Deconstructing Harry Potter

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Harry Potter vs. Lord of the Flies

Deconstructing the Hidden Cultural Costs of the Most Popular Children’s Fantasy

The popularity of Harry Potter is nothing short of stupefying. Nielsen BookScan reports that the sixth in the series, The Half-Blood Prince (2005), was the fastest selling book ever. Many retailers reported that The Half-Blood Prince sold more copies the day of its release than The Da Vinci Code sold the entire year. Global sales reached over 10 million within the first 24 hours (Weinberg, 2005). These numbers have now been exceeded by sales figures for the last volume in the series, The Deathly Hallows. The entire series has sold over 350 million books worldwide making Rowling the first author to earn over a billion dollars in book royalties (Watson and Kellner, 2004). When adding the success of the films and DVDs to the book sales, the Potter phenomenon is truly staggering—both as a money-making and myth-making engine. Rowling now has a net worth considerably greater than the Queen of England, Elizabeth II.

Beloved by millions, Rowling’s Potter creation has nevertheless drawn critical fire from some quarters. The criticism has come primarily from two directions, the Christian right and the scholarly left—the former disturbed about the possible promotion of magic, witchcraft, and Satanism (e.g., McGee and Matrisciana, 2001; Kuby, 2003) and the latter unhappy with what has been argued to be Rowling’s pedestrian style. Aside from being peppered with an abundance of rhetorical clichés and stereotyped characters, the scholarly left finds the Potter series to be a narrative that, while appearing to do otherwise, accomplishes little toward liberation from gender and class prejudices and traditional hierarchies of authority (e.g., Bloom, 2000; Yeo, 2004; Mendlesohn, 2004). This analysis will take a different critical approach, arguing that through the structuring of its primary dramatic conflicts Harry Potter encourages readers and viewers to adopt narrowly reductive ways of assessing and engaging conflict while also endorsing deadly violence as the necessary recourse for disposing with what has been identified as “evil” in the world. These reductive ways of structuring conflict reinforce modes of moral evaluation along traditional hierarchical lines of radical polarization between good and evil. This way of structuring and portraying conflict continues to be an unhealthy, if not deadly, predisposition in the increasingly complex climate of a postmodern global village of inclusiveness mixed with difference, division, and discord.

Since there may be some—a handful, it would seem, based on the volume of book and ticket sales—who have not read a Potter book or viewed a Potter film, revisiting the events that drive the core narrative of the series may prove helpful for purposes of reader orientation and for directing attention toward points crucial to this inquiry.

Murdered parents, a half-human wizard assassin at large, and Harry his primary target! Perhaps as dark, violent, and ominous a beginning for a book designed as “children’s literature” as one could hope to find. And yet adolescents and even adults are eating it up like carnival candy. When repeated endlessly in various retellings and media formats, the formative cultural influence of this series should not be underestimated. The potential effects of “children’s literature” may extend well beyond childhood. Speaking of C. S. Lewis’ work, one commentator on children’s literature, Dan McVeigh, notes that for Lewis “no literature was worth reading as a child that was not just as worth reading at age fifty. Surely the ultimate appeal of children's literature . . . is that it addresses the fundamental questions of the child gazing up, like Dante, at the stars. Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going? In what story line do I live?” (p. 8).

Many adults will claim, along with Lewis, that their childhood literature is in some sense still worth reading and has had a seminal influence in shaping character, ambitions, and the particular quality of life they strive to lead. To the extent this assessment of childhood literature is true, it behooves every adult to constantly re-examine the literature presented to children and adolescents. This point will be touched on again at the conclusion, but now, given the amazing success of the Harry Potter series, one question in particular looms large: Why do these stories resonate in such a popular way for a broad spectrum of the public?

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Topics addressed:

analysis commentary review of harry potter books and films

comparisons between harry potter books and films

violence in harry potter

the onset of puberty and harry potter

dramatic structure plot structure and genre in harry potter

is there a christian influence in harry potter

dan mcveigh on harry potter

morality and moral conflict in harry potter

harry potter criticism and critique

harry potter and media violence

the question of good and evil in harry potter

abuse of power in harry potter

life and death conflict in harry potter

prose style of harry potter

the horror genre and harry potter

melodrama and harry potter

sport competition and harry potter

love and harry potter

conflict management and harry potter

satanic themes and harry potter

symbolism in harry potter

harry potter and media violence

audience effects of violence in harry potter

popular appeal of harry potter

harry potter similarities with lord of the rings

harry potter in contrast with lord of the flies

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