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I intend to examine Voldemort, or Tom Riddle, and his relationship with the idea of family. Family, of course, is a very broad subject. My intention is to narrow it down to a few subjects which we have evidence for: on the one hand, Voldemort's beliefs and feelings about the family as in lineage, his own and others', which occupy a large part of his attested actions and political ideology; and on the other hand, his relationships with his followers, in their role as substitute or acquired family and in his manipulation of their family relationships to control them.
A quick note on methodology and goals is necessary here. My interest is in describing Voldemort as he is portrayed within the world of the original seven book series. I will treat the books like testimony of a basically reliable point of view character, either Harry or in some chapters an impersonal narrator, and act as though they describe a coherent person, Voldemort. This means that I will assume Harry really sees and hears what he does on the page, although I may not accept his subjective judgments. Testimony that he hears secondhand (e.g., Dumbledore's descriptions of Tom Riddle's thoughts) I will treat as only as reliable as the character or their sources are in-universe.
I will not take into account the movies, extra canon like supplemental publications, or any author statements or interviews. I will not consider author intention at all. These are all perfectly valid means of understanding a character. But my goal here is to describe Voldemort as he exists in the books and not in the author's mind or the somewhat different project of the film adaptations. My conclusions are not meant as a judgment on portrayals in fanfic or "correct" characterization. Rather, understanding what takes place in the books is interesting in its own right and may help fan writers decide which details to incorporate (or not) when characterizing their own, distinct Voldemorts.
Methodology out of the way, by examining Voldemort's beliefs about family and relationships with his followers, I can demonstrate two things. One is that Dumbledore is incorrect or deliberately misleading in describing Voldemort as incapable of feeling or indeed understanding any human attachment (as in HBP 13). The other is that Voldemort has an uncompromising view of relationships with his followers in which total submission and self-abnegation are the only acceptable attitude to take towards him. If anything Dumbledore's descriptions seriously undersell the violence, capriciousness and sadism of these relationships.
While Voldemort's overall political strategy is not a focus of this essay, a few words on it are necessary, in part because a prevailing view (in and out of universe) of Voldemort as totally inhuman and detached from relationships is closely related to this political strategy.
Both the internal security measures of the Death Eater organization and their public-facing political strategy involve cultivating mystery, silence and fear. If this cultivated aura surrounds the organization and activities of the Death Eaters in general, the mystery, silence and fear surrounding Voldemort himself are many times stronger. We are introduced to these aspects of Voldemort's personal reputation and political strategy in our first detailed description of the war, when Hagrid explains how Harry's parents died (PS 4). Hagrid first focuses on Voldemort himself, whose name he refuses to say several times before relenting. Hagrid then transitions to the effects of the secrecy of the Death Eater organization: no one knew who to trust and people were afraid to oppose him because they did not know who his supporters were and were afraid of terrible retaliation. These elements are repeated, first by later descriptions of the war given by Sirius (GoF 27), and by the Death Eater trials Harry views, where Karkaroff explains how Death Eater cells operate in secrecy, with each Death Eater knowing only a few other names (GoF 30).
Then Voldemort returns, and continues his strategies of silence and terror. During his rise, Sirius, Remus and Bill as Order members explains to Harry that Voldemort had not wanted anyone but his close followers to know he had returned, and that he will operate in silence until ready to strike (OotP 5). Voldemort's followers confirm this at the end of the book, in the form of Bellatrix Lestrange's comments to Harry (OotP 35). Even when Voldemort's coup is executed, he remains shrouded in deliberate mystery and silence: a spell is put on his name to track and punish anyone who uses it (DH 20), and he governs behind the puppet of an official under the Imperius Curse with no official notice of the change in regimes (DH 11), while making no public appearances. Potterwatch correctly identifies this strategy as a conscious and successful means of breeding panic and fear, with rumors springing up of sightings (DH 22). We do not know to what extent Voldemort's altered physical appearance is deliberate, versus an unintended or incidental effect of other magic, but his altered facial features clearly add to the public image of inhumanity.
I dwell on these seemingly obvious points because they should, properly interpreted, provide a warning to us. An aura of mystery and fear surrounding the leader of a terror movement is a normal and, unfortunately, potentially effective political strategy in our world and in Harry Potter, and it is extremely clear that Voldemort cultivates this aura intentionally. It helps to disorient his enemies, prevent them from moving against him, magnify the effects of his threats and disguise his actions until they are difficult to effectively oppose. It is very clear that Voldemort's public political strategy - as opposed to some of his private interactions with followers and pursuit of personal obsessions - is enacted deliberately and with consideration (even if some of those decisions strike us as strange or less than competent). Mass killings he personally conducts or takes part in are connected directly with ultimatums and threats toward the Ministry or other strategical aims (as when Fudge explains Voldemort's ultimatums to the muggle prime minister in HBP 1). When he appears in battle against Hogwarts, he alternates threats with offers of peace terms throughout the battle (DH 31, 33 and 36). His followers remain in near-total secrecy for a full year after his return, and when the Ministry takes notice of his return it is unable to prevent his infiltration and coup a mere year later.
Having recognized Voldemort's political strategy as conscious and goal-oriented, we should be wary of interpreting it too much for insight into his range of emotion or capacity for human attachment. Real political mass murderers and terrorists often have families, friends and emotional attachments. (Indeed, there are societies where mass murder of the enemy and terrorist-style violence have been considered normative good deeds. These evil actions are unfortunately part of the normal human capacity for violence, and not signs of unusual psychological problems.) This does not make them good people, of course. We can certainly derive information about Voldemort's values, goals and priorities from his political actions -- but we should be wary of treating his physical features or crimes as evidence for whether he enjoys human company.
What do we know about Voldemort and family?
First, discussing Voldemort's idea of family is fairly easy because he speaks about family often. In his chronologically earliest appearance, the memory Dumbledore shows Harry of meeting the eleven year-old Tom Riddle, family appears as a topic he is unable to resist asking about even after deciding he hates Dumbledore -- perhaps unsurprising for an orphan raised with no connections but the story of his mother's death. At this point, Tom Riddle's overriding concern is to find, or find out about, his family (HBP 13).
Later, having found, been disappointed by and murdered his last remaining close relatives, he speaks about family in several different but connected ways.
The first, and most abstract, is his expression of the basic pureblood aristocratic values: ancient wizarding families are good. "Common" families, equated with nonmagical ancestry, are bad, dirty, lower, etc. (As in Voldemort's speech in GoF 33). Closely related is his aggrandizement of Salazar Slytherin's line in particular as pureblood, ancient and powerful. (Throughout CS and DH 36.)
These positions are, in my view, not especially revealing. It seems that the idea of the superiority of "pureblood" families and the association of Slytherin with this idea were well-established before Tom Riddle came to Hogwarts. Lacking money, connections or morals, surrounded by students who seem to have valued magical bloodlines, and with a rare genetic trait that suggested a connection to Slytherin, taking up these ideals in public was not likely to be a difficult choice for young Tom Riddle. If he had had a connection to muggle family or muggle friends, those factors might have made him hesitate to adopt anti-muggle prejudice, but as a friendless orphan who resented his position in muggle society, he seems to have lacked any positive regard for the muggle world. We know that he immediately began imagining magical family when he found out about the magical world, so I suspect he didn't think of himself as a real muggleborn in school when he was introduced to the concept (and insults directed towards muggleborns). All of which is to say he may or may not sincerely believe these things and care very much them, but if so he didn't make them up himself.
But related and perhaps more interesting is the second way he discusses family: as a failure - disappointing, corrupted, diseased - which can and must be overcome. In the midst of explaining this idea, Voldemort sometimes reveals startlingly personal information. For example, we hear Voldemort's account of his parents in the Little Hangleton Graveyard, when he tells both Harry and the watching Wormtail that his father was a muggle who abandoned his mother because he didn't like magic, and emphasizes how useful murdering his father eventually made him, now, in death (GoF 33). Later, we hear an echo of this narrative in Bartemius Crouch Jr.'s interrogation under Veritaserum, when he compares himself to the Dark Lord: both of them, he says, "had very disappointing fathers... very disappointing indeed," but emphasizes how they are also similar in overcoming those fathers by "killing our fathers to ensure the continued rise of the Dark Order!" (GoF 35).
This same view of family as a burden to be mastered with violence is echoed, this time as a tool of abuse, in the scene in Malfoy Manor where Voldemort taunts the Malfoys about Tonks's marriage to Remus Lupin. After raising the specter of the marriage and children with a werewolf, Voldemort presents the solution: "Many of our oldest family trees become a little diseased over time... You must prune yours, must you not, to keep it healthy?" (DH 1.)
Unlike the Malfoys and Bellatrix Lestrange, however, Voldemort lacks any suitably pureblood family. He tells Harry, and through him us, what he has instead on the night of his resurrection: his followers. "Listen to me, reliving family history... But look, Harry! My true family returns," he says (GoF 33.)
Of course, this is in the midst of a manipulative speech to a defeated enemy. But I think it's also a representative of his true feelings on this particular subject. The only people present are Wormtail, who he consistently despises and does not attempt to flatter (e.g., GoF 1), and Harry himself. He has no reason to lie. And I think emotional attachment to his followers -- or at least, select ones -- matches his other behavior. We know that he forms close relationships with "special" followers: examples include Barty Crouch Jr., who he must have confided in, at least, information about his parents, if he did not make the comparison himself, and who he brags of the faith of to his other followers (GoF 33); and Bellatrix Lestrange, who brags to Harry of her personal lessons from the Dark Lord, who he rescues from the disastrous Ministry infiltration (OotP 36), who he does not attack for touching him when he collapses after attempting to kill Harry (DH 36), and whose death he reacts to with a scream of rage and an outburst of apparently unintentional magic (also DH 36).
Finally, and I think interestingly, there is Severus Snape, who Draco believes has "usurped" his father's position of special closeness to Voldemort (DH 33), who Voldemort entrusts with the all-important Hogwarts position - a symbol of his own ancestry (DH 36) - and who, in the end, Voldemort kills. This is an important point: just like his real family, Voldemort's substitute family is ultimately disposable. Voldemort's murder of Snape is unlike any other he commits in the series. He could have summoned Snape and immediately cut him down, or tortured him. Instead, he summons Snape and hesitates. He paces. He goes about explaining himself to Snape in a roundabout way, avoiding telling him he must kill him until the end, and very nearly hesitating and he actually apologizes, in a sense, saying that he regrets it - and he still orders Nagini to kill Snape, and walks away from the body (DH 32). A final trace of this attachment, perhaps, is visible when Harry confronts Voldemort the final time, and Voldemort is "rapt" when Harry tells him of Snape's betrayal (DH 36).
For the other side of Voldemort's attachment to his followers is his extreme jealousy and sadism toward the subjects of his attachment. On the one hand, he encourages Bartemius Crouch Jr. to believe they are alike in struggling against disappointing fathers, while on the other he taunts the Malfoys and demands Bellatrix prove her loyalty by killing her niece. Bellatrix responds with confident, even eager agreement (a verbal response I think doesn't necessarily represent her real feelings - but regardless, she clearly knows what Voldemort wants her to express and is willing to give it). Even his most loyal followers are terrified of punishment and sometimes are tortured by him for minor offenses or failures outside their control (e.g., Bellatrix in OotP 36). Nevertheless, Voldemort is largely successful in keeping them loyal.
Voldemort's jealousy of his followers' other attachments, particularly familial or pseudo-familial, provides a large proportion of his references to family over the course of the series. He is suspicious of Wormtail's reluctance to kidnap Harry Potter - not only that Wormtail may be a disloyal coward, which he knows, but that Wormtail may harbor attachment to Harry Potter as the child of his betrayed friends. He is ready to be furious if Wormtail might care enough about that attachment to be reluctant to help Voldemort kill Harry Potter. (GoF 1). He demands the Malfoys sacrifice their teenage son by charging him with assassinating Dumbledore in the deeply protected Hogwarts, while Bellatrix tells Narcissa she should be pleased to sacrifice her son (HBP 2). The ability to punish Lucius deniably, insisting he watch his son go into danger and attempt to complete an impossible task, demonstrates at the very least Voldemort's understanding of the attachment people feel to their children. Later, Voldemort will react with similar anger and suspicion when Lucius wants to go and find his son in the besieged Hogwarts (DH 32.) I think all of this is meant as much as a test as a punishment: are the Malfoys willing to sacrifice their child for Voldemort? If so, they fail this test - but Bellatrix does not, when she expresses her enthusiasm for the idea of killing her niece. It's possible that this was also the intention behind Voldemort telling Regulus to lend him a family house elf -- a request Regulus told Kreacher, at least, was an honor, (DH 10) echoing Bellatrix's words speaking of Draco's task.
Dumbledore is correct in telling us that Voldemort views his followers as disposable. But he is wrong in presenting Voldemort as impassive and unaffected by them. In fact, he is passionately jealous, unable to tolerate the slightest hint of an attachment beside himself, and constantly involved in manipulating and dominating them, from the rituals of Death Eater meetings to his involvement in their family affairs. We see Voldemort's priorities in Deathly Hallows: while he delegates the matter of actually running the Ministry or persecuting muggleborns, he spends much of the book in obsessive pursuit of immortality, except when he takes the time to manipulate his followers and to lash out at them in punishment. When he discovers the theft of the cup from the Lestrange vault, both obsessions coincide, and he is truly out of control, launching violent, lethal magic at anyone available, and despairing not only over his vulnerability but over his betrayal, and what a mistake it was to trust Lucius and Bellatrix (DH 27). He feels this way because he did trust them -- and in his domination over them.
To conclude, I've discussed Voldemort and the abstract concept of family, as well as Voldemort and his followers as replacement family. But we can also see Voldemort and family through his relationship with Harry. Tom Riddle's memory swiftly mentions their joint status as halfbloods and as orphans (CoS 17), while Voldemort repeatedly tries to manipulate Harry with praise or insults to his parents throughout their encounters. But two incidents show a deeper interest or understanding.
First, Voldemort immediately knows how to lure Harry to the Department of Mysteries when curiosity isn't enough: a threat to Sirius Black will be enough, and it is. Sirius is not only Harry's only remaining magical family, but he represents a hope Tom Riddle once shared, and once was equally disappointed in: a magical guardian who would take either boy away from the muggle world and status as a friendless orphan.
Second, there is Voldemort's flashback to Godric's Hollow, which shows us his point of view of the Potters' murders (DH 17). Reaching their home, he pauses to watch through the window as James plays with Harry and Lily comes to take him to bed. His disdain for the Potters' trust in Pettigrew and poor defenses is matched by a curiosity about family life, and after killing Lily he pauses to note the baby's interest, thinking Harry must think believe Voldemort is James, playing games with magical light again. When Harry begins to cry Voldemort goes from curiosity to rage. He remembers the orphanage and his intolerance for crying children, and he strikes to kill.