Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She is the author of, among other books, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India and The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was.
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Vol. 22 No. 4 · 17 February 2000
pages 26-27 | 3499 words
Can you spot the source?
Wendy Doniger
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Bloomsbury, 317 pp, £10.99, July 1999, ISBN 0 7475 4215 5
Young Harry Potter’s parents are dead. So far, so good: many of the heroes and heroines of the classics of children’s literature are orphans, while others have invisible, unmentionable or irrelevant parents. The sorrow of grieving, not to mention the terror of helplessness, is quickly glossed over in favour of the joy of a fantasised freedom. (A particularly sharp 13-year-old patiently explained to me that if Harry’s parents weren’t dead, there would be no point in writing the book: it wouldn’t be interesting, no matter how many creative details there were.) The problem, for Harry Potter as for most orphans in children’s books, is not the absence of parents but the presence of step-parents. From infancy Harry has been raised by his horrid Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia Dursley, who hate him and dote on their own cruel and stupid son, Dudley Dursley; they starve Harry and, when he’s forced to spend summer holidays with them, they intercept his letters from his school friends, his only link with the world of people who care for him.
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[*] Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury, 223 pp., £4.99, 26 June 1997, 07475 3274 5).
[†] Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Bloomsbury, 251 pp., £4.99, 2 July 1998, 0 7475 3848 4).
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 5 · 2 March 2000
From Alice Burnett
Was the assumption in Wendy Doniger's article on Harry Potter (LRB, 17 February) that those over 12 who read the LRB wouldn't read the Harry Potter books? Or that those over 12 who read the LRB and the Harry Potter books are an emotionally grounded lot who wouldn't be upset at having the end of The Prisoner of Azkaban divulged? Or maybe that those over 12 who read the LRB are such an advanced species that they would all have finished reading The Prisoner of Azkaban by now? Hoping she meant the last, I confess that I am about to start Chapter 10, 'The Marauder's Map', and so, sadly, am a little less advanced than my fellow LRB/Harry Potter readers.
Alice Burnett
London SW1
Vol. 22 No. 7 · 30 March 2000
From Ole Jann
I am a 13-year-old boy from Germany. Wendy Doniger's article about Harry Potter (LRB, 17 February) tells us that 'Harry has been raised by his horrid Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia Dursley,' who 'starve Harry, and when he's forced to spend summer holidays with them, they intercept his letters from his schoolfriends, his only link with the world of people who care for him'. So far, so good, but the Dursleys intercept letters from Hogwarts, his school: not from his schoolfriends. How could they? The little house elf Dobby intercepts these letters before the Dursleys can. (Dobby thinks there's a plot against Harry at Hogwarts and so wants to stop him going back there. Dobby thinks that Harry won't return if nobody writes to him.)
Ole Jann
Potsdam
