More than a decade has passed since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by an unknown author through a minor London publisher. It is hard to recall that before the blockbuster movies, before the chocolate frogs, before the Wizarding World of Harry Potter Theme Park, in Orlando, Harry Potter was neither a Warner Bros. franchise nor a commercial cliché but a series of fantasy stories that transported an entire generation of kids away from their TV sets and video games and into the delights of the old-fashioned printed word.
The sensation in Britain was so great that by the time J.K. Rowling’s third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was published, in July 1999—two years before the release of the first movie—booksellers were asked to keep it off their shelves until late afternoon for fear that thousands of children would skip school to buy it. The British edition had an initial printing of a quarter of a million copies. In 2000, The New York Times created a new list of children’s best sellers so the Potter series wouldn’t crowd adult authors out of the coveted top 10 spots.
Not everyone was impressed by this youthful literary revival. Harold Bloom famously described the books as “rubbish.” “The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible,” he said.
Shira Wolosky disputes that assessment in The Riddles of Harry Potter: Secret Passages and Interpretive Quests (Palgrave Macmillan). Wolosky, an English professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sees in the works genuine literary depth, invention, construction, and imagination.
“To explore and discuss the literary structures and meanings of the Potter books is also to seek to answer the question of its enormous fascination,” she says in an interview at her home, in Jerusalem. “I do not think this can be accounted for only by appeal to its commercialization or its ideological components,” which have been the concerns of many previous studies.
“In the end, when you sit down to read Harry Potter, what you encounter is the book, a work of literary art. Harry Potter offers what literature at its best does: symbolic meanings, psychological experience, moral reflection, word revelation.”
Wolosky, a Guggenheim fellow and visiting professor at both the University of Oxford and the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., is the author of Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (Yale University Press), The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem (Oxford University Press), and other works, including a journal article titled “Democracy in America by Dr. Seuss.”
“I’ve always been an avid reader of children’s literature, since I was a child, and I reread them often, but I had never been moved to write about it before,” says Wolosky.
“I was possessed. I had the privilege of reading the books as they came out along with my kids, who were Harry’s age, so I really had years to work out the puzzles and think through the problems and think from book to book. I just felt it was a work that had tremendous depth.”
Most previous works about Harry Potter have been readers’ guides, explaining the plot, characters, and Rowling’s rich lexicon of invented and borrowed words. Others are collections of essays, while a third group explores particular themes such as gender issues, philosophy, and religion. There is an entire shelf of polemics arguing whether the series is pro- or anti-Christian.
The Riddles of Harry Potter convincingly argues that Rowling’s books are “carefully crafted literary works, with many layers of meaning.” Wolosky is at her best when analyzing the structural devices and rich wordplay employed by Rowling to underpin the psychological development of her characters and to drive forward a plot that is a mixture of detective novel, teenage adventure, fantasy epic, and mythical morality tale.
Harry, Wolosky shows, is continually reinterpreting himself and the world around him as he grows through the books from age 11 to age 18. At first he is repeatedly compared to his father, James, in both looks and talent. But despite his heroic status and special powers, he is less outstanding as a wizard than are several other characters, including his headmaster, Dumbledore, and the chief villain, Voldemort. He never attains the ability to transform himself into an animal, like his father did, and his godfather, Sirius, expresses disappointment that he is not more like James.
The oft-repeated comment that Harry has his mother’s green eyes presages the revelation at the end of the series that it is his mother, Lily, who provides the most important model for both Harry and the world he encounters. It is her sacrificial, protective act that saves his life at birth and her defensive wizarding powers that he inherits—from the expelliarmus (disarming) charm to the ability to summon a perfect patronus, or animal-form protector. It is Lily’s power of devotion that finally defines heroism in the books, proving stronger than the domination that governs Voldemort and his society of Death Eaters.
Wolosky also celebrates the rich symbolism used by Rowling. Eyes, houses, clothes, and names speak volumes about each character. The books are also full of twins, mirror images, parallel worlds, and doubles: the mischievous Weasley twins and the Carrow Death Eaters; the Dumbledore brothers; Professor Moody and his evil impostor; there are twin vanishing cabinets; two break-ins at Gringotts Wizarding Bank; the two prime ministers of the Muggle (nonmagic) world and the wizarding world; Malfoy’s gang and Dudley’s gang; and the twin phoenix feathers that create the strange bond between Harry and Voldemort.
Rowling has clearly read widely and borrows liberally from ancient mythology, medieval theology, classic English literature, and a range of modern British children’s classics about boarding schools and magic.
But Wolosky argues for the profound originality of the literary inventions that so excited Rowling’s young readers. The Dementors, for example, deadly demons guarding the wizard prison, drive home Rowling’s metaphorical discussion of the thin line between inner life, on the one hand, and social and political power, on the other, calling on both to defend freedom against the racist, blood-pure dictatorship of state terror that ensnares the Ministry of Magic.
Critics have assailed the simpering, secondary role of Harry’s friend Hermione, but Wolosky argues that the series also contains a large cast of powerful middle-aged female characters. She says Rowling’s extended description of cleaning, cooking, and house elves—from Molly’s cozy kingdom at the Burrow to the hidden kitchens at Hogwarts, to the dangerous spring cleaning of Grimmauld Place—is a recognition of the skill of homemakers and a thinly veiled metaphor for the secret slavery of “women’s work.”
Wolosky’s main interest, as in her book’s title, is in the riddles that Rowling deploys throughout the series to weave her plot, characters, and major themes into a unified whole.
Voldemort’s real name is Tom Riddle. Clues to the location of the Horcruxes and the Chamber of Secrets, challenges in the Triwizard Tournament, and the prophecy that costs Sirius his life are all expressed as clues—with Harry and his allies as the detectives who must discover their meaning.
In one striking passage highlighting Rowling’s craft, Wolosky traces the relationship of Harry’s role as Quidditch seeker of the Golden Snitch (a position on his school sports team) to his destiny as seeker of the truth that will defeat Voldemort:
“Snatching the Snitch can suddenly reverse the course of the game, a principle central to the workings of Harry Potter. But Snitch also means to tell, and it is the Snitch that tells the books’ final riddle: ‘I open at the close.’ Harry as Seeker pushes toward allegorical meaning through the course of the books. In the last of all the duels, Harry, the rightful owner of the Elder Wand, catches hold of it ‘with the unerring skill of a seeker.’”
“To me, the literary measure is the multiple meanings,” says Wolosky. “That’s why people reread it. That’s why people are caught up in it. It answers to deep psychological, deep moral, deep historical concerns.”
