Head, Heart, Hand

Head, Heart, Hand
An essay on Trio dynamic

J.K. Rowling once said that Harry needs Hermione badly. This is undoubtedly true. But Harry also needs Ron. The Trio often work as a single united whole - thus we prefer to use the singular term 'Trio', implying a united plural, rather than the plural 'Harry, Hermione and Ron'.

However, just as your head, hand and heart don't draw lots on whose turn it is to pump the blood today, the members of the Trio don't just do things willy-nilly. Each have their own established role to play. There is an old metaphor about the three essential aspects which make up a person - their head, their hand and their heart. If we consider the Trio as a single body, we can convey these roles onto its member parts: Hermione is Head, Ron is Heart, and Harry is Hand.

To clarify, the metaphor is romanticised. By head, we mean the cognitive brain. Hand is properly not much more than a chunk of meat and bone by which the brain carries things out - which we see as representing the actual action itself. Heart as always represents emotion, in actuality performed by a subset of the brain and various chemicals, but Head, Heart and Hormones offers the distressing thought of Ron suffering from PMS. What Head, Heart, and Hand really stand for are the less alliterative Reason/Rationalisation, Emotion and Action. It is noticeable that these roles are far more clearly established in the first three books, which are not so focussed on plot progression.

Hermione's role is most blatantly defined within the canon. The majority of her character traits are extrapolations of what is expected from her role: she is studious, efficacious, conscientious, bossy, self-conscious, and somewhat straight-laced. She attempts to rationalise things, and (as it is often complained) is forever explaining to her two best friends. It is absolutely unmistakeable that Hermione is the brains of this operation, and we are very rarely allowed to forget that Hermione is a thinker - her smarts extrapolate what is hidden beyond Fluffy in PS/SS, what's attacking students in CoS, the secret of Lupin's identity in PoA, and so on. Hermione is no Heart - although she shows great compassion and viciousness at times, she struggles enormously with these irrational emotions - as evidenced by her apparent on-going inability to address her feelings towards Ron, and her failed attempts at rationalising 'how girls feel' to Ron and Harry during GoF and OotP.

Harry's role is similarly clear. For all his virtues, Harry is not a great mind - he has no great love for school work or puzzles - and the better part of ten years stuck in a dingy wardrobe has left him emotionally stifled. What he does excel at is rushing in - sometimes before Hermione can properly convey the information that solves the problem. We are told that Harry is a powerful wizard - he's no good at theory, as is proven by his utter failure to understand Occlumency as Snape attempts to teach it by explaining how it works, but when gets the feel for a spell he can really do it, as with the Patronus Charm. He doesn't ever truly understand what he's doing, because Lupin shows him the what and not the how or why. Harry is the person who has the ability to make decisions in a split second. Where both Hermione and Ron will be paralysed by fear, Harry jumps in and takes the initiative. Aside from the Prophecy, it is for this that Dumbledore picks Harry out. He has the makings of a general, someone who can apply the information and intuition they have and turn it into a striking blow.

Here too is the key to which subjects Harry does and doesn't like: Divination and History of Magic are out because they're inactive, theory- and thinking-based subjects, while Care of Magical Creatures and Quidditch are in because they are simply active. Defence Against the Dark Arts hangs in the balance based on how it is taught - under Moody and Lupin in particular Harry enjoys it, because they are hands-on teachers, whereas Umbridge's odious character is re-enforced by the fact that she teaches Harry's favourite subject in an way that is overwhelming unappealing to our protagonist. Charms and Potions hang in the balance as mixtures of both action and theory - with Snape's theoretical guidance in HBP, Harry excels at the action of potion-making.

Ron's role is the least defined of the three. To say that he falls into it by default is not entirely true. Certainly Ron is not the Head - it is absolutely definite that Ron dislikes academia and theory in all its forms. Nor is he particularly associated with action, although it is not unknown. To take Quidditch as an example: Rational Head Hermione cannot understand it at all. Active Hand Harry adores it and plays it with vigour. Emotional Heart Ron spends most of the books as an active supporter (and he, not Harry, follows the professional Quidditch league closely) and casual player, but in the fifth and sixth books he does step up into an active role, although he is not necessarily very good at it. What is clear is that Ron is the most overtly emotionally volatile of the Trio. A spat between Harry and Hermione is often an impermanent thing, but divides between Ron and Hermione & Ron and Harry are often far more festering wounds - Hermione struggles to reunite Ron and Harry during GoF, while it is Harry's turn to try and reconcile Hermione and Ron in HBP, with barely any success. Unlike the other two characters, Ron uses only his emotions as a guide to what he should do and think, when Harry and Hermione cannot provide for him - he has very little personal ability to rationalise or to take initiative action, just as Hermione struggles with emotion and action and Harry with reason and emotion.

Ron is the emotional foundation of the Trio. Which is not to say that Harry and Hermione are without their own temperaments, but Ron's temperament is the one that we are shown, and the one which often leads the other two - and us. J.K. says that when she needs to tell the reader a fact, she uses Hermione and Dumbledore. When she needs to convey what our emotional reaction to something should be, she uses Ron - it is Ron who jumps up and down and tells us how horrible blood prejudice is, and Ron who tells Hermione 'whatever' with regards to SPEW, essentially telling us that this is Not Important.

The interaction that is implicit in these roles is established from the very first time they work together, to defeat the troll in PS/SS 10, although at this early stage the way in which they interact is not yet perfected. Harry immediately throws himself at the troll (action) without any guidance from Hermione, who is currently paralysed by fright, but has already had an effect on the situation with her studious nagging (reason) about Wingardium Leviosa earlier in the day, as has Ron due to his nasty comments which caused Hermione to run to the toilets in the first place (emotional manipulation). With this in the front of his mind, Ron is able to clobber the troll with its own club and save Harry from an imminent and early death.

The Devil's Snare scene later in PS/SS better affirms Ron and Hermione's relationship within the trio. Hermione's attentive mind allows her to identify the plant and its vital weakness, but Harry and Ron are both unable to act because they are restrained by the plant. Head Hermione struggles with carrying out her theoretical knowledge into an action, but Harry quickly prompts her ("So light a fire!"). Once they have been freed, Ron plays Mister Pep talk, praising Harry and chiding Hermione ("Lucky Harry doesn't lose his head in an crisis -- 'there's no wood,' honestly.").

These roles do not simply affect the way the Trio work together - the often-noted removal of either Ron or Hermione (or both) from the climactic sequence of each book occurs as a result of which of Heart and Head is still necessary. In PS/SS, once Ron's somewhat puzzling chess skills have been used to outwit McGonagall's giant chess set, he is no longer necessary and in fact an encumbrance, so he is disabled by the white queen. Hermione's reasoning is needed to solve Snape's riddle next, but afterwards only Harry is need to take action against Quirrelmort, so there is only enough potion to get Harry through.

In CoS, once Hermione has figured out the Mystery of the Basilisk in the Pipes, there is nothing more for her to reason out, while Ron is still necessary to remind Harry that it is Ginny, for whom he already has eeenteresting emotions, trapped dying in the chamber. Ron's wand is also necessary, to backfire and disable yet another Defence teacher (apparently fulfilling Voldemort's curse on the position - which, to be tangential for a second, does beg interesting questions about Snape's inordinate desire to take the position). To step outside the narrative stream, Hermione's presence in the Chamber was not allowed because, as the situation was explained to Hermione later on, there was nothing for her to question, whereas if she had experienced it first hand she would have started on a line of thinking that would have brought the Horcrux plot line into play before its time.

In PoA, Hermione's rationalisation is necessary to inform Harry that he can't possibly have seen his dad casting the Patronus, thereby prompting him to step forward and do it himself, but he does not need Ron's emotion support to conjure up the happy thoughts for the charm to work. The Triwizard Tournament is by definition an action-centred series of events, and it is noticeable that GoF contains some of the strongest divergences from the pattern of the Trio working as one. Here is subtle hinting that something is not quite right at Hogwarts - people other than Hermione are helping Harry with problems requiring reasoning, while Hermione is trying to explain emotions to Harry and Ron with an utter dearth of success. Then Harry has to fight Voldemort alone - we are given the very clear impression that any confrontation with Voldemort is a matter of action.

OotP is, to make a general statement, a bit complicated. Harry rejects Ron's emotion lead earlier in the book, and Hermione's later rational warning about rushing in to save Sirius - neither of which have spectacular results. Once again, we are leading up to a confrontation with Voldemort, so both Hermione and Ron are disabled. Ron rejects Hermione's reasoning and Harry's split-second intuition not to touch the brains for the emotional 'ooh, pretty!' reaction, which disabled him, while Hermione is injured in the battle at the Ministry - an event which is absolutely in Harry's domain. HBP offers yet another strange divergence. Both Hermione and Ron's roles are needed in HBP, but the characters themselves are in fact replaced by Dumbledore, who embodies all three aspects at once, thus enabling a Harry-Dumbledore expedition and, to a certain extent, allowing Harry to bumble along with the Half-Blood Prince's textbook, and the realisation of some progress in the ever-slow Ron/Hermione plot line.

Additionally, these roles perhaps offer an explanation for the common belief/fear that it is Ron, and not Hermione or Harry, that will be killed before the end of the series. Subconsciously, we do identify Ron as Heart, Harry as Hand, and Hermione as Head. A hand is ultimately expendable - we have two, after all, and we can manage well enough without one (particularly in the age of prosthetics), and we generally see our head as invulnerable, protected by the skull and generally not likely to be meddled with. In fact, people who are most afraid of having their head messed with are often considered 'strange' - recluses, conspiracy theorists and tin-hat wearers. It is emotional hurt that we fear most, and issues of the heart are where we tread lightest. Emotional hurt is most easily come by. Ron personifies emotion, and we transfer fear of emotional pain into fear of harm to him.

The very clear message at the heart of this is that the whole of the Trio is greater than the some of its parts. It should be clear by now that when Harry gets help with Rational Head matters which doesn't come from Hermione, alarm bells should be ringing - Moody's seemingly innocent aid in GoF and the mysteriously helpful textbook in HBP both turned out to be more sinister than suspected, although a plot to get Harry to Voldemort is slightly more dramatic than Draco's non-fatal wounding. Ron and Hermione's attempts to take action during OotP and HBP generally only got them hurt, rather than being either help or hindrance to Harry, but there is no guarantee that this will be the case in Book 7. And it is absolutely definite that you should never, ever take love advice from Hermione.

Ultimately, the Trio dynamic is going to be a central feature of Book Seven if J.K.R. holds true to her promise to send them off alone into the great unknown in search of Horcruces. With any luck, they will properly figure out the way they work themselves before they do something foolish and lose a member. Hopefully.