Harry Potter's Bookshelf (7 page)

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

Note that many of the features in Ms. Rowling’s stories, rather than evidence of a singular creative genius, are just delightful, new renderings of Hughes’s staples and necessary characters and devices from the school story. If a book is a boarding school novel, there
has to be
a school and it
has to be
a boarding school (so the students can have nighttime adventures free of parental controls). And it needs to be a very special place, different from common experience. Hogwarts, as a school of witchcraft and wizardry, of course, meets this requirement in spectacular fashion.

The school story also
has to be
told on a time line with two story arcs that complement one another: the course of the individual year—fall to spring with holidays—and the set number of years between the hero or heroine’s becoming a student and graduating. Ms. Rowling makes her series seven volumes, corresponding to the seven years of a Hogwarts education in contrast to the six years of most school series and conventional public school forms (for reasons to be discussed in chapter seven); each book in the series, conforming to convention, follows Harry from his home to school and back again on an annual cycle.

The “terrible trio” of Harry, Ron, and Hermione only differs from the public school formula by including a female character as the agent of civilization and intelligence:

Even Fred and George, the comic Weasley twin brothers, turn out to be refreshed clichés of boarding school book stock players: “Frequently found among the hero’s friends in classic school stories is a pair of identical twins, often practical jokers whose activities provide both comic relief and confusion that gets sorted out at the end.”
⁹

A public school in fiction, too, is obliged, naturally, to come with the stock characters every public school is staffed with; we need a headmaster, teachers, and student leaders in the form of team captains or prefects acting as rule monitors. A sadist teacher is commonplace, hence Severus Snape; “every French mistress in the entire girl’s school story genre” is “risible,”
¹⁰
thus Sybil Trelawney; and a self-important prefect is a must (if only as a foil for resolutions when the hero or heroine assumes that post, also a near certainty), and Perfect Percy, the “Bighead Boy” fills that role.

Some characters in
Harry Potter
, though, are not only necessary representatives to satisfy a formula but pointers to famous characters in the genre U.K. readers will recognize immediately. Harry’s cousin Dudley Dursley, for instance, in his outrageous Smeltings school uniform, complete with sadist’s shillelagh, is a pointer to Billy Bunter, “the sly, overweight, idle, lying, cowardly, snobbish, conceited, and greedy boy antihero” of Frank Richards’s Greyfriars boarding school books.
¹¹

The funeral of Albus Dumbledore in
Half-Blood Prince
is as much a tribute to Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Tom Brown’s Rugby, and to the place of the headmaster as guide and guardian in every schoolboy book, as it is to Harry’s mentor and the “greatest wizard of his age.” Certainly Arnold and Dumbledore have much in common.

As David Steege writes in his wonderful essay comparing Harry Potter with Tom Brown and the typical English boarding school experience:

I’d go even further here. The link between Arnold and Dumbledore is more meaningful than just their both being thoughtful heads of school and mentors to Tom Brown and Harry Potter respectively. Both headmasters inspire a nearly religious devotion in their students. The last chapter of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, “Finis,” ends with Brown weeping at the grave of his “old master.” Hughes describes Brown feeling “love and reverence” for Arnold, that his soul was “fuller of the tomb and him who lies there, than of the altar of Him of whom it speaks.” As he grieves, Brown vows to “follow his [Arnold’s] steps in life and death.”
¹³
Thomas Hughes is hardly subtle here in making the late Rugby headmaster in his sacred tomb as stand-in for Christ in the heart of Tom Brown.

This scene is echoed in
Half-Blood Prince
. Not only does Harry weep at Dumbledore’s grave, he sees a smoke phoenix shape “fly joyfully into the blue” as the white marble tomb appears encasing the headmaster’s corpse. Dumbledore’s Patronus takes the shape of a phoenix, also known as “the resurrection bird,” which is a traditional symbol of Christ. The chapter closes with Harry testifying to the Minister of Magic that he is “Dumbledore’s man through and through” (chapter thirty); he is determined to dedicate the rest of his life to pursuing the Horcruxes and the Dark Lord in conformity with Dumbledore’s example and instruction.

Dumbledore’s sacrificial death in
Half-Blood Prince
, his being the person in whom Harry must “choose to believe in” over the course of
Deathly Hallow
, and his greeting Harry at the place-not-a-place called “King’s Cross” with its suggestion of an afterlife all suggest that Ms. Rowling’s headmaster is the magical equivalent of Hughes’s Rugby headmaster.

Beyond the formula elements every boarding school novel has and their echoes from the tradition in specific characters, Rowling is a conformist both to the thematic conventions of the school novel genre and to the core morality of such books. What is this morality? In two words, “friendship” and “character.” “Building friendships, proving a good friend, separating from those who hold the wrong values and thus showing one’s true character are all central to public school novels.”
¹⁴
We can see celebrations of “the virtues of chivalry, decency, honor, sportsmanship, and loyalty” in this list of the typical plot devices of schoolboy and -girl stories taken from Karen Manners Smith’s essay “Harry Potter’s Schooldays”:
¹⁵

The Hogwarts obsession with Quidditch and the importance to every student of winning and losing “house points” in the intramural competition for the House Cup are Ms. Rowling’s twists on this standard.

Harry’s refusal to go to Dumbledore when tortured by Dolores Umbridge is the heroic version of this code of honor in not telling tales but keeping a stiff upper lip. His telling Cedric about the dragons before the first Triwizard trial and Cedric’s revealing how to hear the clue in the magical egg, not to mention his refusal to take the Triwizard Cup in the center of the maze, are other examples of schoolboy honor.

Can you say “Luna Lovegood” and “Neville Longbottom?” It’s no accident that these square pegs in round holes are redeemed by membership in Dumbledore’s Army. But more on Neville in a moment.

It isn’t a schoolboy novel unless the students break rules early on and come to terms with the moral implications of this choice as they mature. Remember Lupin’s restrained rebuke to Harry in
Prisoner of Azkaban
for going to Hogsmeade— and Harry’s profound shame? That is only possible consequent to poor choices and an implicit moral standard.

As we saw in chapter one, the mystery unwound by our trio of detectives is the narrative drive of every book in the series. Harry is accused and punished, too, in every book, often for doing the right thing (smuggling a dragon to the Astronomy Tower, confronting Umbridge publicly with the truth of Voldemort’s return, saving Dudley from a dementor, etc.).

Part of the agony of
Order of the Phoenix
is that Harry is passed over for prefect and his best friends are chosen instead. Of course, Ron and Hermione’s enthusiasm and discomfort in these positions are clichés of the genre. Harry, the born leader, in contrast to his friends’ appointments and relative lack of authority with students, becomes the leader of Dumbledore’s Army by acclamation. That he is selected as captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team in
Half-Blood Prince
and struggles with the selection of teammates is another necessary piece of the schoolboy’s development.

There are three “unpleasant or incorrigible” players in the
Potter
dramas: Dudley Dursley, Severus Snape, and Draco Malfoy. Dudley, after Harry saves his life in the opening of
Order of the Phoenix
, is transformed from a spoiled selfish brat to a young man who, if still socially retarded, feels and tries to express his real concern for cousin Harry when Dudley leaves Privet Drive in
Deathly Hallows
. I will explain in chapter eight how Harry serves as Snape’s means of transcendence, even salvation, in the
Deathly Hallows
Shrieking Shack death scene.

And Draco Malfoy? The boy Harry hates above all others?

This “unpleasant and incorrigible” character and his prejudice act as Harry’s principal foil throughout the seven-book series. It is no accident that Draco is the first Hogwarts student and wizard his age that Harry meets and that he makes a cameo appearance in the
Deathly Hallows
epilogue. Draco chooses to serve the Dark Lord in
Half-Blood Prince
, enthusiastically obedient to the “bad faith” of his family name, just as Harry chooses to be in Gryffindor House rather than Slytherin during the Sorting his first year.