Adults in "Harry Potter"

            After our passionate conversation in class last Wednesday, I want to continue to explore the issue of adulthood vs. childhood in Harry Potter. I watched films 1-6 for the first time when I was 18. From there, I started reading the books. I loved the story, the characters, the world, everything. And then I came to Deathly Hallows and I didn’t know how to process one of its many big reveals: the Dumbledore dilemma. To put it in as few words as possible, we find out that Dumbledore has been a kind of puppet master since the beginning. I was shocked that Rowling would take such a noble, fatherly authority figure—one of our pillars of the “good side”—and bring him down the way she did. Most children’s fiction doesn’t do this; we can find plenty of incompetent or mostly absent adults, but not many who are as complex as Dumbledore turns out to be. What does this have to do with the book we actually read? Well, as reread, I started looking at all of the authority figures, and what I realized was that Rowling challenges the child/adult binary quite strongly from the very beginning. For example, as early as chapter one we see adults lording over children in a very totalitarian way: Dumbledore dictates what Harry’s childhood should be like, Uncle Vernon tells Harry not to ask questions, and the very structure of Hogwarts’ educational system enforces strict rules on how students should think and behave (think of how the sorting hat dictates identity). Harry and his comrades, and other child protagonists in adolescent literature, have to resist this in order to act and keep the narrative in motion. They cannot fully rely on any adult or else they would have very little to no agency. This is why I think that characters like Dumbledore, Sirius, and James Potter are so interesting. In the typical adolescent novel, we would be on their side and stay on their side. But Rowling frustrates that expectation by revealing them to be more human and complex. We might still be on their side at the end of the day, but not without first questioning their authority and our own response to their authority.