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Potterverse’s Magical and Non-Magical societies, and the readers’ reality. Therefore, I see the opportunity to develop literary study from the bigger picture of the Harry Potter universe.
1.2 Critical Background
The number of formal theoretical readings on Harry Potter has increased since the publication of The Prisoner of Azkaban in 1999. Critics have started to interpret the Harry Potter series from a variety of perspectives, not merely from a pedagogical lens. For instance, reviews have included everything from the preservation and revision of the traditional British boarding school story, Joseph Campbell’s methodical structure,
mythological prototypes and philosophical decoding, to even the Foucauldian concept of discipline and punishment. Although some critics, such as Harold Bloom and William Safire, have doubted the academic value of the Harry Potter series during these twenty years, the influence of the Harry Potter series has deflected these negative critical views.
Several critics have started to defend the literary and educational value of the Harry Potter saga; they have attempted to draw the Harry Potter saga into the canon by providing academic research on the Harry Potter series. The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter, published in 2002, is one of the earliest scholarly readings of the Harry Potter series. Its editor Lana Whited defends the Harry Potter saga by observing that its commercial success and Rowling’s reader-friendly writing style might draw unfair prejudice from critics. To demonstrate the literary value of the Harry Potter series, she collects several academic essays that discussed the Harry Potter series through various perspectives, including gender issues, authority, education, and genre studies. In her 2005 book Scholarly Studies in Harry Potter: Applying Academic Methods to a Popular Text, editor Cynthia Whitney Hallett applies significant academic analysis to the Harry Potter
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series. Critics in this book analyze the Harry Potter saga from the lenses of mythology, space, and transfiguration; they also address the “cultural infantilism” debate. Hallett stated that “these novels provide not only fertile ground for readers and critics of Children’s Literature, but also a field of allusion and intertextuality ripe for alternative academic discourse” (x). Through these critical readings of the Harry Potter saga, Hallett and her fellow scholars argue that the Harry Potter series had finally been incorporated into the canon.
In Harry Potter and International Relations, edited by Daniel Nexon and Iver Neumann and published in 2006, international-relations scholars presented their studies about the Harry Potter phenomenon and Rowling’s significant success in the global market. The book also illustrates how the Harry Potter series enriched people’s understandings of international politics and the discipline of international relations.
Critics in this collection provide various ways to study international relations from the Harry Potter saga, including perspectives that address conflict ideologies and
geographical mapping. However, since the Harry Potter saga had not yet been completed at the time of publication, the critics’ argument do not closure since the story is still developing.
The conclusion would come about in 2007, the Harry Potter saga was completed with the publication of The Deathly Hallows. After the final book was published, critics were able to provide robust analyses and firm conclusions. For example, in the 2009 Critical Perspective on Harry Potter edited by Elizabeth Heilman, scholars offer multiple perspectives on the series through the lenses of sociology and cultural and media studies.
Such interdisciplinary discourse enriched the survey of the Harry Potter series, critics with this saga’s conclusion providing an opportunity to apply their viewpoints to a complete story because the Harry Potter saga had finished. The literary value and stature
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of Rowling and her Harry Potter series were established, and scholars could further question and study the Harry Potter series because they no longer had to debate whether it qualified as literature.
The following critical readings mainly focus on fluid concepts and spaces in the Harry Potter saga. The idea of normality is frequently raised in discussions of these concepts. As for spaces, most critics have discussed the mirrored relationship between the Potterverse and the readers’ reality as well as the shifting structure of the Wizarding world. I introduce their arguments and explain how their critical readings inspired my research about the fluidity of concepts and spaces in the Potterverse.
When discussing the concept of normality in the Harry Potter saga, critics have often focused on the extraordinariness in and of the Wizarding community. In her article
“Harry Potter and the Extraordinariness of the Ordinary,” Roni Natov analyzes the interplay of the Magical and the Non-Magical world in the Potterverse and argues that Rowling slightly revised the tradition in both boarding school story and fantasy. Natov observes that magical force had already infiltrated the Non-Magical world in many ways, such as the several unconventional signs in the first Privet Drive scene in The Sorcerer’s Stone. Natov highlights that Harry’s resistance to normality is “necessary for
inclusiveness, for the individual and the community to prosper” (126).
However, some critics have theorized that Harry does not resist normality because he desires to be an ordinary student at Hogwarts, wishing he could avoid the uninvited gaze, others bestow upon him as “The Boy Who Lived.” Tison Pugh and David Wallace argue that the way that “the wizards’ London lies openly ‘hidden’ from Muggle eyes resembles the ways in which queer establishments can likewise be invisible to straight eyes oblivious to their presence.” They observe that Harry’s agreement to deny his identity as a wizard for the sake of familial peace reflects a central question of why the
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Wizarding community chooses to hide from the Non-Magical community. Although the Wizarding world seems to be a promising place for a person to have a strange and unusual identity, Pugh and Wallace observe that the fear of the other still exists in the wizarding world; one example of this fear of the other is lupophobia (267). Lupophobia refers to a phobia or abnormal dread of wolves and werewolves. These critics’ discussions about normality center on Harry’s identity crisis and the relative diversity of the Magical society. In my thesis, I extend existing analysis regarding normality by discussing the fluidity of the Potterverse and otherness within the Magical society.
The study of fluidity in the Potterverse necessarily considers the relationship between the Magical and the Non-Magical communities, as well as addressing the issue of otherness within the Magical society itself. Discussion of the fluid concept of the self in the Potterverse, meanwhile, calls for an analysis of different ideologies proposed by various subgroups and influential individuals. The Magical and the Muggle societies treat each other as the other; in previous critics’ views, the Magical society embraces
extraordinariness more than the Muggle society does. However, since Rowling released The Order of the Phoenix in 2003, we start to see many minority groups within Magical society, such as beasts, foreigners, people with illnesses, and criminals being, viewed as the other. The issue of minorities within Magical society had not been discussed
significantly in Rowling’s previous works.
Critics have often focused on the Wizarding world’s physical characteristics or the structure of Hogwarts when discussing space in the Potterverse. The Potterverse shares a similar geographical map with the readers’ reality. However, the concept of nationhood in the Potterverse seems to be extremely exclusive. In their “Conflict and the Nation-State:
Magical Mirrors of Muggles and Refracted Image,” Jennifer Sterling-Folker and Brian Folker observe that nationalism and the nation-state are absent in the Wizarding battles.
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While different nation-states are often a leading factor in global warfare in both
Rowling’s Non-Magical society and the readers’ reality, conflicts in the Magical world are characterized as a form of civil war. The Folkers propose that nationalism and nation-states in the Harry Potter series only derail the story’s message by introducing as “identity politics and the delineation of collective boundaries” (122). As for economic institutions, the Folkers state that the Magical world reflects the international cooperation and
capitalism found in our reality. For example, the Triwizard Tournament resembles the Olympics and student foreign exchange programs. Similarly, various advertisements at the Quidditch World Cup mirror global marketing in our world. In addition, the sale of merchandise in Diagon Alley reflects the exchange system of goods and services in the readers’ Capitalist reality. But what of the question of “power” in social structure? The Folkers, for instance, do not address the reason why wizards hide from Muggles as wizards and witches certainly do not fear Muggles to remedy that absence. I elaborate upon this relationship in my thesis, by arguing that the Magical world’s influence is enhanced when it remains in the shadows.
Many critics have explored Hogwarts’ structure and function, especially as the school is the hub and primary setting of the Harry Potter saga. In her “Muggles, Magic, and Misfits: Michel Foucault at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts,” Jamie Warner examines the spaces and monitoring systems within Hogwarts, which include Magical and Non-Magical tools (174). Hogwarts is merely a panopticon3 where students are under surveillance all the time. For instance, the ghosts’ and portraits’ observations, the caretaker’s omnipresence, the prefects’ presence, the Head Boys’ and Head Girls’
3 Panopticon is a type of institution, the invention of Jeremy Bentham, which allows people in this building to observe and be observed. In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault uses the concept of
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existence, and the headmaster’s seeming omniscience all act as surveillance mechanisms.
In her article “‘I solemnly swear I am up to no good’: Foucault’s Heterotopias and Deleuze’s Any-Space-Whatever in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series,” Sarah Cantrell argues that Hogwarts gradually transforms throughout the series from a stable space to an ambiguous space. She explained this shift first through Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and argued that Hogwarts deliberately destabilizes the societal norm (203). Cantrell also examines several areas in Hogwarts that represent uncertain, disconnected, and resistant spaces, such as the Room of Requirement and Number 12 Grimmauld, through Gilles Deleuze’s any-space-whatever concept (205). Cantrell’s argument about Foucauldian heterotopia in Hogwarts has been influential upon this thesis as I explore heterotopia’s relationship to not only the structure of Hogwarts, but also spaces throughout the
Potterverse. For example, I analyze the Magical hospital and prison in my thesis because these institutions shape people’s ideologies and behaviors in accordance with the
principles laid out by Foucault in his Discipline and Punish.
To summarize, the current academic readings focused on the normality debate in the Harry Potter saga mainly by addressing two aspects: Harry’s identity crisis and Hogwarts’ characteristics. The first issue is Harry’s extraordinary identity in both the Magical and the Non-Magical societies. The second aspect is how Hogwarts, as a representative model of Magical culture, embraces strangeness and celebrates diversity.
While examining previous theoretical readings is fruitful, certain aspects of the Harry Potter series remain unexplored. Since the Potterverse is still expanding and being constructed, its fluidity and complexity have become significant; this transitionary stage invites more possibilities for academic research about the Harry Potter saga. Most critics discuss the relationship between the Potterverse and our reality or the shifting structure of the Wizarding world itself. Most existing analyses of the series’ normality center on
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Harry’s paradoxical identity and the structure of Hogwarts. In this thesis, I further the research on the complicated relationship between the Potterverse’s Wizarding and Non-Wizarding communities and explore the fluid concepts of normality and abnormality, while also examining how spaces in the Potterverse function as the Foucauldian heterotopias.