Re: [HPforGrownups] rec: Missing from 'Harry Potter' – a real moral struggle
Pamela Rosen
pam_rosen at yahoo.com
Thu Jul 26 23:19:33 UTC 2007
No: HPFGUIDX 173131
Joan wrote:
I want to recommend this critique piece on Book 7 "Missing from
'Harry Potter' – a real moral struggle", written by Jenny Sawyer,
as it shares exactly my problem with book 7 and the HP series in
general and and put it better than I could ever do.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070725/cm_csm/ysawyer
Pam:
My email box has over 1000 HP for Grownups mails in it, most of which I have not opened because I haven't finished the book yet, but by now it is virtually impossible not to know what happened, so the book becomes more about how it happens and not what happens.
But I wanted to respond to this one. First of all, I don't think that JKR set out to write a morality play. Just as I get frustrated with people who snub certain children's toys because they are not educational, I got frustrated with this essay. Not everything is supposed to be a lesson. Not everything is supposed to have a moral. That being said, I think Ms. Sawyer is only partially right. Looking from the perspective of classic literature, she correctly identifies the problem that Harry does not have an inner struggle. But nor do I think that Harry's destiny was pre-determined (except by JKR herself) or we wouldn't have spent two years talking about it. Though the book may have an obscured moral, it has real, tangible morals that a child can understand.
A perfect example happened this week. My 8-year-old son idolizes the baseball player Barry Bonds. (For those of you not in the US, Bonds is a player who is about to break the world record for hitting the most home runs, but is under a cloud of scandal for allegedly using performance-enhancing drugs.) My son asked about this, rather distraught, and I immediately went to a Harry Potter moral. I asked him to remember what Dumbledore said about it being our choices that define us, rather than our abilities. I don't think my son really grasped that before. But when I said, 'Bonds has great abilities, but he made a bad choice, and that's really sad, because he's not doing that anymore and he's still hitting home runs. That means he had the ability all along and never needed to take the drugs. If he had just believed in his abilities and made the right choice, people would only ever talk about how great he is and not about a mistake he made." When presented with that analogy, my son was able to take a moral right out of Harry Potter and apply it to understanding something in his own life.
That's just one example. I can think of hundreds. So maybe there's no one big moral of the books, but there is a lot of small, but deep ones that help children through the mysteries and magic of their own lives.
Pam, who is hoping the elves don't delete her post because she mentioned baseball.
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