Happily ever after for Hermione and Ron doesn’t mean heartbreak for Potter fans

So J K Rowling is having second thoughts about pairing off Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter.
She says that it would never work and she ought to have allowed Hermione to marry Harry, but
didn’t as she followed some “wish fulfilment” of her own – although she fears it might “break
the hearts” of her readers to learn this.

Really? What exactly is going to break our hearts? If we’re talking about plot credibility, what
happened to the suggestion that Harry would die in a final self-sacrificing battle with Voldemort
– wasn’t that the point of all that “one cannot live if the other dies” stuff? Had Rowling stuck to
that plot-line Hermione and Ron could have married each other as an act of mutual consolation
and a way to perpetuate Harry through their abiding partnership. I bet the first child would have
been christened Harry, or maybe Harriet, given Rowling’s love of a wry joke.

Why tell us the Hermione/Ron match is “wish fulfilment” at all? This is surely no surprise to her
readership, the majority of whom are far more likely to relate to being the hapless sibling of
cool older brothers and bright younger sisters, than the Chosen One, regardless of whether we
are male or female. It’s not just Rowling’s wish that is fulfilled then, despite the suggestion that
the will of the narrative is to pair Hermione and Harry.

But enough of discussing characters as if they were real people. What is possibly more
interesting here is what this interview implies about the continuing power of the readership
over the author; or the fans over the writer.

Rowling’s comment reveals a split between readerly heart – all those who want the Rons of this
world to get their girls – and the authorial head that follows the narrative line which makes
Hermione and Harry the obvious pair. The heartbreak is thus the result of telling her readership,
what they, like her, already knew: with Harry still alive, Ron and Hermione’s marriage defies the
plot.
It’s a quandary – does an author follow their head and the plotline, or acknowledge the
heartfelt power of their readers? There are literary precedents here which might have helped
Rowling out as we enter a longstanding literary tradition of endings being changed or plots
being altered for fear of what the readers would say.

Think of Charlotte Brontë blurring the end of Villette so that it is no longer explicit that M. Paul
dies at sea, leaving a Lucy Snowe who is not entirely unhappy with that outcome. Or consider
Great Expectations. In the original ending (now thankfully persevered in Angus Calder’s Penguin
edition and Rosenberg’s Norton Critical edition), Pip ends neither married nor likely to be,
having discovered that the much despised Joe has had the wit to marry Biddy when Pip himself
did not.

The final encounter with Estella is likewise sobering as it presents an Estella now safely married
to a country doctor, while Pip himself is accompanied by a young Pip who is not his son, but
Joe’s. Estella assumes the boy for Pip’s and thus the novel ends with a mistaken assumption, just
as it has been dominated by one throughout.

It’s a great ending, but not the one that the public desired, so Dickens replaced it with the
promise of Pip and Estella uniting, although, like Brontë, was compelled to retain the hint of his
original intention in the shadow that Pip as narrator does not see: “I saw no shadow of another
parting from her.”

So it seems Rowling differs not in bowing to the inner wish fulfilment, or in fearing to break the
hearts of her readers, but in not retaining a suggestion of the alternative for those who prefer a
sense of realism in their romantic endings. Ron gets his girl, but we all know it’s just not going to
be as good as he hoped.

Perhaps his literary predecessor is not Pip but Thackeray’s faithful Dobbin, who finally gets his
girl in Vanity Fair, but who also, thankfully, sees through the shallow doll that is Amelia.

George Bernard Shaw knew that Dickens’s original ending for Great Expectations was the better
one, but he also thought that the eventual one was “though psychologically wrong… artistically
much more congruous than the original”. Demonstrably, Shaw was also an incorrigible
sentimentalist and it is this sentimentality on the part of reader and author alike that shines
through Rowlings’s interview. Hermione wouldn’t need counselling to cope with being married
to Ron, she’d just need to be a real person in an actual marriage. Fortunately for her, she’s a
fictional construct at the end of a book. She doesn’t need counselling, she’s got closure.

So never mind breaking our hearts, Rowling, just cut the cackle and let the books be. Sometimes
the readers might be right and you could bear to leave them in possession of the ending,
without troubling them with notions of authorial wish-fulfilment. We’ll work it out, and, like
you, we may even change our minds.