by John Granger
Born centuries ago at the dawn of the age of empiricism and enlightened reason, largely in reaction to the industrial and political revolutions of failed millennialist promise,13 the gothic in literature, film, architecture, and popular culture is still very much with us. But there are radical differences between the Victorian gothic morality evident in Stoker’s Dracula and the postmodern vampires of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Having established that Harry Potter, if it has to be described in three words, is a “gothic schoolboy novel,” let’s look at Rowling as a postmodern writer and at the specific moral choices she wants her readers to make for redemption and escape of the fallen world.
CHAPTER FIVE
Harry Potter as Postmodern Epic
Preaching the Gospel of Tolerance and Inclusiveness—
and Choosing the Metanarrative of Love
We’ve just spent two good-sized chapters demonstrating what you probably would have figured out after five minutes of reflection on the question, “What kind of books are the Harry Potter novels?” Granted, it hasn’t been wasted time if you didn’t know about the schoolboy or gothic traditions of English literature in which Ms. Rowling is writing, but, still, to have worked that hard to come up with “Harry Potter is schoolboy fiction with a gothic atmosphere?” It seems quite a bit like the scientific studies that demonstrate the sur est way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. We didn’t know that?
But here’s the really sad thing. Harry Potter isn’t a gothic schoolboy series of books. Yes, it’s about a schoolboy and his secondary education in a public school, and, sure, it has every gothic fiction gadget from secret closets (can you say “Vanishing Cabinets?”) to a castle on the lake.
But the books don’t do what a schoolboy novel or gothic romance is supposed to do. Not exactly.
The schoolboy or schoolgirl novel, be it Tom Brown’s Schooldays, penny dreadful, or Enid Blyton serial, is largely a celebration of Victorian morality and ideas of virtue. A gothic romance or horror piece, too, has a supernatural or human enemy that acts as a moral foil; we are confronted with death’s grip on the fallen world and our own inadequacy to free ourselves from it. This gothic landslide amounts, in relief, to a call to the life of virtue in hope of redemption, what schoolboy fiction is openly about. Who wants to become the man-made monsters Dracula, Frankenstein, Hyde, or Heathcliff? If we are defiant and resist compromise to the end, à la Jane Eyre, virtue will win out.
Harry Potter certainly has its heroic moments and the evil presented is very real. But as noted in the previous chapter, many of the gothic elements aren’t frightening at all; for the most part, they’re funny, and often they have the zap or thrill you might get from living room furniture. I mean, if you’re horrified by Moaning Myrtle, Peeves, or the Giant Squid, Hogwarts’s “Nessie,” you’re as oversensitive as Poe’s narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Hogwarts as a school, too, is hard to take seriously. The only things of any value they learn, after all, are lessons they learn outside of formal classes (how to fly on a broom, Apparating, effective Defense Against the Dark Arts spells, etc.). Teachers, as a rule, are sadists, freaks, officious nits, or sufficiently incompetent that they can be all but ignored (see chapter six on satire). Take Professor Trelawney or Dolores Umbridge. Please.
That Ms. Rowling isn’t writing classic schoolboy or gothic fiction shouldn’t be a surprise, though. As these sorts of books were most popular in the nineteenth century, how weird would it be, as a twentieth-century writer aiming to please twenty-first-century readers, if she wrote books just like Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, or even Enid Blyton?
Very weird. She needs a different hook to catch postmodern readers, a hook at the moral level that will connect with readers the way mystery and Harry’s being an orphan did on the surface layer. That hook is Ms. Rowling’s delivery of moral lessons we already believe in just by living in this historical period, lessons we learn again in every book we read, advertisement we watch, or news program we listen to.
Let’s look at how twenty-first-century schoolboy and gothic books differ from the ones we just reviewed for an idea of how our age differs from Queen Victoria’s.
A World Turned Inside Out
Looking around the twenty-first-century bookstores for echoes of gothic horror, schoolboy novels, or anything like a fairy tale with witches or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I made an amazing discovery. Somewhere around the turn of the last century the world of books was turned inside out. The bad guys of the old books are all new-book good guys, or at least very sympathetic characters to whom we are obliged to give a break for the challenges they’re facing. And the good guys seem a little simple.
Vampires are hot right now. But they’re not bipedal demons and devils like our friend from Transylvania that the good guys are obliged to decapitate, drive metal stakes into, and defy sacrificially and heroically with the Eucharist. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books hold four of the top five spots on the New York Times Bestseller List as I write this; young girls are lining up for repeat viewings of teen heartthrob Robert Pattinson playing boy vamp Edward Cullen in the first Twilight film. The vampires in these books are horribly misunderstood superpowered good guys with drinking problems. They’re “vegetarian,” meaning they drink only animal blood, no human blood allowed. They have to hide who they are lest they suffer persecution by the whacko human beings prejudiced against them.
Dracula is still very bad in Van Helsing, the 2004 Universal Pictures blockbuster directed by Stephen Sommers, but Frankenstein’s creature? He isn’t the horrific figure of gothic romance who conveys what a monster fallen, spiritless man is. The creature is a persecuted victim, attacked by unfeeling villagers, used by Dracula and his brides to animate their “children,” and one who does all he can to help the James Bond version of Abraham Van Helsing save the world from a vampire population explosion.
Witches? I grew up believing there were good witches and wizards and bad witches and wizards. Good wizards? Easy: Prospero, the Narnia Star mage, Gandalf, and the Wizard of Oz. I had a harder time with witches, though there were a few good ones like Samantha Stephens (Bewitched) and Sabrina (Sabrina: The Teenage Witch). What turned me off to witches, probably forever except for Harry Potter, was the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West played by Margaret Hamilton in MGM’s 1939 classic Technicolor film, The Wizard of Oz.
I remember that film was the only thing I saw on television my senior year at Exeter. We had all grown up with this movie and, though it was exam week, we sat down to watch—teachers, tests, and papers be damned. When Hamilton flew into Munchkinland to get the ruby slippers she felt were hers by right, the boy next to me said, “THAT is a wicked wicked-witch.” I’m still trying to unwrap all of what he meant by “wicked” in that short sentence, but everyone present agreed with him. I could never drink Maxwell House coffee as a grown-up because Hamilton was their spokesperson. I felt it had to be a nasty brew.
But in the 1995 novel that became the blockbuster 2003 Broadway musical Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, the Wicked Witch (named Elphaba) is not the bad guy. She’s the horribly misunderstood and misrepresented good witch who has been discriminated against by her religious parents and narrow-minded schoolteachers for her colored skin and free thinking. Who knew?
In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the bad guy and Tom’s nemesis (much like Draco Malfoy is to Harry) is an older boy named Flashman. After being bullied and burned, Brown and his best friend have their rowdy revenge and Flashman is expelled for drunkenness. Flashy is a vicious, violent, self-important prig, and Tom Brown readers can loathe him openly and ardently.
Now, thanks to the twelve volumes of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman Papers (published 1969-2005), we know what happened to Flashman post-Rugby. He’s a lifelong cad and a coward, as we’d expect, but, incredibly, in every one of his adventures in wars and scrapes from India and China to Bull Run in the Dakotas, he escapes alive and, get this, a
s a hero. The suggestion seems to be that it is because he is such an irresponsible, sex-consumed toady and profligate that he succeeds so spectacularly in the bedroom, boardroom, and battlefield despite himself.
Jane Eyre hasn’t survived postmodern revision unscathed, either. In Charlotte Brontë’s original novel, Jane’s first marriage attempt to Mr. Rochester is prevented, right when the couple is at the altar about to make their vows, by a lawyer and the brother of Bertha, the wife Rochester keeps in the attic. Bertha eventually escapes and succeeds in burning down Thornfield Manor and killing herself, simultaneously blinding and crippling Rochester, but also liberating him to marry Jane Eyre.
In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), we learned that the first Mrs. Rochester was the real heroine of her own gothic romance, a white Creole woman whom Rochester married for her money, drove over the mental edge, and imprisoned. The postcolonial version of the tale features Jane and Rochester as racists and colonial suppressors.
Much more fun but in its way as unsettling is Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001). In an alternate-universe story with more twists than I can possibly summarize here, literary detective Thursday Next (her name) chases literary blackmailer Acheron Hades (ouch) into the pages of Jane Eyre via her uncle’s invention, the Prose Portal. Hades, to blackmail a literature-obsessed general population, is killing characters in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit by erasing them from the original manuscript.
In this universe’s version of 1985, England and the Russian Empire are still fighting the Crimean War, Wales is a Soviet Republic, the real author of the Shakespeare plays is contested everywhere, with no little emotion and by almost everyone, and Jane Eyre ends with Jane in India with her cousin instead of making up with the blinded Rochester. Thursday’s battle at Thornfield Manor with Hades, as you might have guessed, ends up starting the fire that destroys the manor, Acheron tosses Bertha from the roof, and Rochester nearly dies getting Thursday out of the building. Next becomes Rochester’s voice that Jane hears, which prevents her from going to India. A new ending to Jane Eyre due to reader participation and engagement with the text, literally and figuratively!
In my favorite touch, Thursday realizes she cannot live without her true love and rushes to his wedding—only to find his wedding has been called off because his bride-to-be is already married. The Rochesters had sent the lawyer who had broken up their first wedding into the “real world” to stop this one. The boundaries of space, time, text, genre, character, and reader in this book are porous, to say the least.
My point?
All the bad guys in the gothic fiction we discussed in the last chapter are revealed in their twenty-first-century rein ventions to be good guys who have been misunderstood. The white hats in these stories, correspondingly, have a dark side we never would have guessed in the originals.
Ms. Rowling is writing stories in the same historical period as these very successful revisionist adaptations of gothic and schoolboy fiction. To get at how her Harry Potter stories resemble and differ from Victorian morality tales, we need to think about how we see things differently than Tom Brown and Robert Louis Stevenson did.
We need to look at our own eyeballs, or, at least, at the colored glasses through which we filter reality. With a better idea of how we think, we’ll be able to understand Rowling as a writer of our times. As popular as Harry Potter is around the world, it’s clear her message and meaning resonate profoundly with the fundamental beliefs of our age.
Three qualities of postmodern thinking and literature are at the moral heart of Harry Potter. These can also be seen pretty clearly in every popular book, movie, and song of our time. To prove that, let’s look at an improbable example: the popular animated television program produced in 1964 from the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
Misfits: A Colored Reindeer, an Elf with Lifestyle Issues
According to Rick Goldschmidt, author of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Making of the Rankin/Bass Holiday Classic, “Premiering on NBC December 6, 1964, Rudolph has become the longest-running, highest-rated television special in the history of the medium.”1 The story goes something like this: A young red-nosed reindeer is being ousted from the reindeer games because of his shiny nose. He teams up with Hermey, an elf who wants to be a dentist, and Yukon Cornelius, a prospector. They run into the Abominable Snowman and find a whole island of misfit toys. Rudoph vows to get Santa to help the toys, and he goes back to the North Pole on Christmas Eve. But Santa’s sleigh is fogged in. Then Santa looks at Rudolph, and gets a very bright idea . . .2
Let’s look at the top three characteristics of postmodern thinking, and how they are reflected in the literature and drama of our time, and how Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer exemplifies all three.
The first characteristic is a tendency to question the defining myths of our culture. Defining myths of a culture impose a rational order and hierarchy on those who live within that culture. They are stories around which we organize our ideas of right and wrong, good guys and villains.
This rational order, however, is necessarily oppressive, exclusive, and incomplete because of the way people in power use every social structure (education, right to vote, access to capital, etc.) to hold on to their status. These structures include law and language, art and literature, even movies. No one whose worldview is shaped by belief in this reality can see the world in any way except as confirmation of their core beliefs.
So, what is the grand myth of Rudolph’s North Pole? How is it a lie? Rudolph is a tale about the evils of unexamined beliefs at the North Pole. Our heroes are Rudolph, a young reindeer, and Hermey, an elf working in Santa’s toy workshop. Rudolph can’t fit in with the other reindeer because of his “shiny nose.” Even his dad, proud Donner, is ashamed of Rudolph’s being so different. At the “Reindeer Games”—Quidditch for reindeer—Rudolph is humiliated by his nose even though he is a good flyer.
True reindeer have black noses. Nonblack-nosed reindeer are “other,” consequently, and “less reindeer” than those whose noses are normal-colored. Remember, this television special first aired in 1964. Rudolph is a minority, oppressed because of his color.
Things aren’t much better for Santa’s elves. Hermey the elf’s nose is the right shade of pink. It’s his lifestyle choice that makes him an “other.” Hermey hates making toys in Santa’s workshop and wants to be a dentist, so he is mocked and marginalized. For Hermey and Rudolph, the happy world of the North Pole is a miserable prison. They reject the defining myth of North Pole culture: that everyone is happy and productive in the places created for them.
The second characteristic of postmodern thinking is: Nothing is what you think it is, no one is who surface appearances make you think they are. A tenet of postmodernism is that our perception of reality is untrustworthy. We do not see or sense anything as it truly is except through a filter of preconception. Really “knowing,” consequently, requires examining the way we think, and how we understand the things we perceive. “Truth” is absolutely relative. In story, our inability to know is best represented by the surprise ending, where we are confronted by our misperceptions and misunderstanding of the people and problems we’ve read about.
In Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the “surprise”—which is so characteristic of postmodern fiction that it hardly comes off as surprising—is that the very qualities excluded by the culture of reindeers and elves just happen to be the exact qualities needed to save those communities in their time of desperation. Rudolph, despised by friends and family, saves the day in the storm that would have cancelled Santa’s Christmas deliveries.
Hermey saves everyone with his peculiar devotion to dentistry by defanging the Abominable Snowman at story’s end. Who could have guessed? Those same qualities that made Rudolph and Hermey misfits were just the characteristics and skills that everyone needed. We missed it because we bought into the prejudices about color-free noses and happy toy-making elves.
The third quality of postmodern thin
king is: Genre blurring: high art and popular entertainment mix. In architecture it’s known as “double-coding” and means mixing in elements of other styles, a Georgian doorway or cornice on a Bauhaus glass-box skyscraper to jar the eye and make the viewer conscious of what is on display. In the literature of our day, the commonplace blurring and mixing of literary genres in one work serves to shake up the reader’s preconceived notions of what he or she is reading. It creates a state of slight confusion, a lack of certainty about what can be expected to happen next—and that creates an opening through which writers can drive home larger messages.
When Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer first appeared as a Christmas cartoon special in 1964, it was an expansion of a song and a story already very familiar to American viewers. In addition to being a television show derived from a Tin Pan Alley holiday song, Rudolph the TV special mixes in two other upside-down elements; it’s a stop motion animation play done with dolls rather than a proper Bugs Bunny-type cartoon and, incredibly—to me at least—it is a musical. Reindeer, Santa, dentists, misfit toys singing at the North Pole like it is Broadway. I mean how weird is this show? The mixing of genres and media is perfect to deliver the prejudice-blasting morality play because its presentation already has the audience questioning their idea of what they are seeing and thinking.
As you already know from your trip through the first four chapters, Ms. Rowling is a master mixer of genres. She does it, of course, to deliver her postmodern meaning and moral message.
Rowling as a Writer of Her Times
I hope now you can see why we needed those rewrites of Dracula, Frankenstein, Tom Brown, and Jane Eyre. You know that Creole woman in the attic was used and abused by the barely suppressed colonial and racist beliefs of Rochester. Vampires and soulless monsters, of course, are misunderstood by the common herd with their ignorant prejudices; turning the story upside-down with the accepted evil as good and vice versa is the means to our re-education in the politically correct prejudice of our time that all prejudice is bad.