“’She’ll be happier, over the wall. With her own
kind. Don’t you fret now, lad.’
His mother said nothing to him about the matter, as
she said little to him on any subject. Sometimes Tristan would look up to see
his mother staring at him intently, as if she were trying to tease some secret
from his face.”- Neil Gaiman, Stardust, pg.
35
“She stopped to draw a deep and went ranting on. It
seemed she had been wanting to say all this for years.
‘Then she met that Potter at school and they left and
got married and had you, and of course I knew you’d be just as—as—abnormal—and then, if you please, she went
and got herself blown up and we got landed with you!’”-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,
pg. 53
In what appears to be a deviation from earlier fairy
tales, estranged mother figures in Stardust
and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone take a more neglectful role when it comes to the queer, as opposed to
an open and unabashed hostility.
Consider, if you would, stock evil stepmother
character, witnessed most stereotypically in the Snow White fable. In it, we
get a stepmother who on different attempts tries her hand at stabbing the
protagonist in the scalp with poison, choking her to death and of course, there’s
that famed apple.
The change seems to be precipitated by the switching
of sexes, which greatly reorients the stories. Where a Cinderella and Snow
White could be understood as sexual competition to strange older women, i.e. “Mirror,
mirror on the wall, tell me who is the fairest of them all;” guys aren’t
bringing this sort of dilemma with them. Instead, they appear to threaten the
very existence of these women, which might justify a standoffish attitude.
When looking at the etymology for the name Tristan,
you find the name was originally associated with disruption in various
languages: “noise,” “clatter (of armor),” and “sorrow.” On the other hand, the somewhat
benign name Harry is complicated by a nautical term associated with it as early
as 1897: Harriet Lane was a term used
for preserved meat, originating from a famous murder victim whose body had been
chopped up by her killer.
In both narrative cases, the young men represent
death of some sort. For Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter series, it is death of
approval (from her parents) and normalcy, while for Mrs. Thorn in Stardust there is the added
consideration of the rightful/illegitimate heir and subsequently her
reputation.
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