by John Granger
Note that many of the features in Ms. Rowling’s stories, rather than evidence of a singular creative genius, are just delightful, new renderings of Hughes’s staples and necessary characters and devices from the school story. If a book is a boarding school novel, there has to be a school and it has to be a boarding school (so the students can have nighttime adventures free of parental controls). And it needs to be a very special place, different from common experience. Hogwarts, as a school of witchcraft and wizardry, of course, meets this requirement in spectacular fashion.
The school story also has to be told on a time line with two story arcs that complement one another: the course of the individual year—fall to spring with holidays—and the set number of years between the hero or heroine’s becoming a student and graduating. Ms. Rowling makes her series seven volumes, corresponding to the seven years of a Hogwarts education in contrast to the six years of most school series and conventional public school forms (for reasons to be discussed in chapter seven); each book in the series, conforming to convention, follows Harry from his home to school and back again on an annual cycle.
The “terrible trio” of Harry, Ron, and Hermione only differs from the public school formula by including a female character as the agent of civilization and intelligence:Traditional school stories feature the hero (or heroine) and his (or her) best friend. A third companion commonly joins them, corresponding to the “rule of three“ policy that historically operated in many boarding schools. . . . In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom Brown first makes friends with Harry East, and the two become inseparable. Later, they adopt the frail and saintly newcomer, George Arthur, who then helps, through his example, to transform the two prankish boys into Christian gentlemen.8
Even Fred and George, the comic Weasley twin brothers, turn out to be refreshed clichés of boarding school book stock players: “Frequently found among the hero’s friends in classic school stories is a pair of identical twins, often practical jokers whose activities provide both comic relief and confusion that gets sorted out at the end.”9
A public school in fiction, too, is obliged, naturally, to come with the stock characters every public school is staffed with; we need a headmaster, teachers, and student leaders in the form of team captains or prefects acting as rule monitors. A sadist teacher is commonplace, hence Severus Snape; “every French mistress in the entire girl’s school story genre” is “risible,”10 thus Sybil Trelawney; and a self-important prefect is a must (if only as a foil for resolutions when the hero or heroine assumes that post, also a near certainty), and Perfect Percy, the “Bighead Boy” fills that role.
Some characters in Harry Potter, though, are not only necessary representatives to satisfy a formula but pointers to famous characters in the genre U.K. readers will recognize immediately. Harry’s cousin Dudley Dursley, for instance, in his outrageous Smeltings school uniform, complete with sadist’s shillelagh, is a pointer to Billy Bunter, “the sly, overweight, idle, lying, cowardly, snobbish, conceited, and greedy boy antihero” of Frank Richards’s Greyfriars boarding school books.11
The funeral of Albus Dumbledore in Half-Blood Prince is as much a tribute to Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Tom Brown’s Rugby, and to the place of the headmaster as guide and guardian in every schoolboy book, as it is to Harry’s mentor and the “greatest wizard of his age.” Certainly Arnold and Dumbledore have much in common.
As David Steege writes in his wonderful essay comparing Harry Potter with Tom Brown and the typical English boarding school experience:Both Hughes and Rowling . . . stress the important ties between the hero and headmaster, an adult mentor who helps the hero develop into a functioning, useful young man of good character. Tom, Harry, and their friends find themselves often working around their teachers . . . But both the doctor and Albus Dumbledore are adults our heroes come to trust and value, and who in turn support, protect, and guide the boys.12
I’d go even further here. The link between Arnold and Dumbledore is more meaningful than just their both being thoughtful heads of school and mentors to Tom Brown and Harry Potter respectively. Both headmasters inspire a nearly religious devotion in their students. The last chapter of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, “Finis,” ends with Brown weeping at the grave of his “old master.” Hughes describes Brown feeling “love and reverence” for Arnold, that his soul was “fuller of the tomb and him who lies there, than of the altar of Him of whom it speaks.” As he grieves, Brown vows to “follow his [Arnold’s] steps in life and death.”13 Thomas Hughes is hardly subtle here in making the late Rugby headmaster in his sacred tomb as stand-in for Christ in the heart of Tom Brown.
This scene is echoed in Half-Blood Prince. Not only does Harry weep at Dumbledore’s grave, he sees a smoke phoenix shape “fly joyfully into the blue” as the white marble tomb appears encasing the headmaster’s corpse. Dumbledore’s Patronus takes the shape of a phoenix, also known as “the resurrection bird,” which is a traditional symbol of Christ. The chapter closes with Harry testifying to the Minister of Magic that he is “Dumbledore’s man through and through” (chapter thirty); he is determined to dedicate the rest of his life to pursuing the Horcruxes and the Dark Lord in conformity with Dumbledore’s example and instruction.
Dumbledore’s sacrificial death in Half-Blood Prince, his being the person in whom Harry must “choose to believe in” over the course of Deathly Hallow, and his greeting Harry at the place-not-a-place called “King’s Cross” with its suggestion of an afterlife all suggest that Ms. Rowling’s headmaster is the magical equivalent of Hughes’s Rugby headmaster.
Hero as Bully Beater and Protector of the Weak, Strange, and Despised
Beyond the formula elements every boarding school novel has and their echoes from the tradition in specific characters, Rowling is a conformist both to the thematic conventions of the school novel genre and to the core morality of such books. What is this morality? In two words, “friendship” and “character.” “Building friendships, proving a good friend, separating from those who hold the wrong values and thus showing one’s true character are all central to public school novels.”14 We can see celebrations of “the virtues of chivalry, decency, honor, sportsmanship, and loyalty” in this list of the typical plot devices of schoolboy and -girl stories taken from Karen Manners Smith’s essay “Harry Potter’s Schooldays”:15 • [The stories feature] competitive team sports in general (called “games” in England), and intramural—that is, inter-dorm, inter-house, and inter-school-rivalry in athletics and other things in which points can be accumulated toward an annual championship.
The Hogwarts obsession with Quidditch and the importance to every student of winning and losing “house points” in the intramural competition for the House Cup are Ms. Rowling’s twists on this standard.
• All the books centralize the schoolboys’ (or schoolgirls’) code of honor: sticking together with one’s peers and never telling tales.
Harry’s refusal to go to Dumbledore when tortured by Dolores Umbridge is the heroic version of this code of honor in not telling tales but keeping a stiff upper lip. His telling Cedric about the dragons before the first Triwizard trial and Cedric’s revealing how to hear the clue in the magical egg, not to mention his refusal to take the Triwizard Cup in the center of the maze, are other examples of schoolboy honor.
• The books explore relationships between pupils and schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and frequently deal with the isolation experienced by the student who does not “fit in.”
Can you say “Luna Lovegood” and “Neville Longbottom?” It’s no accident that these square pegs in round holes are redeemed by membership in Dumbledore’s Army. But more on Neville in a moment.
• School stories abound with moral dilemmas involving cheating, tattling, smoking, drinking, gambling, rule breaking, and unauthorized absences from school.
It isn’t a schoolboy novel unless the students break rules early on and come to terms with the moral implications of this choice as they mature. Reme
mber Lupin’s restrained rebuke to Harry in Prisoner of Azkaban for going to Hogsmeade— and Harry’s profound shame? That is only possible consequent to poor choices and an implicit moral standard.
• Heroes and heroines and friends often find themselves unjustly accused of misdemeanors and subjected to unjust punishments; often children have to deal detective-fashion with thefts or vandalism of school property or personal possessions.
As we saw in chapter one, the mystery unwound by our trio of detectives is the narrative drive of every book in the series. Harry is accused and punished, too, in every book, often for doing the right thing (smuggling a dragon to the Astronomy Tower, confronting Umbridge publicly with the truth of Voldemort’s return, saving Dudley from a dementor, etc.).
• The protagonists typically find themselves promoted—willingly or reluctantly—to authority at some point, such as being made prefect, Head Boy or Girl, or games captain.
Part of the agony of Order of the Phoenix is that Harry is passed over for prefect and his best friends are chosen instead. Of course, Ron and Hermione’s enthusiasm and discomfort in these positions are clichés of the genre. Harry, the born leader, in contrast to his friends’ appointments and relative lack of authority with students, becomes the leader of Dumbledore’s Army by acclamation. That he is selected as captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team in Half-Blood Prince and struggles with the selection of teammates is another necessary piece of the schoolboy’s development.
• In many of the narratives, the gradual reform of a hitherto unpleasant or incorrigible character takes place; often he or she is reformed by the main character.
There are three “unpleasant or incorrigible” players in the Potter dramas: Dudley Dursley, Severus Snape, and Draco Malfoy. Dudley, after Harry saves his life in the opening of Order of the Phoenix, is transformed from a spoiled selfish brat to a young man who, if still socially retarded, feels and tries to express his real concern for cousin Harry when Dudley leaves Privet Drive in Deathly Hallows. I will explain in chapter eight how Harry serves as Snape’s means of transcendence, even salvation, in the Deathly Hallows Shrieking Shack death scene.
And Draco Malfoy? The boy Harry hates above all others?[In Harry’s conflict with Draco Malfoy] Rowling is closely following the boarding school story tradition, in which class differences frequently provoke bigotry . . . violence, vengefulness, and snobbery are only parts of Draco’s character. He is also the schoolboy voice of racism and race purity in the Potter books . . . Draco’s bigotry, imbibed [from] his parents, is similar to the kinds of prejudice frequently presented in British school stories as a problem for the hero or heroine to deal with.16
This “unpleasant and incorrigible” character and his prejudice act as Harry’s principal foil throughout the seven-book series. It is no accident that Draco is the first Hogwarts student and wizard his age that Harry meets and that he makes a cameo appearance in the Deathly Hallows epilogue. Draco chooses to serve the Dark Lord in Half-Blood Prince, enthusiastically obedient to the “bad faith” of his family name, just as Harry chooses to be in Gryffindor House rather than Slytherin during the Sorting his first year.
Their battles throughout the years culminate in the fall of the House of Malfoy and Draco’s agony. Harry feels pity for him after Dumbledore’s death on the tower and rescues him from the Fiendfyre in the Room of Requirement during the Battle of Hogwarts. This act of mercy results in Harry’s being able to tell Draco’s mother, Narcissa, that her son is still alive, which news inspires her in turn to deceive the Dark Lord about Harry’s survival at the risk of her life. The Malfoys, Death Eaters one and all, sit down in peace after the Battle in the Great Hall, however uncomfortably, with the victors.
Reformed? Redeemed? Sort of. The Malfoys at the end of Deathly Hallows, like Flashman (Tom Brown’s nemesis), who is expelled from Rugby for drunkenness, seem abashed and broken but have not become champions of the good, true, and beautiful overnight. The Potter books and Tom Brown both use the hero’s antagonist as a foil against which to celebrate the virtues of modest landowners and nongentry or at least the relatively poor and unpretentious.
As much as Draco and his parents are stock players advancing public school story morality, Luna and Neville are more important:Frequently, schoolboy and schoolgirl heroes find themselves defending their weaker comrades from school bullies. Tom Brown’s role at Rugby School involves his protection of the saintly and frail George Arthur; Darrell Rivers, in Enid Blyton’s First Term of Malory Towers, must defend and encourage Sally Hope, who has trouble at home and is the subject of sneers at school. In fact, throughout the Malory Towers series, Darrell looks after a succession of troubled and friendless girls who are bullied or mistreated by their heartless and elitist schoolmates . . . Rowling’s central character, like those heroes in all conventional school stories, is thus, at least in part, measured by his compassion for underdogs.17
School Story as Morality Tale
Along with these stock players and themes, Harry Potter novels, as David Steege puts it, “have one more trait in common with other public school novels, seen especially strongly in Tom Brown’s Schooldays: a tradition of providing a moral tale as well as a ripping good yarn.”
In writing Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Hughes knowingly preaches to his audience. In his preface, he freely admits: “Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching!”18
Rowling, too, has often been quoted in response to the idea of her books as morality tales. She has said that she “did not conceive it as a moral tale,” but that “the morality sprang naturally out of the story.” Although she “never set out to preach,”19 “undeniably, morals are drawn.”20
What saves Harry in the end are his “free will, courage, and moral certainty.”21 The author values courage “more highly than any other virtue and by that I mean not just physical courage and flashy courage, but moral courage.”22
Ms. Rowling shudders at the idea that she is a “formula writer”23 or a moral pedant. Nonetheless, the setting of her stories in a boarding school and the creative but remarkable conformity of these stories in the characters and to the themes of the public school novel genre make the books deliver a predictable moral worldview that C. S. Lewis praised as “training in the stock responses.”
As he explained in A Preface to Paradise Lost, one of art’s “main functions” is to “assist” in the organization of “chosen attitudes,” namely, being able to recognize vice and virtue and to praise the latter with truth and beauty and to despise the former with falsehood and ugliness. Such training, fostered by the great poets like Milton and, if Chesterton is to be trusted, even by formulaic schoolboy fiction, yields “all solid virtue and stable pleasure.”24 Sydney, Wordsworth, Horace, and Aristotle all argued that story hits its mark when it is simultaneously “instructing while delighting.”
Wouldn’t it be odd if a story set at a school wasn’t about instruction of some kind and, given its roots in Victorian England, about implicit and explicit moral instruction instead? The students and the readers come to learn—and the schoolboy story instructs and delights.
Harry Potter Not “Just Another Schoolboy Formula Novel”
The Potter novels are schoolboy fiction, wonderfully reimag ined but true to the conventions of the genre all the same. And this setting and Ms. Rowling’s conformity to formula does tell us a great deal about the literal and the moral meaning of the books.
It is by no means, however, the whole of the literal meaning or of the books’ moral layering. We have seen other dimensions on these relatively superficial levels of meaning in the previous chapter discussions of narrative voice and drive and of the formulas and moral weight of “manners and morals” fiction à la Austen, Sayers’s character-driven detective stories, and Dickens’s orphan novels. The literal level and the devices and set pieces Ms. Rowling borrows from the various traditional genres bleed with moral meaning that informs the reader’s experience of the surface story.
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The upcoming chapters exploring the explicitly moral, allegorical, and transcendent layers of meaning reveal that dismissing Ms. Rowling’s oeuvre as simply schoolboy fiction, as academic critics have, is to miss the source of the novels’ power and popularity. What separates Rowling from more formulaic books in the schoolboy genre is her level of planning. She planned her seven books for five years before completing the first novel, Sorcerer’s Stone. Planning is an integral part of the process for Rowling. In an interview with the South Australian Advertiser, she talks about how important it is to her:I do a plan. I plan, I really plan quite meticulously. I know it is sometimes quite boring because when people say to me, “I write stories at school and what advice would you give me to make my stories better?” And I always say and people’s faces often fall when I say, “ You have to plan,” and they say, “Oh, I prefer just writing and seeing where it takes me.” Sometimes writing and seeing where it takes you will lead you to some really good ideas but I would say nearly always it won’t be as good as if you sat down first and thought: Where do I want to go, what end am I working toward, what would be good, a good start?25
The Harry Potter books are anything but thrown together. They’re “meticulously planned.” There’s very little that is accidental or spur of the moment about them.
So what?
Ms. Rowling is writing formula schoolboy fiction. But in her years of “meticulous planning” she has layered into the mechanical format, characters, and themes of this tired genre nine other literary conventions from gothic romance to alchemical drama, and the traditional four layers of meaning, to include allegorical satire and symbolist fantasy.