“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (Deathly Hallows 723)
This exchange is arguably the most important conversation in all 41,000 pages of the Harry Potter books. It takes place at the end of the final book, when Harry meets his (dead) mentor in a dream-like state following Voldemort’s second-to-last attempt to kill him. Harry presents Dumbledore with a binary choice, as if “real” and “happening inside my head” are mutually exclusive. As John Granger writes, “Dumbledore’s response reveals that he thinks Harry has created a false dichotomy. There is another option to account for his experience than just either/or…there is a nonmaterial (albeit, anything but immaterial) unity between what is real and what is happening in our heads” (Granger, Lectures 178, 179). Dumbledore casting aside Harry’s dichotomy and replacing it with an option that blurs the distinction between the two extremes is the most literal example of Rowling presenting an alternative to the dualism of the apocalyptic myth.
The significance of having such an alternative is evident throughout the series, though not always so explicitly spelled out. Rowling’s characters are carefully crafted so very few can be easily classified using a binary paradigm. Harry, the hero, is a powerful wizard, but he was raised in the Muggle world and is a half-blood; his mother was a Muggle-born (a witch or wizard from a non-magical family). His best friend Ron’s family are purebloods, but considered “the biggest blood-traitor family there is” for their tolerance of Muggles and Muggle-borns (DH 482). Harry’s other best friend, Hermione, despite being the “cleverest witch of [her] age” comes from a Muggle family (Prisoner of Azkaban 253). Harry’s allies also include a half-giant, a werewolf, a Squib (someone from a magical family born without magic), and others who blur the lines between the magical and non-magical binary or the human and magical creature binary (Order of the Phoenix 173-174).
More significant than this superficial, visible diversity, however, is Rowling’s use of morally ambiguous characters to personify a postmodern alternative to the apocalyptic binary of good and evil. As the fundamentalist Abanes criticizes, “In Rowling’s novels…moral ambiguity and relativism abound, while at the same time no one really seems to know who is and who is not evil. In the Harry Potter series, one’s best friend might turn out to be an enemy, while an enemy might actually be one’s closest ally” (234). According to Elizabeth Rosen, such morally ambiguous characters are a defining characteristic of the postmodern style in an author’s adaptation of the apocalyptic narrative (14). Rowling has a tendency to introduce characters as either good or evil, then gradually reveal over the course of the series how they actually embody some combination or middle ground between the two.
For example, Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, fought against Voldemort and rejected his pureblood family’s prejudices against Muggles. By a binary standard, that should make him good; he fights for the “right” cause. He offers Harry “good” advice about tolerance and treatment of others: “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals” (Goblet of Fire 525). Ironically, however, he is often excessively cruel to those who fall under his preconceived definition of an inferior “other,” which ultimately leads to a betrayal that costs him his life (OotP 831-332). By creating a character who fights with the good guys but cannot overcome the prejudices of the bad guys, Rowling challenges the reader (like Dumbledore challenges Harry) to accept a reality that can’t be explained by an apocalyptic, binary worldview.
Severus Snape is another example of a blend of good and evil in one person. Throughout the series, Snape plays a double agent–Dumbledore trusts him, but he belongs to Voldemort’s inner circle. At the end of the sixth book, Harry sees Snape murder Dumbledore. Harry is sure Snape is guilty, but readers are left to wonder if Snape had really been working for Voldemort all along, or if Dumbledore had arranged his own murder in advance, and asked Snape to kill him. At the end of the seventh book, Rowling reveals that Snape been loyal to Dumbledore until the end. Nonetheless, he’s still a murderer, and cannot easily be classified as simply good or evil. As a postmodern author, Rowling avoids privileging one group over another by breaking down the boundaries between the groups, so there are no longer two distinct and finite groups of good and evil people.
Despite being surrounded by people who challenge the apocalyptic binary of good and evil, for most of the series, Harry stubbornly refuses to recognize anything beyond the two extremes. After Sirius dies, and Dumbledore reveals his mistreatment of his house-elf was the cause, Harry is furious at Dumbledore for his implicit criticism of Sirius. “The rage that had subsided briefly flared in him again…He was on his feet again, furious, ready to fly at Dumbledore, who had plainly not understood Sirius at all, how brave he was, how much he had suffered.” (OotP 832). For Harry, Sirius’s final sacrifice means he could never have been anything but completely good. It’s impossible for Harry to reconcile Sirius’s good and bad traits; he can only see his godfather as one or the other. Harry also fails to understand that not everyone shares this dualistic worldview. When Dumbledore points out Sirius’s moral failings, Harry immediately accuses him of trying to say that Sirius deserved to die for his flaws. Dumbledore, of course, believes nothing of the sort. In fact, he is “ever on guard against letting his perception be clouded by labels, prejudicial stigmas, and pigeon holes” but he also knows Harry is not yet capable of accepting this type of non-binary morality (Granger, Keys 195).
Harry’s binary sense of morality not only prevents his acceptance of bad traits in good characters, it blinds him to any redeeming characteristics in so-called “evil” characters. Harry hates his Muggle relatives, not without good reason. They neglected and abused him as a child, locked him in a cupboard under the stairs, starved him, and forced him to do all of the housework. The second Dumbledore starts to say something positive about his aunt, Harry interrupts, “’She doesn’t love me,’ said Harry at once. ‘She doesn’t give a damn–‘ ‘But she took you,’ Dumbledore cut across him. ‘She may have taken you grudgingly, furiously, unwillingly, bitterly, yet still she took you” (OotP 835-836). This time, Dumbledore doesn’t let Harry get away with focusing on her faults and disregarding her virtue. Obviously Dumbledore doesn’t think she was a good surrogate parent. But he also refuses to condemn her as evil within a binary moral system.
Severus Snape, Harry’s Potions professor, seems to hate Harry on sight, and the feeling quickly becomes mutual. At eleven years old, Harry decides that because Snape picks on him for (apparently) no good reason, he must be evil. For the following six books, nothing can convince him Snape is actually working to protect him. Harry suspects Snape of helping Voldemort in every scheme, even after Dumbledore repeatedly assures him that he trusts Snape completely. Harry doesn’t understand the moral gymnastics required for Snape to put on a convincing show as a double agent. In Harry’s eyes, Snape must be as evil as his actions. After Sirius dies, Harry uses his righteous certainty of Snape’s guilt to deny his own. He demands Dumbledore give him a good explanation for Snape’s behavior. After getting one, “Harry disregarded this; he felt a savage pleasure in blaming Snape, it seemed to be easing his own sense of dreadful guilt” (OotP 833). Seeing the world in black and white makes Harry’s life far simpler and his emotions easier for him to handle, even though it comes at the cost of powerful allies like Snape and Dumbledore.
After Harry learns about Dumbledore’s unsavory past, as discussed above, Hermione vainly attempts to convince him not to see Dumbledore as completely evil. She reminds him of the heroic Dumbledore they knew and tries to make Harry understand that, “He changed, Harry, he changed! It’s as simple as that! Maybe he did those things when he was seventeen, but the whole of the rest of his life was devoted to fighting the Dark Arts!” (DH 361). Despite Hermione’s logic, Harry can’t help but adamantly insist he’s been betrayed. According to his understanding of morality, if Dumbledore wasn’t all good, he must have been all evil. Trapped in this all-or-nothing mentality, Harry takes it far too personally when Dumbledore’s immoral past is revealed, and later questions whether everything Dumbledore ever told him was a lie.
Harry feels similar anguish each time a character proves to be more than he or she seems. He is devastated when he discovers his father, who he idolizes as a martyr and about whom he has never heard anything but praise, was a bully as a teenager. Harry feels “horrified and unhappy,” (OotP 650) and “as though the memory of it was eating him from inside” (OotP 653). He can’t accept the idea of his father, like Sirius or Dumbledore, as anything other than completely good or completely evil. “For nearly five years the thought of his father had been a source of comfort, of inspiration. Whenever someone had told him he was like James, he had glowed with pride inside. And now… now he felt cold and miserable at the thought of him” (OotP 653-654). He even goes as far as wondering whether his father had forced his mother to marry him.
The conversation quoted at the beginning of this section, which Harry has with Dumbledore just before the final battle, foreshadows Harry’s evolution beyond binary morality. Harry’s eventual acceptance of Snape’s true loyalty and Dumbledore’s transformation from devil to god to neither one nor the other would have impossible within a binary framework. The fact that a character like Snape could be Harry’s ally and that a character like Dumbledore could embody all three of those identities forces readers to consider “very complex and shaded questions that the entity now poses about the nature of evil…” (Rosen 17). By letting readers experience the world through Harry’s eyes, seeing everything Harry sees and feeling everything Harry feels, Rowling also prompts the audience to share Harry’s personal evolution from a binary worldview to a non-binary worldview when it happens at the end of the seventh book. Participating in Harry’s transcendence of the apocalyptic moral paradigm like this “satisfies the need we all feel for meaning that is not moralizing and for virtue that is heroic and uniting rather than divisive” (Granger, Keys 236).
This transcendence functions as the New Jerusalem of the story. New Jerusalem, as canonically described in the Book of Revelation, is literally a “great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God” (21:10). Built on “the cosmic mountain where heaven and earth meet,” it is a gift from God to the faithful followers that finalizes the division between the saved and the damned (Bauckham 132):
In the beginning God had planted a garden for humanity to live in (Gen. 2:3). In the end he will give them a city. In the New Jerusalem the blessings of paradise will be restored, but the New Jerusalem is more than paradise regained. As a city it fulfills humanity’s desire to build out of nature a human place of human culture and community. (Bauckham 135)
In contrast, in postmodern apocalyptic narratives, “New Jerusalem is less a place than a new way of seeing: a new vision. Characters do not inherit a new world. Often, they inherit a new way of understanding the old word. And this new way of understanding allows them to see the old world anew” (Rosen xxiii).
Harry isn’t the only one to experience this “New Jerusalem understanding” of transcendence to a non-binary moral system. In the epilogue, nineteen years after the events in the last chapter, Rowling reveals Harry named his middle child Albus Severus, giving him both Dumbledore’s and Snape’s first names. More than signaling Harry’s personal acceptance of each of these characters’ ambiguous moral qualities, Albus Severus symbolizes the possibility of ending the wizarding world’s metanarrative of prejudice. At Hogwarts, students are sorted into four “houses,” or dormitories. Each is named for one of the founders of Hogwarts, and is known for different personality traits – Hufflepuffs are loyal, Ravenclaws are smart, Slytherins are ambitious, and Gryffindors are brave.
Under these simple adjectives, however, lies the dualistic metanarrative of inter-house conflict, which survives past graduation and poisons relationships in the wizarding world at large. The metanarrative is reinforced throughout the story, from the earliest days of Hogwarts when the founder of “Gryffindor had been the champion of Muggle-borns, the wizard who had clashed with the pureblood-loving Slytherin” (DH 307) up to and including the final battle, during which all the Slytherins flee the school either to save themselves or fight with Voldemort, while almost all of the Gryffindors try to stay and defend the castle (DH 610-611). As Hagrid tells Harry in Book 1, “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin. You-Know-Who [Voldemort] was one” (Sorcerer’s Stone). In addition to Voldemort, Harry’s hated Professor Snape was in Slytherin, as was his childhood nemesis Draco Malfoy. Harry’s personal experiences with these characters reinforce the stereotypes of Slytherins as prejudiced against Muggles, power-hungry, devious and evil. Students in Gryffindor (like Harry, his friends, and his parents), in contrast, can do no wrong.
The only hint that there might be an alternative to the divisive house system is Dumbledore’s speech to all of the students after Voldemort is reborn. “Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust” (GoF 723). That Harry names his son after a Gryffindor and a Slytherin who defied their house stereotypes and were not wholly good or evil shows that the wizarding world is finally ready to bridge the rift between the two houses. The Gryffindor-Slytherin combination, as a blending of opposites, offers a postmodern alternative to the dualistic metanarrative of the wizarding world.
