Think about the night that he makes the Quidditch team. Hermione is in one corner of the room sleeping while everyone else is celebrating. Later Harry comes in after his detention with Dolores, talks with Hermione and says he’s going to bed and to tell Ron for him. Hermione then replies with, “Oh no,” said Hermione looking relieved, “if you’re going that means I can go without being rude too, I’m absolutely exhausted and I want to make some more hats tomorrow….” (Detention with Dolores, p. 278 Scholastic edition.)
If Hermione wanted to get together with Ron, don’t you think she’d pour herself some strong coffee and force herself to stay awake for his sake? A night that he’s flushed with excitement? A night that he might just give her a swooping hug and well, who knows what else might happen?
And we know that Hermione was willing to stay up late to help Harry learn Summoning Charms. Why couldn’t she do the same for Ron when he was the center of attention? Especially if she wants a romantic relationship with him to blossom?
Several R/Hr supporters replied to that line of logic with explanations as to why Hermione was dozing off. They used the excuse of her being up so late the night before, in a warm room after drinking butterbeer, etc. They were making excuses for her.
I would say that this might be an adequate explanation if we were talking about a real person and not a literary character. Real life exhaustion is irrelevant when discussing dramatic choices made by writers. Because exhaustion is something deliberately chosen by the author to demonstrate something regarding the character to the readers. It is our responsibility to try and understand exactly what it was meant for Hermione to be tired on that night in particular and not be actively participating in the revelry.
It reminded me of one of my favorite books Audition by Michael Shurtleff.
page 42
Many times when I ask an actor what his goal is in a scene, he will tell me, “I want to get away from this person. I want to run out of this room.”
I then ask, “Why don’t you run? What keeps you there?” The answer to these questions is what makes the actor able to function potently in the scene. Wanting to run away has the actor edging toward the door; he is virtually offstage for all the emotional commitment he gives a scene if that is his goal. And so often it is!
…
In Checkhov – in many plays – a character will claim, “I am bored,” but an actor cannot play boredom or he will be boring. He must find what it is the character wants instead of the boring condition he’s in, and he must fight for that. I use the word fight because the actor must find the strongest, most positive goal possible. Nothing else will do.
Tiredness, like headaches or drunkenness is used to by playwrights and novelists for certain dramatic purposes. Michael Shurtleff also wrote:
page 159
There is only one reason why anyone drinks in a play: to release inhibitions, to be able to say and do things he was normally afraid to do, too repressed to do, too considerate or cowardly to say, too polite or fearful to risk. Have a few drinks and all this can come pouring out, once the blocks are down and the dam has broken.
…
Actors tend to use drinking negatively. It’s important to find the positive: allow drinking to heighten the emotional needs, to free you to express deeply-buried feelings. Not to escape from relationship, but to pursue it. Not to become vague and fuzzy about the world and whoever is in it with you, but to seek confrontation, to fight for what you want in ways normally denied you. Not to withdraw from your scene partner, but to seek in a richer, more needful way, warmth, camaraderie, love.
In Anton Chekhov’s famous play, The Three Sisters we see Masha dressed all in black to illustrate her depression and unhappiness with her marriage and she is perpetually bored, Irina is perpetually tired, and Olga suffers from perpetual headaches. All of these characteristics are used to demonstrate how their living in a provincial town with no culture is draining their very life from them. They spend the entire play dreaming of the day when they will return to Moscow, the city of their birth and childhood.
With this in mind, saying that Hermione is tired because she didn’t get enough sleep simply isn’t good enough. Nope. If she wanted to, she’d force herself to stay awake. We saw in OotP that she drinks coffee, so that is why I said she should have poured herself a strong cup of coffee and forced herself to stay awake. She’d do that if she needed to study for a final and wanted to go over a few hundred more pages of notes, why wouldn’t she be willing to do the same for Ron? (That is if she cared for him in that way.)
Instead it appears more likely that the character of Hermione had stayed in the common room because she was more interested in waiting up for Harry to return from his detention than she was in celebrating Ron’s good news. After Harry had woken her up and told her all about Umbridge and the funny feeling he got as that vile woman touched him, Hermione was no longer yawning or looking bleary-eyed. It seemed like she was refreshed after her power nap. In fact, her face was shining with glee as she discussed something that was important to her: trying to liberate the Hogwarts house-elves by knitting her way to their freedom. This is ostensibly why she was tired, that she was so excited to free them that she would stay up late on a school night at the beginning of the year to try and make as many hats as possible. As if she didn’t have ten months to try and free them all.
She was excited at the prospect of sharing this direct action crusade with Harry and tried to subtly invite him to spend time with her the next day doing extra-curricular activities. His polite rejection of the offer to knit with her (and he was polite enough to say “not tomorrow. I’ve got loads of homework to do…”) resulted in her looking slightly disappointed. She obviously wouldn’t have asked Ron for his help as he made it crystal clear that he disapproved of her plan and disparaged her skills at knitting by calling her elf hats “woolly bladders.” To me this demonstrates a further divergence of Ron and Hermione’s interests. She consistently demonstrates in OotP that she is committed to improving the lot of house-elves while Ron takes every opportunity to ridicule her interest and her efforts.
Then when Harry said “I’m going to bed. Tell Ron for me, will you?” Hermione looked relieved at the thought that now she could also go to bed. It was at this point in the conversation that she brought up the subject of house-elves and her face shone with glee and then turned to slight disappointment when Harry declined her invitation to join her in knitting the next day. To recap the stated emotional range in a small span of time: she went from being asleep, to bleary-eyed, to alarmed, to relieved, to gleeful to disappointment. It seems to me that she was fully awake after all that shifting of emotional states and should have stayed at the party, especially since Ron clearly wanted her to be there at the party celebrating with him. This was demonstrated by Ron looking around the room for Hermione when Harry arrived back in the Gryffindor common room and “looking slightly put out” when he saw that she was asleep.
All this put together leads me to the conclusion that Hermione was more interested in waiting up for Harry and to talk with him after his detention, than she was in celebrating Ron’s being named to the Quidditch team. She could have been there for Ron, but she couldn’t muster the energy or will to do so. Why? Why is she not there for Ron in one of his first hours of glory? It was Ron’s own personal glory, something that for once was not reflected fame due to his friendship with Harry.
And if, Hermione was frustrated with Ron’s inability to make a forward move and she was looking for opportunities where something could happen between them, than that evening in question would have been a prime candidate. The past summer at 12 Grimmauld Place they were surrounded by Ron’s relatives, creepy and malevolent magical forces, etc., which would not very conducive to romance. But a night where Ron is excited and jubilant and wouldn’t want to go to bed because then “his night” would be over…well, that should have been a prime opportunity for Hermione if she wanted something to happen. And it probably wouldn’t matter about not having enough sleep the night before, because she’d have been too excited to sleep. Thoughts would be running through her mind such as: “Will this be the night?” “How can I contrive it so that Ron and I are alone?” “Eeep, what if it is tonight? What then?” Those thoughts alone should have been enough to keep her wide-awake.
Hermione should have been there for Ron. She should have been there even if he was just a good friend and she should have really been there if she wanted to be more than just friends with him. Since she did not put up the effort to be there for Ron, the question I’ve asked myself is what were we supposed to derive from this? The answer I came up with is that JKR was trying to show us subtly that Hermione was trying to avoid having Ron kiss her in all of his excitement that night. A kiss that might start as a “I’m so excited” kiss but then might with a look of expectation on his face might be searching for more. Much more. And then well, things would change between them.
And yes, due to their shared prefect duties, Ron and Hermione did spend time together without Harry, but that would be under circumstances that might easily lend themselves to being properly inhibited from discussing “matters of the heart.” (As in, he wouldn’t have such a thing as an adrenaline rush or even weak butterbeer that might lessen his inhibitions and do exactly what Shurtleff described alcohol being used as a dramatic device.)
There is another reason that I think Hermione is not frustrated with Ron, but rather is trying to avoid his romantic intentions. That has to do with the deliberate ambiguity surrounding her relationship with Viktor. JKR allowed for Harry to clarify to people in GoF that Hermione was not his girlfriend, but there is nothing in OotP to similarly clarify the status of Hermione’s relationship with Viktor.
I assume that Hermione was spirited away to Number 12 Grimmauld Place as soon as the Fidelius Charm was performed in order to protect her from becoming a hostage by Death Eaters wanting to “get to Harry” by attacking those close to him. This is the same reason I feel that the Weasleys were not at the Burrow over the summer. So that means that I do not think that Hermione had time to visit Viktor in Bulgaria, regardless of whether or not she had accepted his invitation in GoF. (Which of course we are still kept in the dark about that detail as well.)
If Hermione wanted to get together with Ron and was willing to challenge him on that point (which is the implication that many R/Hr’s have drawn from the parting shot of the Yule Ball argument), then it would be more logical for that character to make it clear that she is “available” for a romantic relationship. Instead JKR keeps the Viktor angle deliberately vague. It could have been clarified with ease and without interrupting the narrative flow. Here is one relevant passage:
Scholastic edition, p 332
“You’re not still in contact with him, are you?”
“So what if I am?” said Hermione coolly, though her face was a little pink. “I can have a pen pal if I –”
“He didn’t only want to be your pen pal,” said Ron accusingly.
Hermione shook her head exasperatedly and, ignoring Ron, who was continuing to watch her, said to Harry, “Well, what do you think? Will you teach us?”
If the authorial intent is to have Hermione drop signals to Ron that she like likes him, why didn’t she have Hermione respond with something like:
“Yeah, Viktor’s a nice guy, but…he’s not my type,” she shrugged and then turned back to Harry. “Well, what do you think? Will you teach us?”
Now that would have clarified her feelings towards Viktor and it would have opened up a whole big world of possibilities, like for instance – what is her type?
But no, instead we have Hermione deflecting the Viktor issue without letting us know whether or not she “is taken.” It seems like she is using Viktor as a smokescreen to Ron in order to keep his attentions towards her at bay.
I also wonder about the long letter that Hermione was writing to Viktor in the scene where Harry’s First Kiss is discussed. This strikes me as really odd. Hermione is writing a letter to Viktor, a long letter, and she knows full well about the dangers of owl post being monitored by Hogwarts Inquisitorial staff as well as the risk of being intercepted by dark wizards. This is after she wrote cryptic short notes to Harry and warned him about writing to Sirius and after Hedwig was attacked by Umbridge’s goons. So why would JKR have Hermione write a lengthy and detailed letter to anyone? What could be in that long missive? Her thoughts about the literary merits of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus?
She certainly wouldn’t be detailing anything about what was really going on inside Hogwarts, nor anything about Harry. So maybe it was just a long “Dear Viktor” letter that detailed why she didn’t want to have any closer of a relationship with him. At least that is the conclusion that I came away with because of the conspicuous absence of anything from him on Valentine’s day. No flowers, no candy, not even a simple card. And we know that Hermione did get mail on that day, a letter from Rita Skeeter. There was no sign of disappointment that she didn’t get anything from Viktor, but she was eager to get Skeeter’s reply.
That leads me to think that Hermione/Viktor are not a romantic couple, but that Ron is not sure about this and his attempt at giving her a romantic gift at Christmas does not elicit any form of encouragement from Hermione.
As to why Hermione would not be trying to let Harry know that she was available? That would be because she realizes that he does not currently think of her in that way. She knows that he fancies Cho and that he had fancied her for a long time. I do not however believe in the interpretation that has been suggested by some R/Hr supporters that Hermione was actively trying to play matchmaker with Harry and Cho. Not hardly.
One R/Hr supporter asked me to discuss why Hermione hadn’t stayed at the celebration after the Gryffindor win over Ravenclaw back in PoA.
Gryffindor vs. Ravenclaw, Scholastic pb, p. 264
Only one person wasn't joining in the festivities. Hermione, incredibly, was sitting in a corner, attempting to read an enormous book entitled Home Life and Social Habits of British Muggles. Harry broke away from the table where Fred and George had started juggling butterbeer bottles and went over to her.
"Did you even come to the match?" he asked her.
"Of course I did," said Hermione in a strangely high-pitched voice, not looking up. "And I'm very glad we won, and I think you did really well, but I need to read this by Monday."
"Come on, Hermione, come and have some food," Harry said, looking over at Ron and wondering whether he was in a good enough mood to bury the hatchet.
"I can't, Harry. I've still got four hundred and twenty-two pages to read!" said Hermione, now sounding slightly hysterical. "Anyway..." She glanced over at Ron too. "He doesn't want me to join in."
There was no arguing with this, as Ron chose that moment to say loudly, "If Scabbers hadn't just been eaten, he could have had some of those Fudge Flies. He used to really like them --"
Hermione burst into tears. Before Harry could say or do anything, she tucked the enormous book under her arm, and, still sobbing, ran toward the staircase to the girls' dormitories and out of sight.
The difference between the two scenes is pretty simple. That PoA scene is there to demonstrate that the character of Hermione is under tremendous pressure with her impossible class schedule, but that she still took the time to attend a Quidditch match to support Harry. Even though there had not been any resolution yet in the Cat/Rat fight. There were lines in the text that suggested that Harry had tried to play mediator between the Ron and Hermione, but that it didn’t work.
Even though the Trio had not reconciled all of their petty differences (Broomstick, Cat/Rat), Hermione as a character was still loyal to her friend Harry and was offended that Harry had to ask whether or not she came to the match, as if he doubted whether or not she supported him.
She left the party that night not because she didn’t want to celebrate with Harry, but because of the immense pressure she was under with her homework, plus the fact that Ron deliberately said something cruel in her direction to reinforce her belief that she was not wanted there. These things together caused her to have an emotional breakdown and to Harry asking Ron “Can’t you give her a break?”
So even though Harry would have been in a good mood that night flush from his victory, Hermione’s character was definitely not in the mood for love simply because he was near her.
Back to Hermione not encouraging Ron to make the move to Cross the Rubicon romantically with her. There is the evidence of The Perfume. That is a very intimate gift for a boy to give to a girl. Seriously, it demonstrates a lot. If Hermione wanted to give Ron a signal that she really liked that kind of gift from him, she could have done ever so much more than she did. For starters, she could have said, “Thank you for the perfume, Ron. That was very thoughtful of you.” This would have left out any comment about whether or not she even liked the scent. Then if she wanted to utilize The Great Opportunity Provided, she could have stretched out her arm for him to smell it on her or alternately taken her arm and slowly moved her nose from the crook of her elbow to her wrist and demonstrated how wonderful it smelled. Either method would have driven any male crazy to see that, even if the perfume was malodorous to begin with.
One aspect that I do find interesting an observation made by Briarswt that it does not appear that Hermione ever used that perfume. Harry as imperfect narrator is far from perfect at noticing things, but JKR has used him to point out various smells throughout the series. Things that spring to mind include Mrs. Figg’s cabbage smelling living room, the Apothecary in Diagon alley that smelled of rotten eggs and cabbages, the smell of baking pumpkin on Hallowe’en, and the borrowed tent at the QWC that had the odor of multiple cats. I think that the lack of commentary on Harry’s part as to what the perfume actually smelled like indicates that Hermione did not try it on. Because otherwise, I would expect some description other than her “unusual” comment. Some form of association, like for example: fresh rain, floral, sickly sweet, grapes, citrus, freshly mown grass, leather, pickles, burning tires, eau de barnyard, etc., etc. Something. If we had been given some indication of what it smelled like – good or bad – then it would indicate that Hermione had actually tried out her gift.
Can we come to some agreement here that in order to really get a sense of cologne that you must do more than sniff the contents from the bottle? To truly know its scent you need to try it out on your own skin. That is because people’s body chemistries react differently with different perfumes and colognes. The same perfume may smell wonderful on one person, but the next one who tries it winds up smelling horrible. Since it does not appear that Hermione used the perfume, we should ask ourselves, ‘why didn’t she?’
It seems that everyone is in agreement that a gift of perfume from a boy to a girl signifies a personal and romantic gift, regardless of whether the scent is good or not. To me that signifies that we are once again to draw the conclusion of R->Hr. Then the question becomes, how is Hermione’s response to be interpreted by the reader? The observation that she hasn’t used the perfume that day or probably any other day is telling. She doesn’t like the gift and she doesn’t use the gift. That could be because the scent is not “unusual” but stinky instead. Then again, it may also be as simple as Hermione doesn’t like to wear perfume at all. As in it’s not her style. But we can only speculate on this as to what the real reason(s) may be.
However, even if the smell were horrible, she still should have given Ron a nicer thank you than she had. Consider in Real Life when someone gives you a bum gift. Think hideous neckties, think ugly sweaters, think “I Wouldn’t Be Caught Dead Wearing That” kind of reaction when you open a gift from a relative of yours. If you care about someone’s feelings you do not make any value judgment associated with the gift. If you are polite, you turn to the relative who is looking at you with a beaming look on their face anxiously awaiting your reaction and you say, “Thank you very much for the (_____ fill in the blank.) That was thoughtful of you.” While internally you are thinking of just who you could wrap it up and give it to as a gag gift, or if could return or exchange this hideous monstrosity without a receipt.
If Hermione truly cares about Ron’s feelings and didn’t want to hurt him by showing any disrespect towards his romantic gift giving gesture, she should have said, “Thank you for the perfume, Ron. That was very thoughtful of you.” He wouldn’t know if she liked it or not. Instead, she made a comment that it smelled "really unusual.”
That statement reminds me of people describing women as having “good personalities” which is almost universally interpreted by men to mean that they are ugly. Whereas, Hermione’s reaction to Harry’s gift was (as has been repeatedly mentioned by H/Hr’s), in a more positive light.
I guess these are just two examples of Lost Opportunities for R/Hr getting together. And those were actions that Hermione made that could have been different. Which leads me to think that she might be trying to avoid having Ron "Cross the Rubicon" because she doesn’t want to have to crush his heart since she doesn’t feel that way about him.
And then, we have something that shows that Hermione really doesn’t care about Ron’s feelings at all. For someone who could potentially be holding a big flame for him, why doesn’t she care one whit about his problems with his athleticism?
In the chapter Seen and Unforeseen, Scholastic p. 574 we see Harry and the twins discussing the dismal shape that the Gryffindor Quidditch team is in.
“That’s the trouble with Quidditch,” said Hermione absentmindedly, once again bent over her Rune translation, “it creates all this bad feeling and tension between the Houses.”
She looked up to find her copy of Spellman’s Syllabary and caught Fred, George, and Harry looking at her with expressions of mingled disgust and incredulity on their faces.
“Well, it does!” she said impatiently. “It’s only a game, isn’t it?”
“Hermione,” said Harry, shaking his head, “you’re good on feelings and stuff, but you just don’t understand about Quidditch.”
“Maybe not,” she said darkly, returning to her translation again, “but at least my happiness doesn’t depend on Ron’s goalkeeping ability.” emphasis mine.
Her happiness is not dependent upon Ron’s success or failure as a Quidditch player. It implies to me that her happiness is not dependent upon Ron at all.
And remember, this is from the same girl who used to sit in the stands and watch Harry practice Quidditch. She was there providing moral support for him, but now she's not showing the same level of interest or emotion for Ron. It’s as if she couldn’t care less whether or not Ron is about to embarrass himself in front of the whole school by being a human sieve.
Ouch. You know, it’s a good thing that Ron didn’t hear her say that. It would probably break his heart. Poor guy. He deserves someone who really cares about things that are important to him.
(Cue Luna from offstage with the large Lion hat!)
ROOOAAAR!
Athena