The Harry Potter novels as a test case for adolescent literature

Style, Fall, 2001 by Roberta Seelinger Trites

Peter Brooks notes that all novels are telelogically-oriented, that is, all narratives are created with the function of delaying their own climaxes--i.e., their own deaths (97-109). According to Brooks, most narratives rely on recursive actions to delay their endings. We could say that they try to retain their power over the reader by repeating events until resolution is achieved through repetition with variation, as the recurring photographs of Harry Potter's parents demonstrate. In another example out of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and his friend Ginny communicate with a boy named Tom Riddle through his enchanted diary, an artifact of a boy presumed dead. Appearing numerous times, it provides Harry with clues as to the whereabouts of the Chamber of Secrets. Not until the diary appears repeated with variation, however, can the plot achieve resolution. When the author of the diary reveals that Tom Riddle was his childhood name before he became Lord Voldemort, Harry gains the knowledge that he needs to defeat at least this manifestation of the evil wizard. He saves himself and others from death, but, more important, he fulfills his parents' destiny to defy the agent of World Death. Harry--and the text itself--struggle against Being-toward-death until the boy's acceptance of his symbolic power allows the resolution of the plot to effect the book's demise.

The Limits of Adolescent Literature

Everything in adolescent literature is designed to teach adolescents their place in the power structure. In order to mature, teenagers must understand that sexuality is a powerful tool, that they are mortal and will therefore die, that they must both break free from and accept the authority figures in their lives, and that they are institutionally situated creatures, as all people are. If the use of institutions, if the teenager's rebellion against parental authority, if the adolescent protagonist and the very narrative itself are Being-toward-death in a movement simultaneously designed to admit and deny death's power over the human body--then what is the ideological message of the adolescent novel? With incredible consistency, the answer is this: You shall know your power and that power shall set you free--that is, until you begin to abrogate institutional power or parental power or sexual power or the very power of death itself, in which case, the narrative will remind you of your powerlessness as surely as Harry Potter must return at the end of every school year to reside in relative impotence with his Muggle relatives.

Ultimately, most adolescent novels carry some ideological message that reinforces the need for the adolescent to conform to the status quo. If we believe Hollindale's assertion that the power of adolescent literature lies in its cathartic power for the reader, then asking the reader to internalize these continued messages about the need for adolescents' power to be limited is tantamount to destroying the adolescent reader's potential power. Generally speaking, most adolescent novels make this argument at an implicit ideological level that is reinforced by issues of narrative structure. For example, adult characters are more likely to be the intradiegetic narrators who express. Ideological Truths than are adolescents. That is, adult narrators who are interior to the text often have more authority than intradiegetic child narrators (see Genette 227-37). The source of ideological authority in the Harry Potter novels, then, makes this series' implicitly conservative agenda clear. An adult, Dumbledore, utters the theme(s) of every novel: "to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever" (Sorcerer's Stone 299); or "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we surely are, far more than our abilities" (Chamber of Secrets 333); or "You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us?" (Prisoner of Azkaban 427); or "Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open" (Goblet of Fire 723). These are the themes of popular psychology and popular culture that many parents want their children to internalize. Not once in these four novels does an adolescent proclaim a major theme. That a textually-constructed adult (rather than a teenager) serves as the source of all this parentally-approved wisdom reminds the reader that adults have more knowledge than adolescents, so they must have more power. It follows logically that the only way for adolescents to empower themselves is to quit being so adolescent. Grow up. Get over yourselves.