This story, the most gruesome of Beedle’s tales, draws a little bit more directly from a tradition Rowling has already pulled from for the creation of Horcruxes: the magical ability to remove one’s heart and keep it in a safe place. As Colin Duriez notes in A Field Guide to Harry Potter and I expound upon on Harry Potter & Imagination, Horcruxes bear certain similarities to George MacDonald’s story, “The Giant’s Heart.”
I had wondered if the comparison was too much of a stretch, but this story (would that I had it in my hands before the book went to the printers!) confirms the parallel. Dumbledore makes the point clearly, commenting on the young warlock’s magical removal and locking away of his own heart: “The resemblance of this action to the creation of a Horcrux has been noted by many writers” (p. 58).
There is, of course, the obvious moral lesson: if you lock away your own heart for fear of love, you will turn into an evil person. But deeper than this is the philosophy of life and humanity espoused by the story: You cannot separate from yourself what is essential to humanity – and that includes pain and death. “To hurt is as human as to breathe,” Dumbledore writes (p. 56).
The story also confirms the definition of evil that I argue for in chapter 4 in Harry Potter & Imagination. When the man locks his heart away for fear of falling sway to the foolishness of love and family, his heart begins to grow black hair all over it. His heart has become a beast, and when he returns his heart to his chest, he can only act like a beast. He has dehumanized himself, and so become evil in the process.
Being the darkest of the 5 tales, it most poignantly taps into elements of evil and fear. For more on these themes in Harry Potter, see chapters 3 and 4 of my book (which manuscript I wish I still had in my hands).
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Agree that it’s a really dark tale. Creepy too, how the banished heart becomes brutal during its exile, it’s appetites grown “powerful and perverse”. Evil, as you say.
I didn’t like this one – in fact I liked it the least. The murder-suicide at the end is all too realistic, as is the naive hope of the maiden that there is a remedy to what ails the wizard and that all will be well if he just undoes what he did.
I found it so dark that not even Dumbledore’s words at the end had the power to “civilize” its message and make it palatable. And I’m not sure that I entirely agree with his interpretation, that this story is about the futility of the quest to make oneself invulnerable, either physically or emotionally. It’s also about that: I can see that it says that if you deny your humanity, you will become a monster, or at least end up acting like a monster. Which is actually very close to the theme of the Horcruxes: split your soul in enough pieces you end up becoming less than human. But I also see something else going on there, something not quite articulated.
The author of the Tales we learn is a Yorkshire man, like the Bronte sisters and the locale where Stoker wrote Dracula. The story screams “Gothic” and is meant to be the most disturbing and fascinating (hence the bowdlerizing bitty who cannot get enough of it).
Agreed – it does “scream ‘Gothic.’” I must be odd, because I think this was my favorite of the 5.
That, by the way, might be contributing to Red Rocker’s sense that there is “something else not articulated.” The excellent Gothic artist must leave some fearful element unexplained for it to be truly effective.
The Giant’s Heart by George MacDonald, in case any readers haven’t read it. Is ‘Hairy Heart’ a touch of the hat or just a thematic echo?
Probably thematic echo.
And Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart’? No fairy tale but the Gothic masterpiece of the heart as conscience might also be on Rowling’s mind — or is that a stretch?
A lot of story correspondent points for just a thematic echo! One might be a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk adventure and the other a Gothic horror romance in the trappings (thin wraps) of a fairy tale but you have the heart removed to a safe place by an inhuman monster, the heart revealed, and the revelation resulting in the bad guy’s death…
How many fairy tales like this can there be?
Yeah, I’m revising my previous comment and returning to my confidence in the connection in the first place. Heart-removal doesn’t happen a whole lot in stories!
I found it interesting that the warlock seeks to avoid the pains of the heart & thus escape from humanity in that regard but apparently was not thinking of escaping death.
I think the heart of this story, to be punny, is that once one has chosen to remove one’s heart & to live, as it were, heartlessly, that one cannot easily escape the damage one has done to oneself. That is to say, human beings don’t need to remove their hearts & hide them away in order to dehumanize themselves. But once they have dehumanized themselves, it’s not very likely that they can find humanity again.
This story is at once similar & in some ways dis-similar to A Christmas Carol & How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In Scrooge we see a man who has eschewed all human company & affection to the point where he is unable to express hardly any human emotion at all, even greed seems to have passed him by & he is on a miserly autopilot. But in the end he appears to be totally cured.
Same with the Grinch, whose heart is thought to be two sizes too small but who at the end has his heart grow & grow & grow. I think the dis-similarity between Scrooge & the Grinch & the Warlock comes then in the realization that once your heart has turned into a hairy beast, it’s not easy to go back to being human.
I also think Dumbledore, re: JKR, is being too hard on the maiden in this story. Excuse me, but she’s bright enough to realize that the warlock doesn’t have a heart (just not in the way she thinks) & she’s repulsed by this. She also exhorts the warlock to try & recover his humanity. Can she help it if the warlock has so damaged his heart that it isn’t possible? The moral here isn’t that she wasn’t assertive enough or some nonsense like that but that innocent, good people are often hurt & brutalized by the evil of others.
We really need Korg’s comments here. Because what I’m thinking is that the comment about the “powerful and perverse” appetites of the heart, as well as the really gross image of the warlock licking and stroking the maiden’s smooth and scarlet shining heart, are both blatantly sexual. And that we got the bizarre imagery because JKR could not depict what she really meant, a sexual assault, in a story whose audience included children.
I wonder how many parents won’t read this story to their kids today, thinking that it’s too scary.
Dumbledore writes, “And sure enough, in seeking to become superhuman this foolhardy young man renders himself inhuman,” and points out the similarity between this man locking away of his heart and the idea of horcruxes. “Superhuman” is the term used. Do we, seeing ourselves as better than other people, make ourselves less human, sub-human, simply by that perception?
Red Rocker, interesting theory on the sexual assault inferences. I think you could be onto something. Definitely something to examine further. But you’re right that we should have Matthew weigh in first.
I agree Red Rocker is on to something there.
By the way, where is Matthew?!
I’m lurking.
Without the book yet.
Missing being in the discussion as it’s happening
Just my superficial view of this tale, but it seems like a non-Disneyized version of Beauty and the Beast. That was just my immediate reaction after I read the Tale, but I’ve never read Beauty and the Beast and only seen the Disney cartoon.
Brent, I was curious about Beauty and the Beast. I’ve seen the Disney version (the movie) and a shortened stage version at Walt Disney World. I love the story and wondered if they had changed it that much. So I found this synopsis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_beast
It really isn’t similar the “The Hairy Heart”. In Beauty and the Beast, Disney has changed some of the details, but the story is essentially the same – the beast is not a beast because of his own choices but because an enchantment was placed on him by a fairy and the only way for him to break it is to be truly loved, which Belle finally does. In the “Hairy Heart”, the man turns himself into a beast and nothing can undo his evil choices.
I think this was my least favorite as well. It’s probably not one I will read often, if I ever read it again. And I say that as someone who really likes Poe’s “Telltale Heart”. Weird, I know. I remember reading that while in literature class and trying to keep from showing how scared I was, but still fascinated. “The Hairy Heart”, however, was just creepy and gross.
Red Rocker, I agree that you may have hit the nail on the head with the story being about sexual assault. And if read that way, it’s at least more understandable but also explains why the story is so horrific.
Pat
Pat, thanks for the info. No, I think you’re right. I saw similarities in that there was a well to do man who seemed to lose his heart whether it was self inflicted or through disfiguration and then tried to find it and love towards the end. Like I said before, it was just my “gut” reaction to the story. It’s amazing to me sometimes how something you read can bring up different thoughts some of which are totally unrelated. It probably should of hearkened me back to high school English class and Poe’s tell-tale heart, but it didn’t strangely enough.
I think there are both similarities and differences between Beast and Hairy Heart, and they help cast more light on what drives the two protagonists.
I have read different versions of the story. The definitive one appears to be by one Mme. Beaumont, written in 1756:
The Prince informs Belle that long ago a fairy turned him into a hideous beast after he refused to let her in from the rain, and that only by finding true love, despite his ugliness, could he break the curse.
In the earlier, 1740 version, by Mme. Villeneuve, the source of the curse is a bit less tidy:
The Beast was a prince who lost his father at a young age, and whose mother had to wage war to defend his kingdom. The queen left him in care of an evil fairy, who tried to seduce him when he became an adult; when he refused, she transformed him into a beast.
If you go with the Beaumont version, there are more similarities with Beedle’s warlock. Both are in their difficulties due to a malfunction of the heart: the Prince was uncharitable, the warlock is afraid to love. They both turn to a lovely – and loving – girl to help them out of their troubles. And they both manage to charm the girl into falling in love with them. But this is where the two stories diverge. Beast is willing to let Beauty go, does not use violence to hold her, and almost dies from a broken heart. His heart may have been a bit hairy to begin with, but it is transformed by the redemptive power of love. Beedle’s warlock, on the other hand, starts with a normal heart, it turns hairy, and it ends up dominating him. The difference between the two is the difference between a loving heart – even unto death – and a cold and violent heart – again even unto death. They are like mirror images of one another: fair inside, foul outside, vs foul inside and fair outside.