Harry Potter's Bookshelf Page 4

  At the end of Half-Blood Prince, though, we weren’t saying, “I was suckered again! Doggone it!” We were saying, “Wow. Harry was right. Snape killed Dumbledore as part of the plan that the Dark Lord had for Malfoy to do in the headmaster. Time to line up behind Harry and go Horcrux and Snape hunting on our white hippogriff and in our white cowboy hats.”

  Ms. Rowling spun us around again. The funny thing, of course, is that after bruising our foreheads five times previously, we should have expected that the big twist would be coming in the seventh and last book. Dumbledore died, alas, and wasn’t available at the end of Prince to explain how stupid we were to believe Harry again.

  To get to the stunning “twist” at the end of Deathly Hallows, though, we need to grasp what the surprise ending means.

  The Romance Formula That Is Philosophical

  The Austen books have a formula with which you may be familiar: Boy meets girl, adversity separates boy and girl (parents and family, differences in station, etc.), and boy and girl overcome adversity for storybook ending. The engines of the triumph over the obstacles put before love are devotion, emotion, and passion, more or less. Austen plays with the formula, mocks it really, by showing the disastrous results of these passionate first encounters and mistaken first impressions. Again and again, they lead to unhappy marriages and failed relationships. Just consider:• Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility

  • Willoughby and Colonel Brandon’s foster daughter in Sense and Sensibility

  • Marianne’s feelings for Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility

  • Elizabeth’s feelings for Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice

  • Wickham’s usage of Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

  • Emma Woodhouse’s fascination with Frank Churchill in Emma

  All the “happy endings” and positive courtships, in contrast, are the fruit of hard work to overcome the mistakes made on first sight and the characters’ deeply held prejudices or convictions.• Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley in Emma

  • Harriet and Robert Martin in Emma

  • Edward Ferrars and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility

  • Colonel Brandon and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility

  • Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice

  • Jane Bennet and Bingley in Pride and Prejudice

  Austen, in this consistent depiction of hurried judgment from first impressions as bad and of penetrating understanding born of reflection and experience as good, is writing a philosophical argument against David Hume’s empiricist position within her comic novels (and Rowling, in the tradition of English letters, is doing the same thing). Let’s take a look at what Hume said and how Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a response.

  Hume’s position was, ultimately, that nothing could be known certainly (except, of course, the fact that “nothing could be known certainly,” which was certain). The first principle and consequence of what is even on the surface a contradiction is that only sensorial knowledge is even dependable because all of our ideas Hume assumed to be derived from sense impressions. The distance between this belief and the materialism of our times, in which only quantities of matter and energy are thought of as real, is a short walk; the breach made thereby with the Romantic and Platonic vision predominant in literature is correspondingly vast. Not very surprisingly, Austen and Rowling side with Coleridge and Wordsworth against Hume.

  Jane Austen, the very widely read Parson’s daughter, takes aim at Hume’s dependence on sense impressions in the language and meaning of her Pride and Prejudice, the first title of which was First Impressions.3 Pride and Prejudice, as an example, is an argument against trusting cold and sensorial “first impressions” versus sympathetic judgment based on experience and character. The former, as the story unfolds, are relatively worthless because first impressions are so malleable to the ideas we have from our personal pride and prejudice.

  Darcy seems the worst of self-important snobs to Elizabeth Bennet, and the Bennets seem to Darcy to be beneath his attention. Wickham seems the long-suffering innocent to Elizabeth—and Darcy to be Wickham’s persecutor. His pride and her prejudice combine to blind them to their real characters, which, of course, circumstances and their ability both to rise above their sensorial impressions and trust their greater judgment beyond pride and prejudice reveal in time. Their nuptials (and sister Jane’s with Bingley) are a testament of love’s greater perception of truth and goodness than sense, subject as perceived ephemera are to human failings like conceit, class, and inherited beliefs.

  “Pride and Prejudice” in Harry Potter

  Austen showed the cathartic transformation of her principal players (and thereby her readers) from proud, prejudiced figures wholly subject to first impressions into loving couples who have seen the greater truth about others beyond sensorial knowledge. Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, too, turn on this theme.

  There are at least four principal themes running through these novels: prejudice, choice, change, and love’s victory over death—and prejudice may be the pivotal theme of the four. Every book is loaded with reminders of how everyone but the long-suffering, brilliant, and saintly (Lupin, Hermione, and Dumbledore, respectively) is captive to their preconceptions about others and usually almost brutal in their unkindness to the objects of their prejudice.

  We have, of course, the constant of “proper wizard pride” by which all nonmagical people, indeed, even magical brethren that are not “pure-blood” witches and wizards, are held in disdain. The Muggles we meet, too, hate the abnormality of the people living in Harry’s world. The poor, the clumsy, the awkward, the stupid, the ugly, and the unpopular at Hogwarts are also shown to have a hard time. Even the “Nearly Headless” ghost is a second-class citizen among the properly “Headless” ghosts and prevented from participating in the annual Headless hunt.

  Magical folk seem preoccupied, like Jane Austen’s characters, with the birth condition or circumstances of others over which they had no choice or control rather than on the quality of their characters. Ron learns Hagrid is a half-giant in Goblet of Fire, and, though he has been Hagrid’s friend for three years, learning this news really disturbs him because of the wizard prejudice against giants. We see the same or similar responses with respect to noble centaurs, house-elves, and even werewolves. Hagrid even has a few unkind words for foreigners in Goblet of Fire to show he has his own prejudices to get over.

  And this prejudice is institutional as well. The Ministry of Magic refuses to promote Arthur Weasley, in the opinion of his wife, because he lacks proper wizard pride, and though the Ministry opposes the Death Eaters’ attacks on Muggles, they certainly share Voldemort’s contempt for them. Magical media, too, especially the Daily Prophet, transmits and reinforces the prejudices of witches and wizards in almost every story we read. The coverage of news is so biased and irresponsible that when they do report a story correctly Dumbledore notes that “even the Daily Prophet” gets one right on occasion.

  The ubiquity of prejudice in the magical and Muggle worlds isn’t what makes the prejudice theme the pivotal one in the series. The obstacles to the successful resolution of the other themes—love’s defeat of death, freewill choice, and personal transformation or change—are essentially prejudice. You simply cannot be loving, capable of unjaundiced decision making, or capable of change when bound by personal prejudice and pride. The big twist at which the books aim, too, turns on the revelation of Harry’s foundational misconception and the change in him if he realizes and transcends this misunderstanding.

  You’ll recall that Ms. Rowling believes that the surprise ending of Emma is “the best twist ever in literature.” She has said that this finish is “the target of perfection” at which she is aiming with her plot construction. Just as the key to Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement in Pride and Prejudice was his seeing past his pride and her overcoming her prejudice, a victory repeated with Emma Woodhouse in the later novel, Harry’s victory ove
r Lord Voldemort must come through love and after the revelation of an unexpected “back” to a revered or reviled “front.” Harry, like Emma, Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Elizabeth, however, had to transcend his pride as a Gryffindor and free himself of his “old prejudice” against Slytherins. He also had to come to terms with the Machiavellian aspect and clay feet of his hero Dumbledore.

  What Lupin calls Harry’s “old prejudice” against Severus (Half-Blood Prince, chapter sixteen) is resolved suddenly and forever in his experience of his sworn enemy’s memories of his mother. More difficult was coming to terms with the “back” to Dumbledore’s “front,” recognizing the secretiveness and failings of Harry’s beloved mentor. Unquestioning admiration can blind us, Harry learns, as much as inherited prejudice. Most of Deathly Hallows turns on Harry’s finally choosing to believe in Dumbledore while digging Dobby’s grave on Easter morning. Rowling’s astonishing final twist was that Snape was a sacrificial hero and Dumbledore a man with a history; Harry’s victory over his preconceptions, represented in naming his look-alike son “Albus Severus,” is the interior triumph that led to his eventual triumph over Lord Voldemort in the Great Hall (about which see chapters eight and nine).

  Conclusion

  The perspective that Ms. Rowling borrows from Emma to such wonderful effect is more than just a mechanical trick of the trade. The third person limited omniscient view is not just another way of telling a story; it is the view we too-human readers have of the world, as unconscious as we are of our own pride and prejudices. Certainly we are “first person narrators,” but, except in times of extreme self-consciousness, we experience the world as if we are seeing it as God sees it, ignorant as Harry is until story’s end of everything else that is going on outside our vision.

  Because we can only know what we see, confronting and overcoming our pride and prejudices that shape and distort our perceptions is essential work. Until we become more penetrating and sympathetic “readers” of reality before us, we are doomed to be mistaken, trapped, and enslaved by the conventions, blind spots, and misplaced priorities of our historical period. We’ll see in coming chapters why and how Austen’s premodern view and subversive arguments against empirical scientism help and fascinate us postmoderns as much as it does and how much it informs Ms. Rowling’s books.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Setting: The Familiar Stage and Scenery Props of the Drama

  Harry Potter as a Boarding School Story in the

  Tradition of Tom Brown’s Schooldays

  Here is a cute quiz that I expect to find stuck in my e-mail spam filter someday. Subject line: “Name the famous British woman author I’m describing!”

  • She is a bestselling author of children’s stories who has sold over 400 million books (some say as many as 600 million books).

  • Children, when polled as recently as 2008, chose her as their favorite author (Costas Book Awards).

  • Though famous for writing boarding school stories, she was never a boarding or public school student herself. But she was chosen as “Head Girl” of the school she did attend.

  • After school, she was a teacher, had a failed marriage, but remarried with custody of the first marriage’s offspring.

  • Her best books are about the adventures a group of children have, involving a mystery, boarding school life, or a magical event or ability. All of them have a firm moral or Christian message.

  • She had a problematic relationship with her father; her mother was no longer part of her life after she left home.

  • She developed a unique way of communicating with her readers without newspaper or media intermediaries.

  • Despite the Christian element in stories, implicit or explicit, she was not religious in a devotional way, but remained a member of the Church of England.

  • Her books set records for number of translations (more than 90 foreign languages) and are famous and beloved by children and adults around the world, especially in India, Japan, and Germany.

  • The girl hero in her bestselling adventures is a swotty tomboy the author admitted was modeled after herself.1

  J. K. Rowling, right? Well, as you probably guessed, that answer is too obvious, even if everything on the list is a spot-on match for Ms. Rowling except that she belongs to the Episcopal Church of Scotland rather than the Church of England.

  The correct answer is Enid Blyton (1897-1968), the author of more than 700 children’s books, from kindergarten reading primers to the Famous Five adventures and a retelling of Pilgrim’s Progress. What is most remarkable about Blyton, a ubiquitous presence in the lives of children around the world in books and assorted media, is how few American children and adults know anything about her or her stories. She is anything but commonplace in American schools and libraries, and, to my knowledge, her work has never been adapted for television or film in the United States.

  But Blyton’s work is the backdrop that every U.K. reader and English literature wonk sees first in Harry Potter because it is the most evident literary echo sounding in Rowling’s work. Blyton’s stories feature a group of young adventurers solving a mystery (Famous Five series), often with a magical backdrop (The Far-Away Tree Stories), are set in boarding schools (the series Malory Towers, St. Clare’s, and Naughtiest Girl), and have a strong Christian moral (The Land of Far-Beyond).

  Tom Brown as Harry’s Forgotten Father

  That her Harry Potter books are just a mush of Blyton standards and formulas, i.e., the Famous Five go to boarding school to climb the magical Far-Away Tree and save their souls, is a tempting easy dismissal critics like A. S. Byatt have made of Harry’s near universal popularity.2 But the true critical point of reference and influence worth exploring at length is not Enid Blyton per se, but specifically the tradition of boarding school novels of which Blyton’s series are just a small part. Literally thousands of boarding school books like Blyton’s have been written in the U.K., based on the pattern of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). It is into this genre, more than any other, that the Potter books can be placed.

  But American readers, if they’re like me, are not familiar with boarding school novels. Our childhood reading of serial literature makes us think of Harry, Ron, and Hermione as the Hardy Boys going to wizard prep school with an enchanting Nancy Drew.

  Given Ms. Rowling’s evident debt to schoolboy adventure stories and our benign ignorance of the setting British readers recognize as commonplace or even clichéd, it’s worth a chapter to explore the tradition of boarding school fiction and the ways Ms. Rowling conforms to and departs from the norm.

  The Public School Novel Formula: Tom Brown Visits Hogwarts

  Boarding school novels as a rule—to which there are recent exceptions—are set in what Brits call “public schools.”3 The phrase “public school,” however, means something very different in Great Britain than in the United States. In the U.K., the “public” part of “public school” means that the school is open to any child the school accepts and whose parents can pay the costs—making it the equivalent of an American private school. The restricted or exclusive “private” contrary to this “public” openness is tutorial instruction that only the truly wealthy can afford. U.K. government schools, the equivalent of U.S. public schools, are called “comprehensives.” Though anything but hard and fast, English class lines can still be drawn between those who received public school educations and those who went to comprehensives.

  Ms. Rowling comes from a lower-middle-class British family and received her tax-supported education at a comprehensive rather than as a boarder at an expensive public school. She is more than a little put off by the suggestion that she is a supporter or survivor of the elite public schools in the U.K. In an interview with The Guardian, Rowling spoke about her reaction upon first meeting someone at university who had been to a boarding school: “I thought it sounded horrible. Not because I was so attached to home—I couldn’t wait to leave home—just that the culture was not one I’d enjoy. It stagge
rs me to meet people who want to send their kids away.” 4 In fact, she claims to have “never been inside a boarding school.” 5 How does a writer this far removed from the playing fields of Eton come to write a boarding school novel with clear ties to the formula story arc and details of the boarding school novel tradition? Simple. The story formula and its clichéd elements are so familiar to British readers and writers that non-boarding school students, like Blyton and Rowling, have no more trouble imagining a fictional public school than law-abiding novelists who are not police officers or private detectives (or killers) have in writing a whodunit with multiple murders.

  Every public school novel, of course, be it a boys’ or girls’ school, has a hero or heroine that goes to school, grows up there, and departs at graduation a much-transformed person. The details of the formula are not so complicated that they, too, aren’t easily summarized:[A] boy enters a school in some fear and trepidation, but usually with ambitions and schemes; suffers mildly or severely at first from loneliness, the exactions of fag-masters, the discipline of masters, and the regimentation of games; then makes a few friends and leads for a year or so a joyful, irresponsible, and sometimes rebellious life; eventually learns duty, self-reliance, responsibility, and loyalty as a prefect, qualities usually used to put down bullying or over-emphasis on athletic prowess; and finally leaves school, with regret, for the wider world, stamped with the seal of the institution which he has left and devoted to its welfare.6

  A charted comparison of Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone reveals the strong conformity of the latter to the archetype of the school novel genre.7