Harry Potter's Bookshelf by John Granger Read Free Book Online

prejudice” against Slytherins. He also had to come to terms with the Machiavellian aspect and clay feet of his hero Dumbledore.
    What Lupin calls Harry’s “old prejudice” against Severus ( Half-Blood Prince , chapter sixteen) 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 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 (about which see chapters eight and nine).

Conclusion
    The perspective that Ms. Rowling borrows from Emma to such wonderful effect is more than just a mechanical trick of the trade. The third person limited omniscient view is not just another way of telling a story; it is the view we too-human readers have of the world, as unconscious as we are of our own pride and prejudices. Certainly we are “first person narrators,” but, except in times of extreme self-consciousness, we experience the world as if we are seeing it as God sees it, ignorant as Harry is until story’s end of everything else that is going on outside our vision.
    Because we can only know what we see, confronting and overcoming our pride and prejudices that shape and distort our perceptions is essential work. Until we become more penetrating and sympathetic “readers” of reality before us, we are doomed to be mistaken, trapped, and enslaved by the conventions, blind spots, and misplaced priorities of our historical period. We’ll see in coming chapters why and how Austen’s premodern view and subversive arguments against empirical scientism help and fascinate us postmoderns as much as it does and how much it informs Ms. Rowling’s books.

CHAPTER THREE
    Setting: The Familiar Stage and Scenery Props of the Drama
    Harry Potter as a Boarding School Story in the
Tradition of Tom Brown’s Schooldays
     
     
     
     
     
    Here is a cute quiz that I expect to find stuck in my e-mail spam filter someday. Subject line: “Name the famous British woman author I’m describing!”
    • She is a bestselling author of children’s stories who has sold over 400 million books (some say as many as 600 million books).
    • Children, when polled as recently as 2008, chose her as their favorite author (Costas Book Awards).
    • Though famous for writing boarding school stories, she was never a boarding or public school student herself. But she was chosen as “Head Girl” of the school she did attend.
    • After school, she was a teacher, had a failed marriage, but remarried with custody of the first marriage’s offspring.
    • Her best books are about the adventures a group of children have, involving a mystery, boarding school life, or a magical event or ability. All of them have a firm moral or Christian message.
    • She had a problematic relationship with her father; her mother was no longer part of her life after she left home.
    • She developed a unique way of communicating with her readers without newspaper or media intermediaries.
    • Despite the Christian element in stories, implicit or explicit, she was not religious in a devotional way, but remained a member of the Church of England.
    • Her books set records for number of translations (more than 90 foreign languages) and are famous and beloved by children and adults around the world, especially in India, Japan, and Germany.
    • The girl hero in her bestselling adventures is a swotty tomboy the author