The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature

Author(s): Roberta Seelinger Trites

Source: Style , Vol. 35, No. 3, Conventions of Children's Literature: Then and Now (Fall
2001), pp. 472-485
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.35.3.472

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 Roberta Seelinger Trites
Illinois State University

The Harry Potter Novels as a

Test Case for Adolescent Literature

When I first read J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
(1997), I did not understand its mass appeal. It is clever and charming, but it is
also episodically plotted, relatively predictable, derivative of Baum, Lewis, and
Dahl, and it is altogether more sexist than it needs to be. But as I read the final
chapter, I discovered Rowling’s secret ingredients: the book portrays parents’ love
as omnipotent, and it provides a reassuring message about death. These represent
two of the most essential ingredients of children’s literature.1 As a whole, the series
also participates in the traditions of adolescent literature. As the characters in the
series grow older, the books shift solidly onto the terrain of adolescent literature.
The characters learn to recognize their autonomy from their parents, but death
becomes more threatening, more of a menace, than it is in the first Harry Potter
book. Moreover, the Potter books demonstrate another defining characteristic of
adolescent literature: the characters begin to explore their sexuality. Throughout
the series, the books also rely on social institutions to proscribe adolescents’ place
in society. Thus, as a series, the Harry Potter books provide us with the opportunity
to interrogate what constitutes adolescent literature.
Although the task of defining adolescent literature has engaged numerous
scholars, many do so by comparing the genre to adult rather than children’s litera-
ture. Certainly, both children’s and adolescent literature were greatly influenced by
Romanticism. Indeed, the first novels to focus on the transition between childhood
and adolescence were written during the Romantic era; Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship (1795-96) is often cited as the first such novel. Labeled “Bildung-
sromane” by such literary critics as Susanne Howe, G. B. Tennyson, and Jerome
Buckley, the coming-of-age novel focuses on the development of the adolescent
into an adult. Buckley, for example, defines an adult as one who has achieved the
capacity to work and love, but his model is relatively androcentric (22-23). Feminist
critics including Annis Pratt; Eve Kornfield and Susan Jackson; Barbara White; and
Elizabeth Abel, Elizabeth Langland, and Marianne Hirsch point out that the pattern
of development differs for the male and female protagonist. Female protagonists are
more likely to define maturity in terms of inner growth and familial relations than
they are in terms of achieving independence from their parents (Abel, et al., 8-11).
Regardless of the protagonist’s gender, however, critics of the Bildungsroman seek

472 Style: Volume 35, No. 3, Fall 2001

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The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature 473

to understand narrative structure in terms of character development.

But scholars of literature written specifically for adolescents—to which I refer
as “young adult literature”—are more likely to focus on issues of audience and
need than on paradigmatic stages of character development. Such critics as Ben
F. Nelms, Sheila Schwartz, Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen, Geraldine
DeLuca, Robert C. Small, Marilynn Olson, Michael Steig, Marc Aronson, and
Michael Cart tend to ask the implied questions “for whom is the novel written and
what is its purpose?” Peter Hollindale, for instance, singles out the epiphany as the
defining characteristic that provides adolescent novels with a cathartic function; he
firmly believes adolescents need the emotional outlet that books provide (116-32).
Maria Nikolajeva and Caroline Hunt also employ poststructural methodologies
to investigate how material culture infiltrates the genre to help define it. Most of
these critics still assume that depicting characters who grow is still an essential
component of the genre.
From my vantage point, however, the crux of defining adolescent literature
as distinct from children’s literature resides in the issue of power. While in chil-
dren’s literature, growth is depicted as a function of what the character has learned
about self, growth in adolescent literature is inevitably depicted as a function of
what the adolescent has learned about how society curtails the individual’s power.
The adolescent cannot grow without experiencing gradations between power and
powerlessness. Consequently, power is even more fundamental to the genre than
growth is. During adolescence, adolescents must learn their place in the power
structure by experiencing each of three interrelated issues: They must learn to
negotiate the many institutions that shape them, they must also learn to balance
their power with their parents’ power and with the power of authority figures in
general, and, finally, they must learn what portion of power they wield because
of and despite such biological imperatives as sex and death. Adolescents are em-
powered by institutions and their parents and by their knowledge of their bodies,
but by offering up rules and holding repercussions over their heads that limit their
newfound freedoms, these things also restrict them. Foucault tells us it is in the
very nature of power to be both enabling and repressive because it is omnipresent:
“power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes
from everywhere” (History of Sexuality 93).

Institutional Repression
Harry Potter, the disempowered orphan we meet at the beginning of the Harry
Potter books, is a classic example of adolescent growth being constructed in terms
of power that comes from everywhere. When we first meet Harry, he is pitiful in
a comic sort of way. He lives under the stairs at his aunt and uncle’s house. They
are his guardians because his parents are dead. On Harry’s eleventh birthday, he
magically receives a letter that tells him he is a wizard eligible to attend Hogwarts
School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Receiving the riches that his parents have

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474 Roberta Seelinger Trites

deposited at the wizards’ bank is only one part of the patrimony that subsequently
enables him. Suddenly the boy who has nothing has everything, including more
power than the family he is living with, those no-account, non-magical Muggles
(as those of us who are magic-deprived are called). Virtually all of the characters in
the book are obsessed with power, especially with increasing their magical powers.
In the initial story, these powers are defined as either “good” or “bad”: a character
in the first book reduces everything in Harry Potter’s world to a reductive power
binary when he comments, “There is no good and evil, there is only power, and
those too weak to seek it” (Sorcerer’s Stone 291). But as the series progresses, so
does the depiction of the moral complexity of power, and some characters’ powers
are portrayed ambiguously. In the third and fourth novels, for example, one of the
teachers in Harry’s school, Severus Snape, is portrayed as having an ambivalent
relationship with the leader of evil in the wizarding world. The dark forces—cur-
rently disempowered by Harry Potter and his parents—spend the entire series try-
ing to rebuild their power base. In each of the first four books Harry has enough
power to save the world from complete destruction. But his first and most important
empowerment comes from the sense of identity he has as a member of his school.
In the case of the Harry Potter books, school serves as the institutional setting
of socialization that teaches the protagonist both his abilities and his limitations.
As Gregory Maguire points out in the New York Times, that Rowling has coupled
the hero’s tale of apprenticeship with the school story accounts for much of the
series’ success. The books all partake of the formula familiar to readers of School
Stories: addressed to children from the point of view of a child, the texts are middle-
class in their perspective, and they follow a boy through several years at school
focusing on two types of adventures, competition at sports and moral adventures
(Clark 3-4). If the purpose of the School Story is to indoctrinate school-aged
children into their place in the market economy (Clark 4-5), then the Harry Pot-
ter books certainly succeed. While at Hogwarts, Harry learns the uses of money
and the problems with a social class system based on identity politics (including
learning to distinguish “pureblood” wizards, “mudblood wizards,” in whose veins
flows some rather unfortunate Muggle blood, and, worst of all, the subalterns of
the wizard world, Muggles). He learns the caste system of the supernatural world
(ghosts are superior to poltergeists, for example, and most wizards despise giants);
and he learns that those with the most honor ultimately have the most power. After
all, Dumbledore, the school’s headmaster, is the world’s most powerful wizard
because he is the most noble.
As class-conscious as most schools are, Hogwarts displays a dynamic traced by
Yoshida Junko that is present at the heart of many school stories. Borrowing from
Jeremy Bentham’s model for the ideal prison, Foucault depicts a “panopticon” as a
circular prison guarded by a central watchtower. Prisoners housed on the circumfer-
ence of the wheel theoretically behave themselves because they never know when
they are being watched (Foucault, Discipline 201). This model is at work in The

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The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature 475

Chocolate War (1974), by Robert Cormier (Yoshida 111). Certainly the students
at Hogwarts—who are watched not only by their teachers, but also by prefects,
by poltergeists, and even by the portraits on the wall—live in an atmosphere of
constant surveillance designed to remind them of their powerlessness. The greatest
testimony to the power Harry Potter’s father and his friends wield in Harry Potter
and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) is their ability to hide a portion of their magical
powers from their omniscient headmaster. This sense of institutional watchfulness
is present in most novels for adolescents, reinforcing for the adolescent reader the
impossibility of solipsism.2
Mikhail Bakhtin might note that the need for the panopticon exists in conjunc-
tion with the carnivalesque atmosphere present in all schools. The carnival exists
as a steam-letting measure that allows the masses to feel temporarily empowered
so that they will willingly retain their disempowered social status (195-206). At
Hogwarts, the trips to the local town and the occasional high-jinks tolerated by the
school faculty provide an antidote to their students’ sometimes overwhelming power.
The carnivalesque has, nevertheless, a constraining function since its ultimate goal
is to ensure the status quo. Thus, schools repress with authoritarian measures, such
as the panopticon, and they repress with allegedly antiauthoritarian measures, such
as carnivals—but in order to endure, the institution must necessarily invoke some
form of tolerable institutional repression. Harry and his friends coexist with this
system, recognizing it as especially necessary in an environment wherein magic has
empowered students far more than students in the average (Muggle) school. But
the fact remains: the school teaches them, increasing their knowledge and therefore
their power, while it simultaneously represses those powers. The very function of
such institutions as school, government, religion, identity politics, and family is
to serve as “Ideological State Apparatuses” that interpellate subjects as socially
constructed beings (Althusser 155). School is the institution that indoctrinates
Harry and his friends into the social state in which they live. Hogwarts does so by
simultaneously liberating and limiting the adolescents who live there. In almost
every adolescent novel, some institution exists that simultaneously increases and
decreases adolescents’ sense of their own power.

Parental Authority
If being empowered by institutional repression marks one necessary ingredi-
ent of adolescent literature, the adolescent’s ability to negotiate parental authority
marks another. According to Jacques Lacan, the child’s first emotional crisis must
be negotiated with the mother as the child moves from a stage of Imaginary one-
ness with her to a recognition that he is separate from her (Écrits 1-7, 197-99; see
also Natov 1-16). From there follows entry into the Symbolic Order, marked by
conflict with the Name-of-the-Father (Lacan, Écrits 199). For adolescent literature,
this translates into a necessary form of the Oedipal struggle that seems (at times
maddeningly) unavoidable for Western authors of adolescent literature. For critics

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476 Roberta Seelinger Trites

of the Bildungsroman, such as Buckley and Tennyson, the son’s ability to reject
the father is the critical component of maturity. Feminist scholars and those who
have learned from Lacan have a slightly more nuanced reading of the process
that includes the adolescent’s ability to (Imaginarily) identify with and eventually
separate from the mother.
In any event, Harry Potter displays both strands of crisis with parental authority.
For example, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry learns that his mother
saved him from certain death through sheer dint of her love for him. When Harry
was a baby, his family was attacked by the evil wizard Voldemort (often called—in
language that seems to parody Lacan—“He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”). Harry’s
mother has sacrificed her own life for her son’s. As a result, Voldemort can kill the
boy neither in that attack nor in subsequent attacks later in the series. Once Harry
realizes this, he feels loyally identified with his mother. In his memory, he exists
within her powerful love, is One with her, and so cannot be vanquished by this
masculinized agent of World Death.3 Harry struggles throughout his life with this
male agent of the Symbolic Order who would separate him from the inviolability
of his Imaginary existence with his mother. But, of course, his sense of Imaginary
Oneness with his mother can exist only because she is dead. The relationship is
therefore entirely imaginary in both the Lacanian and the non-Lacanian senses of
the term.
Harry’s father plays a prominent role in the third novel, Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of Azkaban, when Harry fears the Dementors, a type of incubus that sucks
people’s souls out of their bodies. From his father’s best friend—a thinly veiled
father-figure functioning in loco parentis—the boy learns to work a spell called
a “patronus” that evokes the spirit of the father to protect him from Dementors.
Harry’s ability to work the spell resides in his eventual perception that his father
lives within him; the boy has supplanted his father and become his father so that
now he can save himself from evil. Only because of this introjection is Harry fully
able to enter the Symbolic Order, an entry marked by his success in evoking the
necessary words of the spell that give him power over the (always and only male)
Dementors. It is as if Harry has created a spell out of words evoking his father in
logos parentis, if my violent yoking of heterogeneous languages can be forgiven.4
The physical absence of Harry’s father necessitates the boy’s creation of a symbolic
presence for his father to serve as a defense against death. When Harry defends
himself from death by creating his father out of words within his own mind, he has
experienced a misrecognition, a méconnaissance, that allows him to (mis)perceive
himself as an “‘Ideal-I,’ a person whole and entire, capable and independent”
(McGillis 42). With this action, the boy proves that Oedipus is alive and well at
Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry—and he proves the inseparability of
his growth from his perception of his power in relationship to his parents’ power.
A necessary component of every Harry Potter book is his conflict with the
power wielded by at least one of his teachers. Throughout the series, Harry and his

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The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature 477

friends conflict with Severus Snape, the potions teacher at Hogwarts. Harry also has
conflicts in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999) with a teacher named
Gilderoy Lockhart because Harry recognizes how duplicitous the man is. In Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he questions the authority of the journalist
named Rita Skeeter. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), Harry conflicts
with one of the Ministers of Magic. In all of these experiences, Harry is testing his
powers; but significantly, in all of them, he still manages to retain a tenable posi-
tion within Hogwarts as an institution. While he is able to confront authority, he
never completely overthrows it. He is never an agent of anarchy. Ultimately, all of
his actions serve to support the intentions of the headmaster, Albus Dumbledore,
so while Harry may appear rebellious, he is no iconoclast. In fact, although many
protagonists in young adult novels initially appear to be iconoclasts, few still are
by the end of a YA novel. Indeed, most have found subversive ways to work within
the system and still remain a part of it, drawing their own authority from a system
they once purported to resist.

Corporeal Limitations
In the fourth book of Rowling’s series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry
and his friends discover yet another dimension of power, that of their burgeoning
sexuality. The sexual tension that has been smoldering between Harry’s two best
friends, Ron and Hermione, begins to sizzle, and Harry himself is enamored of
Cho Chang. In the media hype that preceded the release of the fourth book, much
was made of the fact that Harry and his friends would discover sexual attraction in
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. That Rowling waited until the midpoint of the
series—the fourth book of a projected seven—reflects the cultural tendency to define
sexuality as the purview of maturation.5 No one can be surprised that adolescent
novels discuss sexuality far more often than children’s novels do. Experiencing
sexuality is almost a de rigueur rite of passage for adolescents. After all, part of
the titillation of sexuality for many teenagers resides in being able to rebel against
authority figures by enjoying a forbidden sexuality.
Far more interesting, however, is the connection between sex and death in
adolescent literature. Sex and death are linked in western discourse from at least
as far back as that Ur-story of human sexuality, Adam and Eve’s fall from the
Garden of Eden. Only once Eve discovers knowledge is she doomed to procreate
and to die. Thus, in western discourse, knowledge of sexual pleasure is inevitably
linked with power: sexuality and knowledge both empower and disempower Eve
(Foucault, History 53-73). In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Cho Chang,
Harry’s inamorata, also attracts the attention of Cedric Diggory, one of Harry’s
rivals for the Triwizard Cup in a tournament that involves three wizarding schools.
Among its many other uses in the narrative, the tournament is a mechanism for
Cedric and Harry to work out their male aggressiveness as they compete for the
attention of the same girl. By the tournament’s end, both Cedric and Harry have

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478 Roberta Seelinger Trites

descended to an underworld of death as they fight Voldemort, who is reborn into

a new body during the enterprise. And Cedric, one of the characters who has felt
sexually attracted to Cho Chang, dies there.
Sexuality and death are often linked in adolescent literature to depict the
carnality of the human body: experiencing sexuality is as important to maturation
as understanding that we are mortals who will die. Robert Cormier links sex and
death in the first chapter of The Chocolate War when the protagonist fleetingly
remembers his dead mother and he compares the thought to “seeking ecstasy’s
memory an instant after jacking off” (10). The protagonist of Aidan Chambers’s
Breaktime (1978) tries to distinguish his own authority from his father’s authority
in a quest that leads him to better understand both sex and death; in one scene, the
narrator describes a couple having sex in a coffin (130-31). In yet another example,
the protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s A House Like a Lotus (1984) finally under-
stands her mentor’s predatory sexuality only once she understands that it is linked
to the woman’s fear of death. Hugh and Irene, the double protagonists of Ursula
K. Le Guin’s The Beginning Place (1980), do battle with an incarnation of the fear
of death—a creature that smells of semen—and make love for the first time after
they have killed the creature. Given the frequency of this pattern in adolescent lit-
erature, it seems likely that as the Harry Potter series continues, Harry’s sexuality
will become even more clearly implicated in his understanding that death makes
us mortal. Accepting sexuality and mortality gives adolescents the ability to better
understand the power and limitations of their own bodies.
Moreover, according to Roland Barthes, accepting the death of the parent (the
ultimate authority figure) creates the ultimate grief, for from it the child learns of
his own mortality. Harry’s parents are dead; ergo, he himself is mortal. Perhaps
the greatest difference between children’s and adolescent literature resides in the
two genres’ implications about the limits of the human body. In children’s litera-
ture, death represents children’s separation from their parents (Coats 116-20); in
adolescent literature, death functions as the adolescent’s own awareness of herself
as Being-toward-death, the stage that Heidegger identifies as the individual’s rec-
ognition that her or his existence can be defined only in terms of her or his lack of
existence—that is, in terms of the limits of her or his own body (304-07).
Barthes employs photography as a metaphor that explains the objectification
of the individual inherent in her death. Every photographic image of a person that
captures the individual as an object transfixed in time is an artifact that contains
“this catastrophe” of death (Barthes 96). The photographed object, like the corpse,
is powerless, devoid of agency—except in Harry Potter’s world, where photographs
wave at the person watching them. Wizard photographs have agency, so they serve
as artifacts that defy death: Harry’s parents wave to him from a photograph album
in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (304) and in Harry Potter and the Pris-
oner of Azkaban (212). This denial of death’s power is symptomatic of the series’
conflicted attitude toward death. After all, the first book describes death as “the

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The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature 479

next great adventure” (297), effectively neutralizing death’s power and denying the
primacy of Being-toward-death in an adolescent’s self-definition. This tendency
to minimize death might seem odd unless we bear in mind that this is the very
nature of power, to both admit and deny, simultaneously to empower and repress
(Foucault, “Two Lectures” 88-92). Thus, marking the series’ obsession with death,
the photography metaphor at once affirms and denies the permanence of death.
Barthes notes that photography became established in the nineteenth century
(92) during an historical era in which death became removed from home life and
institutionalized by hospitals, morgues, and the funeral industry (Ariés 2). During
the same era, the Bildungsroman—the novel that codifies the inexorable growth
of the individual as s/he progresses one stage of life closer to death—became
entrenched in the Western literary canon. And, simultaneously, Freud taught
Westerners that sexual repression drove all of their impulses. In other words, as
the culture became fascinated with climaxes—as the culture became obsessed with
ending(s) and teleology—photography emerged simultaneously with the Bildung-
sroman, a genre about growing more sexual and nearer to death. This metaphori-
cal relationship between time passing and photography appears in a number of
late twentieth-century adolescent novels, including Block’s Witch Baby (1991),
Chambers’s Breaktime, Cross’s Pictures in the Dark (1996), Johnson’s Toning the
Sweep (1993), Krisher’s Spite Fences (1994), Lowry’s A Summer to Die (1977),
and Magorian’s Good Night, Mr. Tom (1981). The adolescents in these novels
contemplate various pictures in much the same way that Harry Potter pores over
photos of his parents. Once the protagonists gaze upon a recursive image repeated
with some sort of variation, however, they experience an epiphany that helps them
to reconcile themselves to Being-toward-death (Trites, “Narrative Resolution”
129-49). Harry, for example, has internalized the image of his father from gazing
at his photograph so often. When he sees himself from afar at a critical moment
in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he assumes that what he has seen is
his father. Later, he realizes that he has actually gazed upon himself in a magical
moment in which he has existed in duplicate. The significant point, however, is
that because of his physical resemblance to his father, he can acknowledge that
his father exists within him. This epiphany allows him to reconcile himself to his
father’s death and presumably to his own Being-toward-death. But the epiphany
has been enacted only because Harry’s father’s image has appeared with variation:
this time the image is Harry himself.
Peter Brooks notes that all novels are teleologically-oriented, that is, all nar-
ratives are created with the function of delaying their own climaxes—i.e., their
own deaths (97-109). According to Brooks, most narratives rely on recursive ac-
tions to delay their endings. We could say that they try to retain their power over
the reader by repeating events until resolution is achieved through repetition with
variation, as the recurring photographs of Harry Potter’s parents demonstrate. In
another example out of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and his

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480 Roberta Seelinger Trites

friend Ginny communicate with a boy named Tom Riddle through his enchanted
diary, an artifact of a boy presumed dead. Appearing numerous times, it provides
Harry with clues as to the whereabouts of the Chamber of Secrets. Not until the
diary appears repeated with variation, however, can the plot achieve resolution.
When the author of the diary reveals that Tom Riddle was his childhood name
before he became Lord Voldemort, Harry gains the knowledge that he needs to
defeat at least this manifestation of the evil wizard. He saves himself and others
from death, but, more important, he fulfills his parents’ destiny to defy the agent
of World Death. Harry—and the text itself—struggle against Being-toward-death
until the boy’s acceptance of his symbolic power allows the resolution of the plot
to effect the book’s demise.

The Limits of Adolescent Literature

Everything in adolescent literature is designed to teach adolescents their place
in the power structure. In order to mature, teenagers must understand that sexuality
is a powerful tool, that they are mortal and will therefore die, that they must both
break free from and accept the authority figures in their lives, and that they are
institutionally situated creatures, as all people are. If the use of institutions, if the
teenager’s rebellion against parental authority, if the adolescent protagonist and
the very narrative itself are Being-toward-death in a movement simultaneously
designed to admit and deny death’s power over the human body—then what is
the ideological message of the adolescent novel? With incredible consistency, the
answer is this: You shall know your power and that power shall set you free—that
is, until you begin to abrogate institutional power or parental power or sexual power
or the very power of death itself, in which case, the narrative will remind you of
your powerlessness as surely as Harry Potter must return at the end of every school
year to reside in relative impotence with his Muggle relatives.
Ultimately, most adolescent novels carry some ideological message that
reinforces the need for the adolescent to conform to the status quo. If we believe
Hollindale’s assertion that the power of adolescent literature lies in its cathartic
power for the reader, then asking the reader to internalize these continued messages
about the need for adolescents’ power to be limited is tantamount to destroying the
adolescent reader’s potential power. Generally speaking, most adolescent novels
make this argument at an implicit ideological level that is reinforced by issues of
narrative structure. For example, adult characters are more likely to be the intradi-
egetic narrators who express Ideological Truths than are adolescents. That is, adult
narrators who are interior to the text often have more authority than intradiegetic
child narrators (see Genette 227-37). The source of ideological authority in the
Harry Potter novels, then, makes this series’ implicitly conservative agenda clear.
An adult, Dumbledore, utters the theme(s) of every novel: “to have been loved so
deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection
forever” (Sorcerer’s Stone 299); or “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we

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The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature 481

surely are, far more than our abilities” (Chamber of Secrets 333); or “You think
the dead we loved ever truly leave us?” (Prisoner of Azkaban 427); or “Differences
of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are
open” (Goblet of Fire 723). These are the themes of popular psychology and popular
culture that many parents want their children to internalize. Not once in these four
novels does an adolescent proclaim a major theme. That a textually-constructed
adult (rather than a teenager) serves as the source of all this parentally-approved
wisdom reminds the reader that adults have more knowledge than adolescents, so
they must have more power. It follows logically that the only way for adolescents to
empower themselves is to quit being so adolescent. Grow up. Get over yourselves.
Moreover, the villain in this series is a figure who refuses to honor socially
sanctioned limits on power. That is, Voldemort is something of a teenager run
amok—a rebel who refuses to internalize the repression mandated by his civiliza-
tion. He wants to have power so he can use it to dominate others. In that sense, he
is the perfect foil for Dumbledore, who has power that he does not want to use. It
is Dumbledore’s self-control that marks his maturity, and Voldemort’s refusal to
capitulate to the power-in-check model proffered by the state or institution that
marks him as adolescent. And, of course, no good teenager would want to be like
that. It is with such messages to readers that adolescent literature is all-too-often
dedicated to teaching the intended reader that her or his subject position is inher-
ently flawed and will continue to be so until s/he becomes an adult. In that sense,
adolescent literature is probably the only genre in the world designed to propel the
reader out of her or his own subject position.
Lest I appear to be singling out the Harry Potter books (which I actually quite
enjoy) as somehow unusual or as a Betrayal Of The Sacred Trust of Adolescent
Literature, remember that I offer them as a test case. The Harry Potter novels are
among scores of adolescent novels that inculcate in teenagers their power relative
to institutions, authority, and the limits of the human body. Novels by Francesca
Lia Block, Bruce Brooks, Aidan Chambers, Susan Cooper, Robert Cormier, Gillian
Cross, Chris Crutcher, Peter Dickinson, Virginia Hamilton, S. E. Hinton, Mollie
Hunter, M. E. Kerr, Norma Klein, Madeleine L’Engle, Michelle Magorian, Mar-
garet Mahy, Walter Dean Myers, William Sleator, Mildred Taylor, Sue Townsend,
Cynthia Voigt, Barbara Wersba, Lawrence Yep, and Paul Zindel all display these
characteristics, as do virtually every YA novel published in English since Hinton’s
The Outsiders broke new ground for the genre in 1967.
In fact, the very existence of the YA novel depends on a cultural ability to
question the power relations that construct the individual. YA novels require at their
core the type of postmodern questioning of power relations traced by such theorists
as Barthes and Foucault and Lacan.6 Without the postmodern impetus to question
how a character like Harry Potter comes into being informed as a subject by the
social forces that act upon him, adolescent literature as we know it could not exist.
Without the postmodern imprimatur on iconoclasm, the institutionally-sanctioned

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482 Roberta Seelinger Trites

rebellion of adolescent literature would not be possible. Without the postmodern

injunction against blind acceptance of divinely-ordered authority, adolescent litera-
ture would be unable to depict teenagers temporarily rejecting authority. Without
the postmodern impulse to question the relationship between the individual and
institutional power, we would be left with the type of linear Bildungsroman that
was the darling of the Victorians.
But then, given that the genre’s underlying agenda may perhaps be to as-
sure adolescents that they need to get over themselves and just grow up, perhaps
adolescent literature is, as Jacqueline Rose would have us think of children’s lit-
erature, always already impossible. Indeed, adolescent literature may be as intent
on thwarting adolescent power as Lord Voldemort is on obliterating Harry Potter.

Notes
1
For a cogent description of the parent-child relationship in children’s litera-
ture, see Coats “Lacan with Runt Pigs.” Two of the standard articles on death in
children’s literature include Butler’s “Death in Children’s Literature” and Gibson
and Zaidman’s “Death in Children’s Literature.”
2
Significantly, Harry’s father bequeaths to him an invisibility cloak that allows
him to move about the grounds without being seen, and, indirectly, the Marauder’s
Map that shows the whereabouts of every teacher on the grounds at any given time.
But these two gifts function in the carnivalesque ways I describe below.
3
One of my friends assures me that Voldemort represents the epitome of capital-
istic evil because his name said aloud sounds essentially like “Walmart.” The more
standard interpretation of the name is that it derives from French, “Flight of Death.”
4
For more on the concept in logos parentis, see Trites, Disturbing the Uni-
verse 61-69.
5
Foucault distinguishes “sex” as a biological act from “sexuality,” which is
discursively constructed and ideologically confined (History 68-69).
6
See Trites, Disturbing the Universe 16-19.

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