5th
Harry Potter and Jane Austen
(In the spirit of the Inklings, I give you John Granger…) :http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0908/features/ivory_tower.shtml#top
“Within her comic novels, Austen is writing a philosophical argument against David Hume’s empiricist position. And Rowling, in the tradition of English letters, is doing the same thing. Hume’s position was, ultimately, that nothing could be known certainly (except, of course, the fact that “nothing could be known certainly,” which was certain). Only sensorial knowledge is dependable, because all of our ideas Hume assumed to be derived from sense impressions. The distance between this belief and the materialism of our times, in which only quantities of matter and energy are thought of as real, is a short walk; the breach made thereby with the Romantic and Platonic vision predominant in literature is vast. Not very surprisingly, Austen and Rowling side with Coleridge and Wordsworth against Hume.
Austen takes aim at Hume’s dependence on sense impressions in Pride and Prejudice, the first title of which was First Impressions. Darcy seems the worst of self-important snobs to Elizabeth Bennet, and the Bennets seem to Darcy to be beneath his attention. Wickham seems the long-suffering innocent to Elizabeth—and Darcy to be Wickham’s persecutor. His pride and her prejudice combine to blind them to their real characters, which, of course, circumstances and their ability both to rise above their sensorial impressions and to trust their greater judgment beyond pride and prejudice reveal in time. Their nuptials are a testament to love’s greater perception of truth and goodness than sense, subject as perceived ephemera are to human failings like conceit, class, and inherited beliefs.
Rowling’s Harry Potter novels turn on this same theme. Each book is loaded with reminders of how everyone but the long-suffering, brilliant, and saintly (Lupin, Hermione, and Dumbledore, respectively) is captive to their preconceptions about others and usually almost brutal in their unkindness to the objects of their prejudice.
We have, of course, the constant of “proper wizard pride” by which all nonmagical people, indeed, even magical brethren who are not “pure-blood” witches and wizards, are held in disdain. The Muggles we meet too hate the abnormality of the people living in Harry’s world. The poor, the clumsy, the awkward, the stupid, the ugly, and the unpopular at Hogwarts are also shown to have a hard time. Even the “nearly headless” ghost is a second-class citizen among the properly “headless” ghosts and prevented from participating in the annual Headless Hunt.
Magical folk seem preoccupied, like Jane Austen’s characters, with the birth condition or circumstances of others over which they had no choice or control rather than with the quality of their characters. Ron learns Hagrid is a half-giant in Goblet of Fire, and, although he has been Hagrid’s friend for three years, this news disturbs him because of the wizard prejudice against giants. We see the same or similar responses with respect to noble centaurs, house-elves, and werewolves. Even Hagrid has a few unkind words for foreigners.
This prejudice is institutional as well. The Ministry of Magic refuses to promote Arthur Weasley, in the opinion of his wife, because he lacks proper wizard pride, and although the Ministry opposes the Death Eaters’ attacks on Muggles, they certainly share Voldemort’s contempt for them. Magical media too, especially the Daily Prophet, transmit and reinforce the prejudices of witches and wizards in almost every story they publish.
The obstacles to the successful resolution of the novels’ other themes—love’s defeat of death, freewill choice, and personal transformation or change—are essentially prejudice. You simply cannot be loving, capable of unjaundiced decision-making, or capable of change when bound by personal prejudice and pride. The big twist at which the books aim too turns on the revelation of Harry’s foundational misconception and the change in him if he realizes and transcends this misunderstanding.
Just as the key to Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement in Pride and Prejudice was Darcy seeing past his pride and Elizabeth overcoming her prejudice, Harry’s victory over Lord Voldemort must come through love and after the revelation of an unexpected back to a revered or reviled front. Harry, like Darcy and Elizabeth, however, had to transcend his pride as a Gryffindor and free himself of his “old prejudice” against Slytherins. He also had to come to terms with the Machiavellian aspect and clay feet of Dumbledore.
What Lupin calls Harry’s “old prejudice” against Severus is resolved suddenly and forever in his experience of his sworn enemy’s memories of his mother. More difficult was coming to terms with the back to Dumbledore’s front, recognizing the secretiveness and failings of Harry’s beloved mentor. Unquestioning admiration can blind us, Harry learns, as much as inherited prejudice. Most of Deathly Hallows, the final book in the Harry Potter series, turns on Harry’s finally choosing to believe in Dumbledore while digging Dobby’s grave on Easter morning. Rowling’s astonishing final twist was that Snape was a sacrificial hero and Dumbledore a man with a history; Harry’s victory over his preconceptions, represented in naming his look-alike son “Albus Severus,” is the interior triumph that led to his eventual triumph over Lord Voldemort in the Great Hall.”
While I agree that prejudice is a huge problem, I am not sure that prejudice against man is the greatest sin another man can commit. Isn’t prejudice against God, the refusal to trust the Love that hurts us so seemingly terribly, the ultimate prejudice? Is this not the root of the other? Opening one’s will, with a desire to be changed, is the only absolute precondition for transformation. It is also the hardest of all feats.
