The Subversive Harry Potter: Adolescent Rebellion and Containment in the J. K. Rowling Novels by Vandana Saxena (review)

In The Subversive Harry Potter, Vandana Saxena explores the seemingly emblematic structures within the series—those of hero mythology, boarding-school fiction, religious symbolism, and monster lore—to expose the liminal spaces and upheavals of these cultural institutions within Rowling's works. In opposition to critics who denounce children's literature as formulaic at best, escapist at worst, Saxena takes up Harry's mantle effectively, asserting that within the prescribed scaffolding of the series lie significant themes of rebellion and a decloaking of mainstream cultural values, which elevate the books beyond mere formula to an embodiment of adolescent experience and a discourse of modern social injustice. As such, Saxena transfigures Harry from simply the boy wizard we have come to love into a more mature magical figure who upholds traditional cultural values at the heart of our society, while at the same time exposing the prejudices and flaws inherent in those values, in order to endorse a more inclusive and accepting world built on tolerance and love.

The opening chapter of The Subversive Harry Potter covers a wide swath of territory related to established concepts within hero mythology, focusing on salient points of the series that coincide with the prototypical development of a heroic figure and drawing on a supporting array of scholars including Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Sigmund Freud. Having cemented Harry well within the established tradition of the epic hero, Saxena moves on to elucidate the parts of the Potter series that ultimately question and undermine these mainstream values. Hogwarts, a place of magic and home to a "queering" force that upsets expectations, is explored as a liminal arena. Safeguarding marginalized characters while fostering unconventional relationships, Hogwarts emerges in Saxena's view as a fantastical space within the epic quest that stands in direct opposition to the normally masculine and heterosexual agenda of the heroic tale.

Delving further into the structural literary traditions that underlie Rowling's series, Saxena shifts her focus to the institution of boarding-school narratives as embodied in the Potter books. While Rowling's texts, like those of established boarding-school fiction, seek to acculturate Harry and his friends into the proper roles that education, discipline, nation building, and citizenship play within society, the Potter series is above all a magical story—and magic, by nature, is unconventional and "subversive." Thus again Hogwarts, in Saxena's analysis, materializes as a place of defiance in which the normative values of accepted boarding-school fiction may be questioned and, ultimately, overturned. "Rowling," according to Saxena, "induces twenty-first century concerns of nation and race in a genre previously dominated by all-white educational institutions" (96). Harry and his friends, by questioning the educational and social hierarchy of their magical world—in which wizards, especially dark wizards, claim moral and intellectual superiority over other fantastical creatures—undermine established social practices within their culture.

Concluding her discussion of boarding-school fiction and its destabilization within Harry Potter, Saxena then turns to the religious underpinnings of Rowling's series, namely the overarching battle between good and evil which propels the narrative and Harry's final sacrifice (reminiscent of Christ's death for man's salvation). In drawing these parallels, however, Saxena cleverly intuits the ways in which Rowling's tale "juxtaposes sacred narratives with profane concerns" (107). Calling on examples from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Saxena demonstrates the way in which these adolescent fantasy stories ground sacrifice and salvation in secular love, rather than love of the divine.

The Subversive Harry Potter turns, in conclusion, to the monsters within Rowling's work. Tracing the creatures within Harry Potter to their psychological and sociocultural roots, Saxena provides a full-bodied overview of the way in which Rowling utilizes British and Scottish folklore, tales of Middle Ages colonialism, and narratives of Christian conquest to inform the characteristics of her own monsters, thus "containing" them in the traditional...