Access Provided by University of Madras at 12/20/11 9:26AM GMT

Bubble-Wrapped Children and Safe Books for Boys: The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter
Sarah Fiona Winters

The decade of Harry Potters publication, 19972007, was also the decade of an explosion of British and North American books and media articles, addressed to a popular audience, denouncing both parental neglect and parental overprotectiveness. The books include Frank Furedis Culture of Fear Revisited (1997) and Paranoid Parenting (2001); Richard Louvs Last Child in the Woods (2005); Silken Laumanns Childs Play (2006); and Michael Ungars Too Safe for Their Own Good (2007). At the same time, the media popularized the terms helicopter parenting, free-range parenting, and bubble-wrapped children.1 For its many adult readers, the Harry Potter series may be read as a fictional text performing a cultural work similar to that of these works of nonfiction that capitalize on parental anxiety about risk and the lack of it.2 Although, unlike them, the series claims that responsible parenthood includes accepting the death of children, nevertheless, like them it perpetuates the wish-fulfillment fantasy that allowing children greater freedom (a freedom constructed largely through nostalgia) can be achieved without the sacrifice of incurring debilitating injury and death. For although young people do die at Hogwarts, and their parents mourn them, they only die in the service of a struggle against evil, not as the result of a bid for freedom, fun, or the pleasure of risk taking for its own sake. They are lost to murder, not accident. In reality, however, accidents are much more of a threat to children of Harry Potters age and nationality than is murder: for example, British government statistics for 2006 cite 585 deaths in England and Wales from accidents for ages ten to nineteen, versus twenty-nine from assault in the same age group (Office for National Statistics 202, 224). The series, unlike the contemporary cultural discourse around parenting, asks its readers to accept the necessity of sacrifice, but presents them with a sacrifice they are unlikely to be called upon to make. Thus the culture, agitated by contradictory and willfully blind critiques of parental protectiveness, soothes itself with the displaced truth-telling of J. K. Rowlings bestselling story.

Childrens Literature 39, Hollins University 2011.

213

214

Sarah Fiona Winters

The Denial of Death Cultural anxiety about childrens safety in popular discourse is exceeded only by cultural anxiety about that anxiety. Parents are targeted by both those who point out that they are worried about the wrong kind of harm (kidnap, rape, and murder by strangers) and those who contend that even parents worried about the right kind of harm (accidents) are doing a third kind of harm by making children both emotionally fragile and physically weak.3 The solution offered by most commentators is to grant children the freedom to roam the outside world, engage in unstructured play with their peers, and take risks on their own initiative. What is not said to the parent anxiously reading the latest newspaper editorial or best-selling manual is the very strong likelihood that if thousands of children are granted this freedom, some few will die from itand that one of those few could be your own child. These texts do offer statistics, such as the often repeated fact that only about two hundred to three hundred children a year are the victims of stranger abduction in the United States,4 but they do not attempt to offer a numerical calculation of the acceptable sacrifice in young lives for the sake of youthful freedom. The same vagueness occurs in Rowlings text during Dumbledores speech to the Hogwarts students in Goblet of Fire, in which he explains the history of the Triwizard Tournament: The schools took it in turns to host the Tournament once every five years, and it was generally agreed to be a most excellent way of establishing ties between young witches and wizards of different nationalitiesuntil, that is, the death toll mounted so high that the Tournament was discontinued (16566). Dumbledore implies that one death was not seen as too high a price to pay for an event that established ties between different nations and rewarded one competitor with the Triwizard Cup, the glory of their school, and a thousand Galleons personal prize money (166). Only when the death toll became, as Dumbledore vaguely and nonnumerically puts it, high was the event cancelled. The absence of a number here characterizes the texts treatment of risk as reflecting the contemporary cultural discourse surrounding it. Although commentators on the issue of child safety are eager to point out that keeping children off the streets or away from rambunctious physical games might eventually result in a higher percentage of adult deaths from causes related to obesity, no one is willing to give even a hypothetical cost/benefit analysis in numbers: to say, for example, A

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

215

thirty-three percent reduction in deaths of people in their thirties from causes related to lack of exercise is worth the death of one child out of a thousand playing unsupervised in fresh air and freedom. Harry Potter does assign a number, fifty, to those students who die in the cause of resisting evil, but in the cause of competitive sport it avoids a number just as much as do the popular texts that advocate greater freedom and activity for children.5 When the text constructs a fantasy outside the experience of almost all of the children and parents who read it, it admits that some young people having adventures away from parental control will die; when it tells a story reflecting the experience of many of the children and parents who read it, it denies that terrifying possibility. In its denial it performs the same cultural work as the popular discourse on overprotective parenting by suggesting that children can be set free and will all still come back to their parents alive and well. I have been using the word children, but the endangered children of Harry Potter are gendered; Rowlings series constructs both boys and girls as courageous fighters against evil, but kills off only the boys.6 In so doing, the text reflects the social reality of its readers. First, sons are more likely to end up dead than daughters: in England and Wales, 442 boys aged ten to nineteen died from accidents in 2006, compared to 143 girls of the same age (Office for National Statistics 202). Second, parents are more likely to worry about their sons ending up dead than their daughters; Gill Valentines study on children and public spaces in Britain includes the following information: girls appear to be perceived as more capable of negotiating public space safely than boys because they are perceived to have greater self awareness, sexual maturity and a sense of responsibility than their brothers. In a reversal of traditional constructions of masculinity, boys are perceived as innocent, irrational, irresponsible and as increasingly vulnerable to violence from peers and adolescents. (51)7 Thus, in constructing the dead child as male, Harry Potter reflects both reality and social constructions of that reality. The Appalling Damage that Parents Do In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore condemns Vernon and Petunia Dursleys parenting of both Dudley and Harry by invoking the paradox that protection results in harm, while neglect results in escape from harm:

216

Sarah Fiona Winters

You have never treated Harry as a son. He has known nothing but neglect and often cruelty at your hands. The best that can be said is that he has at least escaped the appalling damage you have inflicted upon the unfortunate boy sitting between you (57). This paradox turns up again and again in the popular writing on parenting: We go through extraordinary effort and worry and stress to keep our children safe. But somehow, we are not keeping our children safe. They are dying of heart disease and diabetes; they are being prescribed antidepressants far more often than they were ten years ago (Laumann 253; emphasis in original); It is always useful to recall that our obsession with our childrens safety is likely to be more damaging to them than the risks they encounter in their daily interactions with the world (Furedi, Paranoid Parenting 199); So where is the greatest danger? Outdoors, in the woods and fields? Or on the couch in front of the TV? A blanket wrapped too tightly has its own consequences (Louv 132); [W]e are going about keeping our children safe in a way that is inadvertently putting them at much greater risk of serious harm (Ungar x). What these texts have in common with Harry Potter is the somewhat palatable message that benign neglect is a mark of good parenting; indeed, that good parents might be better off spending the time that other parents devote to worrying about their childrens safety to letting their own children roam the streets and the woodswhile they, the good parents, read and reread Harry Potter. The series transmutes Muggle and wizarding parenting practices into a spatial dichotomy between Privet Drive and Hogwarts. In chapter one of the first book, Harry arrives at Privet Drive, a baby of fifteen months: A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect astonishing things to happen (Philosophers Stone 18). In chapter six, he arrives at Hogwarts as a boy of eleven: The narrow path had opened suddenly on to the edge of a great black lake. Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers (83). Both are nighttime scenes, but the sky over Privet Drive is inky (a word that invokes both the obscure and the artificial) while the sky over Hogwarts is starry (invoking both the enlightened and the natural, not to mention the sublime). Privet Drive lies under that sky, and the reader is invited to look down upon it, sharing the superior viewpoint of Hagrid on his flying motorcycle; whereas Hogwarts is perched atop a high mountain, drawing the readers awed gaze upward along with Harrys. Privet Drive is neat,

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

217

silent, tidy, and written (in lines of ink); Hogwarts is high, sparkling, vast, and less circumscribed by the text. Even the lines are opposed: in Privet Drive the hedges dissect the space horizontally, while at Hogwarts vertical lines make turrets and towers. Thus their very environments perform a parental function, encouraging Dudley to grow sideways into obesity and Harry to grow upwards into maturity.8 This spatial dichotomy exemplifies the nostalgia about childhood that informs contemporary cultural discourse on parenting and protectiveness. Books, newspaper articles, and email forwards all contrast the restrictions imposed on the current generation with the freedoms enjoyed by the very parents who are keeping them off the neighborhood streets and away from the woods. Michael Ungars declaration is representative: Im not nostalgic for a time when everything was perfect. Quite the contrary. Im nostalgic for a time when things were less perfect, when children still had opportunities to prove themselves (104). This nostalgia tends to erase differences in race and class; the parenting manuals intended for a popular audience are oriented toward a white, middle-class readership.9 Jack Zipes, Farah Mendlesohn, Giselle Liza Anatol, and Julia Park are among the critics reading Harry Potter as similarly constructing an illusory Britain that excludes accurate (that is, literal and nonallegorical) representation of race and class difference. Hogwarts certainly constitutes a fantasy of the past, where students are kept free from clashes between different cultures and religions (although conspicuously secular, Hogwarts is a haven of the muscular Christianity inherited from the progenitor of the British school story, Tom Browns Schooldays), as well as safe from technology (they write with quills instead of typing on laptops), and uncontaminated by either the health food foisted on unwilling offspring by overprotective parents or the junk food offered to the neglected progeny of those other faulty parents who are too busy to cook. Harrys ideal home, a Victorian boarding school housed in a medieval castle, embodies a nostalgic vision of a middle-class childhood unspoiled by either smothering or neglect. Privet Drive, on the other hand, shows us children affected by both; the early chapters of Philosophers Stone set up the contrast between overindulged, endangered Dudley and his neglected, unspoiled cousin. For his eleventh birthday Dudley receives a ridiculous number of indoor, electronic toys and gadgets: a new computer, a second television, a cine-camera, sixteen computer games, and a video recorder. The only exceptions are a remote control aeroplane (21) and a racing bike (20). Although the aeroplane would take Dudley outside, it requires no mus-

218

Sarah Fiona Winters

cular effort to operate, and the racing bike is a mystery to Harry, as Dudley was very fat and hated exercise (20). Dudleys threat to throw a tantrum because he has not received as many presents as last year is summed up in the word danger: Aunt Petunia obviously scented danger too, because she said quickly, And well buy you another two presents while were out today. Hows that, popkin? Two more presents? Is that all right? (21). She then intervenes again when Dudley cannot do the arithmetic that adds two to thirty-seven to make thirty-nine. The text equates parental protectiveness with parental indulgence and makes the motherly fear of danger both ridiculous and vicious. At the same time as they overindulge and overprotect their son, Vernon and Petunia neglect Harry. Surprisingly, such treatment does nothing to damage either Harrys intelligence or his ability to love. Dudley is unrealistic only in the satiric exaggeration of his portrayal; our cultural imagination expects the children of helicopter parents to be spoiled as well as protectedto be like Dudley, just a little less so. Harry, on the other hand, is unrealistic in the total absence of qualities the same cultural imagination expects from an abused and neglected child; if Dudley represents one extreme, we would expect his opposite, Harry, to represent its opposite. As Dudley displays the appalling damage inflicted on him by overparenting, Harry should display a different but equal appalling damage from underparenting. Yet Harry is normal; indeed, he is better than normal. Part of the reason for this discrepancy is that Dudley is restricted in the first six books to one genre, satire, whereas Harry functions not only in the satires of the Muggle world, but also and primarily in the genres of quest-romance and school story. Harrys safety at Privet Drive stems partly from the quest-romance; Dumbledore knows that Petunias blood relationship to Harry will keep him magically safe from Voldemort. But within the satire itself, Harrys safety from the damage inflicted upon Dudley reflects the contemporary cultural reaction to protecting children from risk. The neglect inherent in Harrys upbringing fails to damage him. A New York Times article on Steve Petersen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, quotes him as saying, [a]t a minimum, development really wants to happen. It takes very impoverished environments to interfere with development [. . .] what does this mean? Dont raise your children in a closet, starve them, or hit them in the head with a frying pan (cited in Bruer 188). In an amusing coincidence, the Dursleys inflict all three of these abuses on Harry: in Philosophers Stone he lives in a closet; in Chamber of Secrets Aunt

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

219

Petunia tries to hit him in the head with a frying pan (13); and the family semi-starve him as a punishment for ruining their dinner party (21). But because he still turns out a well-adjusted, intelligent child, the series suggests that children are not stunted by neglect, only by indulgence.10 Dudley is partially redeemed in Deathly Hallows when he belatedly expresses gratitude to Harry for saving him from the Dementor attack in Order of the Phoenix. Dudleys one exposure to the kind of danger that threatens Harry all the timePrivet Drives one transformation into a perilous placeis what saves him from the appalling damage of turning out exactly like his parents. Safety damages him; danger rescues him. However, after establishing this binary of harmful protection and beneficial neglect, the text goes on to complicate it; in so doing, it reflects the bewildering contradictions of the cultural discourse surrounding parenting. The series does not reductively equate overparenting with bad children and underparenting with good ones, for the opposite of both Dudley and Harry (even though they are opposites themselves) is the third child in the text to be parented appallingly, Tom Riddle. His father (who, to be fair, had no choice in becoming a father) abandons him before birth and his mother dies in childbirth because she does not want to live, a choice Dumbledore asks Harry to refrain from condemning: Merope Riddle chose death in spite of a son who needed her, but do not judge her too harshly, Harry. She was greatly weakened by long suffering and she never had your mothers courage (Half-Blood Prince 246). Dumbledore may not judge her harshly, but the text illustrates what happens when mothers do not love and look after their sons: they grow up to become murderous psychopaths. But although Tom Riddle is a nightmarish version of the neglected orphan, and thus Harrys demonic double, the Voldemort he becomes is just as much a nightmarish vision of the overprotected child, and thus Dudleys demonic double. Voldemorts return to power in Goblet of Fire is constructed in the text as a satanic version of the Christian mysteries of incarnation, baptism, Eucharist, and resurrection, but the diction and imagery of the episode also suggest a subtextual mirroring of cultural anxiety over sheltered, helpless, overprotected children. The text compares the pre-resurrected Voldemort to a child three times in one paragraph: It was as though Wormtail had flipped over a stone, and revealed something ugly, slimy and blindbut worse, a hundred times worse. The thing Wormtail had been carrying had the shape of a

220

Sarah Fiona Winters

blind human child, except that Harry had never seen anything less like a child. It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black. Its arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its faceno child alive ever had a face like thatwas flat and snake-like, with gleaming red eyes. (Goblet of Fire 55556) Voldemort combines both the reptilian features of the Christian devil and the lizard-like form of the human fetus in his unnatural body. His name translates as flight of death, but also as flight from death, and it is in the latter meaning as much as in the former that his evil lies. In his absolute refusal to risk his life for anything at all, Voldemort becomes the nightmarish version of not only a genocidal maniac or a rebellious fallen angel, but also of a child who refuses to mature. The text goes on to describe the relationship between Voldemort and Wormtail in terms that can be interpreted as a nightmarish caricature of the relationship between Petunia and Dudley Dursley. It rewrites their mutually satisfying interaction as a struggle between a child and the parent who pampers it while hiding his own distaste and fear: The thing seemed almost helpless; it raised its thin arms, put them around Wormtails neck, and Wormtail lifted it. As he did so, his hood fell back, and Harry saw the look of revulsion on Wormtails weak, pale face in the firelight as he carried the creature to the rim of the cauldron. (Goblet of Fire 556). This cauldron is described as a great stone belly large enough for a full-grown man to sit in (555), and it is in this belly that the man who refuses the risk of dying is placed by the ambivalent, weak, frightened slave who cradles him, and from this belly that the threat to both wizarding and Muggle culture emerges. Voldemort and Wormtail are the two characters in the series who refuse and deny death. Voldemort does so by deciding to split his soul into seven parts, six of which he transfers into things, his Horcruxes.11 His reliance on these material objects to construct his identity recalls Dudley Dursleys ridiculous pile of toys on his eleventh birthday, all soon to be broken as Voldemorts Horcruxes will all be destroyed. Voldemort creates Horcruxes through murder; he flies from death by killing. Wormtail does the same thing, saving his own life by condemning James and Lily Potter to death; as Sirius tells him, he SHOULD HAVE DIED (Prisoner of Azkaban 275) rather than cause others to die. Both men lose their names when they save their lives: Tom Riddle becomes Voldemort, Peter Pettigrew becomes Wormtail. The text in-

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

221

sists that the child cannot grow into an adult unless the child (and the culture which constructs the subjects maturation from child to adult) accepts the possibilities of death. Harry surrenders himself to death, so Harry lives and becomes a man. Voldemort flies from death, so Tom Riddle never grows up and is destroyed. In the Kings Cross chapter of Deathly Hallows, Harry is greeted by Dumbledore as You wonderful boy. You brave, brave man, while Voldemort appears only as the form of a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and rough, flayedlooking [. . .] under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath (566; my emphases). Damnation as arrested development: Harry Potter tells us all that our children can never grow up unless parents in particular and the culture in general are prepared to let them die. Mollycoddling Few parents in the series occupy the smothering and neglectful extremes embodied by Dudleys Dursleys on one hand and Harrys Dursleys and Toms Riddles on the other; most try to keep some sort of balance on shifting ground as they attempt to parent not Tom, Dudley, and Harry but every other Tom, Dick, and Harry negotiating boundaries of independence. Because Harry Potter is a school story, readers encounter teachers acting in loco parentis more often than they do actual parents, with the notable exceptions of Molly and Arthur Weasley. Whether biological or de facto, parenthood in the series is constructed as the same negotiation between providing children with security and granting them their freedom which forms the substance of popular debates over childhood. The teaching position at Hogwarts that most embodies cultural anxiety about how adults should keep children both strong and safe is the professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts (DADA). The very existence of this post at Hogwarts suggests that the wizarding world believes in teaching children how to defend themselves from danger, rather than relying on adults to defend them, yet only half of Harrys six DADA teachers actually do so. Two fail in their task out of the lack of any real desire to succeed; Quirrell is focused on his evil mission, and Lockhart is narcissistic to the point of absurdity. By contrast, the third of the ineffectual teachers acts deliberately and ideologically to keep her students weak and unprepared.

222

Sarah Fiona Winters

For Dolores Umbridge, risk is most certainly a dirty word; she promises her students that they will be learning about defensive spells in a secure, risk-free way (218), and that This is school [. . .] not the real world (220). Lisa Damour says of this scene, real teenagers and Rowlings teenagers share the misery of having to deal with adults who deny the reality, and risks, of that which lies plainly all around them (3). It is not because Umbridge denies risk that she is so hateful, however; it is because she asserts the existence of the wrong type of risk. When Harry insists that Voldemort has indeed returned and that the students are therefore at risk of being murdered by him just as Cedric Diggory was, Umbridge responds, Cedric Diggorys death was a tragic accident (221). Umbridges evil in this scene lies in her belief in an illusory danger and her denial of the real one. In this she mirrors the stupid parent constructed so often by popular discourse, as in Frank Furedis statement that [t]he fear of allowing children to roam on their own has acquired obsessional proportions. These fears are seldom oriented towards accidents at home and on the roadsthe most important causes of injury and death to children. It is the danger of the stranger preying on vulnerable children which influences parental action (Culture of Fear Revisited 122). These silly parents are silly not because they are afraid for their children, but because they fear the statistically insignificant danger, not the statistically significant one. In the world of Harry Potter, by contrast, accidents are statistically insignificant compared to the number of Death Eaters out to prey on vulnerable children; therefore, fearing accidents is silly. Both Furedi and Rowling can criticize an overprotective culture without having to examine the consequences of true benign neglect because they construct the opposite of overprotectiveness not as benign neglect, but as protection from the right danger.12 If Umbridge is the clearest example of negative parental behavior among the Hogwarts teachers, Dumbledore is the clearest example of what appears, in the first four books of the series, to be positive parenting. Yet although he fathers Harry throughout his years at school by slowly revealing the real nature of the dangers he must face, he eventually admits that all his wisdom cannot help him in finding the correct balance between the necessity for revelation and the appropriate pace of that revelation. In Order of the Phoenix Dumbledore confesses that he feels to blame for Siriuss death: Sirius was a brave, clever and energetic man, and such men are not usually content to sit at home in hiding while they believe others to be in danger (727). In trying to

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

223

protect Siriuss life, Dumbledore takes the path that results in Sirius putting himself at unnecessary risk. Further, in being too slow to reveal the truth about Voldemort and the prophecy to Harry, Dumbledore fails to arm him with the knowledge that would have kept him from going to the Department of Mysteries at all. Dumbledores explanation for his failure echoes the wrong choice loving parents are constantly being accused of making: I cared about you too much [. . .] I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act. (739) Dumbledores resolve to prepare Harry for the risks he needs to face like a man is foiled by his desire to keep Harry happy. By keeping him safe, Dumbledore betrays Harry to danger, and in so doing embodies the style of parenting constructed and critiqued by contemporary cultural discourse. Dumbledores protectiveness is anticipated, paralleled, and echoed throughout the series by the biological parent in the text most often seen doing the actual work of parenting: Molly Weasley. Her very name is punned on in Harrys rejection of her motherly care in Order of the Phoenix: [h]e had been touched by what she had said about his being as good as a son, but he was also impatient with her mollycoddling (86). Karin E. Westman reads this moment as illustrating that the desire to love and be loved can smother agency and purpose [. . .] Love can destroy, Harry learns, as well as protect, and he must choose how to negotiate and use that force (195). I suggest that the text focuses particularly on how the parent and child must negotiate the conflicts between love and freedom. Although united and loving as husband and wife, Molly and Arthur often clash over the parenting of their children. Where Mollys reaction to her sons taking out the enchanted car in Chamber of Secrets is to conflate likely and unlikely consequences in a hysterical litany of disasters (You could have died, you could have been seen, you could have lost your father his job), Arthurs is one of enthusiastic curiosity about whether the car was up to the job (30, 35; emphases in original). The text comes down on Arthurs side when Harry and Rons irresponsible decision to fly the car to Hogwarts instead of appealing to Rons parents for help eventually results in the car saving them from Aragogs spiders;

224

Sarah Fiona Winters

Mollys metaphorical bubble-wrap does not protect as well as Arthurs literal steel casing. In Prisoner of Azkaban Molly wants to protect Harry from the knowledge of Sirius Blacks malign intent, but Arthur insists he has the right to know (53); Arthurs attitude once again wins out when Harrys acquisition of knowledge about Sirius eventually helps and does not permanently harm him. Molly pits herself against both her husband and Harrys godfather Sirius in Order of the Phoenix when she tries to prevent them from telling Harry their conjectures about Voldemorts plans; she loses that battle just as she loses all the others. But Mollys coddling is, if not legitimized, eventually forgiven by the series because unlike Umbridge, and unlike the paranoid parents found in best-selling critiques of child raising, she at least fears the right danger. The Order of the Phoenix forces Harry and the reader to share her fear in the powerful moment when she falls to pieces upon encountering the Boggart that keeps changing into dead members of her own family, including Harry. Since he participates in this experience with her, he achieves a moment of empathy: Mrs Weasley smiled tremulously. Being silly, she muttered again, mopping her eyes. But Harry, closing his bedroom door behind him some ten minutes later, could not think Mrs Weasley silly. [. . .] The image of the Boggart posing as the corpse of each member of Mrs Weasleys family in turn kept flashing before his eyes. (Order of the Phoenix 16162) Harry learns to respect Mollys protective impulses by experiencing her fear along with her. This fear is further validated by the series in Deathly Hallows when her vision comes true in part and Fred dies. Mollys efforts at protecting her children and Harry from Voldemort prove vain because the text refuses to let her protect them against their own determination to fight. Only a change in tactic enables her to save one of them. After Freds death, Molly achieves a moment of glory by dueling with and killing Bellatrix Lestrange in defense of her youngest child, Ginny, a moment emphasized by the use of upper-case lettering: NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH! (Deathly Hallows 589). Motherly protection is validated by the text only when the mother exposes herself to the same danger threatening her child in order to protect that child. Lily Potter saves Harry by dying for him; Molly saves Ginny by risking death for her. Harry Potter does, therefore, offer a model for parents who want to protect their children from danger: Mollys journey from

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

225

fussing to fighting proves that the best way to parent a risk-taker like Ginny Weasley is to become a risk-taker oneself.13 Dead Parents and Dead Children Harrys real parents are, of course, dead, thus freeing him for adventures in the classic convention of childrens literature. At the same time as their deaths free him, however, they also protect him. Lilys death provides him with a layer of protection that literally becomes part of him: Your mother died to save you [. . .] to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin (Philosophers Stone 216). Jamess death also protects Harry, but at two removes from Lilys; the Invisibility Cloak which James leaves him protects Harry only when he himself takes action to walk into danger, and it can be forgotten or misplaced or deliberately set aside. The mothers love protects Harry all the time; the fathers only when he wants it. The mothers love allows Harry to be passive; the fathers love requires him to be active.14 The text simultaneously provides protection for the son both from and through parental love, but only at the cost of removing the actual parents. Thus it simultaneously celebrates and rejects the protective parent and promises the paradox of protection without supervision. If the paradoxical figures of the absent-yet-protective parent and the present-yet-harmful parent jostle each other for space in the cultural discourse around child rearing, the bereaved parent is carefully tiptoed around in that same discourse. Harry Potter conforms to the former pattern but contrasts with the latter, granting space to parents who have given freedom to their child and lost him. However, it gives that space only to wizarding parents (the Diggorys), not Muggles (the Creeveys), thus soothing the fear of the Muggle parent who reads the text: grief is contained within fantasy. Cedric Diggory is the only person in the series whose death could be characterized as the accidental result of risk-taking behavior. His death occurs halfway through the series and is the first death of an innocent to take place during Harrys years at Hogwarts; this structural placement emphasizes its importance. The first ambiguity complicating Cedrics death is that he is both adult and child; at seventeen he has legally come of age in the wizarding world, but he is still a schoolboy who dies during a school event run by teachers acting in loco parentis, and still the beloved son of doting parents. Compounding this ambigu-

226

Sarah Fiona Winters

ity is the ambiguity of his death, both accident and murder. In creating these ambiguities, the text evades an examination of the consequences of parenting a risk-taking child. The risks of the Tournament in Goblet of Fire are carefully managed by Barty Crouch Sr. and Dumbledore. Although the three tasks all seem extremely dangerous, no students are badly injured during the course of them. Indeed, Harry comes to the realization after the Second Task that such an outcome would be extremely unlikely: Harrys feeling of stupidity was growing. Now he was out of the water, it seemed perfectly clear that Dumbledores safety precautions wouldnt have permitted the death of a hostage just because their champion hadnt turned up (438). However, Harry is rewarded for his lapse in judgment with points for moral fibre (440). His belief in the real danger of the Task, his faith that the adults involved in the Tournament are not protecting the children, are constructed by the text as idealistic rather than naive. The text invites its readers to believe that there will be consequences of childrens actions, and that consequently those actions are meaningful, while simultaneously reassuring those same readers that those consequences will not in fact be enforced. The outcome of the Third Task, however, illustrates what happens when Crouch and Dumbledore do fail to protect the students. While Cedric is a dashing, brave, risk-taking competitor, he is killed not by the Tournament, but by Voldemort. The Third Task has been sabotaged to bring about Harrys death: that it instead brings about Cedrics collapses random accident, malicious intent, and the politics of parenting in a tangle of signification. Cedric only ends up in the graveyard because Harry saves him from the Imperiused Krum and the giant spider and he then attacks the spider to save Harry, whereupon [t]he two spells combined did what one alone had not (549) and remove the threat. This moment of cooperation betrays the competitive nature of the Tournament. It is followed by Cedrics rejection of the victory, walking away from the sort of glory Hufflepuff house hadnt had in centuries (550), and Harrys rejection of Cedrics rejection: Both of us, Harry said (550). Cedrics renunciation would have saved his life; Harrys reconciliation causes him to lose it. It is not, therefore, Cedrics good sportsmanship which kills him, but his and Harrys refusal to submit to the rules of competition sanctioned by the past; their choice to value cooperation and equality over competition and hierarchy; their refusal, like that of the weak-willed parents satirized in contemporary discourse, to allow anyone to lose. If Harry had seized victory, Voldemort would

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

227

still have returned but Cedric would not have died. If Cedric had seized victory, he would still have died but Voldemort could not have returned. It is only because neither boy wants to force the other to lose that both disasters can occur: Voldemort returns, and Cedric dies.15 Such an interpretation of Harry and Cedrics decision suggests that the Harry Potter series is conservative, even reactionary. Tison Pugh and David L. Wallace certainly read the series insistence on Harry acting alone as a conservative construction of gender and sexuality: Heteronormative masculinity, as it operates in the Harry Potter books, dictates that there can only be one heroHarryon whom the fate of the wizarding world rests (Heteronormative Heroism 272). They revisit their argument after the publication of Deathly Hallows to admit that Harry does not metamorphose into the typical incarnation of an alpha-male, solitary action hero, as the trajectory of his character in the first six books suggested he might (Postscript 189). I argue that it is the absence of the school story from the seventh volume that allows Harry to cooperate rather than compete; Deathly Hallows does not seek to reflect or model contemporary school life, and thus does not have to emphasize the importance of learning to handle the risks involved in competition. The other six books in the series, all school stories as well as quest-romances, do demonstrate nostalgia for a society that valorizes, rather than seeks to protect children from, the pleasures and pains of winning and losing. The text asks the reader to negotiate not only the meanings of Cedrics death, but also the attitude of his grieving parents: They did not blame [Harry] for what had happened; on the contrary, both thanked him for returning Cedrics body to them. Mr Diggory sobbed through most of the interview. Mrs Diggorys grief seemed to be beyond tears. He suffered very little, then, she said, when Harry had told her how Cedric had died. And after all, Amos . . . he died just when hed won the Tournament. He must have been happy. (Goblet of Fire 621; Rowlings ellipsis) Amos Diggory displays elements of an overinvolved parent earlier in the text, boasting about Cedrics abilities instead of letting them speak for themselves (68); his failure in the tact required of a parent in letting his child stand alone prevents him from becoming truly adult himself. It is Mrs. Diggorythe same Mrs. Diggory who has been absent from his school life in the way that her husband has notwho finds meaning in

228

Sarah Fiona Winters

Cedrics death. Moreover, it is she who goes on to refuse the Galleons Harry tries to offer them, in a moment that can be read as the refusal of the culture of compensation. The Diggorys do not sue Hogwarts for negligence in the death of their child.16 Frank Furedi argues that Contemporary culture rejects the idea that death has no intrinsic meaning. The notion that the person we love just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is antithetical to an ethos that needs to endow every misadventure with an inner purpose (Culture of Fear 11). Cedrics death is brought about by Voldemorts callous command, Kill the spare (Goblet of Fire 553; emphasis in original). He is not even awarded the chance to fight; his truly does seem to be a death without meaning. Yet Mrs. Diggory finds meaning, if not purpose, in her sons death, and her words are those of a parent who believes that safety is not necessarily superior to joy. Apart from Cedric, the following young people die in Harry Potter: Ariana Dumbledore; Moaning Myrtle; the unnamed five-year-old brother of the Montgomery twins; Vincent Crabbe; Fred Weasley; fifty unnamed students in the Battle of Hogwarts; and Colin Creevey. Ariana dies as a result of conflicts within the family, thus reflecting the reality of many endangered children. Myrtles death happens fifty years before Harry arrives at Hogwarts, and the tragedy of it is somewhat muted by her ghosts function as comic relief. Many casual readers would not even remember the death of the Montgomery boy, who dies of a bite from Fenrir Greyback, because his death takes place offstage and is recounted by Hermione in one paragraph in Half-Blood Prince (442). The youngest person in the series to die, he is killed while under the care of his parents, not while at Hogwarts. Crabbe is a seventh-year student and thus presumably of age, as are Cedric and the fifty other students who die. Fred is an adult who had left Hogwarts two years before his death. Colin is therefore the only child who dies at Hogwarts during the seven years narrated in the series.17 That Colin is the only named underage student who dies at Hogwarts during the series is significant, because his character represents the fan who is reading the books. In Chamber of Secrets he runs around after Harry with his camera in an advanced, and comic, state of hero worship; in Goblet of Fire, his delight in the threats Hogwarts poses to his and his younger brothers safety constructs him as a reader who experiences vicarious pleasure in the dangers of others: Dennis Creevey, beaming widely [. . .] hurried over to join his brother.

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

229

Colin, I fell in! he said shrilly, throwing himself into an empty seat. It was brilliant! And something in the water grabbed me and pushed me back in the boat! Cool! said Colin, just as excitedly. It was probably the giant squid, Dennis! (159) This characterization of Colin suggests that his decision to join the Battle of Hogwarts arises more from his enthusiasm for all things wizardly than from a serious decision to fight evil. As a Muggle-born fan who encounters Harry through a representative lens and delights in the world in which he finds himself, he is a figure for the child reader. And in emulating his hero and risking his life, he loses it. Colins death is given less prominence than those of other Hogwarts students and alumni; the text shows readers the grief of Cedrics and Freds parents, but not that of Colins. It is because the Creeveys are Muggles, like the readers of the series, that their suffering is hidden. Harry Potter tells a comforting story that all deaths of young people, including Colins, are the result of a grand battle between good and evil that poses no threat to the Muggle readers of the series since they are not living such a reality.18 But although the text also includes the fact that two Muggles send their son, a big fan of Harry Potter, off into the world without them to have adventures and take risks, and in so doing lose him forever, that is a story it refuses to tell. Dangerous Books for Boys In 2006, The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden, a compendium of intentionally old-fashioned games, skills, and knowledge for the active boy, became a bestseller in Britain. The reviews of this book express the familiar cultural anxiety about anxiety: I wouldnt be at all surprised if The Dangerous Book for Boys were banned by zealous school groups, social workers, and other moral busybodies (Kimball); Its amazing that The Dangerous Book for Boys ever got published, really (Middleton). But The Dangerous Book for Boys is marketed to a litigious world; although the section on Books Every Boy Should Read includes Harry Potter, and the chapter on Seven Poems Every Boy Should Know19 instructs boys to Find a big tree and climb it. Read one of these poems to yourself, high in the branches (185), the copyright page includes the following disclaimer:

230

Sarah Fiona Winters

NOTE TO PARENTS: This book contains a number of activities which may be dangerous if not done exactly as directed or which may be inappropriate for young children. All of these activities should be carried out under adult supervision only. The authors and publishers expressly disclaim liability for any injury or damages that result from engaging in the activities contained in this book. It is not made explicit what danger there might be in reading Harry Potter, or whether the danger in reading poems in a tree lies in the poems or the tree-climbing. What is clear, however, is the glorification of boys freedom from parental overprotectiveness without the concomitant acceptance of boys getting hurt or dyingthe same wish-fulfillment fantasy that drives the school story narrative of Harry Potter. The boys who die at Hogwarts do not die from falling out of trees, playing Quidditch without a helmet, or exploring the Forbidden Forest out of a desire to connect with nature; they die from fighting evil. Both The Dangerous Book for Boys and Harry Potter tell stories about great and exciting battles in the full knowledge that the first-world, middle-class parents buying these books for their children (and parenting manuals for themselves) can rest secure in the knowledge that those children do not have to fight those battles. Rowling and her publishers do not have to expressly disclaim liability for any injury or damages that result from engaging in the activities contained in this book, because the series shows us that the only activities that can result in injury or damage to the child reader are precisely those in which the child reader has no opportunity of engaging. Although beloved sons die and their parents grieve for them within its pages, Harry Potter is not a dangerous book for the parents of Muggle boys; it is a safe and reassuring one.
Notes
1 The term free-range parenting originated with a column in the New York Sun by Lenore Skenazy about allowing her nine-year-old son to ride the subway in New York alone and without a cell phone. Although technically it is the children who are freerange in this style of parenting, the term has been applied to the parents. 2 This essay began as an examination of the concepts of risk and the risk society in Harry Potter; I intend to return to that question in a future project. 3 A typical newspaper headline, Careful Parents May Cost Lives, introduces a story about how the practice of parents accompanying their children while crossing the road deprives those children of the skills to do so themselves: The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety said that parents needed to understand the risks of being

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

231

overprotective. Rob Gifford, the councils director, said: Parents should consider whether forbidding their children from crossing the road unaccompanied is exposing them subsequently to additional risk. They may not acquire the skills they need (Webster). 4 Richard Louv serves as an example: At the height of the first missing-children panic, a decade ago, some missing-children organizations were claiming that four thousand children a year were being killed by strangers in the course of abduction [. . .] the actual annual figure of stranger abductions was two hundred to three hundred, and it still is [. . .] One stranger abduction is too many, but in New York state, only three children were abducted by strangers in 2006 (127). A parent of three children might be more emotionally affected by that statistic than by a much larger number detailing the increasing incidence, for example, of type 2 diabetes in overweight children. 5 They moved Voldemorts body and laid it in a chamber off the Hall, away from the bodies of Fred, Tonks, Lupin, Colin Creevey and fifty others who had died fighting him (Deathly Hallows 596). Presumably these fifty others are all Hogwarts students, but also all seventeen or older, and thus adults in the wizarding world. 6 Moaning Myrtle is an exception, but she is killed years before Harry attends Hogwarts, and not as a result of her own agency. 7 Replace girls with Hermione and boys with Harry and Ron here, and one could almost be reading Harry Potter criticism. 8 Rowlings Dickensian skill with names is evident in both Privet Drive and Hogwarts. A privet is a type of shrub commonly grown as a hedge, but the word also evokes both private and privy. Drive evokes suburbia and the contemporary reliance on cars. Hogwarts calls to mind both the whole hog and warts and all, thus suggesting exuberant imperfection. 9 For example, the first chapter of Louvs Last Child in the Woods begins, If, when we were young, we tramped through the forests of the Nebraska cottonwoods, or raised pigeons on a rooftop in Queens, or fished for Ozark bluegills, or felt the swell of a wave that traveled a thousand miles before lifting our boat, then we were bound to the natural world and remain so today (8). With the possible exception of the last example, this litany of geographical inclusiveness excludes immigrant American readers. Moreover, nowhere in the book does Louv discuss the ways in which different religions construct the pleasures and dangers of nature. 10 Harry not only escapes harm from neglect, he receives benefits from danger. For example, Dudleys gang comes over to the Dursleys house all the time, so Harry consequently spend[s] as much time as possible out of the house, wandering around (28), getting fresh air and exercise and exploring the outdoors, a true child of free-range parenting. Danger keeps him safe. 11 He ends up splitting it into eight and makes a Horcrux out of Harry, but he only intends seven, using material objects for the six outside his own body. 12 The series structures the Dursleys malign neglect of Harry as benign in spite of their intentions, but it avoids presenting a model of actual benign neglect. 13 It is notable, however, that the text only allows Molly to save her daughter, not her sons. This exception that proves the rule about the inability of living parents to protect also reinforces the rule that living mothers may not protect their sons. 14 Jamess Invisibility Cloak protects Harry in the same way that Arthurs enchanted car protects Ron. 15 The actual moment when Harry and Cedric seize the cup together reads as a Dantesque vision of a Paolo and Francesca damned for yielding to temptation: Instantly, Harry felt a jerk somewhere behind his navel. His feet had left the ground. He could not unclench the hand holding the Triwizard Cup; it was pulling him onwards, in a howl of wind and swirling colour, Cedric at his side (Goblet of Fire 551). 16 In a story widely disseminated in British newspapers in June 2008, Norwich Union reported that parents were now likely to sue schools for minor injuries (cuts, bruises, and

232

Sarah Fiona Winters

scrapes) to their children and that such litigation costs state schools about 200 million pounds per year, enough to pay for 8,000 teachers. The same story reports Jonathan Hughes-DAeth (former chairman of the Boarding Schools Association) claiming that the current risk-averse climate is producing an anodyne and bland set of children. [. . .] We are in danger of using health and safety to replace judgment and personal responsibility (Clark). 17 Indeed, the paragraph describing Colins death in the Battle of Hogwarts emphasizes his childhood: Harry glanced down, and felt another dull blow to his stomach: Colin Creevey, though under-age, must have sneaked back [. . .]. He was tiny in death (Deathly Hallows 556). Colin is sixteen; this language makes him seem more like six. Compare Harrys view of the dead Colin here with his view of the dead Fred Weasley and his two grieving brothers: three red-headed men were grouped on the floor where the wall had blasted apart (Deathly Hallows 512; my emphasis). 18 In Deathly Hallows, the Potterwatch broadcast informs its listeners that a Muggle family of five have apparently been murdered by Death Eaters, more evidence, as if it were needed, of the fact that Muggle slaughter is becoming little more than a recreational sport under the new regime (356). Although it is likely that the murdered family members include some children, these children do not stand in for the Muggle readers in the same way as Colin does because they are unnamed and have done nothing that the reader knows of to influence their own fate in any way; we do not know if they have any adventures, take any risks, or engage in any fight against evil. The text implies that their role as victims is a completely passive one, unlike the young wizard victims whose stories are told by the series. 19 If, by Rudyard Kipling; Ozymandias, by Percy Shelley; Song of Myself (extracts), by Walt Whitman; Invictus, by William Ernest Henley; Vitea Lampada, by Sir Henry Newbolt; The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost; and Sea-Fever, by John Masefield. Works Cited Anatol, Giselle Liza. The Fallen Empire: Exploring Ethnic Otherness in the World of Harry Potter. Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. Ed. Anatol. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 16378. . The Replication of Victorian Racial Ideology in Harry Potter. Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays. Ed. Anatol. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009. 10926. Bruer, John T. The Myth of the First Three Years: A New Understanding of Early Brain Development and Lifelong Learning. New York: The Free Press, 1999. Clark, Laura. Health and Safety Red Tape Has Produced a Generation of Bland Children Scared of Risk, Headteacher Warns. MailOnline 4 June 2008. 25 June 2008 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1024179/Headteachers-urged-ignorecompensation-culture-let-children-adventures.html>. Damour, Lisa. Harry the Teenager: Muggle Themes in a Magical Adolescence. Anatol, Reading Again, 210. Furedi, Frank. Culture of Fear Revisited: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. 1997. 4th ed. London: Continuum, 2006. . Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May be Best for Your Child. 2001. Chicago: Chicago Review P, 2002. Iggulden, Conn and Hal. The Dangerous Book for Boys. 2006. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. Kimball, Roger. Boys Will Be . . . Pleased by this Garden of Earthly Delights. The Weekly Standard 12:39 25 June 2007. 24 June 2008 <http://www.weeklystandard.com/ Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=13771&R=113E036BDA>. Laumann, Silken. Childs Play: Rediscovering the Joy of Play in our Families and Communities. Toronto: Random House, 2006.

The Politics of Parenting in Harry Potter

233

Louv, Richard. The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. 2005. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008. Mendlesohn, Farah. Crowning the King: Harry Potter and the Construction of Authority. The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter. Ed. Lana Whitehead. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. 15981. M i d d l e t o n , C h r i s t o p h e r. D a n g e r : B o y s H a v i n g F u n . Te l e g r a p h . c o . u k 13 June 2006. 24 June 2008 <http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/ printer_preview.asp?idArticle=13771&R=113E036BDA>. Office for National Statistics. Mortality Statistics: Deaths Registered in 2006: Review of the Registrar General on deaths in England and Wales, 2006. Newport: Crown Copyright, 2008. 10 June 2020 <http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_health/ DR-2006/DR_06Mort_Stats.pdf>. Park, Julia. Class and Socioeconomic Identity in Harry Potters England. Anatol, Reading, 17989. Pugh, Tison, and David L. Wallace. A Postscript to Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story in J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter Series. Childrens Literature Association Quarterly 33.2 (2008): 18892. . Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story in J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter Series. Childrens Literature Association Quarterly 31.3 (2006): 26081. Rowling, J[oanne] K[athleen]. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Vancouver: Raincoast, 1998. . Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2007. . Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2000. . Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2005. . Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2003. . Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. Vancouver: Raincoast, 1997. . Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Vancouver: Raincoast, 1999. Skenazy, Lenore. Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone. New York Sun 1 April 2008. 23 June 2008 <http://www.nysun.com/opinion/why-i-let-my-9-year-oldride-subway-alone/73976/>. Ungar, Michael. Too Safe for Their Own Good: How Risk and Responsibility Help Teens Thrive. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. Valentine, Gill. Public Space and the Culture of Childhood. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Webster, Ben. Careful Parents May Cost Lives. TimesOnline 11 Sept. 2007. 24 June 2008. <http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/ article2426348.ece>. Westman, Karin E. The Weapon We Have is Love. Childrens Literature Association Quarterly 33.2 (2008): 19399. Zipes, Jack. Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Childrens Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2001.