and to inflict pain, all in the name of law and order, are, I think, every bit as reprehensible as Lord Voldemort's unvarnished espousal of evil."
J,K, Rowling has recently released new writing detailing an in-depth look at the Ministry of Magic official, Defense of the Dark Arts professor, former headmistress of Hogwarts and lover of all things pink and frilly, Dolores Umbridge.
In the form of a 1700-word essay (which can be found here or on Pottermore.com), Rowling provides a glimpse of her inspiration and personal views behind the character we were first introduced to in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Although, many of us have all come to loathe Umbridge's love of cat plates hanging on her office walls, it was her tyrannical views and overall nastiness that she brought to everyone around her that kept all readers on edge about her true intentions (and allegiances, on that matter).
"Umbridge's names were carefully chosen. 'Dolores' means sorrow, something she undoubtedly inflicts on all around her. 'Umbridge' is a play on 'umbrage' from the British expression 'to take umbrage,' meaning offence. Dolores is offended by any challenge to her limited world-view; I felt her surname conveyed the pettiness and rigidity of her character."
Notably remembered for forcibly having Harry Potter use her infamous punishment quill to inflict the painful memory of 'I must not tell lies' on his own hand, Dolores' cruel and controlling behaviors were in fact drawn from a real-life person she had encountered in her early years of schooling.
Rowling accounts of a lady back in her younger days carrying a similar incongruency between her outwardly delicate appearance to her personality whom she recalls to be "the reverse of sweet, innocent and ingenuous." The same "sickly sweet" aura in the lady who wears "a tiny little plastic bow slide in her short curly hair" was aptly crafted in Dolores Umbridge's character as Rowling's way of portraying the reality of how two-faced human beings can become.
Such a realization is a horror downright scarier than any late-night tale or movie can provide because Umbridges are real. And they're unknowingly all around us. As nasty and cruel as fictitious characters may seem on the page, true evil warped in the human skin is by far scarier than one can fathom.
"I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world... A love of all things saccharine often seems present where there is a lack of real warmth of charity."
The scariest people you meet aren't the ones who are known to be cruel on the outside, like the fictitious Lord Voldemort, but the ones who hide their nastiness skin deep in ways you could've never imagined. Be wary and be wise of those who may be outwardly doing sweet things on the outside as this is by no means an indication of who they really are or what may be really brewing on the inside.
Doesn't all of this revelation about Dolores Umbridge make Voledmort not seem such a bad guy after all?
0 comments:
Post a Comment