A Wizard of Their Age

Critical Essays from the Harry Potter Generation

Cecilia Konchar Farr, Cecilia Konchar Farr

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781438454481
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Wizard of Their Age began when the students in Cecilia Konchar Farr's "Six Degrees of Harry Potter" course at St. Catherine University kept finding errors in the available scholarship. These students had been reading Harry Potter for their entire literate lives, and they demanded more attention to the details they found significant. "We can do better than this, " they said. Konchar Farr, two undergraduate teaching assistants, and five student editors decided to test that hypothesis. After issuing a call for contributions, they selected fifteen thoughtful academic essays by students from across the country. These essays examine the Harry Potter books from a variety of perspectives, including literary, historical, cultural, gender, mythological, psychological, theological, and genetic—there is even a nursing care plan for Tom Riddle. Interspersed among the essays are brief vignettes entitled "My Harry Potter Story, " where students write about their personal encounters with the novels. Although a quick Internet search yields a dazzling number of books about Harry Potter, few are as deeply invested or insightful as A Wizard of Their Age. Written and edited by—and for—members of the Harry Potter generation, these essays demonstrate this generation's passionate engagement with the Harry Potter phenomenon and provide numerous critical insights into the individual novels and the series as a whole.

PART I

Muggle Studies

One

The Harry Potter Phenomenon

Locating the Boy Wizard in the Tradition of the American Bestseller

KATE GLASSMAN

When Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published in 1997, its first UK print run was a paltry five hundred copies, three hundred of which were distributed to libraries (Fraser). Taking on the new, more fantastical-sounding title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the boy wizard crossed the pond in 1998 to sell roughly 6 million copies over the next year in the United States (Bowker Annual 2000, 651,656). Ten years after children and adults alike picked up a book about a scrawny, bespectacled boy who discovered he could do magic, the final installment hit shelves at midnight on July 21, 2007, and Deathly Hallows sold 8.3 million copies in a single day. No other book in history has sold so well in so short a time (Stevenson 279). J. K. Rowling’s seven-part series went from “good read” to global phenomenon in the span of a decade and in doing so had a profound and enduring effect on the publishing industry and the way in which the literate world conceptualizes a “bestseller.”

It took Rowling five years to plan the series once the concept of Harry Potter and his magical world arose in 1991 (Fraser). Almost every fan knows the anecdote of how a down-on-her-luck Rowling had the idea come to her on a train to Manchester and knew right away that Harry’s story would take him through seven books. Though Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997, it took several attempts before the Christopher Little Agency finally agreed to represent her and nearly a year and twelve dozen publishers before Bloomsbury Press took on the book for publication (MacDonald 40). Three days after her novel was published in the United Kingdom, “Scholastic Books bid a record-breaking $105,000 to publish the book in the United States” (MacDonald 41).

Though Harry Potter arrived quietly on the scene in 1997, it had just begun a relative groundswell when Scholastic released it in the United States a year after its UK debut. Once stateside, the inaugural book of the series—newly renamed Sorcerer’s Stone—slipped by virtue of water-cooler gossip and word-of-mouth reviews onto the New York Times bestseller list. By July of the following year, Sorcerer’s Stone had spent thirty weeks on the list—just fourteen weeks short of its entire time on the market (Maughan, “Halo”). The demand for the next installment was so immediately prevalent and emphatic that the 1998 UK edition of Chamber of Secrets—not due to arrive in US bookstores until September of 1999—was being bought off the Bloomsbury website and shipped to the United States in significant and therefore concerning numbers. Michael Jacobs, senior vice president of trade at Scholastic, announced in February of 1999 that despite the growing demand and cross-territorial consumerism, Scholastic had no plans to change its September publication date (Maughan, “Race”). Not a month and a half later, however, the publisher had to bow to the masses in order to staunch the potential hemorrhaging of sales and announced their modified plan to release Chamber of Secrets a full three months ahead of schedule (Maughan, “Potter’s Publication”). By the time Prisoner of Azkaban was ready for publication, the release dates were only three months apart; however, the phenomenon that Harry Potter was to become found its catalyst in Goblet of Fire.

By the April before Goblet of Fire’s July release date—before its name had even been changed from the tentative title of Harry Potter and the Doomspell Tournament—the book had been in the number-one spot (or at least in the top five) on Amazon’s bestseller list for months (“New Heights”). Though only a year stood between Goblet of Fire and its predecessor, the simultaneous US and UK release created a synergistic buzz of excitement the likes of which had never before been witnessed in the literary domain. As with any icon of popular culture, with success came controversy. The militant demands for the series to be banned in schools and public libraries, or to be burned rather than chosen for another print run, spread across the United States in tandem with the nation’s increased fan base, which represented a correlating increase in the number of impressionable children in danger of Rowling’s supposedly sinister promotion of witchcraft and anti-Christian morals. Parallel to the apparent moral crisis, Goblet of Fire brought with it the second real issue of publishing ethics for the series. Though it was by no means the last issue Harry Potter would face in that industry, the book represented the discernible turn in the series’ popularity as well as the books’ rising share of controversy, dispute, and forced reformation of publishing practices.

With Goblet of Fire set to debut July 8, 2000, Amazon announced that it would ship overnight to 250,000 customers for arrival on July 8 (Milliot and Maughan). The implications of this announcement—that Amazon would receive copies of the coveted fourth book before other booksellers, and that the aforementioned novel would be in transit for delivery a full twenty-four hours before it was to be available to the public at large—sent both booksellers and consumers into a frenzied tailspin. Surely there was some ethical publishing injustice in this. Scholastic’s Michael Jacobs was prompted once again by public outcry to release a statement regarding Amazon’s supposed distribution privileges: “When we found out from Bloomsbury that they were allowing non-walk-in, pre-sold copies of the book to be shipped on July 7th for delivery on July 8th, we decided we could allow our accounts the same opportunity,” Jacobs announced (Milliot and Maughan). Yet not all accounts were created equal. Any booksellers who wished to ship books on July 7 were required to provide Scholastic with proof of a “secure plan” that included receipt of the shipment, organization of orders, employee confidentiality, and timed delivery (Milliot and Maughan).

This stringent control of security and protection against the preemptive leaking of the book’s implied, and therefore highly coveted, secret contents became one of the tamer protection requirements bestowed upon the series by the time Harry Potter reached his final battle in 2007. As is often the case with anything from album release parties to Oscar winners, taking strict care not to divulge any information or details to the public at large is a surefire way to increase both the fanatic frenzy and the energy with which fans attempt to ferret out those details in spite of (or because of) the heightened security. However, the kerfuffle regarding Amazon’s overnight shipping was nothing compared to the serious policy change that came out of the New York Times in response to the series’ increasing popularity and domination of its weekly bestseller list in the Book Review.

By the year 2000, three of the Harry Potter books had already been published in the United States, and the series, by June 25, had been on the New York Times’ bestseller list for seventy-nine weeks (Smith). A year and a half after Sorcerer’s Stone made its unheralded appearance on the bottom of the list, “the top three places on the hardcover fiction list were held by Rowling titles” (Garner). With another book on the way—easily predicted to take up the fourth slot on the list—the New York Times announced it would begin printing a separate bestseller list for children’s books starting on July 23 (Smith). While some publishers had spent months pushing for just such a change, others considered the change both a politically timed blow to the series and a detrimental limitation of books’ classification on a grander scale.

Harry’s move to the children’s list implied that it was meant only for children, a sentiment confirmed by the New York Times’ deferring to the books’ publisher, Scholastic, to decide whether it was a series for adults or children (they indicated it was the latter). When examining the progression of the series as a whole, the irony of the move is even more frustrating. Just as the books began to take on an adolescent—even adult—tone, they were moved to a specialized children’s list. Barbara Marcus, president of the Scholastic Children’s Book Group, notes that 30 percent of the first three Harry Potter books were purchased by and for a reader thirty-five years or older: “It would seem to me that if we were tracking adult bestselling reading behavior, one would say that the book should be on both lists” (Bolonik). Yet the sixty-eight-year-old national institution chose instead to debut its first new offshoot in sixteen years, all on account of a wizard who—though inspiring millions to read—was childishly keeping new adult titles off the bestseller list.

Though the initial debate was furious—the new children’s list being called anything from a “lucrative niche” to a “ghetto” where cross-generational books like Harry Potter are shuffled off to in shame—representatives of the New York Times insisted that the children’s list would remain a permanent fixture in the Book Review, a statement which up to this point has remained true. While there was no demonstrable fallout from the move, nor any significant decrease in adult consumerism as a result of the new categorization, Potter fans were dealt yet another blow in 2004 when, in the interim between books 5 and 6, a further offshoot of the bestseller list was instigated for children’s “series” books, which “ignored the sale of individual titles and instead tracked each series as a whole” (Garner).

Given its extensive build-up, the New York Times’ controversial plan to move Harry Potter from the adult bestseller list to one reserved for children’s titles, and the alluringly off-limits connotation Goblet of Fire derived from its jump in security, it should have been unsurprising when 3 million copies of the book were sold over the release weekend, not including the 180,000 copies of the audio book shipped by Listening Library—the largest lay out ever for a children’s audio title (Mutter and Milliot).

Then, at the peak of the public’s rising awareness, fans were crushed when Rowling announced that Harry’s quest to defeat the Dark Lord in Order of the Phoenix would not arrive in print for another three years. Fans were kept from spiraling into a complete depression only by the advent of the Harry Potter movie franchise, with the first cinema adaptation (of Sorcerer’s Stone) opening in theaters November 14, 2001. With the first film came a merchandising blitzkrieg. Bookstores, toy stores, and shopping centers were filled with toy wands, vibrating broomsticks, plasticized action figures, trading cards, wizarding world candies, House scarves, coloring books, and Potter renditions of board game classics. Daniel Radcliffe’s twelve-year-old face papered the sides of double-decker buses on Tottenham Court Road and stretched across cardboard cutouts in the lobbies of US theaters. Voldemort might have risen again, but while it would take three years for readers to find out what his return meant for the safety of the wizarding world, Potter fans were adamant about celebrating the boy wizard’s back catalog.

It was during this hiatus from the books that Harry Potter fans took it upon themselves to spread the love, so to speak. Three years was more than enough time for the fans to work themselves into a frenzy, recruiting more readers by the sheer force of their enthusiasm and zeal. Others were pulled onto the vastly overcrowded bandwagon by way of cinema—the movie debuts of both Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets drew significant crowds of movie-lovers, many of whom then felt either obligated or encouraged to pick up the books. With the adaptations acting as something of a gateway drug into the Potterverse, the premiere dates of both movies correlated with an increase in sales for the earlier four novels as a second wave of fans succumbed to the intoxicating literary high that the first wave of die-hard Potter devotees had been riding for four years.

It became an issue of cultural standing, potentially the first literary status symbol, for children and young adults—kids the world over wanted to be in on the discussion, especially since “by May 2001, nearly three out of four kids ages 11–13 had read at least one Harry Potter volume,” according to the NPD Group (Hallett). It wasn’t enough to see the movies. If you didn’t want to be the kid sitting alone in the classroom while everyone else debated House superiority, you had to get your hands on the books, and fast. At the turn of the millennium, Harry Potter had become a staple of the world’s popular culture, and as sociologist Dustin Kidd writes in “Harry Potter and the Functions of Popular Culture,” “popular culture, like crime, is a necessary and healthy element of modern society” (71).

In the interim between books 4 and 5, Rowling published two companion pieces to the Harry Potter series, Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, under the pseudonyms Kennilworthy Whisp and Newt Scamander, respectively. Eva Mitnick of the School Library Journal noted at the time, “Harry Potter fans who pride themselves on knowing every minute bit of Hogwarts trivia will devour both books” (“J. K. Rowling”). The two books were quickly amalgamated into the Potter lexicon, and a new brand of microanalysis took hold in a fan base with relatively no new material to distract them from doing otherwise. Fans created catalogues of Famous Witch or Wizard cards, league standings for favored Quidditch teams, and hundreds of theories on topics ranging from Professor Albus Dumbledore’s true desire in the Mirror of Erised to Voldemort’s plans for renewed dominion over the wizarding world post–Goblet of Fire. Fan forums and news sites began to spring up across the internet, including the inception of some of the greatest online Harry Potter resources to date; both The Harry Potter Lexicon (hp-lexicon.org) and The Leaky Cauldron (the-leaky-cauldron.org) appeared on servers in 2000 on the heels of MuggleNet’s (mugglenet.com) arrival in the fall of 1999 (Vander Ark; Anelli; Spartz). Though many started as a simple rolling newsfeed, over the following ten years they have become comprehensive and reliable databases of canonical information, spirited discussion, and entertaining journalism regarding all things Potter (see chapter 2 in this volume).

The growing internet presence (represented here by the three aforementioned sites) fac...