For the past two weeks or so, since I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I've been meaning to write a longish, critical response either to the book itself or to the series as a whole, spurred mostly by a long, intellectually-irresponsible talk my sister and I had about subtext. I'm too lazy to actually do the research required to develop or back up our claims about Hogwarts, though, so I'm just going to throw some down here:
1. For a children's book, there sure is a lot of sexual imagery -- wands, swords, snakes, cauldrons, chalices, lockets . . . Maybe at some point, everything is a cigar, I'm not sure. I do think that it's interesting that Chamber of Secrets is the first really scary book in the series (I remember talks, around when that came out, about people feeling like that one wouldn't be appropriate for their kids to read, because of the basilisk being upsetting.) and it's the one in which a giant snake is ravaging Hogwarts and it's also the one in which an attraction between Harry and Ginny is first introduced. Also, in Order of the Phoenix, Harry has all those violent dreams about Nagini that lead to him feeling irrational guilt.
2. In terms of gender, the wizard world is pretty conservative. In fact, I think that you can argue that J.K. Rowling is in a lot of ways a pretty conservative author. The Harry Potter books tend to promote tolerance, but they also tend to extol boys and athletics over girls and intellectual pursuits. Harry, while introduced as an outsider and freak, quickly emerges as a popular kid and a great Quidditch player. Snape, meanwhile, the perennial outsider, is vilified, pretty much throughout. One can argue that Hermione, Luna and Neville are non-conforming kids, and each does get at least a moment or two of glory, but each is secondary if not tertiary to Harry. Traditional families are a big part of the wizarding world and non-traditional families -- let alone single people -- tend to lead to trouble. Also, back to gender: girls tend to be girly. Female characters are subordinate to the male; even the Hogwarts houses founded by women (Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw) are pretty minor -- and pretty girly. Both are associated with stereotypically female virtues.
3. I was working up something about each of the houses of Hogwarts representing something important about Great Britain, but I don't think there's anything there. I do think that something's going on with Gryffindor and Imperialism, but I'm getting tired just thinking about trying to develop it.
4. The series takes place between the years 1991 and 1997, yet it was written during the late 1990s to about 2006, and is clearly informed by early 2000s mores -- the middle books seem to be obviously influence by the invasion of Iraq and by heightened paranoia, post-9/11. Yet it's weird to think of the world of wizards existing anywhere around the same era as ours. It feels like the books should be set in about 1938 to 1944, with the return of Voldemort mirrored by the Blitz.
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