~~ fair flower, indeed.

One of the things which became the most obvious to me while reading the end of OoTP was that Rowling was setting up the eventual confrontation between Harry & Voldemort as being a struggle between inhumanity (the rejection of love and the knowledge of that which is worse than death, which is what Tom Riddle had done, according to Dumbledore) and, of course, (Harry's) humanity. Harry isn't ready to really be the opposite of Tom Riddle quite yet-- that's obviously a work in progress-- but he has his mother's love inside him just as he has Voldemort's feelings inside him too (of all things). It's ironic, naturally, that Harry's in touch with the aspect of Voldemort that Tom Riddle had claimed to reject.

The subject of how JKR defines love came up in malafede's post on the nature of evil (in the Potterverse & elsewhere), and it occurred to me that this is a central question, isn't it? And of course any sort of answer involves a great amount of projection and guessing on my part (I like to call it intuition, but), since the books aren't finished. Even so, as usual, I have my ideas :>

I think ideally, Rowling defines Love as being something like Lily-- in that I think Lily's pretty close to her idea of a Mary Sue. So far, Lily has three aspects-- Pensieve!Lily, James'-girlfriend!Lily and Harry's-mum!Lily. I think they stand for the 3 different kinds of 'love' and/or positive relationship to others (the Other) in Rowling's mind.

Lily can also be defined by her parallels to Hermione (Muggle-born, Gryffindor, intelligent yet righteous), her contrast with Narcissa (both flower-named: purity vs. selfishness; wife of the Gryffindor poster-boy vs. the Slytherin; hot vs. cold) and her complex relationship to Molly. Harry can easily been seen as Molly's adopted son, and the Weasleys all share Lily's coloring, and Ginny had a crush on Harry in a looking-up-to sort of way which she seemed to get over-- really, it seems like Molly is equivalent to Lily's 'mother' aspect-- bossy and loud yet very giving. But she's not as complex because Lily has other important aspects in the text, I think, which can serve as part of JKR's commentary on love.

( I suppose this makes it a Lily post. )