7 Heavenly Virtues: Hope

[Peg Kerr]

No: HPFGUIDX 3660

Here's a nice segue: Faith, it is said, is the essence of things hoped
for, the evidence of things unseen.

So what, in turn, is hope?  And what does it have to do with Harry?
What does Harry need to learn about hope on his moral journey?

Hope clusters with the concepts of desire, belief, reliance,
expectation.

At the beginning of the first book, we find a paradox: Harry, himself,
IS hope, to the wizarding world, that is.  He is the Boy Who Lived.
Because of him, Voldemort has fled, and wizards everywhere, astounded by
this turn of events, arouse themselves from their long nightmare and
look around, saying, "Is it possible?  Could it be?  Do you think we
could have . . . a normal life again?  Can we actually look forward to
the future, instead of dreading it?"

And yet, simultaneously, Harry must withdraw from the world he has
rescued and go into exile to live with the Dursleys.  (This is a common
mythic trope, btw: Hercules is raised by a magical goat, in hiding from
Hera, and there's Moses in the bullrushes, etc.)  We hear at first from
Dumbledore that Harry will be living there because the Dursleys are his
only living relatives.  He also says it would be best that Harry grow up
without being shadowed by his fame.  Several books in, however, we get a
hint that Dumbledore had another reason for the decision to place Harry
with his aunt and uncle: the Dursleys, being blood relatives, offer
Harry a special kind of protection from Voldemort, despite the fact that
they are only Muggles.  In a way, Harry, the Boy Who Lived, plays the
same role as Hope in the Greek myth.  He must be sequestered, shut away
in a box by Pandora/Dumbledore, to protect him from the evil entities
loose in the world.

So Harry stays with the Dursleys.  And here we find the paradox I spoke
of earlier: while Harry is the embodiment of hope for the wizard world,
he has absolutely no hope for himself.  A trip to the zoo?  Birthday
presents?  A bright future?  Forget it.  Harry has been taught by bitter
experience not to expect anything pleasant, or to even to hope that
things might improve.  The language Rowling uses paint him as that
archetypal figure without hope, the prisoner.  He sleeps in a locked
cupboard, where spiders crawl over him; he dresses in ill-fitted clothes
(Dudley's cast offs); he is expected to swallow insults without protest;
he sometimes goes without meals.  This picture of Harry-as-prisoner
while with the Dursleys is further fleshed out in later books: during
subsequent summers with the Dursley, it is clear that Harry is supposed
to work while Dudley is idle (and doubtless without remuneration); he is
locked into his room and has food shoved through a slot; his windows are
barred; he is denied access to his books and writing implements.

The day that the first letter from Hogwarts drops through the front door
mail slot, however, everything changes.  Uncle Vernon's reaction is to
tell Harry to move out from the cupboard beneath the stairs up to the
second bedroom.  The letter from Hogwarts completes the circle, bringing
the truth (and thus hope) to Harry, about the hope Harry had brought the
entire wizarding world.  And as a result, Harry starts to understand
that he is not meant to be merely a prisoner, a drudge for the Dursleys
and Dudley's punching bag.  As the Dursleys sense that Harry is slipping
out of their grasp, growing beyond the range of their mundane brutality,
they try increasingly to clamp down on him.

But hope, once it has taken root, cannot be denied.  The letters will
keep coming, and Hagrid, in the end, cannot be prevented from telling
the truth.  This struggle between repression and rescue continues in
subsequent summers: the Dursleys bar Harry's windows; the Weasleys
arrive in their flying car to rescue him.  The Dursleys threaten Harry,
and Harry blows up Aunt Marge, and counters threats with the spectre of
his fearsome godfather, Sirius.  Once the prisoner has hope, he can no
longer be cowed into unthinking submission, and eventually, he will be
free.

In the same way that Harry is absorbing these new, exciting ideas about
the possibility of being able to learn a special kind of power, in a
world where he truly belongs, Harry is also learning to place his hope
in other people--to believe in them, in other words; to rely on them.
Reliance, perhaps, overlaps with faith, or trust; I am not sure I could
draw a useful distinction between these terms.  At any rate, as I noted
in post about faith, Harry is starting to realize that he is not all
alone.  There are other people besides himself to whom he can turn if he
is in need of help or guidance.

The first, of course, are Ron and Hermione.  Both of these friendships
with Harry were forged with an incidents in which the three discovered
they could count on each other.  Ron and Harry became friends on the
train, after Harry refused the opportunity to snub Ron to order to curry
favor with Draco.  And Harry and Ron became friends with Hermione after
the incident with the troll the first Halloween.  As Rowling puts it in
one of her delightfully wry observations, "There are some things you
can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a
twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them."

More warily, Harry starts, quite tentatively, to allow himself to rely
upon adults (and we know, after his experiences with the Dursleys, that
the idea of trusting and relying on an adult is a very novel sensation
for Harry).  He takes his time about getting used to the idea.  When
invited by Dumbledore to share his burdens or concerns, Harry often will
refuse, preferring to keep his worries to himself.  Again, as he starts
to forge a relationship with his godfather, Sirius, Harry is
ambivalent.  He decides to write to Sirius at the beginning of GoF,
hoping that Sirius might provide an answer about the pain from his
scar--but conversely, he scolds himself for endangering Sirius when
Sirius reacts to Harry's news by replying that he will fly north
immediately.

And yet, almost despite himself, Harry finds that he is growing in his
trust and reliance upon other people.  In considering his relationship
with one of the most important, Dumbledore, we should note Rowling's use
of an important symbol of hope: Dumbledore's pet phoenix, Fawkes.

As a symbol for hope, a phoenix is quite appropriate.  It dies, but all
hope is not lost, for new life springs from the ashes.  The first time
Harry encountered Fawkes, he was waiting in Dumbledore's office fearing
expulsion, or worse: he was found by a petrified fellow student, Justin
Finch Fletchley, and as Harry is a Parselmouth, he is suspected of
attacking Justin.  As Harry awaits the Headmaster, Fawkes bursts into
flames (to Harry's horror).   But just as a new reborn Fawkes emerges,
Harry will emerge from Dumbledore's office, his academic career not cut
short after all.

When Tom Riddle's ghost jeers in the Chamber of Secrets that Dumbledore
has been driven from the castle by the mere memory of him (Riddle),
Harry counters with a statement that shows how firmly he has placed his
hope in Dumbledore:

"He's not as gone as you might think," Harry retorted.  He was speaking
at random, wanting to scare Riddle, wishing rather than believing it to
be true.

And in immediate response to this statement of faith and hope, Fawkes
appears, singing his beautiful song, bringing the tool (the sorting hat)
that will defeat Tom Riddle's ghost, in defiance of "common sense" that
all hope is lost.

Another example takes place in the GoF.  In the graveyard, crouching
behind the gravestone as Voldemort approaches, Harry decides to die
standing, defending himself, even though "there was no hope, no help to
be had."   And yet, when the wizards duel with their wands, the priori
incantatem spell is triggered--and suddenly there is hope after all.
Harry hears, significantly, phoenix song.   "It was the sound of hope to
Harry . . . the most beautiful and welcome thing he had ever heard in
his life."  The ghosts reappear and whisper words support to Harry; his
parents' spirits tell him that they will try to help him--and he escapes
to fight another day.  And it is Fawkes magical healing tears, falling
later in Dumbledore's office, which heal him from the wounds he has
suffered.

The GoF ends somberly, still resonating with the painful memories of
what happened when Harry and Cedric seized the cup together in the
maze.  But Harry is not the same person that he was when he was a child
of ten, in thrall to the Dursleys with no hope of rescue.  Now, as
Dumbledore says, he has shouldered a grown wizard's burden and found
himself equal to it.  He would not have been able to do what he has done
up until now but for the help he has received, that he has come to
expect, in his moral journey.  He knows he is not alone now.  Friends
and allies stand shoulder to shoulder with him, all gathered together
under Dumbledore's leadership.  That is the hope that will sustain him
as he steels himself to face the ordeals ahead, in the gathering
darkness of Voldemort's new arising.

Peg