could you say more about the Black family and hereditary mental illness? I’ve seen the term “Black family madness” used in ways that made me feel kind of uncomfortable like there was a certain amount of voyeurism and sensationalizing occurring. I haven’t really seen the concept treated seriously/respectfully.
Sirius is clearly deeply depressed in OOTP, Tonks is deeply depressed in HBP (though I feel like HBP Tonks is in pretty stark contradiction of her OOTP characterization and I very much dislike her confronting Lupin about rejecting her in front of their whole social circle). Bellatrix clearly very much the worse for wear after Azkaban but not in an especially great place before going in either? Andromeda has almost no dialogue or action, so it’s hard to say how she’s doing, except that she gave Tonks a very Black Family First Name which is an odd choice for a person who was disowned after running away. Kreacher describes Walburga as mad with grief after losing Regulus. Do you think her portrait’s behavior accurately represents her end of life behavior? Other portraits don’t seem to deteriorate into that kind of instability. Regulus himself has a bit of Q-Anon energy.
I guess I sort of talked myself through this in your inbox! Still very interested in your thoughts, though!
There’s a couple things I want to get out of the way.
The first is that hereditary strangeness, illness, unspecified trouble, etc - all that is a pretty classic feature of gothic literature. If you’re a House Black fan and you haven’t read “The Fall of the House of Usher” (the Poe original. We don’t acknowledge Mike Flanagan’s existence on this blog) you really should, because it’s Patient Zero for a lot of fan discourse on this family and for a lot of tropes around gothic families. Beyond that I’ll recommend Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, the self-proclaimed ‘first gay gothic novel’ Gaywyck, V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic, and Ava Reid’s Juniper & Thorn if you want further reading/watching material in this vein. The idea that families in gothic novels pass down what’s wrong with them to their children and great steps must be taken to escape the influence of their houses and ancestries, and that inherited illness can define your life for good or ill, and that prestige or arrogant pride or aristocracy or some other kind of influence in a community is a corrupting rot, is a central theme in all of those cited stories. Incest is also a central theme, overtly or subtextually; those two threads wind about each other until they’re inextricably bound together.
So from that angle, the Black family madness is simply an expected end goal of putting a gothic family right out of The Shadow over Innsmouth into a middle grade urban fantasy series, especially with the motifs of decay and intermarriage/inbreeding and mouldering wealth and isolationism. Ignoring that is imo willfully ignoring their literary ancestry, and failing to engage with their narrative DNA. (An alternative flavor of gothic family is found in the Gaunts, and yet another flavor in the Dumbledores of 1899 - this is a trope Joanne returns to repeatedly.)
There are going to be people who discuss it in an ableist fashion, because ableism is baked into our society on a truly fundamental level. There are also going to be people who discuss it in a slightly sensationalized fashion, because in all of the above examples the sensational and sensual tone of the story is purposefully done. But it’s not a clear-cut question of “good, respectful representation” and “bad, voyeuristic representation”. People who see themselves rendered faithfully and respectfully in “bad” stories exist, and people who believe the most authentic versions of their mental illnesses or family relationships are found in “unrealistic” stories are going to continue to fight for their right to exist in an ugly, non-idealized fashion.
I’m one of them. I have an aunt who had multiple psychotic episodes with serious lasting delusions throughout her life and whose career and family and stability were all trashed and ruined thanks to her untreated illness, and I share many of her diagnoses. I have addicts and criminals in my immediate and extended family. I have a family history of incest on both sides and very narrowly avoided being one of the victims. I have deep and lasting generational trauma on both sides because fuck colonialism. And so I see myself in the Blacks, and especially in the complicated mess of loyalty and revulsion and yearning to escape and knowing nobody else will ever know you as well as the people who share your name do. Add in the homophobic repression and the abuse and the toxicity and it gets even more relatable, unfortunately.
So for me, ignoring the Black family madness or arguing it doesn’t exist because it’s all ableism by the fandom or claiming that nobody involved in the plot was mentally ill - it carries the implication that my own life and my own family history are Bad Rep, which is something that I get sick and tired of when it comes to fandom takes on mental illness. Sometimes you are going to be sick forever and sometimes you’re also going to either be heroic or villainous. Sometimes your illnesses will directly lead you into being cruel to other people. Sometimes you’ll be both intensely violent and toxic and highly highly susceptible to grooming and abuse. Sometimes you are also going to want to find some romance or dark beauty in your own life, and if your life is never going to be a healthy one by abled standards that can include finding things to sensationalize or render sensually about your own brain.
Because that’s what’s really at the heart of all this. I am not going to get well. I can get better. I can fight to become stable and keep myself in check. I can improve. I can settle into the house of my bones and find peace. But I won’t get well. Cognitive behavioral therapy and medication and being a Good Little Insane Person who’s properly ashamed of her illnesses and works to render them in fiction in ways that are palatable to sane readers won’t save me. And there’s nothing I or anyone else can do to make the sanes love me or tolerate me. There’s nothing gained by trying to make them accept me or love me, either. I’d rather take my chances with the Blacks.
There isn’t much for me to say on the individual characters that you didn’t say in your initial ask. Nobody we see who’s connected to that House seems to be okay. All of them are marked by tragedy and all of them are kind of nuts. The only thing I’d add is that it’s probably very likely that Walburga deteriorated over time as a result of personal stresses - the death of her brother, the death of her favorite son, the loss of her heir, the death of her husband. She suffered immensely, and she took it out on the world in warped and unhealthy ways. And that’s sadly typical of all of us who live inside brains full of knives. It doesn’t erase or justify her racism and eugenicist philosophy and abuse. She’s still responsible for all that. But being abusive and antagonistic doesn’t magically make her sane, either.
