Is Rowling's Incest 'Golden Thread' the Key to Her Cormoran Strike Finale?

Golden Threads

Last July, Nick Jeffery and I put together a month long review of Rowling’s work in celebration of her 60th birthday, a Kanreki party. Every day we posted conversations about each of Rowling’s works with Nick discussing a ‘Lake’ point, something biographical or bibliographical, and me talking about a ‘Shed’ quality of the work, the author’s traditional tools, artistry, and meaning.

That worked great for about twenty days. Then we ran out of books. What to do for the remaining days of the month?

We decided to talk about Golden Threads, the plot points, themes, and twists that run through everything Rowling has written. We started out with a survey of the fifteen-plus already identified by Rowling Re-readers and Fourth Generation types (see here and here) and then with more in depth looks at the ones that were controversial or more difficult to see. We closed off the month with the ‘Lost Child’ Golden Thread and the possibility that Rowling’s inspiration for the Harry Potter series was the trauma of pre-natal infanticide (‘abortion’).

As disturbing as that Golden Thread was to many Rowling fans and Feminist Gate Keepers, there was another third-rail string we didn’t discuss, namely, the plot point of incest that readers encounter again and again in the Potter and Strike series as well as the stand-alone stories.

Incest as Golden Thread

Nick and I discuss the Incest Golden Thread on the fly in the conversation above about Strike-Ellacott fandom theories about Sleep Tight, Evangeline and the series finale. Here are some written references if you want to review them by looking at the books in question on your shelf.

* Harry Potter

The foundation crime of the Hogwarts Saga is the abuse of Merope Gaunt by her father Marvolo and her brother Morfin. The abuse in question in this children’s book series is not explicitly sexual. As with the abuse of Ariana Dumbledore by the Muggle boys, however, that Merope’s father and brother violated her is there between the lines; her trauma is so great that she loses her capacity for magic (as she does after her Riddle lover leaves her) and the family does not send her to Hogwarts lest their shameful secret be revealed.

No broken Merope, no Lord Voldemort, no Potter family murder and orphan Harry — no series. Though the Saga’s foundation crime, the Gaunt family’s abuse of its only young woman, is not revealed until Order of the Phoenix, it is the tragedy on which all the core conflicts of the septology are built.

* Casual Vacancy

Stuart ‘Fats’ Wall is the adopted son of Tessa and Colin Wall. A teenager in Vacancy, he and Krystall Wheedon are the star-crossed lovers around whose choices and behaviors the ensemble drama largely turn. Fats at the end of the book claims responsibility for all the Ghost of Barry Fairbrother posts by means of which the secrets of Padford citizens are spilled.