Professor Julian Womble (44:32)
The last thing that we're going to discuss is one that came up quite a lot in the post episode chat. One that I knew was gonna bring some chaos and one that led some people to engage in some really, really interesting debate. And it's the one that centers on whether Tonks is a good mother. And how do we assess that based on her presence at the Battle of Hogwarts? And how do we reconcile that and juxtapose that next to some of the other maternal sacrifices that we see made by Lily, by Narcissa, made by Molly and other characters. Lily is facing Voldemort directly. James is already dead. Voldemort is in the room. He gives her a literal ultimatum to step aside. If she moves, Harry dies. There's no safe alternative. It's immediate, lethal, unavoidable. Her body is the only thing between Harry and certain death. Tonks situation feels different to me. Yes, it's war. Yes, Voldemort is at Hogwarts, but he's not in her home standing over Teddy. She has a newborn who's days old. She's postpartum. And she does have an alternative. She could stay home with her baby while others fight. She chooses to re enter combat. That doesn't make her not brave, but it makes it a different kind of choice. Nadia wrote. I'm reminded of America Ferrera's iconic Barbie speech. It is literally impossible to be a woman. You have to be extraordinary, but somehow we are always doing it wrong. We are invited to expect Tonks to be a great fighter even weeks after giving birth when we have no information about her postnatal period in the magical world. We expect her to be a good wife to a husband who abandoned her during her pregnancy. We want her to be a good mother with no indication in the text to tell us how she felt about motherhood. We expect Tonks to be superhuman, better than all of us to make impossible choices quickly and easily. It's impossible to be a woman. Lorian wrote. I think she gets punished for Lupin's actions as well as her own. Poor Teddy. Neither of his parents thought to stay with him. And because she's a woman, she gets punished harder at the Battle of Hogwarts. I think it's ambiguous as to what her motivation is for turn up. I think there's a read that she's at least as much there to be with Lupin as she is to fight. The first thing she says when she arrives is, where is Lupin? And immediately goes off to look for him. She doesn't ask where she's needed. She then does the same later in the battle. It's my turn. Okay, I love this because I do think that we do have really, really high standards for these characters, and especially our women characters, especially our mothers. We've talked about it in the context of Molly. We've talked about it in the context of even Narcissa to a certain degree. And now we're here with Tonks, and I think that there is no right way for her to have done this. Um, I think that some of us would say the right way was for her to stay at home with Teddi. And I can see that. Well, I can. I can understand that. I think the right way could have been, well, she needed to be there fighting for him so that he could live in a better world. I could See that as well. Um, I think the thing about Tonks that's fascinating. Right. Is in theory, if I'm not mistaken, she would have been pregnant when they did the Seven Potters, right? Someone help me with that math. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But I think she was, because they don't. They're. They don't end up at Grim Old Place for that long before Lupin shows up and tells them that she's with child. Right? So, like, she's already made decisions and maybe she didn't know, who knows? But at the end of the day, I think. I think we just have to trust women. And I'm not talking about the author of this text. We don't have to trust her because I don't think that she's trustworthy. And I think that Tonks progression as a character proves that to us. But I do think that, like, we are conditioned, and it is so, so easy for us to look at the decisions of mothers and say, well, that was a bad one. Right. And I think, you know, we gotta keep that same energy. If the. If the answer is that she should have been home, so should have Remus. Neither of them should have been there. Like, none. They should have both stayed home with the baby. Right. Like, the expectation that she's the one that has to be there while he's out there fighting that feels imbalanced to me. And I understand the impulse. I understand that, like, if one of them had to be there, then it didn't need to be her. Sure. But at the end of the day, like, we have to trust that the decision that she made wasn't an easy one. It wasn't because she didn't love her child. It wasn't because that she potentially loved Lupin more, which is what some people are saying. And, I mean, the text might give us a sense that she was concerned about him and wanted to be there with him. Yes. But I'm not convinced that that's an indication of who she cared about more. I think that there's a world where she cares about both of them and that's why she left Teddi with her mom. And I think that this feels very similar to me in a lot of ways, and correct me if you don't agree, which is totally fine, but it feels very much like the critique many of us leveraged against Merope when she died. Right. That, like, she didn't care about Tom Riddle, that she gave him up, but she kept herself in good enough health to then go have that baby in a place where she knew he could be taken care of. And I think that the same is set here, right? Like, I cannot imagine, especially given the amount of time that she had, just, like, she had just had this baby. Like, let's say it had been a month. There's no way. There is no way, like, biologically. And again, like, I am not a person who is born a child, but I know enough about science to know that, like, one's brain is altered to the highest level. And the idea that you could flippantly, flippantly, like, just be like, I gotta go so I can go fight, seems very, very, very unlikely to me. Knowing what science tells us about the relationship between, like, a mother's brain that soon after giving birth to a child, like, everything in your body is in a state of, like, constant protection of this child that you have just born. So for her to have made this decision is certainly not one that I think was made lightly. And I don't think that it was one that was made without a consideration of the cost, the potential sacrifice. I just cannot imagine that someone who is as loyal and as caring as Tonks would so easily be, like, the baby will be fine. I gotta go. Like, it cannot have been easy for her. I just can't imagine it couldn't have been easy for Lupin. But there's a world where you want. And what does he say? Where's my book? What does he say? He says something to Harry in the forest. Hold on, I'm flipping through pages. The forest again. The Prince's tale. Blah, blah. The forest again. Sorry. I will never know him, but he will know why I died. And I hope he will understand I was trying to make a world in which he could live a happier life. And that, I think is undoubtedly true for Tonks as well. I think it is easy for us as observers, as readers, as people not in this position, to say, like, you should be doing X. I think the reality is, though, that it is a much more complicated situation when you are wanting to protect your child. And you know that there's a world that you can be of much greater use to those ends by being away from them. I can't imagine. I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for her. And I think that there is a way that, like, yes, absolutely. Like, you know, could she have stayed? Sure. So could Lupin. They could have stayed, and maybe they would have figured it out from there. Um, but. And. And. And it's not Lupin episode. So we're not gonna get into that. But I think that we are harder on her. I think we're harder on all the moms. We're hard on Molly. The only mom that we're not hard on is Narcissa, and that's because she was bad. So we. We expected her to be below the. The bar and she raised it because she lied to Voldemort. We were hard on Merope, which, yes, there are reasons as to why we should be. And I'm not saying that any of these women are above reproach, but I do think that when it comes to our expectations for what they should do, there's a level of impossibility that is introduced here that speaks exactly to what Nadia pointed to in that debate in that quote from Barbie. Right. The impossibility of the decision making on the part of women. And I think that there's a world in which, like, sometimes we expect them to be able to do the impossible in the way that we want the impossible to be done. And it's not fair. We've now reached a point of the episode where I am going to reflect and the reflection is going to be based on the conversation that we had in the last episode about heroism. And I wanted to come back and say something because some of us were not happy with the words that I said. And we'll get into that a little bit as I go through the reflection. But it's been something that I've been sitting with and comments that were critical of what I said, which thank you, kind of invited me to really sit with what I was thinking about and what I said on the episode. And I implied in that that doing your job and being a hero are mutually exclusive. Right? That if Tonks was acting as an Auror, bleh. Did it again. If fighting dark wizards was literally what she was trained and paid to do, then that duty can't count as heroism. And many of you kind of pushed back on that, and I'm grateful that you did. Charlie wrote, tonks is a hero simply for being an Auror. Excluding the DVL diva of it all. She willingly chose to catch bad people to make the world safer. She grew up in a post Voldemort world, never expecting him to return, and still decided to put her life on the line again and again. The fact that she's an Auror doesn't diminish her heroism, it enhances it. This is where I think I fell in a trap. And it's a trap that I just talked about. You see how quickly it Happens because in many ways, Tonks is getting held to an impossible standard here. How she has to be superhuman and make perfect choices and justify herself in other ways. Characters simply don't. And then I turn around and apply the same logic to her heroism, requiring her to earn it some other way beyond the choice she'd already made. Jo, who wrote on Spotify, wrote Tonks not being a hero because of her job is crazy. I'm sorry, Julian, but you're smarter than that. Thank you. It's a job. Yes. A career she chose for herself. Every single day she makes a choice to go out there and risk her life. We praise every person that fought in the Battle of Hogwarts and make it a point that they didn't have to. Tonks doesn't have to be an Auror. She's not forced to. She doesn't have a gun to her head or a wand. She's choosing the Battle of Hogwarts every day. I'm disappointed in this one. Jo's point is really important and I think it speaks directly to the point that was also made by Charlie in that it speaks to the fact that the professional choice to be an Auror is in and of itself something that speaks to doing something that you don't have to do. Right. You could have been anything. You could have made a specific kind of choice. And I think that the thing that I kind of fell into was the idea that because Tonks does this, that this particular moment of her being in the Battle of Hogwarts is not exceptional. And I think that the problem with that thought process is that you don't have to do an exceptional thing to be a hero. And that's what I had to sit with. Right? Like the idea that, yes, other people that we have called individuals, other individuals that we've called heroes, rather, we have often used the Battle of Hogwarts as our barometer. And so why should that shift here? Why should that be any different? It being her job doesn't take away from the fact that she's still pulling, putting her life on the line. She still left her child at home. She still is risking her life for what she believes in. And who cares if she does it every day? That doesn't change the fact that what she's doing is heroic because the profession in and of itself is a thing that people don't choose to do. And I don't think we would ever look at Mad Eye Moody and say, he is not a hero. Now, granted, he died before the Battle of Hogwarts. But he's still a hero. Like the sacrifices that this man had been locked in a trunk. But this is not a mad eye moody episode. There is a way, I think, that even I. Not even I. As if to say that I'm above it all, but, like, that I looked at Tonks and said, well, if you do it all the time, is it exceptional? And that is the trap, y'. All. That's the trap, right? Like, that's the trap of why, when we look at moms doing, like, extraordinary feats of just being able to, like, maintain their children's pulse while also maintaining a life for themselves, we're like, well, yeah, of course she did. But a dad is, like, walking his kid down the street and we're like, he's such a good dad. The best father to ever father of all the fathers, right? Like, that's what I did. I did that very thing right where I'm like, well, yeah, of course. She's an aura. Like, duh. Well, well, well. I'm so grateful for you all, because I listen, I'm a nerd. I love thinking too deeply about things, hence this podcast. And I love that I had to go back and really check my own biases here, right? Because I think at the end of the day, there's a way that we can kind of flatten what it means to be a hero if we're not thinking about it in a way that is critical and also checking our own biases and checking in on what it is. That how it is that we arrive at these definitions. And I think Tonks chose the path of being an aura before the war escalated and showed up for it when it cost her everything and went to Hogwarts because she believed the world her son was going to inherit was worth fighting for. And I know that many of us have very different definitions of what it is to be a hero, and some of those bars are sky high, and some of them are, you know, not. But I think that no matter what your definition is, what this has invited me to do, and what my invitation is for you is to make sure that it's applied equally across all identities, across all the things, in all the ways. And I'm thankful to you all for inviting me to do that.
