Harry Potter's Bookshelf (12 page)

 

In short,
Harry Potter
is a schoolboy novel steeped, no, make that
saturated
in gothic touches, effects, and clichés. But there’s more.

Beyond these gothic touchstones, Ms. Rowling includes gothic romances as stories inside her stories. My favorite is the romance of the Bloody Baron and the Gray Lady, the ghosts of Slytherin House and Ravenclaw Tower respectively (
Deathly Hallows
, chapter thirty-one). In the middle of the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry listens attentively to Helena Ravenclaw’s ghost telling the gothic romance that reveals the story of the Baron’s agonies and the theft of the Ravenclaw diadem. It has a medieval setting; unrequited love; defiant, victimized maiden escaping and hiding; blood; death in the forest before dishonor—in brief, it has it all.

That is my favorite, but Harry’s subterranean adventures in
Sorcerer’s Stone
and
Chamber of Secrets
are close seconds. Ginny’s being possessed by Tom Riddle, Jr., and taken “miles beneath Hogwarts” despite her heroic resistance only to be rescued by her Prince Charming marks her as Harry’s soul mate and fellow gothic romance heroine.

And the story of Severus Snape’s life as another Heathcliff, sacrificing himself, not all at once but day by day for years to protect Harry in Lily’s memory, and his classroom sadism and his genius as a wizard have made Snape almost more important than Harry in many readers’ experience of the book. The Unbreakable Vow he makes with Narcissa Malfoy is a gallant gothic moment and subplot leading to his committing murder-in-obedience on the tower.

Voldemort’s mother, Merope Gaunt, lived a life that Ann Radcliffe, the great gothic romance novelist, might have written. Oppressed by father and brother, she is liberated when they are imprisoned for Muggle baiting. Her magic returns, and she wins the attention and affection of the young lord of the local manor with a love potion or charm. Alas, she feels compelled to reveal to him that she has enchanted him literally rather than figuratively—and he leaves her. She is pregnant, destitute, and despairing enough to lose her magic. She dies in childbirth, leaving Tom Riddle, Jr., to grow up in an orphanage.

How about Dumbledore’s long-neglected backstory? His sister was tortured by Muggles and becomes mad. The family keeps this a secret, though it means the father dies in Azkaban after revenging himself on her tormentors, because they cannot reveal why he acted as he did. The sister kills the mother accidentally and poor, brilliant Albus, caught at home as a baby-sitter, becomes friends with a Dark wizard intent on world domination! He quarrels, though, with his brother and new friend—and little sister dies in the cross fire. He spends the remainder of his life, like Snape, repenting in service and reflecting mournfully on the loved ones he failed.

It is a rare gothic novel that pours in so many touchstones of the genre and layers gothic stories within the already-thick atmosphere of the uncanny and sublime. Those that do are either set pieces like
Frankenstein
or a kind of gothic parody, like Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey
. Austen, Ms. Rowling’s favorite writer (see chapter one), puts
Abbey’s
heroine, Catherine Mor land, in a clichéd gothic scene, a manor house in which she discovers what seems to be a document in secret writing. Because the young woman is a devoted reader of gothic romance, she suspects the worst and sleeps uneasily. She discovers in the morning that the dangerous document is a laundry list. Much of
Abbey
is Austen’s gentle mocking of the genre.

Ms. Rowling may be up to the same thing in including so many gothic elements and subplots in the
Potter
novels. Certainly the Grim subplot in
Prisoner
, in which Harry thinks he is being haunted by a Black Dog death omen, which turns out to be his godfather working to protect him from danger rather than supernatural sign, is an echo of gothic parody à la Austen, in which natural explanations always supplant superstitious fears eventually.

But Rowling and Austen, while laughing perhaps at the more comic aspects of the gothic, don’t neglect the point of the genre. For both writers, the fears appropriate to our fallen world and atrophied spiritual life—not to mention as women in a man’s world (see chapter six)—are real, important, and best expressed with “gothic machinery.”

I have demonstrated, I hope, that the heroes of
Harry Potter
are gothic novel stock players and that the author creates the atmosphere of menace in her schoolboy novels both by using every touchstone of the gothic literary tradition and by weaving into her story arc and individual books gothic story subtexts and locations.

What I’ve neglected to do is discuss how this atmosphere has a specifically moral effect on the reader. The best way to do that is to revisit Ms. Rowling’s very gothic first chapters of
Sorcerer’s Stone
and the Dursleys’ experience of the “Letters from No One.”

Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon Dursley pride themselves on their normalcy. But they have a private dread that the neighbors will discover that their nephew, Harry, is decidedly abnormal. This fear of public revelation causes them to become sadistic cartoons of respectability and repression to mask their secret. Then the letters begin to arrive.

No postage, no return address, but with alarmingly specific detail on where the letter is to be delivered: “Mr. H. Potter, The Cupboard Under the Stairs.” The letters come with the other mail at first, but when Harry does not receive these (which the sender knows, inexplicably), they begin to arrive, en masse, delivered by owls, and, eventually, even through the fireplace chimney in great torrents. Uncle Vernon, already unstable because of his latent fears of his nephew’s problem, becomes progressively unhinged—and determined to escape the letters that are besieging his family.

The Dursleys are so unsettled by this magical assault from an unknown quarter that they abandon their home and flee. They wind up, not in a castle or manor house, but in an equally gothic “house on the rock” at sea where they believe they have so isolated themselves in wild nature that they are safe from their faceless, unknown epistolary enemy. Of course, at midnight, in a “ferocious storm,” the door to the house is broken down by a bearded giant stranger with a pink umbrella. The story, oddly enough, considering its many gothic elements, is not a scare story per se, even if it does have its gruesome images. It’s not just the comic touches like the pink umbrella that keep us from being scared or feeling concern for the Dursleys. They are a despicable lot, we all think, because of the horrible way they treat Harry, who seems a wonderful boy. Harry welcomes the letters. We, consequently, odd as this is in a gothic tale, are rooting for the mysterious, nameless force delivering the mail to win the war with the normal family that feels it is under attack.

What we are cheering for, beyond Harry getting his mail, is that the Muggles will be enlightened by the horror they experience. The Dursleys are allegorical stand-ins for actors in a supernatural drama or, more important, readers of gothic fiction. They are receiving literal and figurative messages from heaven or a supernatural reality they have tried to hide from or deny their whole lives but which is now exploding into their living room in a way that cannot be overlooked, grasped, stopped, or controlled.

Ann Radcliffe wrote that “positive horror” could be “a source of the sublime.”
¹¹
Readers scared out of their wits by stories about man-made monsters, men having made themselves monsters, and defiant heroines trapped by cruel men or supernatural forces in subterranean chambers are stunned out of a complacent normalcy that accepts the fallen world of death and sin as “natural.” Gothic writers “make a righteous use of the element of horror”
¹²
to shake their readers awake and to realize the darkened state of their understanding and inattentiveness to conscience and the eye of the heart.

Ultimately, gothic literature is about having the moral courage to see the world as it is and to make the choice to seek a way out. That choice is by definition and tradition a moral one—to flee death and pursue life, to seek light rather than darkness. We see the horror in the world—and in monsters without conscience—and draw away from it. We identify with the defiant heroine resisting the forces working to imprison or diminish her. What is good, true, and beautiful is sharpened in exposure to its absence in the evil of gothic nightmares.

Born centuries ago at the dawn of the age of empiricism and enlightened reason, largely in reaction to the industrial and political revolutions of failed millennialist promise,
¹³
the gothic in literature, film, architecture, and popular culture is still very much with us. But there are radical differences between the Victorian gothic morality evident in Stoker’s
Dracula
and the postmodern vampires of Stephanie Meyer’s
Twilight
books or
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Having established that
Harry Potter
, if it has to be described in three words, is a “gothic schoolboy novel,” let’s look at Rowling as a postmodern writer and at the specific moral choices she wants her readers to make for redemption and escape of the fallen world.

CHAPTER FIVE

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve just spent two good-sized chapters demonstrating what you probably would have figured out after five minutes of reflection on the question, “What kind of books are the
Harry Potter
novels?” Granted, it hasn’t been wasted time if you didn’t know about the schoolboy or gothic traditions of English literature in which Ms. Rowling is writing, but, still, to have worked that hard to come up with “
Harry Potter
is schoolboy fiction with a gothic atmosphere?” It seems quite a bit like the scientific studies that demonstrate the sur est way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more. We didn’t know that?

But here’s the really sad thing.
Harry Potter
isn’t a gothic schoolboy series of books. Yes, it’s about a schoolboy and his secondary education in a public school, and, sure, it has every gothic fiction gadget from secret closets (can you say “Vanishing Cabinets?”) to a castle on the lake.

But the books don’t
do
what a schoolboy novel or gothic romance is supposed to do. Not exactly.

The schoolboy or schoolgirl novel, be it
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, penny dreadful, or Enid Blyton serial, is largely a celebration of Victorian morality and ideas of virtue. A gothic romance or horror piece, too, has a supernatural or human enemy that acts as a moral foil; we are confronted with death’s grip on the fallen world and our own inadequacy to free ourselves from it. This gothic landslide amounts, in relief, to a call to the life of virtue in hope of redemption, what schoolboy fiction is openly about. Who wants to become the man-made monsters Dracula, Frankenstein, Hyde, or Heathcliff? If we are defiant and resist compromise to the end, à la Jane Eyre, virtue will win out.

Harry Potter
certainly has its heroic moments and the evil presented is very real. But as noted in the previous chapter, many of the gothic elements aren’t frightening at all; for the most part, they’re funny, and often they have the zap or thrill you might get from living room furniture. I mean, if you’re horrified by Moaning Myrtle, Peeves, or the Giant Squid, Hogwarts’s “Nessie,” you’re as oversensitive as Poe’s narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Hogwarts as a school, too, is hard to take seriously. The only things of any value they learn, after all, are lessons they learn outside of formal classes (how to fly on a broom, Apparating, effective Defense Against the Dark Arts spells, etc.). Teachers, as a rule, are sadists, freaks, officious nits, or sufficiently incompetent that they can be all but ignored (see chapter six on satire). Take Professor Trelawney or Dolores Umbridge.
Please.

That Ms. Rowling isn’t writing classic schoolboy or gothic fiction shouldn’t be a surprise, though. As these sorts of books were most popular in the nineteenth century, how weird would it be, as a twentieth-century writer aiming to please twenty-first-century readers, if she wrote books just like Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, or even Enid Blyton?

Very weird. She needs a different hook to catch postmodern readers, a hook at the moral level that will connect with readers the way mystery and Harry’s being an orphan did on the surface layer. That hook is Ms. Rowling’s delivery of moral lessons we already believe in just by living in this historical period, lessons we learn again in every book we read, advertisement we watch, or news program we listen to.

Let’s look at how twenty-first-century schoolboy and gothic books differ from the ones we just reviewed for an idea of how our age differs from Queen Victoria’s.