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Originally Posted by
Drkshadow03
Harry Potter is a work worthy of being considered a classic of children’s literature. Some critics wishing to stack the odds in favor of arguments against Potter’s literary value attempt to employ ridiculous comparisons with works of other popular literary authors. However, the question isn't if Potter can match up with popular celebrated authors like Dickens, Roth, Chabon, Murakami, and their ilk. It is far-fetched to suggest any of these authors’ primary audience is children or even young adults. The real question is if Potter belongs in the same category as C. S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Louis Lowry, L. Frank Baum, Kenneth Grahame, Judy Blume, and other respected children and young adult authors. Many critics who study Children’s Literature as their primary focus have already proposed Potter as a prime candidate for canonization in Children’s Literature and defended its literary merits.
I could agree with your argument for the first book, and maybe the first 3 books, but the later books are marketed for an older audience than those of the other authors mentioned, you know this, she admits this, and the texts themselves show this. The fighting and death, the racist-realism, if you will all demonstrate this, the only thing that qualifies the later 4 novels as children's literature is that the first three were, not that great an argument. As such, she needs to be judged, or at least those texts need to be judged, in accordance with the standard giving a mature fiction, in that they represent a mature fiction, and the question of genre is that of adult, or perhaps, young adult fiction (Young adult is a new term with a shakier definition, but it still is not children's lit).
As I said before, she should have written 3 books, one dealing with Harry in his first year, one dealing with Harry in his last year, and then one dealing with Harry in his later life. That could be argued. But the play by play makes no sense. I have read criticism that people believe Rowling killed characters as a way of trying to make her books more mature, in an artificial sense, and in an attempt to break away from the children's lit fixation of cleanliness in ending - for instance, in books 1-3 Harry always saves the day.
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Harry Potter functions in a fantastical sub-genre known as Wainscot, which is a subgenre of Urban fantasy. The power of fantasy is in its ability to restore objectivity by divorcing itself even further from reality than Realist fiction is capable of doing, and allowing us to see important issues that affect our everyday lives in a new direction, new angle, new slant. In an interview I did with up-and-coming fantasy writer, Kameron Hurley, on my blog, she stated these points more succinctly:
“As for the remove that takes place in epic, heroic, or just plain fantasy works, I’d argue that it’s the remove from the real world than comes closest to examining issues objectively. When you’re mired in your own world, familiar surroundings, you’re more numb to what you’d see as the everyday routines of life, the “normal,” the “expected,” the “natural.” When you remove these things from their settings you can often see the absurdities of them, the injustice. Fantasy – good fantasy – can do that without feeling didactic.”
You are just going jargon heavy by a bunch of weird academic practices. The texts may fit into a genre that is popular in fantasy, but they are not connected to the genre of fantasy in the sense that someone like Orson Scott Card. I bet Rowling has never read much contemporary fantasy, and to try to root her in a tradition of criticism that basically is over another tradition of literature is iffy - her extent of Fantasy literature does not include much written after the 60s, with the vast amount being written much earlier. You know this. As for the genre acting as a form of memisis - well no doubt, it isn't the first text to do that. Gulliver's travels functions in the same way - heck, More's Utopia does the same thing. It's not exactly a new concept.
It also exists across boundaries - the Chinese novel Flowers in a Mirror beats the concept by hundreds of years, and is undoubtedly better.
My problem then, is that in general most good literature functions in this manner. It is not unique to fantasy to offer a critique as a form of escape from the contemporary - the didactic reading of Potter is one of rather bland allegory. You are saying she is paralleling the racist and classicist atmosphere of the world, and, as her movie directors suggested, using Voldemort as a parallel for a violent evil, with all the cliche Hitler analogies. George Lucas got burned for writing the same plot, but he at least redeemed it. Harry being separate from this evil is a rather weak hero. He never battles his own urges for evil, in the sense that all heroes must, so he falls short. The parallel then becomes weak black and white - good and bad - without ever amounting to a proper criticism.
All Slytherin people are bad, Malfoy is just a coward, but still not a good person. All rich people are Slytherins, and therefore bad. There are a few strawmen villains, like the Irish kid who betrays Harry (oh you disloyal Irish, tisk tisk) but Harry himself never questions himself. He never sees Voldemort in himself, and therefore Voldemort is reduced to an embodiment of a non-tangible, rather bland villain. He is all bad, but is apart from those good middle and lower class British folk. Great social realism!
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Urban fantasy in particular allows for direct parallels between the real world and the fantastical milieu. In Epic fantasy or Sword-and-Sorcery the world is further divorced from modern reality. Unfortunately many fantasies are content with simply creating an entertaining adventure story rather than taking advantage of this unique ability of fantasy.
The world of Harry Potter is our world, but transformed through the lens of magic. The two worlds exist alongside each other within the story, encouraging us to read into these parallels. In the hidden magical world we have shops, banks, sporting events, boarding schools, government, but twisted around into new forms through the magical milieu. The attraction at first for the reader is the whimsical charm this familiarity brings, a strange world that is both alien and familiar at the same time. Harry Potter, while possessing a serious story at times, is almost playful with its world and characters and in the actual prose itself. Even in its opening lines we get this sense of playful whimsy:
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privert Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.” – Opening of HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Book 1).
One thing that most critics and proponents of the series can agree on is that the story on some level is about racism; disagreement, of course, exists over the amount of depth it deals with this issue. The racial theme centers on an inter-wizarding ideological conflict between mudbloods (wizards with human parents) and pure bloods (the term is self-explanatory). The ideology of wizarding “racism” takes different forms throughout the novel: we have petty harassment, name-calling, and disdain (exemplified by Draco Malfoy and Slytherins), we have those who advocate for outright exclusion of mudbloods, along with torture and slavery of Muggles (the deatheaters), those with elitist racial attitudes who would rule over Muggles as benevolent philosopher-king/dictators for their own good (Dumbledore in his youth and the dark wizard Grindenwald), and even those who show a slight aversion towards Mudbloods if not verbalized hatred or actions of blatant discrimination (Slughorn who like the typical white person caught saying something stereotypically racist will deny that they are racist). The book doesn’t paint a simplistic portrait of racism, but shows it in its many different forms and expressions, some being more extreme than others, much like racism in real life. The story further complicates this reading through its parallels of the Muggle and Wizarding worlds; the real difference between these two worlds is that the members of one can do magic and the members of the other cannot. This is where the fantasy divide allows for objectivity. All the readers of the books are by definition muggles since magic doesn’t exist in the real world. Therefore, the divide between Muggle and Wizard only matters in the story’s logic and not in any thematic sense. However, by creating a difference between the inhabitants of the two worlds, it allows the reader to see the arbitrariness of the mudblood/pure blood division so important to the racial politics of the Wizarding World. For the reader who knows there is no such thing as Wizards, this fictional logic and imaginary rules forces them to view racism in a new light; as far as we’re concerned all wizards are essentially the same, able to perform magic with equal ability whether they are mudblood or pure blood. By divorcing it from the real world into an imaginary setting we see firsthand in an objective light just how arbitrary racism is as Rowling literally designs her own made-up form of racism in the Wizarding World. It allows children and young adults to think about this arbitrary quality inherent in racism in a way that could never be achieved by just showing them a realistic story about it. It is precisely through the divorcing quality of fantasy, by creating an ideology that exists only in a different world, yet bearing similarities to our own ideologies, that allows us to see the extent of racism’s arbitrary nature.
See above. She does not do a good job of putting her points forward, as she produces a strawman villain. Her villain is not racism, in the sense that racism exists everywhere in everyone's psychology. The divide between the good and the bad makes the books bad moral literature. You have to first be tempted to go bad, but harry is never tempted, and never contemplates acting in such a manner. If he did, it would make the text more interesting, for instance, if he had betrayed Ron for Malfoy, and then learned to see his mistake, there would have been a better reflection and development, but he never does. Evil is always beyond him, therefore he is rather weak as a hero. His only flaw, minus his weaknesses physically, is that he is prone to a sense of self-agrandizement and heroics. He maintains that to the end, and it is instead translated into a sense of bravery and pride.
That being said, does not realism fiction work exactly the same? Is that not what we call setting? Is that not what Plato was talking about? These characteristics are not unique to fantasy, and not particularly reflected in fantasy, nor in Rowling. As I mentioned before, More, or Swift, or anybody else could be held as a better model than this work. The idea of work being a form of veiled memisis is as present in Milton, and Spenser, as it is in parts of Chaucer and Virgil. Aristotle talks about similar ideas in his poetics and discussion of Epic at the beginning. Arguably your understanding of fantasy as somehow more unique needs more evidence than that. It is unique in that it gives room for invention, but Rowling is hardly original in manipulating it, and I would argue, not a particularly good political author. Her moralizing is weak, and your didactic reading of the text, I would argue, pays her to much service.
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Some might see parallels to LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea. There are a number of obvious and important differences: 1) LeGuin’s novel is firmly an epic fantasy in a secondary world rather than an Urban Fantasy Wainscot. 2) Only one section of the first novel takes place in a magic school and it’s an utterly serious school, lacking all the whimsical playfulness that makes Potter so enjoyable 3) the main character is meant to be one of the most talented Wizards ever to exist, much like Tom Riddle, whose own pride is his undoing (creating a very different character from Potter and a very different theme that LeGuin is exploring). These important differences end up creating very different stories, with different feels, characters, tones, purposes, etc.
Harry Potter is meant to be portrayed as a clever but mediocre Wizard who relies heavily on his friends for survival. Rowling continually emphasizes his average ability as a wizard. He cannot solve his problems merely by turning to his awesome powers, but needs help from outsiders, thus twisting the long tradition of fantasy archetypes and stereotypes of super powerful chosen ones exemplified by characters such as Rand Al'Thor in The Wheel of Time of series where the Chosen One is super powerful and its through his immense power that he can save the world from the Dark One. Harry Potter subverts this trope numerous times by continually emphasizing Potter’s average ability as a wizard. As book 5 makes clear, with the prophecy, Potter was not Chosen because of his supreme ability in Wizarding, but Voldemort chose him because he believed the prophecy meant Potter (thus making it a self-fulfilling prophecy); the book says it could just as easily have been Neville Longbottom who the prophecy referred to, and had Voldemort read the prophecy that way he would’ve been the Chosen One and not Potter.
I am not 100% sure what you are trying to argue but I will try. The earthsea is different in that the focus is on character development, whereas Potter is decidedly not. Le Guin does a good job of putting the character, someone beyond everyone else, in a position where he must face himself, a parallel to the heroic journey, and an homage to Eastern Religion. Rowling puts the hero against a white and black world where he is decidedly white.
As for the character's flaws, well, he has them, like anybody. That isn't much credit - if Potter was all powerful the text would be weak. His arbitrary choice of being the hero is also a weak description of the heroic. He is not shown to be a mediocre wizard, just not shown to be overly exceptional. His prowess in certain fields is lauded. For instance, he produces that stag thing which impresses everyone, and he learns to do things faster than most people. He is not a bad wizard, and is decidedly as good as his friends, and better than his classmates - he is not his friend Ron. Ron is the idiot, the buffoon, the but-end of the jokes. He does everything wrong, and breaks his wand, has no money, can never measure up to anybody, etc. The two are put in contrast deliberately - moron against excellence. Harry relies on the moron, and his decidedly better friend, but he is still not bad - he is better in his way than everyone, despite benefiting from the help of his friends.
Now, one could take that a step further by saying what is the deal with the Ron guy? He is bad at everything, never does anything, has no money or career goals, and never amounts to anything. I am not sure what happens to him at the end of the novel, but he never measures up to his friend, or even his girlfriend, who is undoubtedly the best of the group, yet is always reduced in stature based on her Gender. Gender critics have had a field day seeing how the books subordinate women to domestic duties and put forward an old Bread-winner Home-maker system as an ideal English mentality. The most lauded women seem to be the mother figures, with Hermione no doubt retiring into one herself and becoming Ron's mom.
Now with that in mind, Ron is an idiot. Hermione is a genius. She should be the bread-winner, she should be the one lauded, she should be the best friend. But Potter cannot do that. Rowling is not able, Ron is the best friend, for no apparent reason than that of male Comradery.
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One of the most dynamic aspects of the text is the characters. In the beginning of the series, we have a scared, hapless, neglected orphan protagonist named Harry Potter, reviled by his uncle and aunt for his strangeness and clearly out of place in the normal world. He soon discovers that he is a wizard and ends up at a school where he develops new friendships that functions as his replacement family. These friendships are not set in stone; indeed, there many points in the later novels where the core friendship of Ron, Hermione, and Harry almost shatters, but ultimately by the end they, too, come to realize they’re a family and need each other. There are a lot of tangible developments of Harry’s character by the end of the series:
1) One of the most obvious changes from the earlier books is Harry’s desire to play down his celebrity status; he seems embarrassed by it, wanting to blend in with the crowd, and be like any normal kid, but by the final book he embraces his role and fate as the savior of the Wizarding World, even allowing himself to be sacrificed for the sake of everyone else. His choice of name is no accident.
2) However, even more microscopic changes in his character and his relationships are evident as the series progresses; by the final book, Harry’s relationship with the Dursleys has transformed radically, with both sides expressing feelings for each other. The Dursleys, far from being merely a comical interlude and parody of bourgeoisie foibles, plays a crucial part in the development of Harry’s character. Due to past neglect and lack of parental figures, Harry struggles to trust his friends and adults at first. Ultimately, trust in others is what Potter must accept.
3) By the final book, in order to win he must trust in his friends to fight back, he must trust in Dumbledore who he learns isn’t the perfect saintly man he believed him to be during the final book; Harry might play a large part in defeating Voldemort, but he cannot defeat his forces alone.
4) In the end, Harry goes from an orphan who lost his family to building a new family through his experiences at Hogwarts and by literally starting his own as the final sequence of the novel.
5) Harry ends up facing his fears (developed and reexplored throughout the novels) and learns that death is an inevitable part of life; something, Voldemort who functions as a parallel to him, never learns or accepts. Harry learns to accept death as an inevitable part of life, which allows him to be sacrificed to save everyone else. He needs to overcome his parent’s death and his “foster” parents death: Sirius Black and Dumbledore.
Now granted from the very first books we witness a character who is brave and courageous and who cares about his friends. Rowling doesn’t change the central qualities of her character, but I do believe she develops them over the course of the books so that these innate qualities mature. He switches from others sacrificing themselves for him to him sacrificing himself for others.
I am just going to say you read the plot into the character, but you have a specific flaw. You are making these conclusions, not the text. Harry is not this dynamic in the books. He is stagnant. Much of the development is in the form of Rowling moralizing, and bends the characterisation, only to be reaffirmed later. It is not demonstrated, but described, and therefore the development you list is arbitrary. I do not feel Harry grows up. I do not feel the Dursley's are anything but stock character muggles - despite her resympathizing of them in later volumes.
Harry never learns. From day 1 at Hogwarts till the last minute, he is the same. He loves his fame, and loves his sense of heroics. His own self-sacrificing is just more didactic bull**** from Rowling, it is not convincing or interesting and no different than the ending of book 1 when Harry does the same thing - he needs to save the world, and is willing to sacrifice himself, as he tries in book 2, and in book 4. The idea of maturing to the point of being self-sacrificing is a weak argument. He plays the same ploy in book 1 when he is going for the philosopher's stone. Ron does it too. That is not development.
Now take Ron - they have a fight in book 4 - same fight in book 7. No development in that regard, and it ends the same way - Ron comes back and is welcomed, static and dull.
Hermoine - same thing, brainy girl, always the clever one, always loyal, always self-proud, and honestly such an unintentional lampoon of the female activist with her self-proud affirmation of rights. You cannot but feel that she is like a caricature of the detested female activist, with her overly brainy self-proud pronouncements of her moral superiority and "what is right". I guess that is how the book is supposed to read to. Hermione is always right - flat and boring.
Ron and his relations with his friends never mature. He starts off in search of a sense of family - he puts it first in Hagrid, then in the Weasley's (I believe there is a line in one of the books that he wants to give them half his money or something), then in Sirius, then in
Dumbledore - this transfer does not show development. Later he transfers it back onto the Weasley's, marries one, and basically comes to a bland resolution that his search for family is revealed - the Nuclear family persists with the Mother figure reigning supreme in her Kitchen.
Does he learn to trust his friends - well, I think he trusts his friend Ron from the beginning, and never argues with him when he is wrong - he is not prone to Ron's pettiness. Ron's petty lower-class resentments and jealousy are always shown to be wrong, whereas self-superior Potter is always in the right. He relies on three friends (I include Hagrid), and then the cast expands to include more - but the development is never more mature. He never questions his friends outright, always trusts them, and never has to come to terms with real betrayal.
Dumbledore never goes against him Ron does not sell him out - their friendship is never challenged by Potter, who remains a true friend without doubt the whole time. Ron is the one that faces these challenges, but he never learns to overcome his self-inferiority and his resentment of his friend's "luck" or "successes".
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The so-called red herring elements in her plot can best be explained by understanding one of the major themes of the work. One of her themes in the book is adolescent misjudgment of people. The characters continually misjudged characters personalities and motivations. Not to mention Harry himself is naturally mistrustful of adults and friendship because of his upbringing with the Dursleys. A red herring shifting between possible villains makes perfect sense with a theme that centers on mistrusting adults, especially new ones to appear in your life, and misjudging people because of that mistrust, thus overturning expectations and assumptions of the characters. Harry doesn’t just misjudge Snape, but also Malfoy and a whole slew of characters—he even misjudges Dumbledore who it turns out has a darker side as revealed in the final book.
That is a shallow reading. It is not about trust and mistrust. It is about plotting. The Red-herrings never feature as an elaborate sense of character development - they drive the plot. They do not drive the characters, only the plot. Snape is presumed evil in book 1 - it turns out to be a character who is virtually unseen throughout the book, the weird idiot bumbling teacher, who is curious, but not interesting - it turns out then to just be Voldemort - same battle sequence, and the game is over. Harry comes out only learning that despite he hating Snape, Snape was not in the wrong this time.
Book 2 - oh it is Malfoy who is killing people - oops no, it is Voldemort, repeat, same conclusion.
Book 3 - it is this new guy we just heard of who is an agent of voldemort - no it is someone else, another agent of voldemort, repeat, etc.
book 4 - It is that Bulgarian? teacher (we cannot trust those non-English wizards, tisk tisk) - oops no it is Voldemort again, and what a tragedy, he had been helping him all along - still no development.
Book 5 - Need to play the hero, oh whoops, It's voldemort again - Harry comes to terms with death, but the conclusion is ambiguous - does he actually learn to stop being a hero all the time - does he actually mature? Well lets see book 6.
Book 6 - Harry in hero mode now - arrogant, determined. All the lessons are translated into - I should talk to people before heading out there. We are taught Snape is a bad guy, and he seems to be one at the end of the book, but we need to wait to find out that he is good, and it was just, yup you guessed it, Voldemort again.
Book 7 - Basically the extended ending of book 6 - Evil Snape turns out to be good Snape, Voldemort is defeated because of a weird technicality - Harry becomes Jesus and dies for everyone's sins. And then we have a happy ending. No real development, except in his relationship to Snape, who, thanks to Alan Rickman's acting, is shown to be a tragic man in love, instead of just a cold, cynical, violent misanthrope.
So where is this development through red-herrings - the device is apparent in all the texts and plays out the exact same in every text. There is no development as to Harry learning who to trust and who not to trust. He makes the same assumptions in book 6 as he does in book 1 - these devices function to push the plot forward, not to push the characters forward - his "distrust" of his world is as apparent in book 7 as it is in book 1.
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Larry from OF Blog at the Fallen adroitly links this theme of misjudgment with Harry’s maturity through the novels, “The HP of the first book is 11 years old, with the world-view of an 11 year-old boy. He cannot readily see the goodness that lurks within the tortured frame of a Snape or within the spoiled shaping of a Draco Malfoy. They are enemies to overcome - perhaps not capital E Evil like Voldemort, but still just that, "evil." But as the series progresses and we witness things through Harry's PoV, things subtly change, until we too are forced to change our preconceptions of a Snape or a Draco to see that they are not static characters, but that they too are as dynamic as Harry or any of his friends. We end up seeing Harry's world through the eyes of one who is ready to leave his childhood shell to become an adult who will be wise enough to remember the lessons learned during that childhood apprenticeship stage.”
Is it Harry's perception that changes, or rather ours. Rowling I think just reinvented the characters. Either way, Malfoy is not a good guy, Snape is also not a good guy - he is a badguy with a fetish for exotic women - the point is if he had actually been good, he would not have been a bad guy in the first place. He acts out of a sense of guilt and shame, and is perhaps the only character I could say works, though only in the 7th movie, and only thanks to Alan Rickman. Snape in 1-6 is a stock character.
So basically we are judging all the development on the shift from sequence to ending - so basically all on book 7. I have not read it, so I cannot comment in depth, but I would put forward that all these developments happen in the end, not in books 1-6. Therefore, it is safe to say, there is no development from 1-6 and this argument can only be laid upon the conclusion. In other words, from a character perspective, the books are rather weak, and books 2-6 are superfluous.
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Still, all the themes such as friendship, the power of love, learning to trust others after abuse and having no one to love you, learning to trust adults through an adolescent’s eyes in a world where adults lie and tell half-truths are all subservient to the larger moral theme of Harry Potter, the crux of the series so to speak: Choice. In Harry Potter it is the choices we make that define us.
The story’s true center is the connected background of Voldemort and Harry Potter. The longish looks into Voldemort's "origins," which play out throughout all the novels, but especially the middle ones, reveal that Voldemort and Harry Potter are mirror reflections of each other. Both orphans, both living among Muggles who mistreat them, and despite these similar backgrounds both choose to take different paths in their lives. Voldemort is terrified of dying, seeking immortality, while Harry is willing to sacrifice his life so that his friends might live. Voldemort inspires the loyalty of his followers through fear, torture, and his unmatched talent as a wizard, while Harry inspires his friends through his courage, even though he is a mediocre wizard as far as talent and skill go. In the earlier novels, the sorting hat suggests Harry would be a good fit in Slytherin before placing him in Gryffindor. Harry asks Dumbledore why the sorting head almost placed him in Slytherin. Dumbledore explains that the sorting hat looks at the qualities within us, but also pays attention to our own choices; Harry, of course, repeatedly told the hat that he didn't want to end up in Slytherin. We see here an important point made in this moment. Harry could've ended up in Slythern like Voldemort, but likewise Voldemort could've ended up in Griffindor had his choices been different. This theme and central parallel of the novel provides the main moral point of the novel: there is no such thing as immutable essences called good and evil, but it is our choices that make us good or evil. This is a world of difference from the million Tolkien copies where there are Lucifers, Devils, and Dark Ones who are evil Dark Lords in their core essence. Not only are Harry Potter and Voldemort linked by destiny to face each other and magical scars wounds that allow Harry to gain Voldemort’s abilities (ability to speak to snakes called Parsel tongue), but they really have many of the same experiences; however, they react to those experiences differently. Harry Potter chooses love and sacrifice, while Voldemort chooses fear and selfishness. Dumbledore continually tells his protégé that what separates Harry from voldemort is his loyalty to his friends and that most precious of emotions, love.
This does not make them good. These are stalk characteristics of any book with conflict.
Harry is good, Voldemort is bad. The distinction comes from book 1. Of course, given the same circumstances the characters make different choices - my problem is to Harry, these are the only choices.
Luke Skywalker battles himself, and must learn to become good on his own terms. Ged from the Earthsea does something similar - he learns restraint from battling his own unrestrained self.
Harry's foil is a non-foil, because the distinction is constantly made - his foil cannot love, has never loved, and has always been violent. Since childhood he has been a little devil, whereas Harry is meek and mild. Voldemort can be called a purely negative force, whereas Harry never acts out of character, and never has a desire to. He is a cardboard hero.
The idea of choice is an iffy discussion in the text. Potter rarely makes difficult choices - the reader knows he will choose good always, and never has to grapple with his desire for evil. Harry has no desire to be like Voldemort, and his Biggest "choice" in the text is deciding not to be in Slytherin. Their connection is arbitrary, and more in keeping with the downright moralizing tone of the later volumes (from what I gather, particularly the last volume). The first text does not feature this weird connection - Voldemort is a static character, as is Harry up until book 6, when Rowling decided she wanted to preach a little to her audience.
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However, like most the themes in Harry Potter, even love is not an uncomplicated emotion. Like the anti-racial themes it too is treated in a fairly sophisticated way. As critic Karin Westman writes, “[w]hile the earlier books in the series depict love as a generative and protective force, Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows remind us that love can wound as well as shield. In these last two books Rowling locates love's damaging consequences not only within secondary characters like Voldemort's mother Merope and Bellatrix but also within the seemingly unassailable, all-powerful character of Dumbledore, thereby forging unlikely connections between disparate characters. Such parallels diminish easy distinctions between good and bad people and foreground the paradox of love's power. By the end of Rowling's series, love is indeed a weapon, as Dumbledore often explains to Harry, but that weapon is dangerously double-edged, placing the lover and the beloved at risk if it is improperly handled.” Even characters like Ron fall prey to this double-edged sword, temporarily abandoning Harry and Hermione in the final book because he thinks Potter is making moves on the woman he loves (Hermione) and jealousy over Harry’s fame (a personal character flaw that continually rears its ugly head from the earlier books). However, Ron does make the right moral choice and returns to his friends, winning the adoration of Hermione.
I disagree in how complex it is, because I do not feel the development ever matures. Of course love has the power to cause pain, but that does not mean the concept of love is ever understood or developed. Take Ginny for instance - Harry loves her supposedly? Why how, in what what? When does this come about? Snape loves a filthy mudblood, and therefore becomes a good guy, oh great moralizing. Or how about this one, Ron did that in book 4, so this new development is uninteresting.
As for Dumbledore I am not sure, that may be in the text, but I hear he turned out to be gay in later interviews - it just shows how she didn't develop anything in the texts.
By and by, if all these so called developments do happen in book 7, as I argued before, books 2-6 are just filler. They certainly do not happen in there, and therefore, I would call this too little too late. It took her what, 4000 pages to say something that could be told in 200? Or has been told better in 200? Take Bridge to Teribithia - it did it much faster, the themes of isolation and family pain, escape, death, and even love. That's a children's book that got it down much faster and better.
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Individual moral choice is everywhere in the Potter books. Another obvious example is when Draco Malfoy cannot kill Dumbledore. He makes the wrong moral choices in the sixth book, Half-Blood Prince, by helping the Death Eaters to break into Hogwarts, while under duress over the threats to his father’s life. However, he too, must face a real moral choice. Dumbledore tells him he has a choice--he need not proceed down this path. Draco Malfoy in the final book makes the right choice, despite being inclined towards the path of pure-blooded racial politics of Slythern--we see a further complication of simplistic morality in that even racists, which the novel depicts Malfoy engaging in numerous times more than any other character--can sometimes make the right moral choices.
That says something for Malfoy, but not for Harry. Harry, the protagonist, never makes the wrong choice, and never really chooses - therefore no real development in that regard. There is only one choice for Harry, and he doesn't even think it over. To have a moral choice there must be an allure from the other side - Harry never feels that allure. As for Malfoy, all these developments happen at the very end, so as I put it, 6 books of filler, one book of moralizing affirmations. Still plot driven, and too little too late.
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Often critics who call out Rowling’s style have a rather myopic understanding of the term. They will point to a single sentence or two that employs a cliché way of expressing a character’s emotion and shout cliché until their face turns blue. On a sentence by sentence level, indeed, Rowling is nothing special. However, when looked at from a larger paragraph by paragraph basis, Rowling’s work brims with style. In fact, it’s precisely the style that Rowling shines in many occasions. As I pointed out earlier in this thread the opening of Potter exhibits a playfulness in tone reminiscent of Dickens and Austen, while lacking their superior diction and syntax. In an early paragraph about Mr. Dursley, Rowling cleverly characterizes him by deconstructing typical associations of emotions and mood. She takes a typical action (shouting and screaming) normally associated with anger and stress, and flips our expectations in this paragraph by depicting Dursley as being "in a very good mood" after all this yelling as part of his job, telling us a lot about his character in the process in a fairly clever economical way. The playfulness of the tone enlivens the magic world to make the story so much more than a typical romp through a fantasy environment. Even minor details like candy, magical to most children already, is made more magical: strange Jellybean flavors, animated chocolate frogs, etc. These little details show an author thinking through the minor stuff and imbuing even the tiniest fragment of her world with originality. Throughout the work there is an evident playfulness with archetypes and characters that challenge our expectations and re-imagines familiar tropes in new light. The playfulness isn’t just in the reworking of the fantasy tropes themselves, but can be found in the prose and the way she narrates the story.
Come on man. Every author does that. These are typical things ever kid learns to do in school. You give people more credit than they deserve. Her style at the beginning isn't god awful, but it isn't Austen, or Dickens. It is not Le Guin either, who has been praised and written extensively on the use of language in fantasy literature. These tropes aren't knew either. Think Charlie and the Chocolate factory, or even Alice. They use these same tropes of magical world, and everything topsy turvey. She has some cute ideas, I will grant, those beans or those frogs, and these "animated" forms she plays with, but they are not enough to carry the text. You are giving her credit as if she invented writing. Her prose is not that great, and you cannot overly praise her for doing what every other published novel does - use language to describe things. She is not unique in her use of language, she is not even good at it. She is ok, and it carries the story. That is about it. That she uses language to describe characters is not a new revelation. That she builds her paragraph around charicaturing someone like Dursley in the same move that Dickens does in all his works, and many subsequent authors, and preceding authors did before. Tolstoy does it, heck, every realist novelist does it. She is arguably more in the tradition of caricature (how English), but she is not Austen, nor Dickens, and if you argue that she is using caricature, you must retract your arguments that these caricatures somehow are overly deep personalities.
You are either a caricature or a deep character - you are either a Dickens character or a basic stereotype - think Wagner versus Shakespeare - Tristan and Isolde are archetypes, Falstaff and Hamlet are as vast as the ocean. Neither are better, but they do not exist in the same way. Tristan can only do one thing, Hamlet cannot not overthink things. If Rowling is using caricature, using these Tristan like characters, or these Sigfreid-like characters, then we cannot make the argument that these characters mature, or develop. It is not necessary for a novel, except that it is necessary for this novel. Austen's Elizabeth must overcome her Pride and Prejudice - Harry does not overcome anything in himself.
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One who is performing a careful reading of Potter and who is familiar with lots of other children’s books being published today will recognize that is fairly complicated literature for a children's book. The appeal of Harry Potter as a child of abuse learning to negotiate a dark and sometimes cruel world that can be loveless and it where it is uncertain on whom you can trust, while not succumbing down the path of hatred, fear, and sadism, by not becoming a Voldemort, is obvious. As critic Roni Natov puts it, “Harry embodies this state of injustice frequently experienced by children, often as inchoate fear and anger--and its other side, desire to possess extraordinary powers that will overcome such early and deep exile from the child's birthright of love and protection.” As Larry notes when he quotes G. K. Chesterton, Harry Potter teaches us that we all face dragons, but sometimes we can beat the dragons.
That is just pure mediocre didacticism from the worst brand of critic. All children's literature, or at least all praised children's literature does that. The contemporary field of children's literature is overly didactic. Think Judy Bloom not writing a book that is meant to probe controversial development. To praise the books because they are didactic is an argument you can hold, but of which I do not particularly care. The books to me are overly Christian, and do not represent the values I would wish to impart of a child. A Wizard of the Earthsea is a better example of a children's book about facing demons.
The books are cut and paste good versus evil. Harry must learn to overcome evil, but so must virtually all other children's book protagonists. They must learn to come to terms with death, they must learn to come to terms with abuse. These are not unique traits, therefore praising the books for including them is a rather silly argument. It's like praising a cake for including sugar in its ingredients.
I have compared the book to Starwars more than once (I like to only think of the original trilogy) and will say that Harry is even flatter than Luke. Harry never needs to battle his inner demon - he never comes to terms with himself as Voldemort. He battles the metaphorical inner demon, but he does not battle himself. It is a convenient ploy by these critics to not see the distinction of fighting a piece of voldemort, or fighting voldemort, or fighting oneself. The way Rowling constructed it, Harry does not fight himself, only Voldemort, there is never a question in the reader's mind that Harry will become a new Voldemort.
Take Luke now, he actually goes against his teachers, does battle with his inner demon, and comes to his conclusion - he faces himself in the form of his father, and comes to a conclusion that he is good. That is the moral heroic journey. Harry never has to confront himself.
Some critics have the disease of regarding book characters as deeper than they are. rowling was not thinking of all these things when she penned the first Potter. She was not discussing in her head contemporary terminology for child psychology, she was not creating a "human" but rather a character. any sensible person would thus treat as a literary figure rather than as an actual child. He is not an actual child, and therefore, we cannot understand him outside of the conventions of literature.
That being said, if we want to deal with this moralizing crap that these critics are putting forward, why don't we just read Great Expectations. All these themes are all contained within that book, without a miss. In fact, it feels as if these critics are talking about that book, and are basically changing then names of all the characters to fit with Harry.
Dickens however was a better author. Pip is redeemed through his friends, but also goes through a down period. He rebels, finds a new mother in the upper class, comes to love a father he despises, returns for forgiveness from his adoptive father, and becomes mature and can live his life - contained, complete story.
Potter hates his adoptive parents more than Pip (who loves his uncle), goes off with his adoptive parents Hagrid/dumbledore/sirius/dumbledore, makes friends (Harry, Hermione, etc.), battles evil, but never faces himself. The development pattern that makes Pip a better contender for the above descriptions is that Pip learns to be self-reflexive, whereas Harry does not. Hagrid is never really questioned, for instance. Pip is redeemed by his friends, and can remake himself by facing himself - Harry is totally a plot device - he relies on his friends but his friendship is never questioned - he knows who his parents are and loves them, whether or not they are transposed - and his facing his childhood demons is never properly resolved. He does not, for instance, ever do battle with an internal conflict the way Pip does. (Pip at the end of the text, I will remind you, gets sick and almost dies as he confronts the truth of his Great Expectations).
So there you have it. A rather dry reading that could be applied to any other better text. Heck, take David Copperfield - the same idea almost entirely. Take Thamora Pierce's novels, the same idea. It's what we called a Bildungsroman, of course the text has these features.
Your critical work is affirming something as praiseworthy when it is basically what we call the standard plot. The standard cannot be praised as unique, because it is a standard, therefore should not be lauded as special to Rowling, and Rowling's use of it should not be lauded as original. Basically every Bildungsroman is about somebody out of place learning their place. Almost every one features the personalities of father/mother and friends, and almost every one will require its protagonist to make a moral decision and reach maturity.
Rowling did not invent this, and I do not need to read some Jargon-heavy critique that exposes these stock forms within the text.
I praise you for your research, but none of this demonstrates to me any uniqueness, or anything particularly noteworthy within the text. As anyone can note, this book was destined to have a critical following, as there are numerous critics whose job is to critique popular phenomenon. I had a professor who has extensively written on Sex in the City, for instance. There is a degree in everything, and of course there is a degree in Potter - the phenomenon is worth Billions of dollars. There is a degree in Starwars too - does that mean Star Wars is the peak of cinema? Does that mean those studying the appeal of Kraft foods will be studying the be-all and end-all of food? Of course not, just because something is studied now doesn't mean it is already a classic. There are still people who study long dead novelists.
I know one in particular who read all of the unknown French serial authors who were popular but unheard of after their time. It is the equivalent. There will always be analysts of phenomena.
