takes-all world? Can mercy and love really defeat violent evil?
For Rowling, many of the answers come from her religion. Not all. There’s a Christian framework in the Harry Potter books, and Harry shows the power of love and mercy and self-sacrifice, as Jesus does in the gospels. But there is no trembling before God. There is no demand to have faith in Harry. A woman is given the greatest supernatural role.
As Rowling says, “I wouldn’t expect [religion] to provide all the answers, because I would expect to find some of those within me.” She’s also wary of some of the answers that religion offers. “I have some problems with conventional organized religion,” is how she puts it.
As a result, she’s constructed her own set of beliefs. Seven volumes’ worth.
What Evil May Be Worse Than Voldemort’s?
VOLDEMORT DOESN’T SEEM TO BE A VERY
complicated villain. He wants what he wants. He doesn’t try to disguise his disregard for human life. Woe to the person who gets in his way.
But no one can say Rowling has simple ideas about evil. If you look closely, Voldemort turns out to be an unusual villain for a story like this one. And there’s another kind of evil in the story, perhaps more powerful and more dangerous than Voldemort, which Rowling believes to be present in real life.
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
We have to start with a crucial difference between evil in this story and others. In books like C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, evil is a supernatural force. Its origin goes back to the creation of the world, to battles between God and“I wasn’t going to pretend that an evil presence is a cardboard cutout and nobody gets hurt,” Rowling once said. “If you’re writing about evil you genuinely have a responsibility to show what that means. . . . I was not going to tell a lie.”
In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the Dark Lord, Sauron, seems much like Satan. Both tempt humans to ignore God’s laws. But Sauron is actually an underling of another Satanic character, Melkor, who is never mentioned in the trilogy. Melkor is mentioned in The Silmarillion, which reveals the legends behind Middle-earth.
the fallen angel Satan. Although Lewis dresses Satan in different clothes, and Tolkien hides him, under another name, in the ancient mythology of Middle-earth, the supernatural quality of evil is apparent all through their books.
If there’s supernatural evil in the background of Harry’s world, Rowling doesn’t mention it. Given the magic in the series, this omission is especially unusual. In most traditions, the power of magic comes from summoning supernatural spirits, including Satan or figures like him. In the Harry Potter books, no one summons the evil dead.
For Rowling, evil has a human face. Voldemort’s twisted mind is explained, at least in part, as a result of his childhood circumstances.
Even before being born, Voldemort had the odds against him. His mother, Merope, had suffered her own abuse as a child, then used a love potion to trick Voldemort’s father into a loveless marriage. “The enchantment under which Tom Riddle fathered Voldemort is important because it shows coercion,” Rowling explained to an interviewer when the series was complete. “There can’t be many more prejudicial ways to enter the world.” Voldemort’s father left his mother when she let the enchantment lapse. She became homeless, and died giving birth to Voldemort, who was raised in a Muggle orphanage. In an extreme version of the “family romance” described in a previous chapter, Voldemort’s rage led him to kill his father and his father’s parents.
This is psychological, not supernatural. In interviews, Rowling talks about Voldemort being a “psychopath.” He’s evil, but not demonic. And, she adds, “Everything would have changed for him if Merope had survived and raised him herself and loved him.”
THE FAULT LIES NOT IN OUR STARS
Because we like to see a great hero battle a great villain, it’s easy to think of the series as Harry versus Voldemort. But Voldemort, for all his skills, would be no threat to Harry without the help of the Death Eaters.
Voldemort “is what he is, and he’s beyond redemption,” Rowling has said. “But the people around him, that’s what’s more interesting in a way . . . People who do have a choice, did make a choice, like the Malfoys of this world. I think it’s always worth examining why people choose to make those decisions.”
Choices. Decisions. The Death Eaters are more than mindless underlings.
The name Merope (pronounced MARE-a-pee) comes from a character in Greek mythology. That Merope was one of the Pleiades, seven nymph sisters who eventually became stars. Like Merope Riddle, the nymph Merope married a mortal and later hid herself in shame. The name Merope actually means “[only] partially visible.” In the Pleiades constellation, the star with her name is the faintest.
In another Greek myth, Cadmus—whose name Rowling gives to one of the Peverell brothers—also sows dragon’s teeth and creates an army. He throws a jewel into their midst to make them fight with each other, then takes the handful of survivors and founds the city of Thebes.
For a story with so much magic, it’s a surprise, and an important one, that Voldemort doesn’t use magic to attract his followers. With his powers, he might easily have enchanted the cronies he needed. That’s a common way for Dark Lords to gain power. Or he might have created an army the way Tolkien’s Orcs were created, by giving life to something inanimate, like clay and rock. Examples of supernatural armies go back to ancient myths. In the Greek story of the Golden Fleece, warriors sprout from dragon’s teeth planted in a field. Jewish folklore tells of a Golem, a giant clay monster given life to protect Jews against attack.
But Voldemort wins followers without even casting a spell. He doesn’t tempt them, trick them, or convince them that he has a better idea than other wizards. They follow him because of their own psychology. They need to follow. They were fascinated by him when he was just Tom Riddle, an extraordinary student. He wasn’t recruiting Death Eaters then, but they were already beginning to gather around him. Even Horace Slughorn, who thought of himself as a leader, and who had created the Slug Club to give himself admirers, was enthralled by Riddle.
Why do these wizards, who already have great skills and bright futures, follow Riddle?
It seems they don’t just want a leader, they need one. The reasons behind that need, and the consequences of it, say a lot about Rowling’s notion of evil.
DADDY DEAREST
Wizards feel the same emotions as Muggles. All humans know their powers are small compared to the dangers of the world, so they desire safety. Children may separate from their parents, but they then seek out new authority figures who offer the same kind of comfort.
Psychologists describe this desire for a father figure as a desire for “magical protection.” Sigmund Freud remarked that leaders, like parents, eliminate fear and allow followers to feel powerful. That’s true whether it’s Crabbe and Goyle following Draco Malfoy, or Draco and Lucius Malfoy following Voldemort. Rowling’s wizards, for all their magical powers, look for the same thing from a wizard whose powers are greater than their own.
The leader gives followers a view of the world they want to see: He appeals to their narcissism, telling them that they are good, and their enemies are evil. If they don’t have enemies, he creates them. Voldemort, for example, makes enemies of Muggles and “Mudblood” wizards.
“Mobs,” wrote Freud, “demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.”
“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” —James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy”
“HOLY AGGRESSION”
Unfortunately, these thoughts often turn into actions. The followers believe they have the right to express forbidden desires. They might steal the land of neighbors who are from another ethnic group, or attack the women from that group. In the minds of the followers, these acts are
n’t crimes. They’re defence against an evil enemy. “If one murders . . . in imitation of the hero,” writes anthropologist Ernest Becker in his influential book The Denial of Death, “why then it is no longer murder, it is ‘holy aggression.’ ”
Of course, that’s a lie that people tell themselves. They’re doing what they’ve wanted to do all along. This brings up the question, are the followers actually doing the leading? People often choose leaders who have the courage to do what they might be ashamed to do themselves. Becker explains:
People use their leaders almost as an excuse. When they give in to the leader’s commands they can always reserve the feeling that these commands are alien to them, that they are the leader’s responsibility, that the terrible acts they are committing are in his name and not theirs.
This, then, is another thing that makes people feel so guiltless, as [Elias] Canetti points out: They can imagine themselves as temporary victims of the leader. The more they give in to his spell, and the more terrible the crimes they commit, the more they can feel that the wrongs are not natural to them. It is all so neat, this usage of the leader; it reminds us of James Frazer’s discovery that in the remote past tribes often used their kings as scapegoats who, when they no longer served the people’s needs, were put to death. These are the many ways in which men can play the hero, all the while that they are avoiding responsibility for their own acts in a cowardly way.
That’s the “more interesting” evil that Rowling was talking about. She sees the world as more than Harry versus Voldemort, hero versus villain.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF HERO
Rowling has often talked about the story’s references to mob aggression, to the sadistic treatment of “Mudbloods,” Muggles, and magical creatures. She confirms that she was thinkingElias Canetti (1905-1994) was a novelist and playwright, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature. He fled the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, moving to England. His family had a long history of such escapes. In 1492, his ancestors were Spaniards and had the name Cañete, from a town there. Along with all the other Jews in Spain, they were forced to leave as part of the Spanish Inquisition.
Political theorist Hannah Arendt observed that Nazi war criminals imagined themselves “involved in something historic, grandiose, unique, which must therefore be difficult to bear. . . . So instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”
of Nazi Germany and other atrocities. Even in the lead-up to the story’s final conflict between Harry and Voldemort, she focuses the reader’s attention on this other kind of evil.
When Harry’s search for Voldemort’s Horcruxes leads to the goblins, Bill Weasley tells Harry to ignore conventional wisdom about goblins. Harry has been taught that wizards have treated the goblins well, and that the hate goblins feel toward wizards comes from the goblins’ nature. Bill knows Harry has heard only the wizards’ version. The wizards, to use Becker’s phrase, “are avoiding responsibility for their own acts in a cowardly way.” Unfortunately, Harry doesn’t fully understand. Despite Bill’s warning, he tries to trick Griphook instead of just explaining that he’ll need to borrow the sword for a while. Harry, for all his compassion, doesn’t heroically overcome the bigotry he has been taught.
That’s because Harry’s not the hero in the battle against this kind of evil. Hermione is.
Hermione is obsessed with fighting injustice. (Rowling says that quality came from her own teenage years.) In Chamber, when Harry and Ron are happy to believe the wizards’ self-serving lie that house-elves don’t want freedom, she creates S.P.E.W., the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare. Although she stumbles along the way, offending the house-elves she’s trying to help, her heart is in the right place, and her mission is more than teenage folly.
In Hallows, she’s the one who convinces Harry that Kreacher’s nastiness comes from mistreatment by wizards. Harry doesn’t want to believe that one of his own heroes, Sirius, could have been so unjust. He thinks the opposite: he believes Kreacher is responsible for the death of Sirius. But Hermione is right. “I’ve said all along that wizards would pay for how they treat house-elves,” she reminds Harry. “Well, Voldemort did . . . and so did Sirius.” Harry’s merciful treatment, which comes at Hermione’s urging, leads Kreacher to rally the house-elves to help the wizards in the Battle of Hogwarts.
Hermione even manages to open Ron’s eyes. As the Battle of Hogwarts is about to start, it’s Ron who thinks of warning the house-elves. “Ron had finally got S.P.E.W. and earned himself a snog!” is how Rowling put it to fans in a webchat.
And what future does Rowling see for her alter ego? She imagines that Hermione ended up in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, where Hermione “was a progressive voice who ensured the eradication of oppressive, pro-pureblood laws.”
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” —Joesph Conrad
See also: Voldemort
Rowling’s message is that even good societies—like Harry’s, like ours—commit great injustices. To define themselves as good, they imagine outsiders to be evil. They find some way to make a virtue out of their beliefs or rituals, and to belittle the customs and beliefs of their closest neighbors. It’s a narcissism of little differences. In Harry’s world, even people who devoted themselves to fighting Voldemort were blind to the bigoted assumptions they inherited.
Hermione’s victory isn’t as dramatic as Harry’s, but in Rowling’s view, it’s just as important.
Is Rowling a “Master of Death”?
ROWLING HAD ALREADY STARTED TO WRITE about Harry when her mother died at age forty-five. Her mother’s death sharpened the story’s focus. “From that moment on,” she has said, “death became a central, if not the central, theme of the seven books.”
The history of the Deathly Hallows that’s told in the final book is a cautionary fable with the same theme, perhaps the most important in the series.
ON THE ROAD
Rowling has said the story of the Peverell brothers and their Deathly Hallows was inspired by “The Pardoner’s Tale,” an episode in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. A pardoner was an official agent of the church who sold the church’s forgiveness to people who had committed certain sins.
The pardoner in The Canterbury Tales tellsIn Celtic legend, early gods known as the Tuatha Dé Danaan brought four hallows to Ireland: a magical stone that could give a king long life, a sword and a spear of great power, and a magical cauldron that never ran out of food.
Arthurian legend also names four hallows: a cup from which Jesus drank, a sword, a platter, and a lance. The lance is sometimes called “The Spear of Destiny.” According to legend, it was used by a Roman soldier to stab Jesus on the cross, and still has Jesus’ blood on it. This makes its owner invincible. In Hallows, the invincible Elder Wand is called the “Wand of Destiny.”
a story (borrowed by Chaucer from other fables) of three men who take revenge for the death of a friend by trying to find and kill Death himself. But where they expect to find Death, they find gold coins. They then decide to rest, and one man goes to buy wine. While he’s gone, the other two come up with a very simple plan to keep the gold for themselves. They kill him when he returns. They then celebrate by drinking the wine, never suspecting that the man who went to buy the wine had his own simple plan. He put poison in it. They die, and Death wins again.
Rowling’s version is a little different. Death tricks the Peverell brothers by giving them three gifts that seem to make them stronger than he is. With the first two, the Elder Wand and the Resurrection Stone, there’s a catch. The brothers who receive those objects soon regret their decisions. But the brother who does not ask to defeat Death gets the Invisibility Cloak, and manages to live a full natural life. Wisely, he doesn’t try to elude Death for longer than that.
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br /> Rowling’s version gives the story a new meaning. In Chaucer’s version, the Pardoner explains that the story illustrates that “greed is the root of all evil.” As Hermione explains to Ron and Harry, the fairy tale of the Peverell brothers is “a story about how humans are frightened of death.”
THE LAST ENEMY
“In many ways,” Rowling has said, “all of my characters are defined by their attitude to death and the possibility of death.” In every case, that attitude is or once was fear. Voldemort, for example, seems extraordinarily powerful to other wizards, but Rowling doesn’t see him that way. “He’s terrified of death,” she says. “He’ll do anything not to die.” His very name gives this away: Vol de mort means “flight from death.” He’s not going to outwit death; he hopes to outrun it. This unnatural desire leads him to great evil. Like Voldemort, Dumbledore lusted for power, to his regret.
It’s also important to understand that this fear of death doesn’t lead only to evil: Hermione’s drive to be the best Hogwarts student ever is a desire for a socially acceptable form of immortality.
The story of the Peverell brothers presents Harry’s choices in a nutshell. He could make the mistake of trying to use violence to defeat Voldemort, which he’s tempted to do. He could make the mistake of using the Resurrection Stone to bring his parents back for good, letting them be a family again.
Chaucer’s wicked sense of irony is part of the appeal of “The Pardoner’s Tale.” The narrator gleefully talks about his own greed. “I will not work and labour with my hands . . . I will have money, wool, and cheese, and wheat, Though it be given by the poorest page, Or by the poorest widow in village, And though her children perish of famine.”
The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter Page 18