Harry Potter As Rorshach
In children's lit, people see what they want to see
I was reading The Will to Change by bell hooks when I came across this passage about Harry Potter:
It was adult, white, wealthy males in this country who first read and fell in love with the Harry Potter books … Harry as our modern-day hero is the supersmart, gifted, blessed, white boy genius (a mini patriarch) who “rules” over the equally smart kids, including an occasional girl and an occasional male of color. But these books also glorify war, depicted as killing on behalf of the “good.”
hooks published The Will to Change back in 2004, before Rowling had even finished the Harry Potter series and well before she alienated much of her fanbase by broadcasting her vehement anti-trans views. But hooks was already skeptical, arguing that part of Potter’s success story had to do with the way Rowling’s books affirmed traditional power structures. “Books that do not reinscribe patriarchal masculinity do not get the approval the Harry Potter books have received,” hooks writes.
Interesting, right? I was thinking about this when I read a section of a more recent book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer.
Monsters published last year to high acclaim, climbing bestseller lists and sparking online conversation. J.K. Rowling is a “monster,” by Dederer’s definition, meaning a person who created beloved art and then did something heinous in his or her real life that horrified fans. Again, Rowling’s arguments against the transgender rights movement — which she’s made publicly over and over again — alienated LGBTQ+ readers and allies. Dederer makes the point that Rowling’s comments were especially hurtful given what the Harry Potter books had come to represent to that specific community.
In other words, the books offered a navigable system for belonging — alluring, perhaps especially, for a person who didn’t entirely feel like she belonged in the real world. Which describes a lot of preteens, and especially a lot of preteens with a dawning sense of their own queerness. Harry Potter fan-ship twined with the growth of the Tumblr platform, which in turn twined with the growth of a new kind of LGBTQ+ movement … kids who found solace in un-embodied community, whether it was Hogwarts or online.
How can it be both? How can Harry Potter be both an indoctrinating fairy tale designed to uplift the war-thirsty patriarchy and a beacon for alienated queer adolescents?
The answer, of course, is perspective.
bell hooks saw in Harry Potter a money-reaping franchise that elevated the importance of a white male prodigy. Claire Dederer, knowing the role Rowling would come to play in the culture wars, lived through her own child’s obsession with the books and saw how they helped that same kid make sense of her queer identity.
Meanwhile, would-be book banners in Georgia saw in Harry Potter a book that promoted witchcraft — making it anti-Christian and therefore, dangerous.
Which one of these takes is correct? All of them? None of them?
What strikes me is the way that children’s books become vessel for our biggest fears and projections. They’re designed that way, really — the best-beloved stories are the ones in which kids can project and see themselves. But it also makes them ripe for controversy. What’s the biggest threat to you; White male exceptionalism? Conformity and a rigid gender binary? Paganism?
One ultra-popular book can have it all, if you’re looking for it.