The Harry Potter novels as a test case for adolescent literature

Style, Fall, 2001 by Roberta Seelinger Trites

When I first read J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997), I did not understand its mass appeal. It is clever and charming, but it is also episodically plotted, relatively predictable, derivative of Baum, Lewis, and Dahl, and it is altogether more sexist than it needs to be. But as I read the final chapter, I discovered Rowling's secret ingredients: the book portrays parents' love as omnipotent, and it provides a reassuring message about death. These represent two of the most essential ingredients of children's literature. (1) As a whole, the series also participates in the traditions of adolescent literature. As the characters in the series grow older, the books shift solidly onto the terrain of adolescent literature. The characters learn to recognize their autonomy from their parents, but death becomes more threatening, more of a menace, than it is in the first Harry Potter book. Moreover, the Potter books demonstrate another defining characteristic of adolescent literature: the charac ters begin to explore their sexuality. Throughout the series, the books also rely on social institutions to proscribe adolescents' place in society. Thus, as a series, the Harry Potter books provide us with the opportunity to interrogate what constitutes adolescent literature.

Although the task of defining adolescent literature has engaged numerous scholars, many do so by comparing the genre to adult rather than children's literature. Certainly, both children's and adolescent literature were greatly influenced by Romanticism. Indeed, the first novels to focus on the transition between childhood and adolescence were written during the Romantic era; Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96) is often cited as the first such novel. Labeled "Bildungsromane" by such literary critics as Susanne Howe, G. B. Tennyson, and Jerome Buckley, the coming-of-age novel focuses on the development of the adolescent into an adult. Buckley, for example, defines an adult as one who has achieved the capacity to work and love, but his model is relatively androcentric (22-23). Feminist critics including Annis Pratt; Eve Kornfield and Susan Jackson; Barbara White; and Elizabeth Abel, Elizabeth Langland, and Marianne Hirsch point out that the pattern of development differs for the male and female p rotagonist. Female protagonists are more likely to define maturity in terms of inner growth and familial relations than they are in terms of achieving independence from their parents (Abel, et al., 8-11). Regardless of the protagonist's gender, however, critics of the Bildungsroman seek to understand narrative structure in terms of character development.

But scholars of literature written specifically for adolescents--to which I refer as "young adult literature"--are more likely to focus on issues of audience and need than on paradigmatic stages of character development. Such critics as Ben F. Nelms, Sheila Schwartz, Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen, Geraldine DeLuca, Robert C. Small, Marilynn Olson, Michael Steig, Marc Aronson, and Michael Cart tend to ask the implied questions "for whom is the novel written and what is its purpose?" Peter Hollindale, for instance, singles out the epiphany as the defining characteristic that provides adolescent novels with a cathartic function; he firmly believes adolescents need the emotional outlet that books provide (116-32). Maria Nikolajeva and Caroline Hunt also employ poststructural methodologies to investigate how material culture infiltrates the genre to help define it. Most of these critics still assume that depicting characters who grow is still an essential component of the genre.

From my vantage point, however, the crux of defining adolescent literature as distinct from children's literature resides in the issue of power. While in children's literature, growth is depicted as a function of what the character has learned about self, growth in adolescent literature is inevitably depicted as a function of what the adolescent has learned about how society curtails the individual's power. The adolescent cannot grow without experiencing gradations between power and powerlessness. Consequently, power is even more fundamental to the genre than growth is. During adolescence, adolescents must learn their place in the power structure by experiencing each of three interrelated issues: They must learn to negotiate the many institutions that shape them, they must also learn to balance their power with their parents' power and with the power of authority figures in general, and, finally, they must learn what portion of power they wield because of and despite such biological imperatives as sex and de ath. Adolescents are empowered by institutions and their parents and by their knowledge of their bodies, but by offering up rules and holding repercussions over their heads that limit their newfound freedoms, these things also restrict them. Foucault tells us it is in the very nature of power to be both enabling and repressive because it is omnipresent: "power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere" (History of Sexuality 93).