Harry Potter Stole My Child

harry-potter

 

Thursday

Today I focus on my Theories of the Reader senior seminar students who examined attacks on young adult fiction (YAF). Becca LaMora wrote about a planned burning of Harry Potter in Lewiston, Maine, and Taryn Timko, Ally Szymanski and Mairin Rivett looked at parent protests against Perks of Being a Wall Flower, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret respectively.

While some of the controversies are old, they continue to be relevant. After all, the fears of the rightwing evangelical Christians who attacked Harry Potter also helped elect Donald Trump. The culture wars that have raged around these YAF novels are far from over.

Because of how literature can inflame passions, studying attacks provides valuable insight into people’s anxieties. When I ask my students to analyze literature “that functioned as an event,” I insist that they suspend judgment, at least until they reach their conclusion. They are to respect every response, even if they disagree with it. In other words, they are to be historians, sociologists, and psychologists as well as literary scholars.

The events these students studied were similar. In 1998 an administrative hearing of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education (in Maryland) was debated whether Caged Bird should be taught to high school students. (In the book Angelou describes how she was molested as a child.) A Wallingford, Connecticut parent argued that Perks of a Wallflower should be banned because it is “a glorification of alcohol use and drugs.” Judy Blume’s novels overall have been challenged over 57 times, with Margaret, where girls discuss menstruation, comprising eight of those challenges. The Maine Christian group was one of many that have attacked Harry Potter for its positive depiction of wizards. (Check out this video clip to get a taste.)

In each case, my students concluded, parents worried that they were losing their children to a secular society, with novels being seen as a gateway drug. Since even liberal parents can worry about their children growing away from them, adding cultural anxieties to the mix prompted people to lash out in fear. Sometimes the lashing out occurred at school board meetings.

Some of my students, drawing on thinkers we had read, said the attacks resembled Plato’s criticisms of Homer. In The Republic the philosopher worries that young people will quarrel if they read about gods quarreling; will drink because Odysseus praises drinking; and will refuse to fight because Achilles in Hades tells Odysseus that he would rather “break sod as a farm hand for some poor country man on iron rations” than be a dead hero. My students also cited Samuel Johnson’s concern that, when young people fall for attractive but misbehaving protagonists, they “lose abhorrence for their faults.”

Becca was one arguing that the fears about Harry Potter are more than just fears of a secular world–that they are also fears of their children growing up into autonomous individuals able to make their own decisions. She concluded this after analyzing an attack on Harry’s use of magic:

In “Is the Harry Potter Series… Truly Harmless?”, published by ChristianAnswers.net, Ken James begins by speaking about how critically acclaimed the book series is and how some characters practice what would be considered “white magic” while others practice the dark arts or “black magic.” James believes that though white witchcraft is portrayed as innocent and good, he states that the Bible makes no discrimination—and that “any practice of magic is an abomination…God doesn’t distinguish between “white” and “dark” magic since they both originate from the same source.”

It’s hard to take this seriously if one doesn’t believe in magic. If one sees such attacks as masking other anxieties, however, then it makes more sense. After all, children really are using Harry Potter to break free of their parents. They imagine themselves wielding their own individual wand (which reflects their own individual self), defying teachers, operating without parents, and hanging out with their best friends. All institutions and authority figures (except for Dumbledore) are suspect. Furthermore, to an anxious parent Harry Potterism looks like a cult, with children disappearing into the books (say, staying up all night to read the latest release), dressing up as characters, and having intense Harry Potter conversations with friends.

I note, as an illuminating parallel, that men in the mid-1740s were tremendously threatened by Samuel Richardson’s million-word novel Clarissa. They saw their wives and daughters disappearing into the work for days at a time, abandoning their household duties, and felt as though they were losing control.

Margaret and Perks have faced their own attacks, which Mairin and Taryn attribute to anxieties about sexuality. Margaret is about menstruation, a sure sign that one’s children are moving on. Blume speaks so deeply to teens that, even when her books are banned, they get passed from student to student. Mairin studied various blog responses as she analyzed the book’s impact:

“Being a girl between the ages of 11 and 14 is pretty much the worst thing ever,” one blogger says, recalling her first experience of reading Are You There God? in middle school. “You’re awkward and developing…or not developing. It’s horrendous. This around the age where girls get mean (They’re awful to each other. And I’m not even speaking as someone chronically bullied or anything. We were all really neurotic and hormonal and impulsive…)”

And:

Blume does not turn Margaret into an ideal girl, a person who automatically knows right from wrong and acts accordingly; instead she is just as insecure and unsure about herself as everyone else and in this moment, when her compliment to Laura gets torn apart by her group of friends, Margaret is as relatable as ever. “I’m literally shuddering right now remembering middle school,” blogger Katie writes. “Incidentally, this is how I know my BFF is indeed Forever [a controversial Blume novel about teen sexuality]. Anybody who can love you when you’re at your worst and weirdest is someone worth keeping in your life.” Middle school is a time of so much change and turmoil for young girls that if Margaret had been confident enough to stand by her opinion when her peers acted otherwise, Blume’s character would have lost her believability.

Taryn and Ally, who are planning to be teachers, stressed how much their students will need such books to cope with the overwhelming pressures of adolescence. My assignment, therefore, forced them to wrestle with how they will respond to parents who challenge their teaching materials? How will they speak to such parents to assure them that they have the children’s best interests at heart? Will fear and ideology destroy trust? Will they as teachers self-censor to avoid controversy, thereby depriving their students of invaluable resources?

Literature is like dynamite. We need it to power through the obstacles we face, but sometimes we forget just how explosive it is. By studying those times when it blows up, we at least can understand why people are fearful.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

5 Comments

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.