J. K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry
Potter publishing phenomenon, is an odd mixture. On one hand she is a
public supporter of the Labour party and an active campaigner for the
rights of single parents, much to the distaste of the Daily Telegraph
and Daily Mail. Yet she is also an honorary member of the British
Weights and Measures Association -- an organisation whose aim is to fight
for the pound and pint, and calls the metric system "a political
philosophy and tool". Rowling's fellow honorary members include Norris
McWhirter, the faithful friend of apartheid, and Peter Hitchens, the last
of Britain's Burkean Tories.
Rowling's imperial bedfellows are
all the odder because her Harry Potter oeuvre has a "big tent"
inclusivity to it, which seems a million miles away from the world of
McWhirter and Hitchens -- the books all contain prominent female characters,
alongside references to ethnic groups, Harry's classmates at Hogwarts
school for young magicians including children with obvious Welsh and Irish
names -- Seamus Finnegan and Dean Thomas -- and slightly mangled Asian
ones: Cho Chang and Parvati Patil.
But these glancing references are
just a veneer: the books are steeped in a nostalgic and (small "c")
conservative view of Britain that fits perfectly into the John Major/George
Orwell dream of cricket on the village green, warm beer and old maids
cycling to communion. More than that -- more Major than Orwell -- the
Harry Potter books are an attempt to recall what Peter Hitchens calls
"the world we have lost", a reaction against modern living in
the same way as William Hague's description of Britain as "a foreign
land". Harry Potter might be a wizard, and the only one able to withstand
the powers of the evil Lord Voldemort, but Harry Potter is a Tory. A paternalistic
One-Nation Tory in the tradition of Harold Macmillan and Iain McLeod,
perhaps, but a Tory nevertheless.
For those -- and there may be some
-- who haven't read the four Potter titles, the story is that young Harry
is an orphan, his parents having died while he was still a baby. He was
brought up by his remaining living relatives, his aunt and uncle, who,
in contrast to the honest English yeomanry implied in the name Harry Potter,
are called Petunia and Vernon Dursley. The Dursleys are Rowling's epitomisation
of the post-war lower-middle class: crass, mean-spirited and grasping,
who would not be out of place in the work of Evelyn Waugh or John Betjeman.
They live in a detached house at number four, Privet Drive (Rowling must
have been tempted by Acacia Avenue), in an suburb of Surrey called Little
Whinging. Vernon Dursley works in white-collar middle management and supports
capital punishment -- "When will they learn ... that hanging's the
only way to deal with these people," Uncle Vernon observes in book
three --, while Petunia is a caricature of a curtain-twitching suburban
housewife: "bony and horsefaced .... She was the nosiest women in
the world and spent most of her life spying on her boring, law-abiding
neighbours". They would certainly have voted for Margaret Thatcher's
Conservative party.
True to the tradition of fairytale
step-parents, the Dursleys treat Harry cruelly, regularly threatening
violence or imprisonment. In the second book Harry is literally imprisoned
by them when he is locked into his bedroom and bars are installed on his
window. They confiscate his wizard equipment during the summer holidays
he is forced to spend with them, although Harry outwits them in the third
book, significantly while the family "... had gone out into the front
garden to admire Uncle Vernon's new company car (in very loud voices,
so the rest of the street would notice it too)". The film version
of the first book includes a cute reference to the suburban car obcession
of middle England: a shot of Privet Drive shows a car parked in each houses'
driveway, and each exactly the same model. The Dursleys read the Daily
Mail and use private health care, as revealed in book four, where
Rowling tells us that "Harry had lived with the Dursleys too long
not to know how touchy they were about anything even slightly out of the
ordinary".
The Dursleys have one child, Dudley,
the same age as Harry but who is indulged like a spoilt prince by his
parents. Dudley is also stupid, fat and lazy, while Harry is made to do
the hard work of cleaning and gardening, in the traditional Cinderella
role. For their respective birthdays, Dudley gets computer games and expensive
treats, while Harry's birthday is hardly recognised: one year the Dursleys'
present to him is a coathanger and a pair of second-hand socks. The Dursleys,
as might be expected, are avid television watchers, with an extra television
installed in the kitchen after Dudley complains "... about the long
walk between the fridge and the television in the living room". Vernon
Dursley is a salesman for a drill manufacturer, and the second book begins
with Uncle Vernon announcing that, "This could well be the day I
make the biggest deal of my career". It is also coincidentally Harry's
birthday, but the Dursleys are far more excited that "a rich builder
and his wife were coming to dinner and Uncle Vernon was hoping to get
a huge order from him." The scene where Vernon explains how the dinner
party will run is a satire of petit bourgeois pretension:
'Now, we should aim to get in a few good compliments
at dinner. Petunia, any ideas?' 'Vernon tells me you're a wonderful
golfer, Mr Mason ... do tell me where you bought your dress, Mrs Mason
...'
Anticipating the order and the large
commission it will bring, Uncle Vernon sums up the limits of his ambitions:
"We'll be shopping for a holiday home in Majorca this time tomorrow."
Not Umbria or Provence, the Dursleys' holiday ideal is Majorca, with its
lower-middle class attractions.
Harry is banished to his room for
the dinner. But, as punishment to the Dursleys for neglecting Harry's
birthday, the plot disrupts the evening: "You've just ruined the
punchline of my Japanese-golfer joke," rages Uncle Vernon. Later
Harry overhears his uncle saying,"...tell Petunia that funny story
about those American plumbers, Mr Mason". Both hosts and guests are
plainly boors, trading crass jokes about Japanese golfers and American
plumbers.
In the first book the Dursleys are
delighted to get Dudley into a minor public school called Smeltings --
thanks to the old school tie, as his father went there, rather than stupid
Dudley's academic ability. All the readers ever learn about Smeltings
is that the boys are well fed -- although the school later orders Dudley
on a diet. The cruel Dursleys plan to send Harry to the local comprehensive.
Instead, at the age of eleven -- a reference to the eleven-plus examination
to get entrance to grammar school -- messages arrive saying that Harry
has been admitted to Hogwarts school, sparing him the horror of attending
a comprehensive, which are thereby classed alongside coathangers and used
socks as the sort of second-best that no one really wants. The Dursleys
later explain Harry's absences at school by telling others that he is
at St Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys.
Hogwarts itself might be a school
for wizards, but in other respects it is a stereotypical English public
school. It is a boarding school, a thousand years old and the only one
of its type in Britain. (There are of course no wizard comprehensives,
the only alternative education being a comedy correspondence course called
Kwikspell). The pupils wear black gowns, and live in an ancient stone
building with large grounds. The school is divided up into four houses,
which compete against each other for academic and athletic prizes. Meals
are served by servants in the Great Hall, the food is hearty, the masters
and mistresses are eccentric, with stock characters taken from the Rugby
school of Tom Brown's Schooldays: the wise headmaster -- Dumbledore,
filling in for Arnold -- and the embittered and vindictive teacher, in
this case Professor Snape, who was a schoolboy rival of Harry's father
and particularly dislikes Harry. There are nasty bullies -- Draco Malfoy,
as the Flashman character --, swots, sneaks and weeds: the standard cast
of the public school genre.
Like Eton and its peculiar Wall Game,
Hogwarts has its own bizarre sport in Quidditch, with inexplicable rules
(a sort of combination of polo, cricket and rugby, on broomsticks). The
long descriptions of inter-house Quidditch games are similar in plot development
as the football matches in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Just how similar
Hogwarts is to an archetype of a public school comes in a comment in the
second book by Justin Finch-Fletchley, who tells Harry: "My name
was down for Eton, you know, I can't tell you how glad I am I came here
instead. Of course, mother was slightly disappointed...."
There is one difference, in that Hogwarts
accepts girls, and the books give the appearance of inclusivity. Three
girls are in the seven members of Harry's house Quidditch team, one of
Harry's best friends is a girl, Hermione, and many of the teachers are
witches. But aside from Hermione, all the principle characters are male.
Even Hermione's character is a stereotype: the hard working middle-class
swot, who spends most of her time in the library and reading books, and
talks Harry out of taking risks: her parents are dentists. And it is the
female students who are easily taken in by the most palpably ridiculous
teachers: Gilderoy Lockhart (a wizard double for Robert Kilroy-Silk) the
vain and egocentric teacher who turns out to be a coward and a liar in
the second book, and Sybill Trelawney, the tea leaf-reading divination
teacher who has only made two correct prophesies in her career. The only
times Harry competes against women as equals in the four books -- Cho
Chang on the Quidditch pitch, and Fleur Delacour in the Triwizard Tournament
-- he defeats them both. More significantly, all of the central evil characters
in the books are male, while all of the senior authority figures are male.
The core of the class system that
runs through the Potter books is in the facts of admission to the school.
Hogwarts' pupils -- unlike Smeltings' -- are selected entirely on the
basis of ability: the wizards instinctively "know" which children
are capable of performing magic. This is an innate ability -- some children
come from non-magical families, others are half-breed. Those from full-blooded
wizard families are more likely to be able to do magic, although not all
can.
Blood and family descent are a key
part of the plots throughout the series. Non-magic users -- ordinary humans
-- are called Muggles, although wizards from Muggle parents are also pejoratively
called "mudbloods" -- dirty blood, explains Rowling -- although
the word is such an insult that it starts fights. Within the wizard world
there is class system based on parentage, like an aristocracy. The pure-blooded
wizards tend to be wealthier and more elitist. The very oldest ones have
castles and indentured servants, and foreign sounding names that gesture
towards the post-Conquest Norman aristocrats, such as Draco Malfoy, Harry's
schoolboy rival. Even the founding of Hogwarts led to a rift between three
of the founders and the fourth, the particularly foreign-sounding Salazar
Slytherin, who wanted to restrict it to pure-bred wizards, and thought
those with Muggle blood were unworthy to study magic. (This leads to the
major plot development of the second book.) Draco's father, Lucius Malfoy,
frequently expresses the view that those with Muggle blood are "not
to be trusted" -- although he is one of the most devious characters
in the books.
The evil villain of the four books,
Lord Voldemort (another name with a hint of Norman French) also felt very
strongly about non-wizard blood, in an exclusively aristocratic way. He
himself is only half-blooded, according to his appearance in the second
book, though his wizard line is directly descended from the aristocratic
Salazar Slytherin. But as a character in the second book observes: "Most
wizards these days are half-blooded anyway. If we hadn't married Muggles
we'd've [sic] died out" -- which makes wizardry similar to
a royal family line. The character is Harry's best friend, Ron Weasley,
who happens to be a pure-bred wizard. Unlike other untainted families,
the Weasley family is not rich -- the wealthy aristocrat Draco Malfoy
often taunts Ron with how poor he is. But while the Weasleys might not
be wealthy, they still represent an recognisable aristocratic type, in
this case a declining old Anglo-Catholic family. There's little doubt
the Weasleys are the book's surrogate Catholics: they have seven children,
all with bright red hair. The Weasley house is a tumbledown sort of small
farm, although Mr Weasley works (in a gentlemanly profession: a senior
civil servant with the Ministry of Magic in the wizard government), which
is some sort of idealised family small-holding.
The operation of the government that
Mr Weasley works for is hard to understand. There is a powerful executive
(the Ministry), but there are no signs of a legislature or elections,
although references are made to bills and acts being passed. There is
a Minister of Magic, although how he -- and it is a he -- is selected
is not mentioned. The Ministry seems to fulfil all aspects of wizard government,
although extrapolating from a few references (the Minister of Magic informs
the Muggle prime minister when a particularly brutal evil wizard escapes
from prison) and the way the rest of the Muggle and wizard worlds interact,
the Minister of Magic may well sit in the cabinet alongside the rest of
the UK government, as if connected through some sort of magical House
of Lords.
The theme of all four books is the
attempts by Lord Voldemort to regain his power. Voldemort is an Oswald
Mosley-Darth Vader type figure, a wizard who went over to the "dark
side". Voldemort launched an unspecified coup attempt before the
start of the first book: it was he who murdered Harry's parents. He also
attempted to kill the infant Harry but was unable to, and as a result
lost his powers and was defeated. Although the climax of each book sees
Harry thwarting an attempt by Voldemort or his supporters to either kill
him or resurrect Voldemort, by the fourth book Voldemort has once again
regained full strength (in fact, he is even stronger). But quite what
Voldemort and his supporters want to achieve is unclear. On one level
there is a Nietzschean demand for power owing to the strong. But what
Voldemort wants to do with that power, and why his reign is feared, is
never made plain, although Voldemort does say in book four his original
goal was immortality -- his supporters are nicknamed Death Eaters -- but
without explaining how his coup would bring that about. Another element
is in the treatment of Muggles: Voldemort and cohorts are happy to murder
and torture Muggles, and exploit the power of magic over them, whereas
the existing wizard government has strict rules about the use of magic
and takes great pains to conceal it from non-wizards. Another element
is in the purification of the wizard race, by removing the "mudbloods".
In this combination of blood and power, Voldemort most resembles the Muggle
world's Adolf Hitler.
But if what Voldemort is fighting
for is hard to understand, what Harry Potter and allies are fighting to
defend is even harder to determine. The French newspaper Libération
has published a Marxist-structuralist critique of the Potter books, with
philosopher Pierre Bruno claiming that Harry represents a political allegory
of the triumph of the socially ascendant petite bourgeoisie. The four
houses at Hogwarts -- Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw
-- are seen as competing social groups. Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are the
lower orders, hard-working but stupid. Slytherin -- named after the aristocratic
Salazar -- represents the propertied-classes and Gryffindor -- Harry's
house -- the ascendant class of the bourgeoisie. The whole series is therefore
not about the traditional struggle of Good and Evil but "the conflict
between established and rising classes."
There is some sense to this, in the
conflict between Voldemort and his desire to purify the wizard race, against
the more inclusive policies of cohabitation with Muggle-born talent. But
this is too simplistic. Rowling's hostility to the petit bourgeoisie personified
by the Dursleys suggests that the abilities of wizards places them in
a class well above the Dursleys. And the distinguishing characteristic
of the Gryffindor house is bravery -- a more noble image than the competing
Dursley representation of the middle class world, with its company cars
and televisions. More importantly, it is Voldemort who is reacting against
the status quo acceptance of Muggle blood. The conflict between
them is not between a rising middle class and a declining gentry; rather
it is a civil war among a ruling class over how it treats its members,
whom it admits into the ruling class, and how it treats a lower form of
life, the non-magician Muggles.
There is little in the way of an explicit
moral code in the Potter books, although there is an attempt to suggest
one in the fourth book (and results in Harry unwittingly bringing about
the death of a fellow student at the hands of Voldemort). The fourth book
also includes a fruitless attempt by Hermione to emancipate the "house
elves", who appear to be slaves and indeed speak in a sub-Gone
With The Wind southern black patois, quite similar to the irritating
Jar-Jar Binks of Star Wars Episode One. Otherwise, the wizards
in Rowling's books are psychologically the same as humans without magical
powers. They celebrate Christmas and Easter holidays, but without any
theological connection (much like the Muggle secular world). The self-imposed
rules governing the use of magic are sometimes explicitly laid out, but
the emphasis at Hogwarts is on raising "good" wizards with a
paternalistic sense of civic responsibility. Those who support Voldemort
are shown in the fourth book torturing hapless Muggles for sport. But
there is no suggestion of a greater power, no God-like judgement, only
the judgement of one's peers. In this the books are very up to date --
and differ from Tom Brown's Schooldays, where evangalical Christianity
plays an important part in the plot.
But in Rowling's books what sets wizards
apart from the non-magical world is the paradox that they live in a time
warp. Aside from their magical powers, their physical lives exhibit an
almost complete lack of technological change. Pure bred wizards are unfamiliar
with Muggle modern technology such as electricity, guns, telephones and
computers (Mr Weasley remarks how ingenious Muggles are at getting around
their lack of magic). Wizard lifestyles are faintly bucolic: they travel
by train, they have an economic system that William Morris would have
approved of, with every shop run by owner-operator artisans: there are
no wizard equivalents of Tescos or W. H. Smiths chains. There is one bank,
and one daily newspaper. The streets are cobbled, the roofs are thatched,
but they do have plumbing -- baths, but not showers. There is a special
wizard radio station, but no television. Photography is common, but movies
are unheard of. Cars are unusual and restricted to a rich or powerful
few, while the wealthy have live-in servants but no dishwashers.
Socially, the wizard world is strongly
attached to the extended family -- so strongly that it cannot conceive
that Harry would not want to stay with his aunt and uncle during holidays.
And, despite Rowling being a single parent and setting up a trust fund
to campaign on behalf of single parent families, there is, as far as I
can see, only one on view in her books. Harry of course is an orphan (with
a surrogate nuclear family in the Dursleys), while Neville Longbottom
(the only other pupil not with his parents) lives with his grandmother
because his parents are both in an asylum. Rather worringly, the only
character from a single parent family appears to be the evil Lord Voldemort,
whose father rejected his mother when he discovered she was a witch and
who later died giving birth to Voldemort. Voldemort's father was a Muggle
noble, while his mother was a magician but low-born in the Muggle world,
suggesting that Voldemort has a mixture of class prejudices in both worlds.
Voldemort later murdered his father.
In fact, technologically at least,
the wizard world appears to have stopped somewhere around 1918. And this
is significant. Those wizards not raised among modern Muggles would not
feel out of place in the world of J. P. Hartley's The Go-Between.
Even their currency gestures towards pre-decimal pounds, shillings and
pence, although in the wizard world these become galleons (gold), sickles
(silver) and knuts (bronze) -- all coins, there are no banknotes, credit
cards or cheque books. This is an interesting era for Rowling to model
the wizard world on, because it was of course the last time that Britain
could genuinely call itself a great power. That it did not remain one
is at least in part explained by the two world wars of the twentieth century.
These conflicts are mirrored in the
world of Harry Potter and its symbolism: the first battle against Lord
Voldemort representing the first world war, the seeds within which leads
to the second, even more calamitous, world war. Voldemort's hibernation
after his defeat in the first bloody conflict mimics in its timespan Germany's
acquiescent Wiemar interlude from Versailles in 1919 to the rise of Hitler
in the 1930s. What these books represent is a memory of Britain as it
was then (in Rowling's imagination, since she was born well after that
time), when it still had its Empire, when sterling was on the gold standard,
and when Rowling's beloved yards, ounces and acres were how much of the
world was measured. Having lost that world, Rowling has tried to recreate
this vision of Britain as out of reach to mortals.
