Harry Potter's Bookshelf (6 page)

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 over 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).

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

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!”

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
).

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.

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 staggers 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: