Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Half-Blood
Prince), the sixth and latest book of the Potter series,
finally gets going when Harry’s fellow student at Hogwarts School
of Magic and Wizardry (Hogwarts), Draco Malfoy, immobilizes Harry
with the Petrificus curse and then stomps his face,
bloodying and breaking his nose (pp. 153-54). Harry lies there
paralyzed by the curse, with his own blood dripping into his mouth
and his long-held hatred for Draco peaking.
But Harry gets his revenge in spades soon enough when he cuts
Draco up so badly with his new Sectasempra curse that
Draco is left “shaking uncontrollably in a pool of his own blood”
(p. 522). Harry regrets the excessive power of the curse, but the
bloody score is more than evened. And Harry’s thirst for revenge
against his child peers has been a major theme of the series from
that moment early in the first book when Harry arrives at Flourish
and Blotts, the magic book store, and dives into a book of curses
to find one with which to avenge himself on his bullying cousin
Dudley Dursely (Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 80).
J. K. Rowling’s attitude towards this theme of child-on-child
revenge is illuminated by a 1999 interview. She said that Harry
“wants to get back at Dudley…and we the readers want him to get
back at Dudley. And in the long term, trust me, he will”
(“Talking with J. K. Rowling,” BookLinks, July 1999,
emphasis added). Thus, Rowling shamelessly admits that she nurtures
in her heroes and child readers a desire for revenge and
then fulfills it.
Rowling’s dubious bargain to fulfill her readers’ desires for
revenge also explains why in each of the last two previous Potter
books, Harry and his friends illegally used their magic to knock
out and temporarily disfigure Draco and his buddies Crabbe and
Goyle on the London-bound Hogwarts Express (Goblet of
Fire, pp 729-30; Order of the Phoenix, pp. 764 ff).
One of the great mysteries of Pottermania is the malfeasance of
critics who have failed to report the incongruity of a children’s
author repeatedly setting the “good” kids to inflicting physical
violence on the school bullies with no consequences for the heroes’
violations of school rules, the magical world’s laws, and the
traditional conventions for violence in children’s books. After
all, the studies on the real student shooters who have savaged
American schools show that their main motivation has been
revenge against bullies. So that’s just what Rowling has
her heroes do to start their summer vacations — take revenge
against bullies for their threats and plots.
But isn’t bloody vengeance a common theme in fairy tales? Just
so, but real fairy tales are always set in the never-never land of
the long ago and far away. Indeed, Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses
of Enchantment) thought such stories salutary for children,
but he seriously warned against the harmful effects on children of
realistic stories of revenge. And Rowling’s tales
seamlessly blend fantasy magic with realistic child characters and
school situations that closely resemble those of contemporary
student life. Therefore, Bettelheim’s warnings against realistic
stories of revenge for children apply to Rowling’s volatile mixture
of fantasy and reality.
Certainly, Harry has just cause for killing the Dark Lord
Voldemort, his parents’ murderer. But Harry and his friends do not
have a similarly weighty justification for taking revenge against
their peers and others. Despite Christianity Today’s
ill-considered baptism of the series as a “Book of Virtues,”
Rowling’s cultivation of a desire for revenge rather than for
justice in her child heroes and readers is enough in itself to
render her series both morally objectionable and potentially
dangerous.
But vindictiveness is far from Harry’s only character defect; he
is, to put it bluntly, a liar. As previously, in the latest book he
tells so many lies that if he were Pinocchio, his nose would be
longer than his Firebolt broomstick (Half-Blood
Prince, e.g., pp. 231, 241, 286, 293, 318, 321, 357, 489, 524,
527, 547, 572). And Rowling dutifully labels most of his lies so
that even her youngest readers can’t miss it that their hero is a
habitual liar. Thus, Hogwarts resembles nothing so much as the
Clinton White House. Truth telling is simply not a virtue to be
expected of the hero. Instead of a “Book of Virtues,” then, the
Potter books are a veritable Manual of Prevarication.
Rowling’s disregard for the virtues of obedience, truth telling,
and self-restraint cultivated in traditional children’s literature
show that she consciously rejects its moral framework. One of the
reasons for this is her stated belief that children are naturally
good. As one gripped by this dream of the Enlightenment who,
nevertheless, is shrewd enough to observe that schoolboys often
lie, cheat, fight, and break the rules, she apparently believes
that these things are not real evils. Real evil is murder,
especially when based on discrimination by ancestry, and misuse of
authority, especially authority over the naturally good children.
And the moral instruction children most need is just to see real
evil, as exemplified by Voldemort.
Thus, J. K. Rowling is a clever Pelagian who has created a
fantasy world that runs according to the Neopagan continuum of
immanent power for good or evil popularized in Star Wars.
But how did Rowling fool the panoply of non-Pelagian moral
gatekeepers who have hailed her works? This is yet another Harry
Potter mystery, but Harry’s military virtues of bravery, boldness,
and loyalty to his friends have certainly helped blind conservative
religionists to his vices. (Some claim to have discovered a
mystical Christian symbolism in the books, a symbolism unapparent
to those children lacking a Ph.D in classics.)
Traditional children’s literature sought to moderate the
natural, evil tendencies of children to disobedience, lying, and
revenge. Unfortunately, Rowling fails to recognize the evil
inherent in our race and effectively does the opposite. Because
stories are the most powerful means of teaching morality known,
parents should be aware of the vicious examples that Rowling’s
heroes set for their children before they countenance these
books.
