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Isabela Cristina Chioveanu

Professor Dragoş Manea

Practical Course of English Language

February 4, 2014

Attachment versus Evolution: The Father Figure Issue in J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter Series

The purpose of this essay is to show Harry Potter’s evolution throughout the series, from

a lonely, apparently usual child to an intelligent man who succeeded to struggle against his

attachment on many father figures and to make peace with his past.

Harry Potter, an orphan boy, is affected by mourning, after the loss of his parents. He

lives with his uncle, aunt and cousin, Vernon, Petunia and Dudley Dursley, a Muggle family

(they don’t belong to the magical world), who don’t treat him as a member of their family: “The

room held no sign at all that another boy lived in the house, too.” (Rowling 13). Harry is forced

to endure their bad treatment, like giving him as a room “the cupboard under the stairs”

(Rowling 14), and all the bullying from his cousin because he’s an orphan. All this bad treatment

affects Harry, making him suffer a lot from the lack of love that he has, after his parents’ death.

In Sigmund Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia essay, these two concepts are presented as

similar, but melancholia is seen as being more complex than mourning. In fact, Harry suffers

more from mourning: “mourning, which is for the most part occasionned only by a real loss of

the object, by its death.” (Freud 243). It is mostly presented in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and

The Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry discovers The Mirror of Erised (which is Desire spelled

backwards), and he sees himself near his parents, so that mirror shows what he desires the most,

to be in the company of his family: “The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared

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hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall

right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible

sadness.” (Rowling, 167) When Albus Dumbledore sees him in front of that mirror, he explains

the fact that the Mirror of Erised “shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate

desire of our hearts.” (Rowling 171) He also warns Harry not to stare at that mirror because it

becomes like an addiction and many wizards lost their minds by looking at what they desire

most.

In order to evolve, Harry had to renounce at those father figures such as Albus

Dumbledore, his godfather Sirius Black, the professors Alastor Moody, Remus Lupin and

Severus Snape, even at the villain Voldemort who may be seen as a father figure. They die, one

by one, because Harry has to get rid of his attachment. Only after their death he makes peace

with his past and becomes a man who defies his inner suffering. In his Reading For The Plot,

Peter Brooks talks about Sigmund Freud’s masterplot- Beyond the Pleasure Principle- which is

presenting repetition as a matter of choice:

If repetition is mastery, movement from the passive to the active, and if mastery is

an assertion of control over what man must in fact submit to-choice, we might

say, of an imposed end-we have already a suggestive comment on the grammar of

the plot, where repetition, taking us back again over the same ground, could have

to do with the choice of ends. (Brooks 98)

It can be told that J.K.Rowling chooses to kill these father figures, as a repetition in the plot, to

make Harry heal his attachment. Their deaths are shocking and unexpected, and Harry is a

witness who cannot do anything to save their lives, but only to move on, and to keep their

memories in his heart. All these shocks are making him evolve. Albus Dumbledore told Harry

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once, in Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, that the persons he loves will never leave

him, especially his father: “You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we

don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you,

Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him.” (Rowling 362)

In his life-journey, Harry has many experiences, in every book, which make him see

death with his own eyes. Even if he was defending Lord Voldemort’s ghost or the Lord

Voldemort himself, he always has the courage to face the death. In Sigmund Freud’s Death

Drive Theory, there are presented the death instincts, the will to die by having a self-distructive

behavior. In his acts of courage Harry also has a dose of madness which may be caused by his

death instincts, accentuated by the repetition of his father figures’ deaths, as a traumatic event. In

the final book, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, he finds out that a part of Voldemort’s

soul lies in his body, so he’s a Horcrux himself. He’s not afraid of the death, and he prefers to die

rather than to find out that another person died for his cause: “Like rain on a cold window, these

thoughts pattered against the hard surface of the incontrovertible truth, which was that he must

die.I must die. It must end.” (Rowling 693)

J.K.Rowling uses death as a sanction for Harry’s attachment, as Peter Brooks mentions in

his Reading for The Plot: “Hence Benjamin can state that <<Death is the sanction of everything

that the storyteller can tell.>>. While this need not be a literal death- it can be some simulacrum,

some end to a period, an arrest- very often it is.” (Brooks 95). All those deaths may be seen as a

sanction, or a forced evolution. Harry becomes a strong person throughout his experiences.

Although he suffered everytime someone he cared about passed away, he always moved on and

was there for new adventures. In the end of the series, he saw his parents and some father

figures, with their kind faces, neither the real persons, nor their ghosts, with their kind smiles:

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“Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts, they moved toward him, and on

each face, there was the same loving smile.” (Rowling 698) This fact means that Harry managed

to get rid of his attachment and perhaps even the father figures were proud of him, because in

this way it is seen a great evolution. He stopped dreaming about having his family by his side

and in his way he saved his soul and many other lives. J.K.Rowling “rewards” him for his

courage not by killing him, but keeping him alive again, against Lord Voldemort’s curse. In the

Epilogue, Harry is seen as the father of three children. Even if he was not attached anymore on

those father figures he had in his childhood and teenage years, he named his children after the

persons he loved and they were not (physically) by his side anymore: Albus Severus, James and

Lily.

In a nutshell, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series reveal the evolution of Harry Potter, a

child who suffered a lot because of the loss of his family, and throughout his experiences in a

magical world he succeeded to fight his attachment on his father figures and finally, to “greet

Death as an old friend” (Rowling 409), making everyone proud of him.

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Works cited

1. Brooks, Peter. “Freud’s Masterplot”. Reading for The Plot: Design and Intention in

Narrative. New York: A.A.Knopf, 1984. Print.

2. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia”. The Standard Edition Of The Complete

Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud. Ed. J.Strachey. Trans. J.Strachey Vol. XIV.

London: The Hogarth Press And The Institute Of Psycho-Analysis, 1974. Print.

3. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Print.

4. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Print.

5. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Print.