During Christmas week we get to imagine being children again so I’ve decided to write about student responses to Harry Potter. Members of my British Fantasy Literature class could write essays on any work of fantasy as long as they applied the tools and perspectives we developed in the course. Michelle Steahl and Evan Rowe chose to write on horcruxes.
As you know if you’ve read the final two books of the series, a horcrux is a magical object into which a dark magician may deposit a part of his soul. Voldemort, the villain of the series, has his soul residing in seven objects. As long as even a single one remains, Voldemort remains immortal whereas if all are destroyed, then Voldemort is mortal like any man. (The price Voldemort has paid for splintering his soul, incidentally, is that he lives in a perpetual incorporeal state.) Harry’s quest in the last two books is to destroy Valdemort’s horcruxes.
Voldemort has chosen six of the locations but he doesn’t know that there is a seventh, which is Harry Potter himself. Harry receives one of Voldemorth’s soul shards as a baby when Voldemort, trying to kill him, splinters against the force field of Mrs. Potter’s love for her child (she herself dies in the attack). This is why, throughout the series, Harry retains a special connection with Voldemort. For instance, he can sense Voldemort’s moods through the scar that resulted from the attack.
As I read my students’ essays, I came to better understand why J. K. Rowling captivates young minds. The Harry Potter books are maturation stories, articulating adolescent rites of passage and speaking to youthful idealism. Both Michelle and Evan drew on Jungian archetypal criticism and Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces to map Harry’s journey to “individuation”—which is to say, recognizing and stepping into his full powers. For Michelle, Harry moves beyond his egotistical self sufficiency into full selfhood and, in the process, empowers his friends to do the same. For Evan, Harry is involved in a battle with a shadowy father, whom he must defeat if he is to become a man.
Michelle believes that Harry needing to share his powers is signaled early in the final book when Harry is surrounded by Voldemort’s forces. To help him escape, his friends all take his shape (made possible thanks to “polyjuice potion”). Their enemies are confused by the ruse and Harry gets away. Michelle says that, to defeat Voldemort, Harry must stop thinking that everything comes down him, that he alone can save the world. Teenagers find it a shock when they discover that they are not the center of the universe, something they believed as children. Managing that shock is one of the central challenges of adolescence.
In Jungian terms, Voldemort is Harry’s shadow, the narcissistic self that is one possible future. By letting go of this self-containment and sharing his quest, Harry becomes a conduit for others to step into their potential.
Michelle points out that Harry gives each of his friends space to take on his or her own hero’s quest. As a result, each destroys a horcrux. Ron overcomes his own shadow, his jealousy, to destroy Salazar Slytherin’s locket. Control freak Hermione loosens up and, as a result, is able to destroy Helga Hufflepuff’s cup. Neville Longbottom overcomes his timidity and low self esteem and slays Nagini, Volemort’s serpent. Ginny, who must grow out of little girlhood, doesn’t exactly destroy Tom Riddle’s diary, but she is associated with it and, by the time of the final battle, steps into her powers.
Although Michelle doesn’t say this, there is a Christ-like dimension to this quest that backs up her theory about Harry needing to learn selflessness. Since Harry is one of Voldemort’s horcruxes, he must go to his death so that the others can be free (just as Dumbledore needs to die so that Harry can take full responsibility for his life). Harry’s dying functions as a kind of stepping aside so that others can step forward.. As with Christ, the death is not a death but a moving into a new self. When Harry returns, he joins with his newly empowered companions to defeat Voldemort.
Evan like Michelle saw a maturation drama at the heart of the Harry Potter books but focused on the father-son drama. Harry must step beyond his father to become a man in his own right. Evan points out that there are a series of father figures in the books. These include Vernon Dursley (the unsatisfactory father figure), James Potter (the idealized absent father), and Sirius Black and Dumbledore (both surrogate fathers). Voldemort is the archetypal castrating father, a shadow figure who resides within Harry’s head (literally) and seeks to prevent him from growing up. Finally, there is Snape, the father figure that Harry must deal with on a daily basis and with whom he is finally able to come to terms.
The sign that Harry has successfully achieved the hero’s maturation quest occurs in the epilogue, where we see Harry himself as a father with sons. These children, named after a number of Harry’s own father figures, will have their own battles as they grow to maturity. But don’t expect a sequel.
Of course young readers, as they dive into the Harry Potter dramas, aren’t seeing all this. But at a deep level they sense that the books are aiding their own journeys to self empowerment. We fall in love with the books that point to our own growth.
Below are the final paragraphs of Evan’s essay. And, as an aside, I note that Evan will begin his senior project with me next semester on spiritual questing in Harry Potter and (believe it or not) Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamozov. You can expect to hear a lot more on this subject in the upcoming months.
from “Growing Up Godly: Stepping into Adulthood in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”
By Evan Roe
Throughout the series, Voldemort plays the role of a static character bent upon returning to power and dominion that was his before being thwarted by infant Harry. From the time he decides that murder is the best way to achieve immortality as adolescent Tom Riddle, Voldemort is unchanging in motivation and methodology. His insistent refusals to acknowledge Harry’s own abilities, writing off his feats as “accidents,” reflect his greatest weakness: his inability to value that which he cannot fully comprehend. So blinded is he by this that in the climactic battle in the Great Hall, with all his followers slain and now beset upon by the entire world, Voldemort refuses when offered the chance to repent. He does not change and so he dies.
Conversely, Harry steps into roles of increasing agency throughout his years spent at Hogwarts. For every successive encounter with Voldemort, Harry is progressively more responsible for the outcome of their meeting. In their meeting in his infancy and in Book I, he is saved by no action of his own but by his mother’s sacrifice. In Book II, he slays the basilisk and stabs Riddle’s diary but is ignorant of the fact that this will overcome him. Book III sees Harry take his first significant step in this transformation with his struggles to produce a patronus charm. He must overcome his fear of the dementors and is directly responsible for driving them off at the conclusion. The next book features the first duel between the two, but Harry is given the chance to escape by virtue of the priori incantatem that keeps Voldemort and Harry’s wands from harming one another. His failure to shield his mind and subsequent flight to the ministry in Book V to “save” Sirius is the actual impetus for Sirius’ demise. In the penultimate volume he commences his hunt for horcruxes with the aid of Dumbledore, and in Deathly Hallows he completes that quest, finally vanquishing Voldemort. He accomplishes this by surrendering his life to Voldemort and subsequently choosing to return from the in-between world of King’s Cross station. His “death” here is not even literal but is instead symbolic of the death of his adolescent self. Through taking the greatest act of responsibility, dying so that others may live, he grows into a responsible adult – a change confirmed by his rebirth in which he returns to finally defeat Voldemort. Indeed, the entire series can easily be read Harry’s coming of age, his adolescent transition from helpless child to active adult.
Bruno Bettelheim helps shed a more penetrating light on this with his analysis of the psychological phenomenon of “splitting” the parent into contrasting venerable and monstrous roles. Bettlheim applies this analysis to fairy tales in which an absent but loving parent is replaced by a wicked step-parent, the latter being a harsh symbol of the parent at which the child can direct its frustration and anger without spoiling its image of the loving parent. Applied here, Vernon Dursley serves as the abusive father figure to Harry, one whom the son hates with a passion. James’ murder occurs before Harry is old enough to remember, allowing Harry to idealize his dead father as “the most powerful, the most beloved, and most lamented of all wizards” (Mills 5). In the wizarding world, Voldemort takes on the monstrous father role that Dursley fulfills at home and exaggerates it to a literally murderous extent. For Voldemort, this becomes an Oedipal struggle in which he must kill Harry before he rises up to overthrow him. A critical piece of Harry’s growth is his realization in Order of the Phoenix that his father, in reality, does not match up to this supposed ideal and was instead something of an arrogant bully in his youth. Accepting this is crucial to his own transformation into a well-balanced individual who embraces the totality of his father, both the monstrous and venerable halves. Voldemort’s death at his own hand, brought on because of the Elder Wand’s loyalty to Harry, is significant because had Harry actually cast the spell that killed him, it would have signaled his inability to step out of the hateful son role. Instead, there is a chance the act would have rent his own soul, according to the magical laws of killing, effectively turning him into Voldemort himself. The epilogue in which Harry sees off his own sons as they depart for Hogwarts confirms Harry’s successful development into a father himself.
Harry’s sacrifice in the Forbidden Forest serves as the vehicle for another transformation, this one an apotheosis, or divinization, which is according to Campbell “the divine state which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance” (Campbell, 151). The parallels between Harry’s deed and that of the god-figure Jesus are evident (Granger, 179). The aforementioned ignorance is shed with his realization in Dumbledore’s office that Harry must embrace his doom and “require[s] a different kind of bravery,” echoing Jesus’ experience in the Garden of Gethsemane (Hallows, 692). Similarly, Harry’s walk into the forest is symbolic of Jesus’ trek along the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha. Most important to the transformation of both into divine figures, though, is that they willingly lay down their lives for the greater good. Dumbledore explains that the voluntary nature of the sacrifice permits Harry to return to “the world of space and time,” ultimately overcoming death and the power of Voldemort (Granger, 222). Harry already nominally possesses the title “Master of Death” by virtue of possessing all three Deathly Hallows, but Dumbledore tells him that he is “‘the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying’” (Hallows, 720). This stands in stark contrast to Voldemort, who rejects and therefore ultimately succumbs to death.
If Harry’s acceptance of death completes his process of individuation, his return symbolizes his transformation into a divine hero figure that is finally equipped to attain Campbell’s Ultimate Boon. Harry achieves the boon, the overarching goal of the quest, in his subsequent victory over Voldemort in the Great Hall. This is in fact the least challenging battle for Harry in the series because his victory is assured before their wands are even pointed at one another. The Elder Wand’s loyalty to Harry will not allow it to kill its master, so the outcome is a foregone conclusion. When Voldemort casts his killing curse it rebounds upon him just as it did in their first encounter – only this time, there are no remaining horcuxes to tether the Dark Lord to life. Campbell writes that “the ease with which the adventure is here accomplished signifies that the hero is a superior man, a born king” (Campbell, 173). In other words, it is indicative that Harry’s heroic transformation is complete.
The Ultimate Boon itself here is the sowing of the seeds for a safer world in which there is greater opportunity for the next generation to be happy. The willing sacrifice of Harry’s mother to save infant Harry from Voldemort reflects this aim and is mirrored in Harry’s sacrifice to defeat Voldemort. The “deeper magic” of love that Dumbledore champions ultimately conquers individual mortality because compassion allows for people to die with a purpose: to improve the situation of others. Remus Lupin shows this when he says that he hopes his son will realize that he died “trying to make a world in which he could live a happier life” (Hallows, 700). After Harry returns from his apotheosis, Voldemort is literally unable to kill anyone in the battle because they are protected by the same sacrificial magic that Harry’s mother grants him. Voldemort perishes because he is too consumed with power and his quest to thwart death to recognize the value of love and sacrifice. As a result, he destroys himself. The Ultimate Boon is realized in the closing scene at King’s Cross station in which Harry looks out at his son and other children disembarking to Hogwarts. He knows that they’ll “be all right” because the security of the world they live in has been bought with loving sacrifice.