Heroes in the Harry Potter Series

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 176115

I'd like to start out by saying that, since my cultural background is from the United States, these comments are going to be U.S.-centric. However, from what I have read in the group, it seems that, although details will differ, it seems essentially correct for Great Britain, as well.

Moses smashed the 10 commandments, and had to go back to Mt. Sinai for a new copy.
Hercules, in a fit of rage, killed his wife and children.
King David arranged for an officer to get killed so he could bonk the officer's wife.
Sir Lancelot bonked Queen Guinevere.

So, it is obvious. These guys were not heroes. After all, they weren't perfect.

It sounds kind of silly. Yet, currently, we expect our heroes to be perfect. Any sign of imperfection takes away their heroism. And the news media glories in finding flaws in heroes, to prove that they are not heroes. So, what's going on, here?

I can't give a precise point in time that this happened, but, from my readings, I suspect that it was during WWII that heroes lost their flaws. 

Certainly, in the Greco-Roman tradition, heroes WERE human, and WERE flawed. Their heroism was not just in the great deeds that they did, but in the fact that they were able to do those deeds in spite of their flaws. To believe they were perfect was hubris, and if they believed in their own perfection, it would inevitably lead to their downfall. 

The Old Testament was certainly full of warts and all depictions of the heroes; Noah got stinking drunk, Jacob tricked Esau and Isaac to get the firstborn's share of the inheritance, Aaron cooperated with the Golden Calf, and let's not even BEGIN with King Solomon. But they were all still heroes; they were merely human, and fallible. Even Jesus was tempted to give in to his human aspects. 

Pre-Christian European mythologies were filled with heroes who had to overcome pride, avarice, bad tempers, drinking problems, etc. to achieve their heroism. In the United States, Ben Franklin slept with pretty much any woman who would have him (and, apparently, that was quite a few), but sleeping around was more acceptable then; Alexander Hamilton once explained away charges that he was making secret deals with a man by explaining that he was, in fact, having sex with the man's wife. Jefferson was a hypocrite, protesting slavery but borrowing money against their value, preventing him from freeing them. Woodrow Wilson was publicly a white supremacist, firing blacks from positions of authority in the federal government that they had earned under Republican presidencies, and segregating the armed forces. All these appeared in American history textbooks until about the second World War, when the wartime propaganda was pushing an idea that America was perfect, and the Axis powers were evil personified This attitude continued into the cold war; that the children born around then first discovered that there WERE flaws in the heroes when they went to college quite probably was a major impetus behind the student revolt of the 1960's. 

Yet this idea remains; that, in order for someone to be a hero, they must be flawless. The press, having successfully exerted its power as a counter to the government in the early 1970's, started taking delight at pointing out the flaws in people thought of as heroes by society, with the assumption that pointing out the flaws rendered the heroics of these people null and void. And people fell for it; loud denial that the flaws existed, as if it nullified the heroism, became commonplace. Older texts, which exposed the heroes' flaws, were accused of glorifying rather than exposing the flaws. 

And now, of course, we have Harry Potter. Harry Potter can't possibly be a hero; he cast Unforgivable Curses; he even cast Crucio just because he lost his temper. Dumbledore isn't a hero either; after all, he manipulated people. And certainly not Snape; Snape was a nasty, sarcastic, maybe even sadistic. He can't POSSIBLY be a hero!

But of course, they were. Snape put his life at risk, and even lost it, in trying to stop Voldemort. Dumbledore did use people, but it was in accomplishing a task that these people very much wanted accomplished. Harry may have tortured a torturer, but he also willingly allowed himself to be killed, and later gave Voldemort a final shot at redemption, even though he was sure it wouldn't work. We can go on and on.

The point is that, yes, the heroes in the Harry Potter novels do some decidedly non-heroic things. But to either think that the fact that they are heroes excuses this behavior, or that the behavior makes them less heroic, is to use a definition of heroism by which there are no heroes. They are human, and, being human, they are flawed. They are heroes in spite of these flaws, not because of them.

Bart