Harry Potter and the Sacred Text 2.03 – Curiosity: The Burrow
Vanessa- Chapter 3: The Burrow.
‘Ron!’ breathed Harry, creeping to the window and pushing it up so they could talk through the bars. ‘Ron, how did you – what the – ?’
Vanessa- I’m Vanessa Zoltan.
Casper- And I’m Casper ter Kuile.
Vanessa- And this is Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.
Thank you to all of you who have already booked tickets for the live show, which is gonna be on January 24 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find all of the information about the show at harrypottersacredtext.com, and we really hope to see you there.
Casper- It’s gonna be awesome!
Vanessa- It is gonna be really fun. It’s gonna be fun. And we’re really cute for radio! Casper, now that we’re done shamelessly promoting ourselves, can you tell me a story?
Casper- Vanessa, as you know, I am obsessed with RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Vanessa- I’m a little obsessed with the fact you’re obsessed.
Casper- It’s a reality TV show that pits different drag queens against each other to be the best drag queen, the next drag queen superstar, and be crowned victorious by RuPaul herself, an amazing drag queen of the decades. And I love this show – but I can’t explain why. I don’t watch a lot of TV, I don’t watch a lot of reality TV, but this show just captures my imagination, and I have become so curious about it that I watch recaps of the show. I watch recaps of recaps of the show. I watch discussions where people, like, vote up and down on people’s outfits on social media. It has gotten so bad that my husband has to knock on my door and say, ‘Casper, drag time is over. You have to come back to me.’ Like, I am just obsessed with this show, and the curiosity I have for it is insatiable. Like, I keep wanting more, and I don’t know why! I’m not a fashion-y person, I’m not a reality TV person, so just this question of: what is curiosity? How does it have a hold on us? How does it shape us? Where does it come from? These are all questions that I really brought with me when we read Chapter 3 of Chamber of Secrets, where we’re reading it through the theme of curiosity.
Vanessa- I’m so excited to talk about curiosity with you because I’m hearing you say that, for you, there’s an association between curiosity and joy, and I love that energy going into this chapter, and I really think that’s what Harry is experiencing in this chapter, right? He’s so curious about the Burrow and the Weasley family, and he’s just bringing so much happiness and joy into that curiosity. So I think that that story is just a great, exciting way to get us into this chapter and introduce us to the Burrow, which is one of my favorite places to hang out in the imaginative world of Harry Potter. I love the Burrow.
Casper- Absolutely. Except that ghoul. Well, maybe the ghoul is part of the charm.
Vanessa- It is part of the charm!
Casper- Vanessa, before we dive into our thematic discussion, let’s do our thirty second recap of Chapter 3: The Burrow. I just wanna say that, last week, I got a text from a friend saying, ‘you were so great at the thirty second recap!” And that high has stayed with me for days.
Vanessa- I’m very happy for you, and I would like to compliment your campaign strategist for setting expectations low early on so that you just have to clear the lowest hurdles. So, yeah, it’s great that your friends have low expectations of you. Ready?
Casper- Bring it on!
Vanessa- On your mark. Get set. Go!
(tick-tocking sound)
Casper- So there is Ron, at the window, with the Weasley twins, and they pull the bars out of the window. Harry, uh, is about to get in the car, but then is like, ‘Oh my god, all my stuff is down the stairs!’ So they go downstairs and get the stuff. Vernon wakes up because of Hedwig. He forgets, Harry forgets Hedwig, gets in the car. They drive, they land, magic car. Um, they don’t, didn’t tell their parents that they stole the car. Molly gets there, she’s like ‘oh my god, how dare you!’ Um, and she’s so angry with Arthur because he lied, saying that it was just for research purposes. They have lots of breakfast, they de-gnome the garden, um and – [buzzer] you know, life… happens.
(Vanessa and Casper laugh)
Vanessa- I felt like you were going dada, but then you kept going with complete sentences.
Casper- I, I did my best, but it ended in nothingness – as does life, Vanessa.
Vanessa- Yeah, I know, it was an existential meditation that you were doing.
Casper- Are you ready for your round, Vanessa?
Vanessa- Of course I am.
Casper- Here we go. 3…2…1…go!
(tick-tocking sound)
Vanessa- The Weasleys come in a car to pick up Harry. Harry, um, grabs all of his stuff and grabs Hedwig. Fred and George help him, and they drive off. And they go to the Burrow, and they arrive at the Burrow, and Mrs. Weasley’s really mad because Fred and George and Ron aren’t as good as the older siblings. And, but she’s really happy to see Harry and she’s really welcoming to Harry, and Harry just falls in love with the Burrow. He helps de-gnome the garden. Ginny has a really big crush on Harry, and that’s awkward. Arthur comes and is like, ‘Oh, Harry, I’m so excited that you’re here!’ and they have all of these lovely conversations. And Harry really appreciates that he feels loved [buzzer] –and he loves the Burrow!
Casper- I mean, Mrs. Weasley’s pretty mad.
Vanessa- I, yes! So I guess I’m bad at this.
Casper- Alright. Where should we start, thematically.
Vanessa- So I’ve had this idea that’s been percolating over the last week about curiosity that I saw in the chapter and that I think your story completely validated for me. Which is that curiosity and love are inextricably linked, that curiosity’s actually a loving act, and I think we see this in Ron. Ron, I would say, is more skilled at loving than Harry. Although Harry, like, intuitively understands love, he just hasn’t had a lot of practice with it. So Harry, when he doesn’t get letters from Ron, is like, ‘I guess Ron never liked me.’ Whereas Ron, when he doesn’t get letters back from Harry, is curious as to what’s going on with Harry, and so he shows up. And that curiosity is a form of really sophisticated love. When somebody is mean to me, if I really love them and know them, I’m like, ‘Oh, what’s going on there? That’s probably not about me, like, something might really be going on.’ Whereas if somebody is mean to me and I don’t really love them, I’m like, ‘Screw them! Who do they think they are?’ Right? So I think that, I’m wondering what you think about the relationship between curiosity and love and how we see it in this chapter.
Casper- That’s such a great thought, Vanessa, and it’s making me think of Arthur Weasley and the enchanted car. You know, in this chapter we learn that Arthur, who works in the Ministry of Magic where he’s responsible for finding people who are illegally magicking…
Vanessa- Muggle artifacts.
Casper- … Muggle artifacts. Arthur secretly at home has enchanted this whole Muggle car to be able, you know, so it can fly and all sorts of things. So we learn that Arthur’s kind of stance to the world, especially to the Muggle world, which is foreign, which is different, is so open and so curious and means that he is loving towards Muggles in a way that many witches and wizards are not.
Vanessa- Especially because he comes from an old wizarding bloodline, and there seems to be a resistance in the older wizarding bloodline families to Muggles, but he’s this anomaly who loves Muggles.
Casper- And so much of that is countering that close-mindedness, exactly, that you find that you find in the ancient wizarding families. So, you have to be, your mind has to be open, but your heart has to be open, too, to potential possibilities that we can’t even imagine. To be curious means that you have to be willing to accept an answer that you don’t know.
Vanessa- Yeah. So it’s curiosity where you really have no idea what the outcome is going to be, and you don’t have a stake in what the outcome is.
Casper- Exactly.
Vanessa- So one of the definitions of gossip that I really love that’s a Jewish idea of gossip is that it is sharing information when it is for the point of something positive, and it’s gossip when it is for the sake of entertainment and nothing else.
Casper- That’s like… when I stalk ex-boyfriends online, like I’m not actually curious about their life – I’m just trying to figure out that I’m doing better than they are.
Vanessa- Which you always are. You win.
Casper- Hashtag fabulous.
Vanessa- Yes. So I’m gonna keep this Arthur thing going so we can keep talking about discerning exactly where the line is between curiosity and love. So Harry experiences the way that Arthur talks to him as very loving. There’s the line of one of the things that Harry likes being at the Burrow so much for is that everybody seemed to like him and how great that is for Harry. And the example that we get, the evidence that Harry sort of presents us with that he is liked in this house, is that Arthur asks him all these questions about Muggle life. And that seems to be using Harry for his knowledge, not about liking Harry. He doesn’t ask Harry any questions about – ‘What was it like growing up in an abusive house? Is everything ok? Why weren’t you writing back and forth to us? You know, you must have had such an awful summer.’ It’s like, ‘Tell me everything you know.’ And so it’s interesting that Harry’s experiencing that about liking him when really it seems to me to be about loving Muggles.
Casper- Yeah, there’s this sort of instrumentalizing of Harry where he’s just useful for as much knowledge as he has about the Muggle world. But I wonder if we need to think of Arthur as part of a unit in the sense of the broader Weasley household because we know that Molly is incredibly caring and very conscious of feeding Harry, for example he gets eight or nine sausages as soon as she learns that he hasn’t been eating. I think you’re right that Arthur maybe is just interested in his Muggle knowledge, but for Harry, it’s part of a broader experience of this Weasley household where he feels seen in all of his elements because, you know what, at Hogwarts, no one’s asking him about his Muggle experience and it is part of who he is and where he’s come from, so…
Vanessa- And it might be nice for Harry to feel instrumentalized in some ways? Because it’s a service that he can provide back to the Weasleys. The Weasleys are giving him so much, and it’s so relieving to be asked for something when you feel indebted to someone, right? Students will come to me and say like, ‘I don’t want to ask this favor of whomever,’ and it’s like, it is a gift to tell someone specifically how they can show their love for you. Be like, it would be a lot to me if you did x, y, or z. We often don’t know how to be there for each other, so the fact that Mr. Weasley is telling Harry – these are stories we want to hear, this is a way that you can add joy to our house – is actually, really, a loving act.
Casper- What if Arthur already knows the answers to these questions, and he’s just asking it because he knows Harry will know the answer?
Vanessa- I buy that…
Casper- But, before we get too easy on Arthur, I do want to point out something that struck me from this text. Arthur’s curiosity is limited because he’s an authority figure. So we know that he wants to ask a ton of questions once the boys come home from flying this car that he’s designed, and he’s just so thrilled that it worked. He’s so excited, and he starts to ask questions, and Molly shuts it down. Because Molly’s like, ‘No! Our boys did something a) illegal. You could have been fired, right?’ It could have had all these incredible consequences.
Vanessa- The kids could have died!
Casper- Literally. Mrs. Weasley is right, but she shuts down Arthur’s inquisitive, curious questions, so I’m wondering – does this tell us something about how people in authority might be very curious about situations but feel they’re unable to actually explore those lines of thought or lines of inquiry because, like Arthur, they have a position to maintain and can’t be seen asking questions? And to me, it says something about bureaucracy, and it says something about how we’re going to see the Ministry of Magic fail in its duty to stand up against Voldemort because people are inhabiting roles where they are not given permission to be curious.
Vanessa- I love that. We both have this proctoring role with students, and because I’m an officer of the university, if I am aware that there’s alcohol in the building, because the kids are 18, I have to just shut down the party, right. Whereas, in a perfect world, I would go in and be curious as to whether or not they were drinking responsibly, and whether or not they were talking care of one another, right, and like trying to encourage that behavior. But because I’m an authority figure, there’s a line that I have to toe, and I do not get to be curious. And so instead I find all these weird ways to, I probably shouldn’t admit this, but to not hear certain parties if it sounds like people are behaving well and, because, yeah, I don’t have the permission to be curious. So I do think that power limits us. Curious isn’t the only element of love. Boundaries also have to be involved in love and curiosity, which I wonder if Molly and Arthur are just a good team in that because Molly is not curious at all about what the boys were up to. She is just setting boundaries and is saying like, ‘This was bad. These could have been the consequences, and I was upset all night, worried sick.’ And then Arthur gets to play the curious role – which feels gendered and unfair to me that, like, the mom has to be the bad cop and the dad comes home from work and just gets to be like ‘what shenanigans have you boys got up to?’ And like, I think that maybe they, as a team, embody the balance between boundary and curiosity.