by Alison Lurie
As with the irrepressible pot of porridge, J. K. Rowling gets more than her wish. The story is finished, the publisher found, and the tales of Harry Potter begin to cover the earth, both as books (they have now been translated into over sixty languages) and as films. There are games, toys, costumes, guidebooks, websites, and a multitude of imitative versions of the novels that bear the same relation to the originals as wet cardboard sludge does to tasty porridge. In China alone, according to the New York Times, there are already a dozen false Harry Potter books in print, in one of which six Chinese teenage wizards travel to Hogwarts to rescue Harry and his friends from the forces of evil.
The film versions of Rowling’s books are, fortunately, very good. By now it sometimes seems as if every great British stage and screen actor has appeared in them. The casts have included Helena Bonham Carter, John Cleese, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Gambon, Robert Hardy, Richard Harris, Maggie Smith, Miranda Richardson, Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, Emma Thompson, and Zoe Wanamaker. In the film The Order of the Phoenix, Imelda Staunton, best known to Americans as the kind and sympathetic heroine of Vera Drake, is the villainess. She appears as Dolores Umbridge, a brilliantly chosen name that suggests a down-to-earth mum from Coronation Street.
At first this association seems reasonable: Professor Umbridge, who has been appointed to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, is plump, middle-aged, and always smiling; she wears pink tweed, with perky bows in her curly permed hair, and speaks in sweet, ingratiating tones. Soon, though, the picture darkens. Professor Umbridge refuses to allow her students to practice her subject, confining their class time to the reading and rereading of theory (a frustration that many recent graduate students in the humanities have also suffered). Eventually she turns out to be ambitious and relentlessly cruel. When we take another look at her name, we are likely to think that we should have known this from the start, since “Dolores Umbridge” so clearly suggests grief (dolor) and resentment (umbrage). Names in Rowling’s books, like those in Dickens, are always significant: “Harry,” for instance, recalls both Shakespeare’s brave and impulsive Prince Hal and his Harry Hotspur, while “Voldemort” simultaneously suggests theft, mold, and death.
The delight that all these great actors appear to feel in taking a holiday from serious drama and hamming it up, sometimes against type, is often practically visible on the screen. As the formidable but benevolent witch Professor McGonagall, for instance, Dame Maggie Smith cannot help reminding us of a reformed Miss Jean Brodie, now genuinely concerned for her students’ welfare and no longer a fan of Mussolini, but bitterly opposed to the authoritarianism of the Ministry of Magic. Sir Michael Gambon, as the headmaster of Hogwarts, Professor Dumbledore, recalls the TV show based on the novels of Georges Simenon, where as Inspector Maigret he also often arrived late but triumphantly at the solution to a dramatic problem. It is easy to imagine them and their colleagues getting together for laughter and congratulations at the end of every scene.
Meanwhile, J. K. Rowling has become the richest and most famous children’s writer in the world. Already in 1999 more than two thousand fans lined up outside a bookshop to meet her and have their copies of The Prisoner of Azkaban signed. At this occasion, according to Publisher’s Weekly, “the crowd became so ugly that the store manager was bitten and punched.” Soon Rowling could not leave the house without being pointed out and besieged by fans. By 2001, in an interview on the BBC, she complained that people had started searching her trash. “It’s horrible,” she said. “It feels like such an invasion, and I’m not a politician, I’m not an entertainer; I never expected that level of interest in my life.”
That Rowling has in fact received far more attention than she ever wanted is strongly substantiated by the attitude of her hero to his own fame. Again and again he expresses the wish that he were an ordinary boy. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for instance, he says, “He was sick of it, sick of being the person who was stared at and talked about all the time.” But Harry is not only oppressed by public attention: he is also, as the books progress, in more and more danger of being injured or killed. In the real world, too, this is an occupational hazard of great fame and fortune, and one that Rowling now cannot help but share. She has already been stalked by a mentally disturbed fan, as well as sued (unsuccessfully) for plagiarism, and has received special permission from the Edinburgh City Council to increase the height of the walls surrounding her house and install an electronic security system.
Many writers, including myself, have speculated about why (ruling out supernatural influence) the Harry Potter books should have become so popular. The simplest explanation, perhaps, is that Rowling’s stories have something for everyone, and combine so many popular genres: fantasy, school story, quest tale, thriller, mystery, and—more recently—electronic games. Some chapters of each book read like text versions of an early video game, in which cartoon characters whoosh about on screen trying to zap one another.
Rowling also provides a wide selection of characters for readers to identify with. The student population of Hogwarts, like that of most high schools, is divided into jocks, brains, nice guys, and dangerous Goths. Harry and his two best friends are in the jock house, Griffindor, where “dwell the brave at heart.” Ravenclaw emphasizes “wit and learning,” while the students in Hufflepuff are described as “just and loyal.” (In fact, Hermione seems a natural Ravenclaw and Ron a Hufflepuff; authorial convenience rather than the Sorting Hat appears to have placed them all together.) Unlike most classic boarding-school story locations, Hogwarts is multicultural and multiclass: its students come from both rich and poor families and include Chinese, Indian, Black, and Jewish kids. Some have parents who are also wizards or witches; others do not.
It has always been clear that J. K. Rowling writes extremely well and has remarkable powers of invention. She has created a world that cannot help but appeal to children and adolescents: one in which conventional adults (Muggles) are either clueless or cruel or both, while her young hero and his friends have special abilities. These abilities can also be seen as a metaphor for the particular powers of childhood and youth: imagination, energy, creativity, and especially humor—as well as being exciting, the books are often very funny.
In a world that is changing too rapidly even for many children to keep up with, the Harry Potter books can also be enjoyed as the celebration of a largely pre-industrial society. Hogwarts School is in a castle lit by torches and oil lamps and heated by fires; mail is carried by owls, and at the Ministry of Magic memos fly about as paper airplanes. There are no computers, phones, or radios, though a Knight Bus makes an occasional and often disastrous appearance. Magic takes the place of most modern inventions, and many of the people who employ it are children and adolescents. (Anyone who has recently had to appeal to a nine-year-old to debug a computer, program a cell phone, or operate the new TV’s remote control will already have experienced the bafflement and irritation that Harry’s Muggle foster parents, the Dursleys, frequently feel towards his unique skills.)
In interviews, J. K. Rowling has often said that as time passes her books would get darker, and she has been true to her word. When the final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, begins, Lord Voldemort and his associates, the Death Eaters, have taken over the three central institutions of the wizarding world: the Ministry of Magic, Hogwarts, and The Daily Prophet newspaper. Voldemort’s political platform is racist and reactionary: it favors the limitation of magic power to “purebloods,” all of whose ancestors were wizards and witches, and the elimination of what he and his friends scornfully call “Mudbloods” (those who have magical powers although both of their parents were Muggles) and “half-bloods,” who had only one magically gifted parent. The Daily Prophet and its unscrupulous columnist Rita Skeeter are doing their best to promote these racist views, and to destroy the posthumous reputation of Professor Dumbledore, claiming that “he took an unnatural interest” in Harry Potter, and
even suggesting that Harry may have been responsible for Dumbledore’s death.
Lord Voldemort, who himself is a half-blood, is essentially interested not in racial purity but in total power and immortality. Since it has been prophesied that either he or Harry Potter must die, one of his first priorities is to kill our hero. He has already tried to protect his own life in a manner familiar to folklorists, by hiding his soul, or life force, in various external objects. As long as these objects, known here as Horcruxes, survive, he is safe. Much of the action of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows consists of the attempts of Harry and his friends to escape Voldemort and his followers, and at the same time to find and destroy the Horcruxes. Unable to return to Hogwarts, they spend most of the fall term on the run, living in a magical self-erecting tent that moves constantly around Britain in order to escape pursuit. They are often wet and cold and hungry and sometimes given to squabbling and sulking. At times, this part of the story resembles the worst camping-out experience you have ever had; at others, it recalls a dungeons-and-dragons-type electronic game. At one point, for instance, Harry and his friends escape from the underground vault of a bank run by goblins by clinging to the back of an old blind dragon whom they have liberated. The dragon is unaware of their presence, and never recognizes them as its rescuers—something that also occasionally happens to benefactors in Muggle life.
Though Harry Potter would prefer to be an ordinary person, he is clearly not one: even his role in the school game of Quidditch proves this. During matches he does not engage with the members of either team. Instead, as Seeker, he pursues a flying golden ball called the Snitch, which if captured will win points for his side. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that Harry is not just a unique protagonist, but also an example of a mythical figure that the famous scholar Lord Raglan called the Hero. Though he is still only seventeen at the end of the story, he already scores six points on Raglan’s list of the characteristics of the Hero:
1. At birth or soon after an attempt is made to kill him, but
2. he is spirited away, and
3. is reared by foster parents in a far country [among Muggles in Surrey, not all that far geographically from the Wizarding world, but supernaturally totally separated from it] …
4. On reaching manhood he returns or perhaps goes to his future kingdom [Hogwarts]”
5. He achieves “a victory over … a dragon or wild beast,” as well as a series of evil opponents, both human and non-human.
6. Finally, he meets up with a mysterious death.
But there are other mythic echoes in this story. At one point in the saga, for instance, Lord Voldemort tries to convince Harry to join him by promising him power and immortality, the standard temptations of Satan. And at the end of The Deathly Hallows, having learned that one of Voldemort’s external souls resides in his own body, Harry willingly goes into the forest to be killed by the Dark Lord, a self-sacrificial act that cannot help but recall the West’s most familiar myth. After he dies, he returns to consciousness in a huge hall full of white mist that resembles King’s Cross Station (where Muggle trains leave for Scotland, Rowling’s home, and also where the train to Hogwarts departs from Track 9 3/4). This location for the afterlife cannot help but focus attention on the name of the London railway terminus, and suggest that we are in the realm of Christian tradition; another, earlier clue is that Lord Voldemort, the representation of evil, looks like a snake and is often accompanied by one.
In the transfigured King’s Cross Station, Harry meets the spirit of Professor Dumbledore. He is offered the opportunity to “go on” or to return to Hogwarts and confront Lord Voldemort for the final time—in other words, to be resurrected. Naturally, being a hero, Harry makes the second choice. His apparently dead body is carried back to the castle and displayed to his grieving friends, while the representatives of evil mock him and them. Then Harry springs to life, duels wand to wand with Voldemort, and defeats him. Virtue triumphs, and both Hogwarts and the Ministry of Magic—as well as, one hopes, The Daily Prophet— are returned to the control of relatively benevolent leaders.
Among readers, opinion about this ending varies. Some people I have talked to, including teenagers, are happy that Harry survives; others had not only expected that he would die in the end, but would have preferred it that way. Indeed, Rowling’s repeated assurances to journalists that “there would be deaths” suggested this. (Over fifty people do die in The Deathly Hallows, but most of them are anonymous or minor characters; the most prominent and most missed by my informants are Fred Weasley and Dobby the house-elf.)
Almost everyone I’ve spoken to hated and regretted the Epilogue to The Deathly Hallows, which takes place nineteen years later in King’s Cross Station and portrays Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley as parents of three children, two of whom are about to take the train for Hogwarts. Though many of the other passengers appear to stare at Harry, it seems clear that Rowling has at last given her hero the ordinary domestic life he longed for (and the same number of children she has). Also present are Hermione and Ron, now married and with two children, one of whom is also boarding the train. We are given no news of any of the other characters in the series except for Neville Longbottom, who is currently Hogwarts’ Professor of Herbology. The fact that Harry’s scar has not hurt in nineteen years does not mean that evil has vanished from the world. Hogwarts still has a Slytherin House, whose students “use any means / To achieve their ends.” Apparently, one out of four potential wizards is still drawn to the dark side. The Epilogue also effectively blocks the creation of more Harry Potter stories, since there can be no real suspense in any adventures he might have had in the past nineteen years—or even in the future. “Anyhow,” as one fourteen-year-old reader from Santa Cruz put it, “who would care once they know he’s just an ordinary middle-aged dad?”
The bitter criticism of Harry Potter that greeted its early success, mostly from fundamentalist Christians who objected to any story with a good witch or wizard in it (including The Wizard of Oz) seems to have died down somewhat. Complaints that Harry, Ron, and Hermione are not model children: that they break rules, disobey orders, and sometimes even lie or steal, are also less frequent—though of course these charges are true. Possibly, as the heroes of the book become older, such actions seem more readily justified, especially as Hogwarts begins to be infiltrated by teachers who are determined to injure or kill Harry and his friends.
Today criticism tends to be more analytical, in both senses of the word. In The Psychology of Harry Potter (2007), many of the contributing authors (like its editor), have PhDs in psychology, and occasionally a fairly tongue-in-cheek attitude towards their subject. They complain, however, that Hogwarts seems to feature rote learning, does not teach critical thinking, and lacks adequate career counseling. They also identify Harry’s and Ron’s relationship problems as due to their upbringing. Ron, one of seven children in a poor family, suffers from Anxiety Syndrome as the result of a lack of sustained parental attention and affection; Harry, raised in isolation by unloving relatives, suffers from Avoidance Syndrome. (Hermione, by contrast, had loving and attentive parents, and is an example of security and confidence.) Timely intervention by a well-trained Muggle child psychologist might have made their lives easier, but probably not much could have been done for Tom Riddle, the future Lord Voldemort, who was rejected at birth by his mother and brought up in a harsh orphanage, where he developed a full-blown antisocial personality disorder.
Looking back on the series now, some questions occur. For one thing, it is hard to understand why so many witches and wizards would want to join the Dark Lord and become Death Eaters. Voldemort is neither beautiful nor charming, as many Dark Lords have been in the past, both in history and in literature. His aspect is repellent and his manner towards his associates cold, haughty, and cruel. On the other hand, many of the Death Eaters themselves are fascinating in their own way, and so are their supernatural helpers. One of
Rowling’s best inventions is the Dementors, who wear black hooded cloaks, have scabby claw-like hands, and spread hopelessness and depression wherever they go. When they appear, they awaken your worst memories, and nothing seems good or beautiful or interesting or worth doing. The Dementors are the manifestation of emotions we are all subject to at times; and they also recall some people we have had the misfortune to know, people who have the ability to make life seem worse just by walking into the room and making a few apparently harmless remarks. (Examples from my own experience: “Of course, at your age a broken leg never heals completely, you’ll probably always walk with a limp.” “What a shame that your article should have appeared in a magazine that nobody ever reads.”)
One way of looking at the Harry Potter books today, of course, is as a political allegory. At the start of the series, the Ministry of Magic, which seems to be located in Downing Street, is merely a bureaucracy handicapped by too many rules and a few pompously fussy officials. Later it appears to be run by fools whose main wish is to avoid trouble, and who therefore refuse to admit that Lord Voldemort has returned and that the entire Wizarding world is in danger. Gradually it becomes clear that some government officials can be bribed and manipulated. In The Order of the Phoenix, the Minister of Magic, Fudge (note his name), is seen talking to the rich and powerful Lucius Malfoy by Mr. Weasley, Ron’s father. Mr .Weasley, who is basically a good man, but rather weak and ineffective, remarks, “Malfoy’s been giving generously to all sorts of things for years… . Gets him in with the right people… . then he can ask favors … delay laws he doesn’t want passed.”