Tom riddles passive vs active victimhood
If u saw me post this before, no u didnt
A unecesarry long analysis of Tom psychology based on one quote (i’m also gonna go into headcanonland a bit, so)
English isn’t my native language and i suck at explaining so FOLLOW ME (pls)
I find this single sentence from teenage Tom Riddle always so interesting. Although his relationship with his mother can be analyzed here as well, I want to focus on his father.
The language he uses is interesting in this scene because he does not say that his mother was abandoned or that his father left his mother. He says that HE was abandoned. His mother is entirely passive. He doesn't connect his father's leaving to his mother, it's HIM who the father chose to leave. While leaving a pregnant wife does suggest abandoning the unborn child as well, Tom Senior fled specifically because of his wife. Tom Senior's action was of Merope, yet Tom bypasses her to frame himself as the primary target, and only target of abandonment.
Tom is twisting this event because it serves as a projection of his own experience. But what is he projecting exactly? He gives a hint at the second part of the sentence: the reason was that she was a witch. This detail is importand, as magic is a significant aspect of Tom’s character and he projects his own experiences onto his mother’s fate. What he believes happened to his mother, who is disliked for possessing magic in his imagination, mirrors his own experience growing up in the Orphanage. Tom’s Magic led the other children and authoritative figures to perceive him as odd, insane, mad and therefore scary and frightening. All descriptions are charged with negative connotations that cause others to distance themselves as he is something dangerous and best avoided. Even if Tom didn’t have a name for it before Dumbledore arrived, he recognized that this thing, this something that set him apart from others, was wrong. Rather than elevating his status, it had the opposite effect. He became less desirable than before he started using magic. People started to distance instead of noticing him.
This created a profound personal wound within Tom, and to cope with this injury, he convinced himself that this "wrongness" made him special (also to challenge the group identity common in these facilities by creating his own individual identity, but that's not relevant for this projection). He could do things only found in fantasy books, stories, and legends. He was something mythical. And if you are something mythical, then the opinions of non-mythical people and the names they call you no longer matter. This coping mechanism sustained him until he was 11 when his uniqueness was confirmed. However, despite this validation, years of internalized shame meant he already ingrained in him that his magic made him “wrong” in the eyes of Muggles, leading to inevitable rejection out of his control and rendering him a passive victim.
He claims this is what his father did and believes it explains what happened to his mother after he discovered her magical heritage. He projects his own experiences of social rejection due to his magic onto his father. His Muggle father is no different from the Muggle children who kept their distance from him. Instead of allowing this internalized shame to surface, he constructs a grand narrative that his and his mother's magic was simply too overwhelming for Tom Senior. He convinces himself that Tom Senior recognized his superiority, leading to his departure. In doing so, Tom reclaims his agency because rather than being a passive victim with no control over being socially rejected, like orphan-Tom, he convinces himself he was an active threat, like Voldemort-Tom, that he himself FORCED the other person to leave. HE was in control in a situation although in reality he was in fact powerless (he does that later too to the other children in the orphanage). He was simply too extraordinary for the common Muggle.
There is another dimension to the word “abandonment”. The word itself is a strong and charged term, especially for something he didn’t personally experience in the literal sense from his father, but which resonates deeply with his subjective experience of neglect. It evokes images of something or someone left behind, forgotten, completely given up, and neglected. Consider an abandoned car, for instance, which begins to decay, corrose, rust, and become dirty due to it’s environment. It mirros Tom’s subjective experience in the Orphanage. He is left to rot in the commoness of Muggles who percieve his magic as a defect. In such surroundings his magical essence is decaying and he himself is starting to wither the longer he remains there.
Perhaps he hopes that one day his family comes to rescue him from this place that makes him corrode, rot and decay (or he will find them). It’s not uncommon for orphans to fantasize about their families. Tom likely spent time dreaming that his biological family was as special and unique as he is which ties into his need for external validation of his own uniqness (general concept of a family, then possibly his father's side, then definetly the Gaunts). Little Tom doesn’t have to necesarilly firmly believe he has a living family. He might be aware that his family might not exist due to the lack of evidence, yet he indulges in the fantasy and dreams whenever he sees a family on the street, in the media, or in books, igniting his envy and want of a familial connection. This might occur even when he fails to convince a married couple to adopt him. It's another coping mechanism. It soothes him.
However, the dream of having a family stopped being the source of recognition and validation of his uniqness specifically once he discovered the wizarding world, with Hogwarts taking its place. But that doesn’t mean his longing stopped for a family that could save him from this rotten place. Now, in the wizarding world, he searches for the family he once idealized, assuming his mother was a Muggle and his father was magical. The reality was the opposite, forcing him to confront the fact that his magic doesn't spare him from the common fate of Muggles. And that his father isn’t this powerful wizard (like him), the more u idealize the more painful the disappointment is going to be. And he had this image in his mind for YEARS. He doesn’t have a reason to believe his father can save him, why would a Muggle save him? All Tom experienced from them was the opposite. He must have abandoned him just like every other Muggle ever did.
(Note: someone feeling abandoned / think they got abandoned doesn’t necessarily mean someone else left them physically. A perceived rejection can also be interpreted as being abandoned)
Now that only leaves the gap, why was his father not seen with his mom? He must have left her. What reason do you as a muggle have to leave a witch/wizard? Right, of course, magic! He simply feared the magic.
Another intriguing aspect to observe in this sentence is Tom's shift from his perspective, using "my mother," to adopting his father's viewpoint, referring to "his wife," while talking to Harry. This linguistic maneuver is intended to place Harry in his father's position, forcing him to agree with Tom's view of his father's coldness: not only for abandoning a "mother," but for leaving his own family, his "wife.", his own union. The aim is to elicit empathy and sympathy from Harry, leading him to agree that the father is at fault, not Tom. Tom seeks external validation to affirm that the rejection is not due to Tom’s magic (his “wrongness”) but his father's. A validation he cannot provide for himself internally.
Later, he seizes complete control of the abandonment narrative by killing him and corrupting his appearance with dark magic. By replacing his name with Voldemort and altering his appearance to look distinctly different from his father (and everyone else really), he erases the last evidence of their shared commonness. Now, he can no longer claim to have been abandoned as Tom actively takes measures to reject his father in return.
(Without sounding like a broken record, i just need to address this too because it's fascinating. Notice how Riddle keeps the "I" separated right before he speaks about his father? He creates linguistic distance between himself and his father even in his grammar. It reminds me how royals speak "I, Mr. King, hereby declare". It's formal, elevated and self-important. Next, he is devaluing his father with words like "fool" and "common." Tom communicates he is a powerful while his father is weak and ordinary common, he is showing Harry that he is superior to his father. But then the power shifts suddenly to his father the moment he admits he was abandoned? How does a common man abandon a powerful? It doesn't make sense again. For a short moment, reality threatens his self-concept: "I am special. I am unique. I am powerful." Now he is stressed, its creates a very uncomfortable feeling. He has to correct the slip because he can’t accept the reality yet. And he does by explaining "Well, it was only because I have this very powerful thing called magic! “ All good, he is on the throne and his beliefs about himself are true again!)
Thank you for listening (๑✪ᆺ✪๑)
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