Harry Potter and The Brothers Karamazov seldom get mentioned in the same sentence, but my student Evan Roe—in the third of the senior projects I have been mentoring this year (you can read reports of the other two here and here)—points out that both works demonstrate that sons must break free from oppressive fathers if they are to find themselves.
Evan has entitled his project “Not All Scars are Lightning-Shaped: How Harry Potter and Alyosha Karamazov Overcome the Oedipus Complex.” I first blogged on Evan’s ideas as he was starting off the project, but he has fleshed them out considerably since then.
Freud famously uses the Oedipus story to get at the psychological conflicts that boys have with their fathers. The trauma that causes the Oedipus complex begins in childhood when the newborn child, who initially has his mother all to himself, grows a little older and discovers that he has a rival. Somehow daddy thinks he has a place in mommy’s bed as well. What Freud calls “the primal scene” is the moment, actual or imagined, when the boy witnesses his mother and father having sex. If he is to grow up, the boy must move past his pure longing (to return to the mother) and his pure hatred (to get rid of the father who appears to have supplanted him). There are those who remain forever trapped in one or both of these emotions, becoming emotionally stunted adults.
Freud thought that Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov was the world’s greatest novel, and, while I am inclined to agree, Freud liked it because it perfectly illustrates the Oedipus complex. Evan points out that three of the brothers are never able to escape their father’s orbit—one is accused of killing him, one is an unwitting accomplice to his murder, and the third actually kills him. The first remains a virtual adolescent, the second goes mad, and the third commits suicide. Only the fourth brother, Alyosha, is able to successfully move beyond his childhood emotions and achieve emotional maturity.
It’s less obvious how the Oedipus complex relates to Harry Potter, but Evan’s interpretation has caused me to see J. K. Rowling’s series in an entirely new light.
First, Evan says that we see Freud’s “primal scene” occurring in the episode where Voldemort visits the infant Harry’s house and tries to kill him. Seen in this light Voldemort is Harry’s father, separating him forever from his mother, and he indeed remains inside Harry’s head through most of the books. But because we can’t only imagine our father as evil, Harry believes that he once had a perfect father (James), who was killed by this man. Evan points out that many fairy tales have a girl’s version of this: the perfect mother dies and is replaced by an evil step-mother. Freud calls this process “splitting.”
Okay, so that’s in the realm of myth. But then Evan takes us into Harry’s adolescence. Harry at this point has an actual father and his name is Vernon Dursley. Harry sees Vernon as many teenaged boys see their fathers and therefore indulges in the fantasy (or rather, the book indulges in the fantasy) that he is an orphan. Here Evan shifts from Freud to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and describes the process that an adolescent boy must undergo to “individuate,” which is to say, to become a full individual. If he is not to remain emotionally dependent and crippled by father hatred, he must embark on what Campbell describes as the hero’s journey.
Evan says that we have an example of what a failed maturation journey looks like in the figure of Dudley, Harry’s cousin. If he is not to remain a pampered and infantile Dudley, Harry must successfully pass the tests that stand between him and adulthood. School (Hogwarts) is the realm where this occurs although, in the end, Harry must leave Hogwarts and show that he can handle the world.
In his project Evan charts all the father figures that Harry encounters as he works to become his own person. Some operate as benevolent guides (Sirius Black, Lupin, Mr. Weasley, Albus Dumbledore), and there is also a stern disciplinarian who seems to be his enemy (Severus Snape). I am anxious to see what Evan does with Snape but I suspect that he will find significance in Harry’s softened attitude towards his “teacher of the dark arts.” A sign that Harry is maturing is that he no longer sees his father in extreme terms, no longer either perfect (James) or villainous (Snape). In a symbolic sense, both merge into a single individual: both are partnered with his mother
Keep in mind that everyone, from Voldemort to Vernon to James to Snape to Dumbledore, is a symbolic version of Harry’s actual father. (Think of the series as the Freudian dream of a teenaged boy named Harry Dursley.) We know that we have truly matured when we see our fathers as people in their own right and not as projections of our inner maturation dramas. Although to be honest, we may never achieve absolute clarity or absolute maturity. But it’s a goal worth striving for.
Back to Harry, where the father-son drama gets played out most dramatically in Harry’s battles with Dumbledore and Voldemort. To be sure, Harry doesn’t fight Dumbledore. But he does become disillusioned with him and he can only rise to his true powers if Dumbledore leaves the scene, seemingly killed by Harry’s bad father (Snape). I remember a stage in my own life—rather late, actually (I was in my 30’s)—when I unloaded on my father, whom I had heretofore worshipped. Neither the idealized image I had of Scott Bates nor the image I reacted against was the actual man.
In the end, we see Harry going against the father of his projections, the father from the primal scene who seems to stand in Harry’s way. But Harry’s can’t symbolically kill him because that would just be a sign that he is trapped in father hatred, a sign that his father still has a crippling hold on him. We see this drama also with Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy when Luke is going up against his father Darth Vader. If Luke stays locked in his hatred of Vader, the evil emperor/hatred wins.
Fortunately, Evan points out, Harry is able to see his father as a suffering child and can even have compassion for him. At this point, Voldemort essentially self-destructs, which is another way of saying that Harry has superseded him. Voldemort no longer has power over him and Harry is able to define himself.
And what kind of man does Harry grow into? Evan points out that Harry manages to get virtually all of his fathers into his kids’ names (although Voldemort and Vernon are missing). James Sirius is his oldest, Albus Severus his second, so there we see Harry’s idealized father, his surrogate father, his guide, and his disciplinarian. Harry also marries into the ideal family that he wishes he had grown up in. We can honor our fathers once we are mature enough to stop fighting them.
Evan and I have been joking about the projected versions that James and Albus will have of Harry. He may want to think of himself as an ideal father and hopefully he will be a better father than, say, Vernon Dursley was. But having acknowledged that, maybe there will always be a way in which we are Voldemorts to our sons. Indeed, Harry’s sons will have a particularly hard time finding themselves. After all, everyone will compare them with the boy who saved the world.
Harry thinking that he can circumvent the Oedipal conflict with his sons reminds me of a conversation that I had a couple of years ago with my two sons (I report on it here) where I said that I felt that we weren’t having the classic father-son battles. Darien and Toby would have none of it. No, they must symbolically kill me, just as I symbolically killed my own father. (See also Patrick Logan’s guest post on the subject here.) Given how mature both of them are, they’re well on their way. Once they do so, our relationship will take new and wonderful forms, as my relationship with my father has.
Another note on Evan’s project. He has been intrigued by how a classic work and a popular work can both have deep things to say about an issue that matters to him. He wonders what this means.
I’ll say to him here that, while Harry Potter may be more complex than we at first think, it is no Brothers Karamazov. (I imagine certain readers at this point saying, “Duh!”) Both may tap into the same archetypes and work through similar issues, but the character depth of the Karamazov brothers and their profound exploration of life’s psychological and spiritual complexities far surpass anything that we find in J. K. Rowling’s books.
I’m not putting down Rowling when I say that. Henry James, writing about a popular bestseller of his day, wrote, “I call Treasure Island delightful, because it appears to me to have succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts.” Robert Lewis Stevenson’s work is no Portrait of a Lady or Turn of the Screw, but James (who was a good friend of Stevenson) isn’t being patronizing here. Just accurate. Harry Potter attempts less than Dostoevsky’s novel but succeeds in what it attempts.
One other note: Here’s another of Evan’s ideas that, as it’s not about fathers and sons, may not make its way into the essay. Drawing on Jungian psychology, Evan notes that the Karamazov brothers function as parts of what together would be an integrated self: Dimitri is body, Ivan mind, and Alyosha soul, while Smerdyakov plays the role of the shadow, the darkness that the hero must transcend. Without integration, they cannot mature, and only Alyosha opens himself up to his other selves. In Harry Potter, Harry is soul while Hermione is mind and Ron body. (I suppose Malfoy would be the dark brother). In the end, Harry, Hermione, and Ron must all work together to defeat the dark lord. Harry can’t do it alone.
That’s the thing about the journey of the hero: he can’t do it alone, and if he’s got a good father, that father will help him grow strong enough to transcend him. In some ways it may seem like a thankless task, but in fact it can lead to a father’s greatest sense of fulfillment.