Dolores Umbridge novell

Synpunkter av J.K. Rowling

Once, long ago, I took instruction in certain skill or subject (I am being vague as vague can be, for reasons that are about to become obvious), and in doing so, came inte contact with the teacher or instructor whom I disliked intensely on sight.

The woman in question returned my antipathy with interest. Why we took against each other so instantly, heartily and (on my side, at least) irrationally, I honestly cannot say. What sticks in my mind is her pronounced taste for twee accessories. I particularly recall a tiny little plastic bow slide, which would have been appropriate to a girl of three, as though it was some kind of repellant physical growth. She was quite a stocky woman, and not in the first flush of youth, and her tendency to wear frills where (I felt) frills had no business to be, and to carry undersized handbags, agains as though they had been borrowed from a child’s dressing-up box, jarred, I felt, with a personality that I found the reverse of sweet, innocent and ingenuous.

I am always a little wary when talking about these kinds of sources of inspiration, because it is infuriating to hear yourself misinterpreted in ways that can cause other people a great deal of hurt. This woman was NOT the real Dolores Umbridge’. She did not like a toad, she was never sadistic or vicious to me or anyone else, and I never heard her express a single view in common with Umbridge (indeed, I never knew her well enough to know much about her views or preferences, which makes my dislike of her even less justifiable). However, it is true to say that I borrowed from her, then grossly exaggerated, a taste for the sickly sweet and girlish in dress, and it was the tiny ornament on Dolores Umbridge’s head.

I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world. I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fluffy kitties: she was the mos bigoted, spiteful champion of the death penalty with whom it has ever been my misfortune to share a kettle. A love of all things saccharine often seems present where there is a lack of real warmth or charity.

So Dolores, who is one of the characters from whom I feel lures dislike, became an amalgam of traits taken from these, and a variety of sources. Her desire to control, to punish and to inflict pain, all in the name of law and order, are, I think, every bit as reprehensible as Lord Voldemort’s unvarnished espousal of evil.

Umbridge’s names were carefully chosen. ’Dolores means sorrow, something she undoubtedly inflicts on all around her. ’Umbridge’ is a play un ’umbrage’ from the British expression ”to take umbrage”, meaning offense. Dolores is offended by any challenge to her limited world-view; I felt her surname convoyed the pettiness rigidity of her character. It is harder to explain ’Jane’; it simply felt rather smug and neat between her other two names.


Mr.Lupin , hermioneemma. Ifall ni ville läsa hur J.K. Rowling kom på Umbrige.