Is Lord Voldemort incapable of loving?
One of the few certainties we Voldelovers have about the Dark Lord – because of the author’s owns words – is that the Dark Lord does not love. He is unable to love because of his mother’s absence during his first years of life, the abandonment of his muggle father and the overall absence of a supportive environment for his emotional and psychological development. I personally think this is a huge step forward from the assumption that he can’t love because of the Love Potion’s mess, but I also strongly think that as much as the Harry Potter’s Series has very original hints, they are isles in a sea of badly written tropes; and, since I’m very much bored because of these godforsaken lessons, I’m going to share my opinion on in this matter here.
First, what does it mean to love in the Harry Potter series?
I personally think that the author perception of love is a bit distorted and, like many of us already pinpointed in the past, she accepts a common misconception of our culture: true love is sacrifice.
When did love become sacrifice? When did true love become loss?
This is of course rooted in Christian’s culture. The sacrifice of Christ is the ultimate example of love and if we love truly, we sacrifice ourselves (body, mind, and soul). Even more so if you are a woman, and therefore mother and wife. Lily Evans, the greatest example of love in the series, is a symbol of this societal – and eventually sexist – value. As you can imagine, and as we see every other day, this has terrible consequences in the way we build and perceive relationships: we expect ourselves and others to sacrifice themselves for love. We require sacrifice to think – and therefore feel – love.
So, I’d like to set off from stating the assumption that ANY kind of love in the Harry Potter Series is somewhat distorted and both the greatest minds of the books – Voldemort and Dumbledore – manipulate this reality to make others do what they want. Both know love but use it in different ways.
Dumbledore uses this sacrificial love not only to manipulate others into doing his bidding but also to create a separation between “good-us” and “evil-them” (while Voldemort uses blood). I don’t know whether he is conscious of perpetuating this erroneous myth about love or if he himself feels love this way, but this is a fact: he forces his idea of love on others, and this eventually brings them to their greatest sacrifices. For one, Harry himself wholeheartedly believes in this, that he and Voldemort are inherently different because he can love and is loved back, while Voldemort is unloved and can’t love back. He comes to accept his own death and the idea of killing Voldemort (another living being) because, without the ability to love, he is beyond redemption, he can’t be spared.
This, of course, protects Harry from truth: he eventually WILL become a murderer (as much as a Death Eater), but – as we see in real life – if you kill the right target, you can’t be considered a real murderer.
Voldemort, on the other hand, uses his ability to appeal and be loved by others to escalate in his social environment and gain what he wants. He does this during his Hogwart’s years, and I believe that during the First War he gets even smarter in this, manipulating his followers’ desires for closeness to their Master. He uses their assumptions on love (again, sacrificial love) to make sure their sacrifice is for him. I believe that, before the fall, he was loved by many, not in the maternal way of Lily Potter, but in the way we love our heroes.
Because of this, Dumbledore is right: Love is a great form of power.
But, what about Voldemort’s own ability to love then?
I believe, like many others have said, that Voldemort is incapable of sacrificial love (and on some level I’d say “Thank goodness”): his whole life’s purpose is not to sacrifice himself but to legitimate his persona. But is sacrificial love the only kind of love that exists?
Let’s take a few steps back to understand the way Voldemort perceives himself in this big world of mutual relationships.
He comes from nothing, he’s raised as “nothing” and, to survive, he had to fight against an external force that denied him in every way (physical, psychological, and emotional). His constant struggle is to run away from annihilation. Sometimes, he succeeds, other times he fails and hurts himself. Fighting against the feeling of being nothing, he starts accumulating objects, followers, knowledge, power.
If we agree on these premises, we also must agree on the fact that attachment is something Voldemort must be capable of. I mean by attachment the ability to form a one-sided relationship with an external object and project some kind of identification on it. This is a very immature kind of love we all somewhat experienced when we were babies, when we were unable to accept in our very unstable inner world the concept of “The Other”. It’s not mutual – he would hate to be somebody else’s – but he feels attachment for things, places and even people that give structure his persona. One way we can be sure He feels attachment is that he can feel betrayal, he suffers when he loses things (and people) he is attached to (e.g., Bellatrix, of course). He feels attachment because he’s a collector (of things, places, power, and people). It’s selfish and immature but nonetheless it’s a kind of love. Of course, it’s distorted because he’s a grown man with the affectivity of a child.
I personally don’t think this is sicker than Dumbledore’s sacrificial love, maybe less sophisticated since Dumbledore’s kind of love is a sublimated version of Voldemort’s, but both are distorted forms of interpersonal relationship, and both are ways of controlling people.
Does Voldemort know that what he feels is love?
One quote that I personally love and that I freely take from the brilliant words of Andrea Judith is: “Intelligent Love is a Love that is conscious of loving”.
I think that Voldemort’s disadvantage on this matter is that he knows that love exists, he manipulates it in others (he knows he can ask Bellatrix the world and she would give it to him, he knows Barty would sacrifice himself for him in a different way than others would…) but he is not conscious of when this feeling (in its unripe state) arises in him and he is often blindsided by the effects of his attachments. This is a whole other thing than saying that he is not capable of any kind of love. He’s not intelligent in loving because he never learned to manage this feeling, but he is not deprived of it.
I believe this makes him even more interesting and gives his character and his relationship with others a whole different nuance that I can’t wait to explore further. I hope that those who had the pleasure of following me till this point will be somewhat intrigued with this argument and I wish some of you will be happy to share their opinion with me.
