What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [65:46-70:47]

Bell asks her father for a humble rose, unlike the expensive gifts her siblings desire. And yet, as is typical of fairy tale endings, both of these heroines wind up marrying into the aristocracy. So it's a virtue not to desire wealth and status, yet that virtue is rewarded by getting wealth and status anyway. Potter has the same contradiction. Like Cinderella, Harry starts as a humble servant, abused by his family. No money is spent on him and his prospects are low. Then he's whisked away to a fairy tale world where he has wealth and status, and a fancy broomstick. Modesty is still a virtue. Harry chooses not to align with the wealthy elite, instead choosing friends without wealth or status respectively. But it's still a very materialistic story. There's a whole chapter in the first book about Harry using his newfound wealth to go on a shopping spree. Similarly, fairy tales have their own contradictions of beauty bias. It's wrong to judge by appearances. A frog may be a prince, an old crone may be an enchantress, etc. And yet, fairy tales also tend to associate beauty with goodness, handsome knights and fair maidens, which has a racist connotation too, light versus dark. Austria argues that all fairy tales suffer an innate contradiction between radicalism and traditionalism. While Potter may attempt to advocate radical ideas of social change, it finds itself limited by the folklore and fairy tales it's quibbing from. Austria doesn't see these contradictions as purely a failing on Joanne's part, but instead a failing of fairy tales as a genre. Yeah, I don't think reliance on fairy tale traditions sufficiently explains all the contradictions in Potter. Again, how hard would it have been not to portray ourselves as inherent slaves? Austria does say Joanne is not writing as radical a fairy tale as other writers of the time. Nevertheless, I agree that Potter is limited by making a point about equality and meritocracy in a traditional story about a chosen hero. These ideas were never going to mesh. So how come this didn't break Potter right from the start? Well, for the same reason, they don't break other fairy tales. Austria quotes literary critic Peter Hollendale, who argues children's stories are inherently didactic, they're educational in some way. Even if it's not an esop style fable when an adult author writes to children, there's always going to be an element of imparting knowledge to the next generation, which means the core message, the lesson, carries a lot of weight in determining the meaning of a text. Hollendale's main argument draws a distinction in children's literature between three kinds of ideology, active ideology, passive ideology, and what others have later dubbed organic ideology. Active ideology exists in the surface-level reading, what the text explicitly states as its lesson. In Potter, it's that bigotry is evil and love is the greatest power. Passive ideology lies in the text's assumptions and biases, what the text says without necessarily meaning to. Like Potter's assumed essentialism, the lack of systemic change, and organic ideology is found in the ideas the text draws from the world, our culture, language, and history. In Potter, that'd be fairy tales, folklore, the culture of boarding schools, British imperialism, and so on. Bar talked about this too. One reason a text cannot have a singular voice of the author is because authors create meanings by drawing on the voices of authors who came before them. And Hollendale says it's actually not unlikely that active and passive ideologies will contradict each other. Because in didactic children's literature, new and radical ideas can only work in active ideology. If the lesson isn't communicated on the active surface level, a child reader might not recognize it. And in order for the lesson to be persuasive, you've also got to meet the kids where they're at, which means making some passive assumptions. Radical ideas are only effective when contrasted against something a child reader finds familiar, like fairy tales, or the school yard, or modern society in general, which come with their own organic ideologies, all of which is to say, a text never has just one ideology. In numerous commentaries on children's fiction, not to mention many novels themselves, a customary era is to make the wrong implicit analogy by treating ideology as if it were a political policy when, in fact, it is a climate of belief. Potter isn't putting forth a coherent ideological manifesto. It's a hodgepodge of ideas and attitudes, interacting and colliding, sometimes in contradictory ways.