This is the third in a series of posts that detail the various Pregnancy Trap plot points that run through the work of J. K. Rowling from Harry Potter to Cormoran Strike. For the ‘Fourth Generation Rowling Studies’ context of this series, see the introduction to the first post in it, ‘Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Merope Gaunt.‘
In brief, each post in this series will explain the importance of the specific Pregnancy Trap being explored to the specific title in which it appears or to the series in question, will detail its textual appearance and what if anything Rowling has said about in her interviews, and will compare and contrast the Trap with others Rowling has used, i.e., what makes it a typical one and what makes it unique. At the conclusion of the series, I will be sending my summary and conclusions from it to HogwartsProfessor Substack subscribers.
I have chosen to start this series with those Pregnancy Traps that are foundational plot points in the book or series in which they appear. Merope Gaunt’s nightmare relationship, for example, with her abusive father and brother and her decision to trap Muggle charmster Thomas Riddle were the foundation crime and point of origin respectively for the Harry Potter novels. Rowling’s first post Potter piece was the stand-alone novel Casual Vacancy in which two women characters try to win a man by sexual favors, one of whom deploys a Pregnancy Trap intentionally in the story climax with tragic results. A third woman in Vacancy traps her husband with a child he does not want albeit through adoption not pregnancy and the trap is post nuptials not prior. See Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Krystal Weedon, Kay Bawden for the Casual Vacancy details.
In today’s entry for this series, I want to discuss the play Rowling didn’t write, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but which she helped plot and plan to some degree. The foundation crime, or, better, plot point of origin is the conception of Delphini ‘Diggory’ Riddle, the Augurey and the cursed child of the title. Was it a Pregnancy Trap? I think the parallels between Merope Gaunt and Bellatrix Lestrange in pursuit of their capture of Tom Riddles, Senior and Junior, respectively, suggest heavily that it was. Join me after the jump for that discussion!
Unlike the first two entries in this series, a discussion of a possible Pregnancy Trap in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has to repeatedly note that Jim Thorpe wrote this play, not Joanne Rowling Murray. Readers simply do not know what plot points and themes of the Time Turner tossed salad narrative are Thorp’s and which are Rowling’s. Having highlighted that (again), working on the assumption that Delphini’s story came from Rowling, in what sense was her conception a Pregnancy Trap and ‘So what?’
(1) The Importance of the Pregnancy Trap in Cursed Child
As Kayti Burt explored in her ‘Harry Potter: Who is the Cursed Child?‘ at Collider.com, it isn’t obvious, really, to whom who the title ‘Child’ refers. She makes reasonable arguments that Harry Potter, his youngest son Albus Severus, Scorpius Malfoy, as well as Delphini Riddle can be understood as the eponymous character, even that all children are “cursed” in some sense because every one of us comes into the world with flawed parents as guides.
I enjoyed that umbrella perspective and review for its inclusiveness and thematic universality but am skeptical that the authors were aiming for this kind of ambiguity. I suspect, which here means “I speculate sans evidence,” that Rowling’s aim with this play was to create closure for the Hogwarts Saga, a bookend to the tale beginning in the Gaunt household a la Vanity Fair, an ending more fleshed out and canonically fixed (?) than the one provided in the epilogue to Deathly Hallows. For that effect, the story needs a second Voldemort that the adult and father Harry Potter can duel and resolve all the issues he could not grasp as a younger man. Hence, ‘Child of Voldemort,’ Delphini.
To be a compelling ‘Heir of Riddle-Slytherine,’ though, she needs to have more in common with her biological father than genetic material. My view is that Delphini is a ‘cursed child’ in the way that Merope’s son was, namely, one conceived “coercively,” Rowling’s remarkable marker for a child born in unfortunate circumstances (see the Merope Gaunt post in this series for that interview comment), one raised without a father or with an abusive, negligent stand-in, and someone who never knew a mother’s selfless, sacrificial love, the author’s go-to story metaphor for the love of Christ in everything she writes (cf. Christmas Pig 5: The Blue Bunny and Rowling, Ring Writing, and Maternal Love). Delphini, raised by the nanny-for-hire Euphemia Rowle, checks these boxes — and Harry, Albus, and Scorpius do not.
But was the meeting (mating?) of Bellatrix Lestrange and Voldemort a proper Pregnancy Trap? Yes and no.
No, as presented at least, Bellatrix was not plotting to gain a husband by becoming pregnant, a ‘trap’ whose mechanism requires something like a conscience in the father or a person even being susceptible to social pressures. For all Bellatrix’s fascination with the Dark Lord, she couldn’t have been so naive as to think that her target would want to settle down with her as a head of family in a gingerbread house with a white picket fence. She was already married, for one thing, to another Death Eater and both the husband and wife, I think we’re meant to assume, were driven by hopes of the unparalleled honor and status among Pure Bloods of raising a child conceived with Volde-daddy.
Which isn’t a Pregnancy Trap of a desperation woman looking to capture a man as with the ones we have seen attempted by Merope Gaunt, Krystal Weedon, Tessa Walls, or even Kaye Bawden. It seems more like a trophy hunting expedition or venture.
Yes, the Bellatrix-Tom, Jr. union is a Pregnancy Trap, however, in the sense of it being a loveless conjugation pursued only for the sake of individual advantage. As Harry notes in ‘Cursed Child,’ Delphini is Voldemort’s relatively conventional but much more fixed attempt at immortality vis a vis simple reproduction, what he calls the Dark Lord’s “ultimate Horcrux.” For Bellatrix, the baby presumably was a secret trophy that would demonstrate forever and to everyone her singular status among Death Eaters, the mother of their Liege’s child. Neither the mother or the father cared enough about the child herself, of course, or its care, as evidenced by the fact that no mention is made of Delphini in the seven Potter novels (and what a different aspect it would give to the Molly Weasley-Bellatrix duel in Deathly Hallows if readers had known Lestrange was a mom…).
That ‘Trap,’ then, does not qualify as “coercive” in the sense of ‘forced’ or ‘manipulative’ but has the same yield with respect to the child in its not having been conceived in love or treasured as the fruit of that love.
As with the Harry Potter novels and Casual Vacancy, the Pregnancy Trap of Cursed Child, the loveless conception of Delphini, gives us the story’s beginning and end. The Augurey is the play’s villain and her bloodline and attempt to save her father is the great reveal and plot point of the play. She is the ‘Cursed Child’ of the title because she is in large part the substance and engine of the play’s conflicts.
(2) Textual Appearance of the Pregnancy Traps
Delphini is revealed as Voldemort’s daughter in the last scene of Act III in the play (pp 240-243) and is confirmed by Delphini’s testimony to Harry in the guise of Lord Thingy in Act IV, scene 11 (287).
(3) Compare and Contrast with Previous Rowling Pregnancy Traps
Again, among the Big Four Pregnancy Traps in the works of J. K. Rowling, the Cursed Child one has to be asterisked in the record books because she didn’t write the play. I find it credible, however, having noted that caveat once again, that Rowling was responsible for the Delphini Riddle storyline rather than Thorpe because it so neatly creates a bookend for the Merope Gaunt-Lord Voldemort storyline in a closing version in which Tom Riddle, Jr., plays the part of Tom Riddle, Sr., with similar results on his orphaned offspring. It has ring-resonance, which is a Rowling signature. It provides the closing of a circle with a mirror reflection that I believe were Rowling’s aim with this play.
I hope in this series of Pregnancy Trap posts to catalog the common qualities and differences between the various traps sprung by women to capture husbands in the works of J. K. Rowling. How does the Lestrange-Riddle trap compare with the ones we have seen already? Let’s review those we’ve discussed previously in Potter and Vacancy:
Merope-Riddle trap qualities: abused woman, clueless, disinterested, and self-important man, dishonest conception of child (Love Potion), coercive marriage, ‘divorce’ after father learns about trap, figurative and literal death of mother consequent to that break, love-less and consequently psychopathic child reflecting union of parents
Krystall Weedon trap qualities: abused woman, clueless, disinterested, and self-important adolescent, dishonest conception-attempt (no birth control), transformation of father-target ex post facto (a psychological death and rebirth), figurative and literal death of mother consequent to trap-event, death (and community apotheosis) of child associated with trap-event
Kay Bawden trap qualities (Brendan/Gaia): no information on state of mother beyond being a university girlfriend, father leaves mother and child, no transformation of mother it seems ex post facto as she works to entrap Gavin Hughes, daughter seems fairly well adjusted at least until her mother “uprooted” her to Padford
Tessa Wall trap qualities: chronically ill woman, mentally ill man, already married but childless, forced creation of family that ‘father’ does not want or welcome, figurative death of father (ultimate rebirth at child’s psychological death, being the target of a woman’s Pregnancy Trap), revelation of mother’s coercive maternity, psychological death and rebirth of child
The Cursed Child trap?
Lestrange-Riddle trap qualities: deranged and murderous mother, psychopathic father, both killed during Battle of Hogwarts in duels to the death with reverse-image doppelgangers, (presumed) calculated conception of child for the advantage of each parent individually, love-less and consequently psychopathic child reflecting non-union of parents and consequent raising in a foster home
The obvious match here is between the conception of Tom Riddle, Jr., and that of Delphini Riddle, his daughter.
On to the last of the Big Four Pregnancy Traps, the capture-by-Cormoran-conception of that Rocking Prune, Jonny Rokeby!
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