Heroism in the Harry Potter Series

Katrin Berndt, Lena Steveker, Katrin Berndt, Lena Steveker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317122104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Taking up the various conceptions of heroism that are conjured in the Harry Potter series, this collection examines the ways fictional heroism in the twenty-first century challenges the idealized forms of a somewhat simplistic masculinity associated with genres like the epic, romance and classic adventure story. The collection's three sections address broad issues related to genre, Harry Potter's development as the central heroic character and the question of who qualifies as a hero in the Harry Potter series. Among the topics are Harry Potter as both epic and postmodern hero, the series as a modern-day example of psychomachia, the series' indebtedness to the Gothic tradition, Harry's development in the first six film adaptations, Harry Potter and the idea of the English gentleman, Hermione Granger's explicitly female version of heroism, adult role models in Harry Potter, and the complex depictions of heroism exhibited by the series' minor characters. Together, the essays suggest that the Harry Potter novels rely on established generic, moral and popular codes to develop new and genuine ways of expressing what a globalized world has applauded as ethically exemplary models of heroism based on responsibility, courage, humility and kindness.

PART I
Heroism in Generic Perspective

Chapter 1
A Paradox: The Harry Potter Series as Both Epic and Postmodern

Mary Pharr

In a sense, the conclusion of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was never in doubt: the first chapter of Philosopher’s Stone is, after all, entitled ‘The Boy Who Lived’, and within the narrative context, life means not just existence but victory – just what Harry reaches at the formal close of Deathly Hallows. Prolonged life is Lord Voldemort’s ultimate goal, but the Boy Who Lived thwarts this goal repeatedly. Victory, however, comes only when Harry recognizes his duty to sacrifice his own life as a climax to his crusade to save his society, a sacrifice the increasingly inhuman Voldemort cannot comprehend. Rowling neatly twists the sacrifice so that Harry survives by giving in to death, Voldemort dies by longing too much for life, and stability returns to the wizarding culture through the restoration of mortality. It seems the inevitable close to a contemporary epic, the serious triumph of compassionate acceptance over evil solipsism after a prolonged and violent conflict involving journeys, suffering and introspection. But the series is also a postmodern work, targeted first at older children but reaching a generation of both youths and adults desperate for accessible but fantastic heroism – yet reluctant to commit to any extended code of values beyond an essential belief in compassion. In this sense, the series is a paradox: a myth whose higher truth is ambiguous, an epic that reflects the general distrust of code prevalent in its creator’s culture. Marked as much by his lack of any coherent theology or philosophy as by his font of empathy and power, Harry really is an epic hero for the postmodern world.

Part of the cultural intrigue of this series is the nature of its success: undeniable at every commercial level but still in the early stages of comprehensive interpretation by critics and scholars. Years before its conclusion, the series was prematurely and quasi-officially branded as children’s literature by its own publishers as well as by hegemonic institutions such as the New York Times. Fundamentalist zealots also set up temporary roadblocks to serious consideration of the series as literature with their objections to its use of magic, but those roadblocks collapsed under the feet of the masses of readers rushing to get each new volume. The popularity of the (admittedly simplified) film adaptations of the early books merely added to controversy. Harry always had his supporters, of course. Articles lauding the series as a means of resurrecting reading appeared early on, followed soon enough by books interpreting Harry as a master of virtue according to everything from scripture to business ethics (for example, Connie Neal’s The Gospel According to Harry Potter [2002] and Tom Morris’s If Harry Potter Ran General Electric [2006]). Meanwhile, on their own and in groups, readers independently created a multitude of fan sites on the Web, enough so that Rowling herself called online Potter fandom ‘a global phenomenon’ (Rowling, 2008, p.xii) in her foreword to Leaky Cauldron Webmaster Melissa Anelli’s Harry, a History (2008). As the millennium took off, millions of readers were defined by the ‘wild about Harry’ label.

Where readers go, scholars follow. Harry became the focus of numerous symposia such as Nimbus and Prophecy, and an expected session topic at scholarly gatherings such as The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and Meetings of the Popular Culture Association. Simultaneously, critical anthologies appeared, among them The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter (Whited, 2002) and Harry Potter’s World (Heilman, 2003). While newspaper and magazine critics tended to focus on the social aspects of the Potter phenomenon (especially its impact on a postmodern generation hitherto uncomfortable with print literacy), scholars looked as well at literary antecedents, structures and themes. Rowling’s books were both praised and criticized as fairy tale, bildungsroman and schooldays series, with their author justly lauded for her gift at creating charming transgenre detail that sweeps readers through a range of literary traditions. She was also censured for the sexism and elitism that scholars such as Farah Mendelsohn (2002) saw lurking beneath such charming detail. As best I can tell, far more works have been presented and published praising the series’ virtues than citing its flaws, but even those of us most wild about Harry have to admit that the wizarding world seems an Anglo-Saxon colonial construct, dominated by action-orientated white men. Yet what the critics of Rowling’s series sometimes overlook is the way her characters instinctively struggle against the limitations of their world. Harry’s empathy, Hermione’s intellect, Lupin’s forbearance, Luna’s independence all serve as models for a more tolerant culture not just within the wizarding world but also within the postmodern construct in which readers live. What makes Rowling’s seemingly old-fashioned construct remarkable is the way it has stirred the imaginations of contemporary readers with the possibility of positive action.

Ironically, Rowling’s ability to penetrate and stir millennial culture has itself generated controversy among non-fundamentalist critics. From the beginning, cultural mavens such as Harold Bloom (2000) indicated their sense of the series as an offensive sign of the current zeitgeist, of culture warped and/or reduced to the most conventional public denominator. After the fifth book, A.S. Byatt (2003) wrote that Rowling’s ‘magic world’ was written ‘for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated […] mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip’. In other words, Rowling’s narrative is derivative enough not to tax a postmodern audience accustomed to endless variations on old stories reworked as gaudy, contemporary fantasies. What this perspectives misses, however, is that Rowling’s accessible narrative is more than another popular fantasy. Anne Hiebert Alton calls the series ‘a generic mosaic’, a narrative ‘made up of numerous individual pieces combined in a way that allows them to keep their original shape while constantly changing their significance’ (Alton, 2003, p.159). Young and old, literate or not, hundreds of millions of human beings can relate to what they find comfortably familiar in the Potter series while also seeing in it something increasingly significant to our time. Accessibility is not always a sign of complacency. It was not so for those preliterate hordes who entered into the ancient epic tales of Gilgamesh, Achilles and Beowulf; it need not be so for the postmodern throngs who participate in the contemporary epic Potter experience. Indeed, in Harry Potter’s Bookshelf, John Granger specifically labels the now completed series a ‘postmodern epic’ (Granger, 2009, p.129). Granger’s focus on postmodernism is apt, but although he makes some remarkable literary connections that explicate the books’ meaning and appeal, he does not define in any detail just what an epic is when he links the series to the genre through postmodernism. For me, finding the details of that link is central to confirming it.

Even without the Potter association, however, the phrase ‘contemporary epic’ seems dubious to those scholarly readers who associate the epic with the grand classicism of the Iliad and the Aeneid. Defining the genre, however, suggests that its grandeur goes beyond the classical and that its narrative possibilities are open to all ages and cultures. Older than history, more approachable than tragedy, and more introspective than comedy, the epic genre is at once universal and individual, since it is, according to J.B. Hainsworth, ‘the longest-lived and most widely diffused of all literary forms’ (Hainsworth, 1991, p.3). Traditionally, epics weave long heroic episodes into a coherent form, but that form is only a narrative frame. Increasing awareness is also a hallmark of the epic, and such awareness cannot be one-dimensional. Epic heroism requires as much knowledge of sacrifice and ambiguity as it does of triumph and certainty. As Hainsworth observes, non-epic heroic works may celebrate and confirm, but ‘they do not, as the epic can and does, explore and question at the same time as they celebrate’ (Hainsworth, 1991, p.6). An epic makes its audience both thrill to the fantastic nature of heroic episodes while simultaneously pondering the cost and the nature of that heroism. And since the genre almost certainly began in the oral tradition (being chanted by poets long before it was carved into stone and written on parchment), it has always required of its creators high narrative skills. Epic rhapsodies must be capable of using their culture’s media as a means of engaging their audience in a story at once familiar and new, universal yet relevant and – above all – exciting imagination and understanding. No wonder epics are rare – but no doubt any era’s culture may produce one.

For me at least, the Potter experience began not with epic grandeur but with the charm that swept me through the early pages of the first novel. Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans immediately reminded me of my own childhood’s confectionery fantasies. This fantasy mode was only reinforced as I envisioned Harry attending his first dinner at Hogwarts, a meal served on tables glittering with gold plates piled with good food produced (or so it seemed in the first novel) without effort or cost. The combination of fellowship (through Harry’s new friends), challenges (through the Sorting Hat) and instruction (through Dumbledore’s welcome) at the first meal makes it the perfect banquet – not only an idealized and sanitized version of the banquets in classical and Christian mythology but also a child’s vision of the perfect alternative to the dull reality of school lunches. By the end of Philosopher’s Stone, however, I was struck by something beyond childhood’s dreams: when Voldemort’s reptilian face appears grafted on Professor Quirrell’s head, the narrative reaches past children’s literature into something riper, more dangerous. It is not just the horror of the image – so much at odds with the whimsy of the Hogwarts’ banquet world – as it is the way that Quirrell clearly relishes his physical and spiritual absorption into Voldemort’s essence. What I was reading was no fairy-tale warning about the dangers of straying off the path of rectitude; it was and is the narrative embodiment of the human ability to give in to evil by choice. At age eleven, Harry does not have the strength to defeat so much malevolence, but the boy’s determination to stay sane and defiant in the literal face of evil is, as his rescuer Dumbledore understands, heroism in itself. Even so, though Harry attends a laudatory Christmas feast after recovering from the shock of facing such evil, the book ends with the boy not safe within his rescuer’s domain but back on Privet Drive, where food is scarce and love non-existent. Although he is not the same child as he was the year before, Harry is still just beginning a journey – and so, too, were we readers.

Harry’s journey struck me as not just heroic but possibly, potentially epic as early as Year Two, when Ginny Weasley is possessed by the living memory of Tom Riddle, by what proves to be a Horcrux enclosed in Tom’s diary. Chamber of Secrets is not the most comfortable narrative in the series; its inclusion of Dobby, the house elf effusive to the point of hysteria in his worship of Harry, emphasized the element of class distinction in the works, an element that has echoed disharmoniously ever since. House elves prove to be sentient, magical creatures in service to human wizards. Few such elves are introduced as individuals, and of them, only Dobby really seems to want freedom – understandably so since he is bound to the household of the cruel Death Eater, Lucius Malfoy. Rowling has Harry trick Lucius into freeing Dobby by the end of the book, but all the elf really does is transfer his allegiance from a hated master to his beloved Harry. Harry is always kind to Dobby, but later, the boy shows no real interest in helping Hermione try to free the other elves, who seem to see their position as house servants as a birthright rather than a burden. Hermione never succeeds in making the elves share her democratic viewpoint, Harry comes to regard the whole thing as a bit of a nuisance, and Rowling lets the ‘plight’ of the house elves drop into the background. What Harry really does in freeing Dobby is to gain a useful follower (one who eventually proves vital to Harry’s success) and to give the unseen reader more reason to despise Lucius. The ethical issues of class and species rights are left hanging – and they essentially remain so at the end of Year Seven. Granger has observed that Rowling, representing our era, repeatedly presents the ‘postmodern message of political correctness’ (Granger, 2009, p.128), of resistance to ingrained prejudice. And so she does, but her message is couched in the small victories of kindness. Presented thus, the message does not (until the last book, at least) interfere with the aristocratic essence of the epic. Epics, alas, are not noted for their liberal interpretation of civil rights. Indeed, from Gilgamesh through The Lord of the Rings, they seem committed to hierarchical structure, structure that at its best promotes civilization but not democracy. If Dobby vexes the reader in Year Two and then wavers between poignancy and comedy for both Harry and his author during the elf’s reappearances through Year Six, the confusion may lie in the hyperbole of Dobby’s emotional response to Harry. Only in Year Seven, when Dobby dies a hero, will he be respected.

Ginny’s situation, in contrast, has an immediate and deadly fascination. Unlike the adult Quirrell, this first-year student is possessed by Tom Riddle’s memory, by a part of Voldemort’s soul, utterly against her will. Under Riddle’s control, Ginny attacks both campus animals and fellow students. The possession of a child is a grim subject within any narrative frame, its paedophiliac implications at odds with the ‘children’s literature’ label still attached to the series. This act of secret and intimate contact demonstrates Voldemort’s inherently evil nature far more vividly than any open attack could have. Riddle describes Ginny’s ignorance and fear when she begins to suspect that something has gone horribly wrong with her mind as ‘very amusing’ – a sadistic response (CoS, p.229). Even when he was wholly human, Riddle was a sadist, the incipient Dark Lord who killed the girl doomed to become the ghost of Moaning Myrtle because it was expedient, probably entertaining – and because Riddle lacks empathy. He is a textbook sociopath. What makes him a serious epic antagonist is not just his power and intelligence; it is his willingness to do anything to anyone because he wants to do it. In absolute contrast, Harry is always empathic. Rather than being ruined by the cruelty of the Dursleys, he feels both an honest anger towards oppressors and a deep sympathy for the oppressed. What makes him a hero is that he is able to overcome the anger and act on sympathy, to the point of defending a friend even when it throws his own life in peril.

In an article entitled ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Epic’, Lakshmi Chaudhry criticizes the emphasis on the personal in the Potter series, noting that Harry ‘shows no interest in the larger issues at stake in the resistance against Voldemort’ (Chaudry, 2007, p.6). Up to a point, Chaudhry is correct. However, as with Harry’s refusal to accept the supposed inferiority of house elves in the specific case of Dobby, the personal focus allows the contemporary message to flow into the stern nature of the ancient epic structure. And as the boy matures into the man, Harry does face larger issues squarely. Thus, Michiko Kakutani, who calls the series an epic, notes that by the end of his journey Harry has been forced ‘to ponder the equation between fraternity and independence, free will and fate, and to come to terms with his own frailties and those of others’ (Kakutani, 2007). Moreover, pondering the personal may itself become crucial even in the greatest of epics when they are viewed in a human context, one that looks for a hero’s motivation beyond the rational or the pragmatic: Achilles taking on the Trojans for love of Patroclus; Beowulf responding to Hrothgar to repay a father’s debt; Odysseus always moving home to wife and child. Harry and Riddle are never again so ‘close’ as they are in their private talk in the unlocked Chamber. Yet when Harry’s apparently mortal wound is healed by another friend (this time Dumbledore’s phoenix, Fawkes), this personal act perplexes Riddle, who cannot conceive of friendship. Ironically, the living memory has forgotten that such things exist, giving a re-energized Ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Heroism in Generic Perspective
• Part II The Formation of The Hero
• Part III Heroic Originals, Friends and Foes
• Index