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

reaction upon first meeting someone at university who had been to a boarding school: “I thought it sounded horrible. Not because I was so attached to home—I couldn’t wait to leave home—just that the culture was not one I’d enjoy. It staggers me to meet people who want to send their kids away.” 4 In fact, she claims to have “never been inside a boarding school.” 5 How does a writer this far removed from the playing fields of Eton come to write a boarding school novel with clear ties to the formula story arc and details of the boarding school novel tradition? Simple. The story formula and its clichéd elements are so familiar to British readers and writers that non-boarding school students, like Blyton and Rowling, have no more trouble imagining a fictional public school than law-abiding novelists who are not police officers or private detectives (or killers) have in writing a whodunit with multiple murders.
    Every public school novel, of course, be it a boys’ or girls’ school, has a hero or heroine that goes to school, grows up there, and departs at graduation a much-transformed person. The details of the formula are not so complicated that they, too, aren’t easily summarized:
    [A] boy enters a school in some fear and trepidation, but usually with ambitions and schemes; suffers mildly or severely at first from loneliness, the exactions of fag-masters, the discipline of masters, and the regimentation of games; then makes a few friends and leads for a year or so a joyful, irresponsible, and sometimes rebellious life; eventually learns duty, self-reliance, responsibility, and loyalty as a prefect, qualities usually used to put down bullying or over-emphasis on athletic prowess; and finally leaves school, with regret, for the wider world, stamped with the seal of the institution which he has left and devoted to its welfare. 6
    A charted comparison of Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone reveals the strong conformity of the latter to the archetype of the school novel genre. 7

    Note that many of the features in Ms. Rowling’s stories, rather than evidence of a singular creative genius, are just delightful, new renderings of Hughes’s staples and necessary characters and devices from the school story. If a book is a boarding school novel, there has to be a school and it has to be a boarding school (so the students can have nighttime adventures free of parental controls). And it needs to be a very special place, different from common experience. Hogwarts, as a school of witchcraft and wizardry, of course, meets this requirement in spectacular fashion.
    The school story also has to be told on a time line with two story arcs that complement one another: the course of the individual year—fall to spring with holidays—and the set number of years between the hero or heroine’s becoming a student and graduating. Ms. Rowling makes her series seven volumes, corresponding to the seven years of a Hogwarts education in contrast to the six years of most school series and conventional public school forms (for reasons to be discussed in chapter seven); each book in the series, conforming to convention, follows Harry from his home to school and back again on an annual cycle.
    The “terrible trio” of Harry, Ron, and Hermione only differs from the public school formula by including a female character as the agent of civilization and intelligence:
    Traditional school stories feature the hero (or heroine) and his (or her) best friend. A third companion commonly joins them, corresponding to the “rule of three“ policy that historically operated in many boarding schools. . . . In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom Brown first makes friends with Harry East, and the two become inseparable. Later, they adopt the frail and saintly newcomer, George Arthur, who then helps, through his example, to transform the two prankish boys into Christian gentlemen. 8
    Even Fred and George,