by John Granger
Steeped in Gothic: Tales Within Gothic Tales
The Harry Potter novels are not only full of gothic touches, but every one of them also has a gothic story inside the story.
First let’s look at the gothic touches.
HOGWARTS CASTLE: A gothic novel is set in a castle, manor, or monastery for the most part, preferably far removed from city life. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry exists in its own castle, unplottable to mapmakers. Even if Muggle tourists were to stumble upon it, enchantments prevent them from seeing more than charming ruins. The classrooms and house common rooms are set in towers and dungeons and the castle’s grounds and hallways with their huts, suits of armor, torches, and absence of technology are thoroughly medieval.
SUPERNATURAL ATMOSPHERE: With few exceptions, the major players are all magical creatures, which is to say, witches and wizards. Hogwarts has a resident population of ghosts, too, featuring a monk, a poltergeist, and a bathroom spectre. Not enough like Halloween? Harry has a werewolf as a trusted mentor; meets an honest-to-God vampire, Count Sanguini; and even trolls turn up here and there.
HORROR: The supernatural at Hogwarts, it could be argued, isn’t any scarier than the old Addams Family gothic camp television series. But there’s plenty of fright: dementors that suck the souls and joy from a person in a fate worse than death; Voldemort’s head under Quirrell’s turban; Fenrir Greyback the werewolf eating human beings; not to mention the inconsolable, raw-fleshed baby soul fragment at King’s Cross in Deathly Hallows.
SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGES: Harry goes underground every year for his annual confrontation with the black hats (except for Goblet of Fire when he Portkeys to a graveyard . . . ). In Deathly Hallows, he goes underground seven times. As a gothic “heroine,” Harry is almost defined by his heroic deeds performed in tight spaces underground.
ISOLATION: Every year, sometimes for most of the year, Harry is despised by most of his classmates for something he has done or for things he hasn’t done. In Sorcerer’s Stone, it was losing house points for being out after curfew. In Chamber of Secrets, the rumor is that he is the Heir of Slytherin petrifying Muggle-borns. In Prisoner of Azkaban, the need to protect him from Sirius Black is the reason dementors surround the school. In Goblet of Fire, he is chosen as the second Gryffindor champion for the Triwizard Tournament even though he is not old enough to have applied. In Order of the Phoenix, no one wants to believe Voldemort is back—but Harry tells everyone he has witnessed his return. And, in Deathly Hallows, Harry is a hunted man on the run from the Ministry, their Snatchers, and the Death Eaters. For a popular guy, Harry spends a lot of time despised or feared by his peers.
FRAGMENTATION AND REUNION: The most painful chapters of the books are the several times either Harry, Ron, or Hermione decides to exclude a member (for example, Hermione’s agony in Prisoner of Azkaban) or takes leave voluntarily, spitefully (such as Ron in Goblet of Fire and Deatlhy Hallows). Their eventual and usually dramatic reconciliations and reunions, in keeping with the gothic formula, are the highs of the whole series. Harry’s life as an orphan is highlighted by his always-surprising meeting with shades of his parents: in the mirror in Sorcerer’s Stone, in the golden web while dueling with Voldemort in Goblet of Fire, and on his walk to certain death in Deathly Hallows.
PROPHECY, ANCESTRAL CURSE: The Harry/Voldemort relationship and conflict turns on a prophecy about The One with the Power to Vanquish the Dark Lord. Hogwarts struggles with its founder’s myth and the cross-generational hatred between Slytherin and Gryffindor. The Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching position is clearly cursed. And Professor Trelawney predicts Harry’s death at a young age in almost every Divina tions class.
TAINTED BLOOD, BOND OF BLOOD: The great divide in the Wizarding world at large is an extension of the Gryffindor/ Slytherin feud. The Pure Bloods of Slytherin maintain that those witches and wizards who are Muggle-born or who have Muggle ancestry in any way are inherently inferior to those who aren’t and don’t. Issues of “blood purity” and tolerance of Mudbloods define social grouping and standing. It’s no accident that Harry ultimately defeats the Dark Lord because of the sacrificial love of his Muggle-born mother.
GRAVEYARD, CORPSES: The pivotal scene for the seven-book series occurs in Goblet of Fire in the Little Hangleton graveyard, where Lord Voldemort throws his rebirthing party. Some of the Dark Lord’s most horrific weapons are the Inferi, animated corpses that almost pull Harry into the lake and to his death.
DECAY OF ARISTOCRATIC PRIVILEGE, RISE OF BOURGEOISIE: Gothic romance celebrates the minor gentry and simple landowner, whose virtues and ambitions for individual rights in inheritance and marriage are in conflict with old money, landed estates, and an aristocracy in decline.9 Can you say “Malfoys and Weasleys?” The Malfoys have one child because of their caste belief in primogeniture and unwillingness to divide their holdings; they are corrupt, bigoted, and unfailingly patronizing to their social inferiors. The Weasleys are the opposite on all counts. Draco Malfoy, when Hermione points out that he has only been made the Slytherin Seeker because of his father’s money, not talent, enrages the Weasleys by calling her “Mudblood.” The gothic social argument in a snapshot!
FOREST: The Forbidden Forest that all but surrounds Hogwarts is populated with angry centaurs, a giant, ferocious Acromantulas, and a host of magical creatures running the spectrum from Bowtruckles, Triwizard dragons, and Nif flers to unicorns, Hippogriffs, and Thestrals. It is off-limits because it is a wild place and dangerous to students; Harry, consequently, visits almost every year on detentions, classroom trips, outings with Hagrid, and, finally, to meet his death.
SACRIFICIAL BRAVERY: Hermione says Harry has a “saving people thing” and she has a point; Harry ends every book, it seems, by putting his life on the line to save a friend or keep the Dark Lord from taking over the world. But Harry isn’t the only one. Lily dies to save Harry. Ron jumps in the Forest of Dean pool to save Harry’s life, and Snape risks his life daily in the last three books as a Death Eater double agent within the Order of the Phoenix. Sacrificial love, loyalty, and bravery are the stock responses Potter readers are trained in, beginning to end.
MEMORIES AND DREAMS: Several of the books’ mysteries turn on information gained from memories in a Pensieve, and one features a living memory as a principal character (young Riddle in Chamber of Secrets). Harry dreams prophetic dreams or has visions through Lord Voldemort’s soul fragment when he rests.
FOUND BOOK: In Chamber of Secrets, Lucius Malfoy plants Tom Riddle’s diary inside one of Ginny Weasley’s textbooks. The living memory in it possesses her and frees the basilisk from the Chamber of Secrets. Harry is given a Potions textbook in Half-Blood Prince that is brilliantly annotated by the book’s mysterious namesake. Harry becomes a Potions whiz kid, learns a spell with which he almost kills Draco, and saves Ron from a death by poisoning.
DOPPELGÄNGERS: The Hogwarts cast of characters is a double-natured bunch. There is a werewolf, a half-giant, a Muggle-born, a double agent, and a “Dumbledore Man” with a Voldemort soul fragment tattooed to his forehead. Besides these Jekyll/Hyde interior doppelgängers, there are also pairs; Dumbledore/Voldemort are a light and darkness set, for example, akin to Van Helsing/Dracula, and Harry’s gothic heroine role is complementary both to Snape’s Byronic antihero part and Voldemort as the gothic overreaching scientist.
SCAR OR TELLTALE MARK: Harry’s scar is his connection with the soul of Lord Voldemort. It is also the identifying mark by which every magical person recognizes him.
MYSTERIOUS STRANGER: Consider Black, Lupin, Moody, even Snape as figures who are not what they seem to be at first sight or until known very well.
CONFUSED ORIGIN: Harry is not only an orphan, but also a living mystery. How did he survive the Death Curse as an infant? Harry’s life as a survivor leaves everyone scratching their heads.
NIGHT: Rowling has said that Hogwarts had to be a boarding school so the children could have nighttime adventures.10 Given the number of nig
hts Harry is out in the halls under the Invisibility Cloak, I often wonder how he passed any classes or stayed awake. The naps during Professor Binns’s lectures must have helped.
MIST AND FOG: Half-Blood Prince opens with the U.K. Prime Minister upset by the chaos erupting all around him inexplicably, not to mention “all this chilly mist in the middle of July . . . It wasn’t right, it wasn’t normal.” He isn’t cheered to learn from Cornelius Fudge that the cause of the mist everywhere is breeding dementors, “the creatures that drain hope and happiness out of people” (Half-Blood Prince, chapter one).
DISTANT PAST: There isn’t time travel into the distant past, but Hogwarts and the Wizarding world have a medieval or Renaissance flavor nonetheless because of the castle and its antiquities and defining characteristics (suits of armor, paintings, the Great Hall, etc.). The robes and absence of technology, too, give everything about the school a nineteenth-century feel, at best.
DEATH: Lupin, Tonks, Sirius, James, Lily, Colin, Fred, Albus, Peter, Alastor, Barty, and Severus, for starters. The books are about death, and characters drop right and left as you’d expect in a series beginning with a double murder . . .
In short, Harry Potter is a schoolboy novel steeped, no, make that saturated in gothic touches, effects, and clichés. But there’s more.
Beyond these gothic touchstones, Ms. Rowling includes gothic romances as stories inside her stories. My favorite is the romance of the Bloody Baron and the Gray Lady, the ghosts of Slytherin House and Ravenclaw Tower respectively (Deathly Hallows, chapter thirty-one). In the middle of the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry listens attentively to Helena Ravenclaw’s ghost telling the gothic romance that reveals the story of the Baron’s agonies and the theft of the Ravenclaw diadem. It has a medieval setting; unrequited love; defiant, victimized maiden escaping and hiding; blood; death in the forest before dishonor—in brief, it has it all.
That is my favorite, but Harry’s subterranean adventures in Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets are close seconds. Ginny’s being possessed by Tom Riddle, Jr., and taken “miles beneath Hogwarts” despite her heroic resistance only to be rescued by her Prince Charming marks her as Harry’s soul mate and fellow gothic romance heroine.
And the story of Severus Snape’s life as another Heathcliff, sacrificing himself, not all at once but day by day for years to protect Harry in Lily’s memory, and his classroom sadism and his genius as a wizard have made Snape almost more important than Harry in many readers’ experience of the book. The Unbreakable Vow he makes with Narcissa Malfoy is a gallant gothic moment and subplot leading to his committing murder-in-obedience on the tower.
Voldemort’s mother, Merope Gaunt, lived a life that Ann Radcliffe, the great gothic romance novelist, might have written. Oppressed by father and brother, she is liberated when they are imprisoned for Muggle baiting. Her magic returns, and she wins the attention and affection of the young lord of the local manor with a love potion or charm. Alas, she feels compelled to reveal to him that she has enchanted him literally rather than figuratively—and he leaves her. She is pregnant, destitute, and despairing enough to lose her magic. She dies in childbirth, leaving Tom Riddle, Jr., to grow up in an orphanage.
How about Dumbledore’s long-neglected backstory? His sister was tortured by Muggles and becomes mad. The family keeps this a secret, though it means the father dies in Azkaban after revenging himself on her tormentors, because they cannot reveal why he acted as he did. The sister kills the mother accidentally and poor, brilliant Albus, caught at home as a baby-sitter, becomes friends with a Dark wizard intent on world domination! He quarrels, though, with his brother and new friend—and little sister dies in the cross fire. He spends the remainder of his life, like Snape, repenting in service and reflecting mournfully on the loved ones he failed.
Conclusion: The Morality of Gothic Literature
It is a rare gothic novel that pours in so many touchstones of the genre and layers gothic stories within the already-thick atmosphere of the uncanny and sublime. Those that do are either set pieces like Frankenstein or a kind of gothic parody, like Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Austen, Ms. Rowling’s favorite writer (see chapter one), puts Abbey’s heroine, Catherine Mor land, in a clichéd gothic scene, a manor house in which she discovers what seems to be a document in secret writing. Because the young woman is a devoted reader of gothic romance, she suspects the worst and sleeps uneasily. She discovers in the morning that the dangerous document is a laundry list. Much of Abbey is Austen’s gentle mocking of the genre.
Ms. Rowling may be up to the same thing in including so many gothic elements and subplots in the Potter novels. Certainly the Grim subplot in Prisoner, in which Harry thinks he is being haunted by a Black Dog death omen, which turns out to be his godfather working to protect him from danger rather than supernatural sign, is an echo of gothic parody à la Austen, in which natural explanations always supplant superstitious fears eventually.
But Rowling and Austen, while laughing perhaps at the more comic aspects of the gothic, don’t neglect the point of the genre. For both writers, the fears appropriate to our fallen world and atrophied spiritual life—not to mention as women in a man’s world (see chapter six)—are real, important, and best expressed with “gothic machinery.”
I have demonstrated, I hope, that the heroes of Harry Potter are gothic novel stock players and that the author creates the atmosphere of menace in her schoolboy novels both by using every touchstone of the gothic literary tradition and by weaving into her story arc and individual books gothic story subtexts and locations.
What I’ve neglected to do is discuss how this atmosphere has a specifically moral effect on the reader. The best way to do that is to revisit Ms. Rowling’s very gothic first chapters of Sorcerer’s Stone and the Dursleys’ experience of the “Letters from No One.”
Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon Dursley pride themselves on their normalcy. But they have a private dread that the neighbors will discover that their nephew, Harry, is decidedly abnormal. This fear of public revelation causes them to become sadistic cartoons of respectability and repression to mask their secret. Then the letters begin to arrive.
No postage, no return address, but with alarmingly specific detail on where the letter is to be delivered: “Mr. H. Potter, The Cupboard Under the Stairs.” The letters come with the other mail at first, but when Harry does not receive these (which the sender knows, inexplicably), they begin to arrive, en masse, delivered by owls, and, eventually, even through the fireplace chimney in great torrents. Uncle Vernon, already unstable because of his latent fears of his nephew’s problem, becomes progressively unhinged—and determined to escape the letters that are besieging his family.
The Dursleys are so unsettled by this magical assault from an unknown quarter that they abandon their home and flee. They wind up, not in a castle or manor house, but in an equally gothic “house on the rock” at sea where they believe they have so isolated themselves in wild nature that they are safe from their faceless, unknown epistolary enemy. Of course, at midnight, in a “ferocious storm,” the door to the house is broken down by a bearded giant stranger with a pink umbrella. The story, oddly enough, considering its many gothic elements, is not a scare story per se, even if it does have its gruesome images. It’s not just the comic touches like the pink umbrella that keep us from being scared or feeling concern for the Dursleys. They are a despicable lot, we all think, because of the horrible way they treat Harry, who seems a wonderful boy. Harry welcomes the letters. We, consequently, odd as this is in a gothic tale, are rooting for the mysterious, nameless force delivering the mail to win the war with the normal family that feels it is under attack.
What we are cheering for, beyond Harry getting his mail, is that the Muggles will be enlightened by the horror they experience. The Dursleys are allegorical stand-ins for actors in a supernatural drama or, more important, readers of gothic fiction. They are receiving literal and figurative messages from heaven or a supernatural reality
they have tried to hide from or deny their whole lives but which is now exploding into their living room in a way that cannot be overlooked, grasped, stopped, or controlled.
Ann Radcliffe wrote that “positive horror” could be “a source of the sublime.”11 Readers scared out of their wits by stories about man-made monsters, men having made themselves monsters, and defiant heroines trapped by cruel men or supernatural forces in subterranean chambers are stunned out of a complacent normalcy that accepts the fallen world of death and sin as “natural.” Gothic writers “make a righteous use of the element of horror”12 to shake their readers awake and to realize the darkened state of their understanding and inattentiveness to conscience and the eye of the heart.
Ultimately, gothic literature is about having the moral courage to see the world as it is and to make the choice to seek a way out. That choice is by definition and tradition a moral one—to flee death and pursue life, to seek light rather than darkness. We see the horror in the world—and in monsters without conscience—and draw away from it. We identify with the defiant heroine resisting the forces working to imprison or diminish her. What is good, true, and beautiful is sharpened in exposure to its absence in the evil of gothic nightmares.