Harry Potter, the Wizard of Earthsea, and the Difference Between American and British Wizards
This past week while doing some book sorting, I came across two books that by random accident were sitting side-by-side on one of my shelves. One was J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire, the other Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Which, when you think about it, is somewhat fitting. Both books tell the story of a young boy — the eponymous Potter, and Ged/Sparrowhawk, respectively — each of which whom grows up to become a wizard. Each boy begins from the lowliest of beginnings to become the greatest hero of his age. Each has a powerful, elderly mentor that acts as a spirit guide as well as an instructor. Each wears facial scarring that mark early-life incidents with magical evils.
Despite all of their similarities (and despite the fact that I truly love each series of books), the truth is I can only like the hero Harry Potter even as I love the hero Ged. The reason for this is nothing more than the accident of birth that made me American. Harry Potter, you see, is designed in the mold of the classic British hero, while Ged is his American counterpart. And that, for me, makes all the difference in the word.
In British lore, the classic hero is always identified by having the right bloodline. (This bloodline doesn’t always have to do with aristocracy, though it often does). Britain is a country historically weened on the concept of peerage meaning everything, and that viewpoint has bled deeply into its culture. This is why in so many rags-to-riches stories in British folklore those who ascend do so because they are lost scions whose identity had been previously disguised — sometimes even to the heroes themselves. In the quintessential British story, a character’s… well, character leans heavily on his or her peerage. The sword gave for Arthur not because he was a great man or had accomplished great or even good deeds. It released itself to him because he carried his father’s bloodline. This is why, as a hero, Harry Potter is so very British. In Rowling’s story, his destiny comes to him directly because of his peerage, as does most everything else. Why is Harry such a brave, principled, and noble person? Because his parents, who didn’t raise him and were people he never really knew, were themselves brave, principled, and noble. This is true for just about everyone else in the Harry Potter universe. Whatever a child does in the books, it is almost always a reflection of their bloodline — even when that bloodline is villainous. Voldemort may have been raised an orphan, but it is less the orphanage than the Riddle-Guant family tree that Rowling looks to to explain his eventual dark nature.
Le Guin’s Ged, on the other hand, is a fairly prototypical American hero. Born of lowly means, his heroism is largely painted as a reflection of Ged’s individual self and not his peerage. Like Harry, Ged’s parents died when he was a mere baby. But unlike Rowling, Le Guin doesn’t have the story (or Ged’s nature) hang on a parental plot reveal. Indeed, neither Ged nor the reader ever learn much of anything about his parents; their sole function in the story is to act as a kind of marker of humble birth which accentuates the individual growth and achievements of Ged. While Harry’s bloodline makes him an inherently good, kind, generous, and decent person from page one (despite his cruel upbringing and lack of even a single positive role model), Ged begins Earthsea without those qualities. Where Harry arrives at being a good person via an accident of birth, Ged must achieve these qualities through trials of fire. While Harry is a literary testament to the English proverb “blood will out,” Ged is the image of America’s quintessential hero-myth: the self-made man.
Of course, none of this means that Ged is a better hero than Harry, or that the Earthsea Trilogy is a better set of books, or that Le Guin is a better writer than Rowling. It simply means that, being an American, I find that Ged’s claim to Hero feels quite natural, while Harry’s has always made me uncomfortable. This is true of my reaction to much of British literature, in fact, including Lord of the Rings. And as I’ve noted here before, I especially have problems with Jane Austen’s books for this very reason. The thought that I’m supposed to cheer for the female protagonist because she has succeeded in winning the affections of the bachelor with the best bloodline in town is one that makes me bristle rather intensely. Fans of Austen tell me that I have to look past that, and see that for the time they were written the books are quite progressive. And I do get that, of course.Still, if I’m being honest I find Austen-lovers rely pretty heavily on the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too reasoning that people who tell me Soul Man is hilarious do.[1]
Now, of course, I wonder: does this national sensibility go in both directions? Somewhere in London right now, is there some man or woman reading the Earthsea trilogy saying to themselves, “Sure, that Ged seems a nice enough wizard, but come on. How does Le Guin expect us to root for someone that lacks the proper breeding to be worthy of our admiration?” Or is this a unilateral and strictly American thing?
[1] If you have never seen the 1986 screwball comedy Soul Man, allow me to kindly suggest that you keep it that way. If you are among the lucky set that have never seen it, Soul Man is one of those works that allows white liberal audiences to pat themselves on the back and nod along to the message of how totally non-racist white liberal audiences are while they sit and watch a movie that doesn’t seem to understand how embarrassingly racist it is.
In the movie, C. Thomas Howell plays a spoiled rich kid who gets into Harvard, but whose spoiled rich Beverly Hills parents tell him they won’t pay for tuition. To pay for Harvard, Howell’s character — who is white — dyes his skin black and a week later wins one of those full-ride scholarships they only give to African Americans. All of the subsequent humor is played off of the stereotypes that white people stereotypically have about black people, but it does so in a way that reinforces those same stereotypes. For example, when he arrives at Harvard and everyone thinks he’s black, no one understands why Howell isn’t naturally good at basketball. (Get it? He isn’t naturally good at basketball because he’s not really black!) Girls he sleeps with don’t understand why his penis isn’t massively big. (Get it? He isn’t well-endowed because he’s not really black!) The one actual African American girl he meets — who was slated to win the scholarship he did before he stepped in last minute — can’t understand how he was so smart to win the scholarship so effortlessly. (Get it? He’s actually really smart because he’s not really black!)
I find the entire movie pretty gross.
[Pictures: Harry Potter posters, via Wikipedia. Earthsea book covers, also via Wikipedia.]
Then I think you’d like Uprooted.Report
Hmmm. At the risk of performing an act the moral equivalent of which is defending Soul Man, let me just put in a word for Austen. Look, there’s no question she’s got some icky views about birth and rank (as she might put it), especially in Emma and Sense and Sensibility. I do look past it because I find so much else valuable in her novels (as I look past Shakespeare’s anti-Semitism and sexism, without ignoring or excusing). I understand why someone would be either unable to do that, or immoral of me to do that. I see it as something I have to live with and acknowledge in engaging in the works that I value for other reasons. They are moral and aesthetic defects, but not deal-killers (to me).
However, I would like to say that Austen’s view on birth and rank is not totally cut-and-dried awfulness (although it is partly!). It’s worth noting that while most (not all) of her *male* protagonists are top drawer, half of her female protagonists have non-aristocratic immediate forbears: Fanny in Mansfield Park, Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, Catherine in Northanger Abbey. In the conclusions of their novels, Fanny and Elizabeth are both shocking marriage partners from the men’s point of view, women so declasse that the men’s families make vigorous objections. And of course, the men are portrayed as having done the right thing by ignoring family protests and marrying them. (In Mansfield Park, the family has so completely fallen apart that they just give up objecting out of exhaustion.)
The exception to the toff male protagonists is in Persuasion, where the guy is the second son (gasp) of a gentleman, but seeks to marry above his level by pursuing a baronet’s daughter. He has to go out and earn money by his skill in the navy (which probably involved plundering, but that’s offscreen), but he’s seen as all the more admirable for that. Also in that novel (her last, and prehaps her views were evolving – she died at 42), the baronet is something of a dope. He loses all his money and must rent out his ancestral home. The guy who rents it is another navy man, an admiral. Austen makes very clear that the admiral (who earned his money instead of inheriting it) is clearly the more admirable (ha) man, and is far more deserving of the ancestral pile than a ridiculous baronet.
But I digress. I need to read LeGuin.Report
If we can talk about bloodlines without offending Tod, LeGuin’s books often including
anthologicalanthropological insights, which is unsurprising because her father was Alfred L. Kroeber (the K. in Ursula K. LeGuin).ReportI wonder if this is why Ged is black.Report
@mike-schilling I just spent an embarrassingly long time wondering what you meant by “anthological insights” (The protagonist is the best compiler of short fiction imaginable!) before I focused on the name Kroeber.
Where should I start with LeGuin?Report
Earthsea is excellent, as are the novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. And there are some wonderful stories in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, which includes the famous The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.Report
The characterization of Austen novels seems off to me. You clearly cannot learn everything you need to know about a character’s, um…, character by looking at the parents. Just taking Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Wickham’s failings aren’t due to his parentage. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s bloodline is exquisitely flawless. At the same time, Jane’s Aunt and Uncle Gardner are probably the two most sensible characters in the book, and they are only barely within the gentry class. Yes, Mr. Darcy is filthy rich, but so is Lady Catherine, and no one in the book who matters assumes that Mr. Darcy’s wealth equates to quality of character.Report
@richard-hershberger Yes! I forgot about Uncle (and Aunt) Gardner, whose purpose in the novel (besides forwarding some plot points) is to be a dignified, respectable couple who are not gentry. They are a counterpoint to Lady Catherine, who is not only ridiculous, but is the person most attached to the importance of rank.
Worth noting too, that the characteristic that makes Mr. Collins most ridiculous is his attention to rank and his superciliousness with Lady Catherine. We are supposed to admire Elizabeth for mouthing off to her. Forgive the extremely long quote, but I think it is illustrative of Austen on class. It is Elizabeth speaking to Lady Catherine. Lady C is trying to persuade Elizabeth not to marry her nephew, Mr. Darcy.
Report
Luke Skywalker is a very American creation, consider who his dad is. Superhero comics – which can be intensely American – feature X being Y’s kid all the time.
Hidden lineages are a common fairy tale idea, dating back as far as folk tale compilations go; your examples are probably not illustrative. It is probably true that British populism/egalitarianism is drawn more along class lines than individual ones, though (eg it is important that the lowborn, stereotypically Irish Weasley family are relatable, decent folk that the hero marries into, whereas the aristocratic highborn Malfoy family are incorrigibly arrogant and evil, even if this implies awkward things about heredity).Report
Now i want to see Lily Potter come back as a cow, and then get slaughtered so her son has something to eat.
/morbid
/what? it’s the Indian version!Report
+∞
The rest of Austin’s work is very good, but Persuasion is spectacularly good.Report
In LOTR, the real hero is not Aragorn, nor Frodo, but good ol’ commoner Sam ‘Rudy’ Gamgee.
And all the kids in Narnia started off as urban London middle/working class before become kings and queens.Report
Even if you take Frodo as the hero, Frodo/Bilbo (and indeed all hobbits) are shown to be unconcerned overmuch with ranks and titles and hierarchies (though obviously families are still important). Hobbits are supposed to be almost aggressively, comically “normal” and pedestrian.Report
True. And the Welsh liked being made fun of…Report
Probably because I’m old and cynical now, but these days I see the “heroes” in LOTR and the Potter series as Gandalf and Dumbledore. Both cold-hearted old bastards that hone people as tools used in manipulative schemes spread over decades. Both with a carefully constructed facade as a jolly harmless old wizard. Some day I’ll be tempted to do fanfic for the Potter universe as seen from that Dumbledore’s perspective.
One of the things that makes the Earthsea series enjoyable is that Ged isn’t cast in that mold.Report
I’ve got a fanfic rattling around my skull about a foreign exchange student turning Hufflepuff against Dumbledore. He seems a bit too much like Santa Claus… and who trusts the whitebeard in a jolly red suit going “ho ho ho”?Report
@michael-cain
Both cold-hearted old bastards that hone people as tools used in manipulative schemes spread over decades. Both with a carefully constructed facade as a jolly harmless old wizard. Some day I’ll be tempted to do fanfic for the Potter universe as seen from that Dumbledore’s perspective.
…you do know that’s already a trope in HP fanfic, right? Along with a related plot of Harry realizing this and escaping from Manipulative!Dumbledore’s clutches.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FandomSpecificPlot/HarryPotter
(Search for Manipulative Bastard)Report
I’ll give you Sam (although the whole series is one big “race X is Y because of breeding” message), but Peter Susan Edmund and Lucy are kings and queens purely because they are “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.” Literally their entire qualification is about lineage.Report
Isn’t everyone? I mean, who really traces their lineage to Lillith?Report
Actually, in Narnia, this is rather questionable. I don’t think it ever *is* explained where the other humans come from, but I don’t think it’s earth.Report
Kim’s right, but that makes their entire qualification about their race. Which is not better (and almost certainly worse). Otoh, the number of fantasy stories where the protagonist is not some sort of ‘chosen one’ for one reason or another is vanishingly small. And any world with anthropomorphic sentient non-humans makes some dogged implications – e.g. Pluto v Goofy.Report
Wasn’t Soul Man that bad movie starring Jim Carey as a Harvard law student who pretended to be black to get into Harvard? I think I watched on Comedy Central when I was in high school out of sheer boredom. It was pretty bad. The fitting end would have been if Jim Carey’s character got a criminal charge pressed against him and good kick in the balls. At best you can say it falls into the genre of “well-meaning but.”
On the main topic, I don’t think you can make a judgment on the entire fantasy genre in America and the United Kingdom because of two series of books. There are lots of American fantasy series or American books in general that also put a very emphasis on birth and blood as determining character. In David Edding’s the Belgariad, the hero was literally a product of destiny along with everybody else. The actual Tarzan of the books was superior because of his British aristocratic blood. There are other less deliberate examples like the play the Bad Seed, where the adopted girl is a psychopath because her birth mother is a psychopath. Its just that American readers do not recognize this because it manifests more “scientifically” in American books. Its about genetics, blood, and the big American bugbear of race rather than class.Report
What’s Dune doing with the concept of breeding?
Is it actually lampshading the concept…?Report
Dune is the trio of Abrahamic theology IN SPACE. I never thought about it, but there is probably an element of ‘what if Matthew 1:1-16 was only Matthew 1:1-15?’.Report
C. Thomas Howell rather than Jim Carrey, but yeah, you have the idea.Report
Wasn’t there a paragraph or two in the OP on it?Report
Yes. Our Tod put a synopsis of Soul Man in a footnote.Report
Robinson Crusoe is the quintessential example of “Put An Enlightenment Man In The Jungle And He’ll Be Running The Place After A Year Or So”.Report
I’d think The Mysterious Island even more so. Crusoe is still wearing skins and living in a rough hut, while Verne’s group includes an engineer, and within a few months they’ve got all the comforts of home.Report
Otoh, Hermoine, who is essential to saving Harry’s butt on numerous occasions and clearly one of the best student wizards in the school (certainly better than Harry), comes from muggle parents.
And Ron, who is in many ways the Samwise Gangee character, comes from ‘lower class’ wizard stock.Report
Yes, I was thinking that about Hermione. And how Draco is clearly shown to be a jerk for making a big deal about blood. Harry’s parents, too, were born Muggles (IIRC).Report
Hermione’s parentage always seemed a sop to me. You still have to have the wizard gene to be a wizard. A muggle can’t study magic like you study engineering and end up a wizard. The series also ends with Hermione erasing herself from memory and fully joining the wizard world.Report
@leeesq
There seems to be a not-gone into recessive gene thing that makes someone a Wizard.Report
The gene could have been recessive in both her parents. Two full wizard parents sometimes had kids with functionally no magic power, I forget the disparaging term Rowling used for this. Harry
was halfhad Muggles in his family and was very powerful. Snape was half Muggle and also quite powerful. Full wizards were not necessarily powerful wizards. Harry’s own wizardly power is a function of his fate and destiny; his parentage is only a small part of that: his specialness derives not from something he was born with and is innate to his breeding, but rather as a byproduct of his mother’s act of sacrifice.Socially, while Harry came from “good stock,” he bristled against the class system, seeing it as basically irrational and not serving any significant social purpose — because while his parents were well-respected wizards, he had been raised by doofy, abusive Muggles, so he was socially an outsider. Most every time someone else mentions breeding and parentage, they are portrayed in the moral wrong to do so. As he matures and learns about his parents, he gets information that particularly his dad was something of an upper-class snobjerk, too; only with maturity did his father mellow out and change that behavior and the social echoes of that historical snobjerkery rebound down through the generations: Snape never really got over being humiliated by Harry’s father when they were teenagers, for instance.
So it seems to me that a principal lesson in Harry Potter is that too much is made of class and parentage and people, both as individuals and as a society, are better-off when they stop paying attention to bloodlines and focus instead on their own behaviors.
…Of course, maybe that’s me being a bloody American about it.Report
Full wizards were not necessarily powerful wizards.
Almost all the powerful wizards we see are half blood. (As in, had either a Muggle or Muggle-born parent.) Voldemort, Dumbledore, Snape.
Meanwhile, some of the most inept people we see are full-bloods. Neville isn’t very good at magic, and Crabbe and Goyle are idiots.
The most powerful full-blood we see is…Lucius, maybe? Bellatrix? Or some other death eater…although there’s a question if it really takes *power* to run around throwing curses at people, or just practice.
Fanon believes, basically, that full-blood wizards’ gene pool is too small and a lot of the super-pure-blood fanatical ones have managed to incest themselves into genetic problems. There’s even a super-powered version of this where they’re really *really* inbred, enough that they’d never make it to birth, except that magic is managing to fix most of genetic problems, at the cost of, you know, a large amount of their magical power the rest of their life.
There’s a certain satisfaction at having the racist theories of pureblood wizards be exactly backwards.Report
Why assume wizardry is as simple as a single recessive gene? We don’t believe anything so reductive for other sorts of talent.Report
Harry is a half-breed. As is Snape.Report
No. Harry’s parents were both Wizards, they met at Hogwarts. Harry’s maternal aunt was pure-muggle though.Report
Saul,
No. Harry’s parents were both Wizards, they met at Hogwarts. Harry’s maternal aunt was pure-muggle though.
Not being keen on the finer points of JK’s universe, how does this work? If Harry’s mom’s sister is pure muggle, how can his mom be pure wizard?Report
Harry’s grandparents on his mother’s side were muggles, i believe . That’s a point of contention that his aunt is bitter about being overlooked and all the attention that lilly got. Harry doesnt come from a pure family bc it has muggles in it, unlike the say the Blacks.Report
Saul,
half-breed, as in the way hitler reckoned the jews… Since Potter’s two grandparents on his mum’s side were muggle, he was a half-breed.Report
You’re right, it’s not the same thing. The Potters are an old wizarding family, while Harry’s mother is a wizard who was born a muggle. Snape was the product of a wizard-muggle marriage.Report
Oof, there were quite a few typos in this (two or three in the opening sentence alone). I took a quick pass and tried to clean up, but you may want to check once more.Report
Tod,
This essay came out a few years ago:
http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/harry-potter-and-the-incredibly-conservative-aristocratic-childrens-club
“Rowling’s adherence to the old English principle of blood-nobility—that weird but deeply held superstition that has caused countless English protagonists to discover that unbeknownst to them, they were peers of the realm all along—is in stark contrast to the biggest conflict depicted in the Potter stories, the blood purity conflict. The bad guys, Voldemort and crew, are race purists, anti-Muggle (meaning anti-human), which is to say that they are against any magical Muggles or intermingling of Muggle blood (“Mudblood”) and wizard blood. Yet Rowling’s heroes are all noblemen, with the exception of one: Harry Potter learns in the old-fashioned surprise way that his father was a fabulously rich wizard, and his godfather is a rich aristocrat, too; Ron Weasley is a nobleman of the purest blood, though poor. The sole pure-Muggle wizard of any consequence at all in these books is Hermione, the author’s personal projection of herself (there are two other minor pure-Muggle wizards, boys, both of whom are bumped off). So this story can be read pretty effectively as an explanation of why J.K. Rowling should be allowed to hang around with the nobility (she is smart, is why).”Report
This is a prefect example of starting with the conclusion and creating supporting “facts”.Report
This is why you always travel with an engineer or two. We are damn handy in a pinch.Report
I know. You’re not sticklers for logic like we are.Report
(there are two other minor pure-Muggle wizards, boys, both of whom are bumped off)
I can’t even imagine who this is supposed to be talking about.
I can think of exactly *one* (known) Muggle-born school-age wizard that dies. Meanwhile, there are plenty of Muggle-born school-age wizards that do not die, or at least don’t die where we know about it.
And that article has perhaps the dumbest comment about how Hermione is treated ever: her infinite sagacity, foresightedness and teacher’s-pet-hood to be rewarded at every turn.
Erm, no, she’s not. In fact, there’s plenty of times Harry is smarter than her, and often she fails. In fact, it’s hard to think of any time she’s actually come up with a useful solution to any real-world problem besides ‘Let’s read some about it’. (Okay, I’ll give her credit for getting rid of Umbridge. Way to attempt to murder your teacher, Hermione.) Her reputation for being smart is because she’s much better academically than the others, who are lazy in that regard, and because she often plays the role of exposition fairy via reading out of a book. Oh, and she solves a puzzle in the first book.Report
I’ll add that the Spring movie, Kingsman, tackles the “Blood Will Out” issue head on, making the point none-too-subtely that breeding has nothing to do with character (with the original source comic being written by a Brit & a Scot).Report
Great piece Tod. My mother was big proponent of the Earthsea books when I was growing up and she had me read them. Even with Ged’s American-minded origins and direction, I could never get into the series. Perhaps it was simply that my mother wanted me to read them, unlike other texts on the shelf she dissuaded me to pick up. I will have to revisit the series.Report
There’s another difference between American and British heroes, and it causes a weird thing. Namely, a lot of American readers seem to think of think of Harry Potter and his friends as nerds.
Harry Potter is a *jock*. He’s very good at sports, and end up coaching the team. His father was a jock. He slacks off on his schoolwork and gets the smart kid to finish it. He’s in the jock house, Gryfinddor.
This is because in British boarding school books, the protagonists *are* jocks.
And yet, despite the text being pretty clear about this, American readers are used to their heroes being nerds, so subconsciously, he’s a nerd.Report
Off on a tangent, but finishing the story. Earthsea is very American: Ged triumphs, then rides off into the sunset. What happens next doesn’t matter. Harry’s story is British: he triumphs, then picks up the pieces of a normal life. Wife, kids, etc.Report