Harry Potter's Bookshelf (8 page)

Their battles throughout the years culminate in the fall of the House of Malfoy and Draco’s agony. Harry feels pity for him after Dumbledore’s death on the tower and rescues him from the Fiendfyre in the Room of Requirement during the Battle of Hogwarts. This act of mercy results in Harry’s being able to tell Draco’s mother, Narcissa, that her son is still alive, which news inspires her in turn to deceive the Dark Lord about Harry’s survival at the risk of her life. The Malfoys, Death Eaters one and all, sit down in peace after the Battle in the Great Hall, however uncomfortably, with the victors.

Reformed? Redeemed? Sort of. The Malfoys at the end of
Deathly Hallows
, like Flashman (Tom Brown’s nemesis), who is expelled from Rugby for drunkenness, seem abashed and broken but have not become champions of the good, true, and beautiful overnight. The
Potter
books and
Tom Brown
both use the hero’s antagonist as a foil against which to celebrate the virtues of modest landowners and nongentry or at least the relatively poor and unpretentious.

As much as Draco and his parents are stock players advancing public school story morality, Luna and Neville are more important:

Along with these stock players and themes,
Harry Potter
novels, as David Steege puts it, “have one more trait in common with other public school novels, seen especially strongly in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
: a tradition of providing a moral tale as well as a ripping good yarn.”

In writing
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, Hughes knowingly preaches to his audience. In his preface, he freely admits: “Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching!”
¹⁸

Rowling, too, has often been quoted in response to the idea of her books as morality tales. She has said that she “did not conceive it as a moral tale,” but that “the morality sprang naturally out of the story.” Although she “never set out to preach,”
¹⁹
“undeniably, morals are drawn.”
²⁰

What saves Harry in the end are his “free will, courage, and moral certainty.”
²¹
The author values courage “more highly than any other virtue and by that I mean not just physical courage and flashy courage, but moral courage.”
²²

Ms. Rowling shudders at the idea that she is a “formula writer”
²³
or a moral pedant. Nonetheless, the setting of her stories in a boarding school and the creative but remarkable conformity of these stories in the characters and to the themes of the public school novel genre make the books deliver a predictable moral worldview that C. S. Lewis praised as “training in the stock responses.”

As he explained in
A Preface to Paradise Lost,
one of art’s “main functions” is to “assist” in the organization of “chosen attitudes,” namely, being able to recognize vice and virtue and to praise the latter with truth and beauty and to despise the former with falsehood and ugliness. Such training, fostered by the great poets like Milton and, if Chesterton is to be trusted, even by formulaic schoolboy fiction, yields “all solid virtue and stable pleasure.”
²⁴
Sydney, Wordsworth, Horace, and Aristotle all argued that story hits its mark when it is simultaneously “instructing while delighting.”

Wouldn’t it be odd if a story set at a school wasn’t about instruction of some kind and, given its roots in Victorian England, about implicit and explicit moral instruction instead? The students and the readers come to learn—and the schoolboy story instructs and delights.

The
Potter
novels
are
schoolboy fiction, wonderfully reimag ined but true to the conventions of the genre all the same. And this setting and Ms. Rowling’s conformity to formula
does
tell us a great deal about the literal and the moral meaning of the books.

It is by no means, however, the whole of the literal meaning or of the books’ moral layering. We have seen other dimensions on these relatively superficial levels of meaning in the previous chapter discussions of narrative voice and drive and of the formulas and moral weight of “manners and morals” fiction à la Austen, Sayers’s character-driven detective stories, and Dickens’s orphan novels. The literal level and the devices and set pieces Ms. Rowling borrows from the various traditional genres bleed with moral meaning that informs the reader’s experience of the surface story.

The upcoming chapters exploring the explicitly moral, allegorical, and transcendent layers of meaning reveal that dismissing Ms. Rowling’s oeuvre as simply schoolboy fiction, as academic critics have, is to miss the source of the novels’ power and popularity. What separates Rowling from more formulaic books in the schoolboy genre is her level of planning. She planned her seven books for five years before completing the first novel,
Sorcerer’s Stone
. Planning is an integral part of the process for Rowling. In an interview with the
South Australian Advertiser
, she talks about how important it is to her:

The
Harry Potter
books are anything but thrown together. They’re “meticulously planned.” There’s very little that is accidental or spur of the moment about them.

So what?

Ms. Rowling
is
writing formula schoolboy fiction. But in her years of “meticulous planning” she has layered into the mechanical format, characters, and themes of this tired genre nine other literary conventions from gothic romance to alchemical drama, and the traditional four layers of meaning, to include allegorical satire and symbolist fantasy.

This is not just another
Tom Brown
or even
Tom Brown
“reseen . . . in the magical mirror of Tolkien,”
²⁶
as Harold Bloom would have it. The literal level of meaning we’ve been exploring in these first three chapters, with their pointers to the moral dimension the surface story inevitably brings with it is just the visible vehicle or stage setting through which and on which Ms. Rowling has worked her multivalent artistry.

Doubt me? Turn the page to discover the Frankenstein monster, vampire, and gothic romance moral meaning tucked into this schoolboy novel. We’re about to leave
Tom Brown
and
Malory Towers
for a different dimension in setting and stock response training. On to Transylvania!

CHAPTER FOUR

Harry Potter
as an Echo of the Brontë Sisters,
Frankenstein,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
and
Dracula

 

 

 

 

 

Gothic as a literary genre was born in the mid-eighteenth century with the stunning
Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole, which almost singlehandedly introduced the devices, themes, and morality of this kind of novel. “Pure gothic” or gothic romance accounts for close to a third of all books written in the late 1700s and early 1800s, believe it or not, and then fades dramatically into near nonexistence. The “machinery” of the pure gothic romance, however, bled into all other genres and became a staple of Dickens, Collins, the Victorian horror writers, the “late gothic” authors, and eventually, we shall see, found a home in the world of
Harry Potter
.

“Gothic” can be used meaningfully to describe everything from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
to bodice-ripping yarns from Victoria Holt, not to mention the macabre horror stories of Poe, Lovecraft, and Stephen King. There are “classic gothic” stories from the nineteenth century that everyone still reads, though; a look at them reveals the common elements of gothic novels that are found everywhere in
Harry Potter,
as well as their admonitory morality. If you could do a word-response test with literature geeks, a test in which for every category named the person has to name a novel, I’m confident that for the word “gothic” most would answer either
Jane Eyre
,
Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
or
Dracula.

None of them are “pure gothic”—because they don’t contain all the elements that would make them so—but all get their feel or atmosphere from Walpole and his eighteenth-century imitators.
¹
Let’s look at their individual stories quickly to spot the dominant, recurrent threads before seeing the gothic wool of the
Potter
tapestry and its moral message.

Jane Eyre
(1847) by Charlotte Brontë is an orphan novel featuring the original “plain Jane” in her rise from abused, adopted child through life’s vicissitudes to marriage with her beloved. Taken in by an aunt and uncle at her parents’ deaths, she is tormented by her cousins and shrewish aunt when her uncle dies. They send her away to school, but this is hardly an improvement, despite her making a dear friend and finding a sympathetic mentor. The teachers and the school head are sadists and sophists who dislike her, and the boarding students are treated so badly that disease eventually kills many of them, including the dear friend. The school is reformed, and Jane eventually becomes a teacher herself. She leaves the school to become a governess at a Gothic manor to a French child.

The child is the ward of a man twenty years Jane’s senior. Edward Rochester is a passionate gentleman who, after a rough start with the manor’s new governess, falls in love with her and proposes. Jane is swept off her feet but learns
at her wedding
that Rochester is already married and his mad wife has been kept in the manor attic out of sight. She refuses to become his mistress and flees the manor in the dark of night.

She escapes north to desolate moors and is taken in, near death, by St. John Rivers and his sisters. St. John plans to become a missionary to India and after Jane’s physical recovery and miraculous inheritance, he proposes they marry and she join him in India. Jane, though, hears a voice and realizes just in time she still loves Rochester and returns to him.

But he is a humbled man. His confined wife had burned down the manor and died after leaping from the roof; Rochester was crippled and blinded in the fire. In a melodramatic reunion, Jane and Rochester reconcile, and, in their union, he eventually regains sight in one eye.