WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!
If you haven’t read the
Harry Potter books, but plan to do so, do NOT read the following as it contains
spoilers!!
When reading the Harry Potter series, you
quickly realise that J. K. Rowling has one thing in common with the Danish
fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen: they both use other people’s stories
as the sources for their own. Where Hans Christian Andersen mostly used myths
and older fairytales as a model for his stories, Rowling uses mythology, British
folklore, the Bible, Homer’s "Iliad", works of Tolkien, Lewis
Carroll, C. S. Lewis, Jill Murphy, Nancy K. Stouffer, Orson Scott Card and many,
many more, not to mention Star Wars! That way in the Harry Potter series,
Rowling has created a veritable Babel Tower consisting of the best of other
people’s works, which I am sure is why her series is so popular.
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Because of the many sources, J. K. Rowling’s
seven books about Harry Potter have many themes. The major theme of the books is
clear (love conquers all), but there are others as well that are almost as
important, but as hardly anyone addresses them, I thought I’d point out a few
problematic ones here.
Death
A major theme of the books is death, but
unfortunately Rowling’s protagonists die pretty ridiculous deaths, I mean,
Sirius suffers death by curtain and Fred death by wall! That’s no way to end
two of the most popular characters in the books and others like Remus and Tonks
just die. You don’t even hear any more about it. It’s pretty annoying that
we have to spend so much time grieving over Dobby and Hedwig, when the deaths of
Sirius, Fred, Remus, Tonk and Colin Creevy are just shrugged off. It’s like
saying that the deaths of human beings aren’t as important as the deaths of
owls and house elves! In the books only Dumbledore and Snape die decent deaths,
whereas the rest just snuff it. End of story.
People’s reactions to the deaths are
equally strange. No one seems to care. I mean, the fact that George doesn’t
react at all to his twin brother’s death is totally incomprehensible. Of
course it echoes Fred being petrified when George loses an ear, but you can’t
help but think that Percy’s reaction to Fred’s death should have been George’s.
Fred’s death wasn’t that big a surprise, anyway. I saw it coming way back in
HP2, chapter 3 and at least by HP5, chapter 9, no one in their right mind could
overlook it. Not with Mrs. Weasley’s woes and the mentioning of her brothers
Gideon and Fabian, although Rowling tries to lure her readers into believing
that it is George who is going to die. She mentions that Gideon and Fabian
Prewett were killed during the first war, especially concentrating on the
bravery of Gideon. And because of the likeness in names (Gideon/George and
Fabian/Fred) you’d think that George is the one who is going to snuff it. But
in fact Fred is the Gideon of the Weasley twins, the one to be mentioned first
etc. And throughout the books Harry has been close to George and Ron to Fred,
but it is Fabian’s watch that Harry gets for his 17th birthday in
HP7, showing that George equals Fabian, whereas Ron gets Gideon’s, mirroring
that Fred is Gideon.
Another theme of the Harry Potter books is
time. Rowling plays around with time, goes back into the past, jumps ahead to
the future, parallels same-time happenings etc. She even suspends time when
Harry dies, but it doesn’t quite add up. In the books there’s a clear
timeline and Rowling mentions it in HP2 where she tells that the year is 1992,
which means that Harry is born in 1980. But in HP7 when Harry is close to being
18, we suddenly miss a year. In a TV-interview Rowling listed Fred’s death as
having happened in 1997, but if you follow her own time line he dies in 1998.
Very strange indeed.
Another strange thing is that the HP
characters never act their age. Rowling tries to write for an audience that is
the same age as her young hero. This way HP1 is written for children around 11
years of age, whereas HP7 is for the 17 year olds, but it doesn’t really work.
In the first books the protagonists act way too young and especially in HP5 when
Harry is 15, he acts way below his age, having fits at the beginning of the
story like a 6 year old. In HP7, however, Harry seems too mature, thinking and
acting like a middle-aged man. And the tone of the young heroes isn’t quite
right. The twins, and to a certain degree Ron, are depicted okay, but most of
the time Harry and Hermione don’t seem to be children at all. The characters
clearly do not mature the way they would, if the progress of time had been
considered, and it’s too bad that a major phenomenon like Harry Potter has to
suffer from flaws like this.
Sex
To me the most intriguing theme in HP is
sex, or rather the lack of it. Although there’s no direct sex in the HP
series, you know that people have sex. Married people like Mr. and Mrs. Weasley
and Remus and Tonks, that is. As for the young protagonists they don’t have
sex, not even when they come of age, and that is not believable. I mean, how
many 17 year old virgins do you know? The young HP protagonists are left to
holding hands and snogging, although they are of age before the series end.
Actually the only ones who probably have sex are the twins at Bill and Fleur’s
wedding when they disappear into the darkness with a couple of Veela cousins!
But as for Harry, Ron and Hermione: no. Ron and Hermione even seem to date for
almost a year before they kiss!!
As the protagonists can’t have sex with
the opposite sex, they have to compensate in other ways. Charlie Weasley for
instance seems to be gay, but it turns out that he prefers dragons to people.
Well, hello, then he has something in common with Donkey from Shrek! To be
absolutely sure that we don’t miss Charlie’s disposition, Rowling mentions
the book "Men Who Love Dragons Too Much" in HP4. And Charlie is not
the only one to suffer from zoophilia. Dumbledore’s brother Aberforth has been
convicted for fiddling about with goats. What kind of message is that to send to
young people? You can’t sleep with the opposite sex until you are married, but
it is okay with goats?
Not everyone is willing to sleep with
animals, though, so instead you’ll find a lot of gay crushes in the books. The
female characters don’t seem to have very close bonds with each other, but the
males do. For one, Dumbledore is gay (which Rowling told in a TV-interview) and
he seems to have been the lover of the evil wizard Grindelwald in his youth. And
what about James Potter and Sirius Black for instance? Or Sirius Black and Remus
Lupin? Not to mention the ambiguously symbiotic dependence between the Weasley
twins, who after they come of age and leave home insist on living with each
other in a small flat above their shop? Although Fred brings Angelina to the
Yule Ball and George knows a girl in the village of Ottery St Catchpole, the
twins are only truly happy when they are together. It is clear that one cannot
live without the other - the reverse of Harry and Voldemort, where one cannot
die unless the other dies too.
As for Harry Potter, he himself says, that
he’s Dumbledore’s man through and through, and there are some rather
touching moments between the headmaster and Harry. In HP7 it is even hinted at
that their relationship is "unhealthy" and Harry keeps
wondering whether or not Dumbledore loves him. Throughout the series you’ll
also find several tender moments between Harry and Ron. And isn’t it a bit odd
that in the end they both choose to marry women who are far from their own
personalities, but who resemble the other bloke? It isn’t very plausible that
Harry should end up with Ginny and Ron with Hermione and even Rowling struggles
to make her readers believe in these liaisons. She changes Ginny from a shy
victim in HP2 to an independent sex bomb in HP5 in order for her to match Harry
and she suddenly increases Ron’s IQ in HP7 for him to match the intellectual
Hermione. As I see it, the only reason Rowling would make these absurd twists of
the protagonists’ personalities is for Harry to marry a female version of Ron
and Ron a female version of Harry.
Reading between the lines you’ll find a
lot of (maybe) involuntary male/male crushes and people do. Fans are swamping
the Internet with slash-fiction about the male protagonists and to my best
knowledge Rowling has caused this herself by indicating sexual ambiguity in
almost every leading male character. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good m/m
romance and there’s plenty of fuel for it in the books! So if you need a
soundtrack to the books, instead of listening to the official ones, try Gred and
Forge’s "Brotherly Love" from the "Siriusly Smiling"
album. That’s what I’m talking about!
@Lise Lyng Falkenberg, 2010
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