62 Taylor Lockhart – Escaping The Superstructure: Analyzing Harry Potter Through a Marxist Lens

Taylor Lockhart is a Senior at Indiana University Southeast studying Secondary Education in English Language Arts.  This paper was her final essay for her Critical Practices course wherein she was asked to take one of the pieces of literature they read and apply a field of literary criticism to it. Taylor decided to use the field of Marxist criticism to do a deep analysis of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to compare it’s place as escapist literature with larger beliefs about Marxism and the existence of a superstructure.  Professor Alisa Clapp-Itnyre notes, “Taylor wrote a very sophisticated paper, arguing that Rowling is appropriately criticizing the classist structure of society through escapist fantasy with great examples from the text. Overall, I greatly admired the philosophical discussion and Taylor’s exceptional writing skills which I was first able to admire in W270!”

Escaping The Superstructure: Analyzing Harry Potter Through a Marxist Lens

The ancient tradition of fantastic storytelling has extended into the modern day with tales of cursed rings, flying police boxes, and magical schools hidden outside of the view of mortal eyes. Despite taking audiences on escapes through impossible realms, these modern fairy tales often choose to unite the real world and the imaginary one  to create realistic heroes and relatable issues. These works of escapist literature make deliberate choices to present our current  social issues or create worlds that exist without them. Despite the wizarding world of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series being set outside of the real world, classist issues are still clearly presented and addressed through comparisons between the Weasley and Malfoy family. Viewing J.K. Rowling’s second entry, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, through a Marxist lens reveals the bridge Rowling builds between reality and fantasy to create a pathway for children to acknowledge and address the issue of classism in ways that break down the Marxist idea of the superstructure.         

One of the key tenets of Marxist ideology is the development of the base and superstructure. Marx called the means of production produced by the working class the base and referred to culture, including societies’ legal, educational, political, and artistic developments the superstructure (Bressler 193). Within this philosophy, art exists to perpetuate and normalize the classist divide between the working-class proletariat and the elites within the bourgeois. Marxist beliefs suggest that art which does not maintain society’s accepted systems will not be accepted within its popular culture. However, an argument can be posed to suggest that art which normalizes a Marxist society fails to depict the necessary transition between the existing Capitalist society and a Marxist one. Escapist literature authors such as J.K. Rowling embrace the argument which favors normalization by setting their books in fantasy worlds and depicting realistic issues within these separate realities. Using Marx’s beliefs about the superstructure, escapist literature could potentially be misconstrued as a bourgeois tool because of how it maintains classism as a natural aspect of reality present in both human and non-human-based worlds . In reality, authors like Rowling use their unique worlds as tools to introduce and combat the ideas of classism.

Reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, a reader finds that blue-collar workers and privileged capital owners have been traded out for the affluent leaders within the Ministry of Magic and the lower wizards who complete the bulk of the ministry’s important duties. Harry’s friend Ron belongs to an impoverished family which gets by on a small salary from the work Ron’s father does within the Ministry. When it is time for Harry and Ron to return to Hogwarts, Ron’s parents struggle with producing the funds to buy their children’s school supplies. Ron’s brother George remarks about their condition during a section of chapter four when he says, “Dunno how Mum and Dad are going to afford all our school stuff this year” (Rowling 24). Rowling takes this moment in the chapter to remind the audience about Harry’s wealth, in contrast to the Weasley’s poverty. The fact that Harry has an “underground vault at Gringotts in London” with “a small fortune that his parents had left him” makes him feel guilty around the Weasleys (Rowling 24). Harry’s position as an affluent protagonist lends credence to the necessity of literature, within a bourgeois-controlled society, to promote the ruling class as dominant. However, Harry’s wealth does not keep the novel from introducing classist issues and siding with working-class sentiments through Harry’s decisions. An article titled “Distinct Stratums and Distorted Society: A Study on The Socio-Economic Stratification represented in J.K.Rowling’s The Harry Potter Series” analyzes the classist issues Rowling depicts within her novel, using the characterization of, and dialogue between Lucius Malfoy and Arthur Weasley. Arthur Weasley is depicted as a hard worker within the Department for the Misuse of Magic Artifacts. However, despite his trustworthy ethics and passionate work, the Weasleys struggle to provide for their family (Poojaasri and Vanitha 2). Conversely, Rowling depicts Lucius Malfoy as arrogant and rude, and yet he is rewarded, despite his poor ethics, because of his family’s powerful position. Lucius throws this in Arthur’s face with the line “Dear me, what’s the use of being a disgrace to the name of wizard if they don’t even pay you well for it?” (Rowling 65). However, contrary to the precedent set up toward the beginning, the ending of Chamber shifts the power balance to show the power that Arthur Weasley has over the wizarding world and the lack of power that Lucius has to overcome Weasley’s influence. Dumbledore suggests that Ginny Weasley was targeted throughout the book because “The Weasleys are one of our most prominent pure-blood families.” He then adds, “Imagine the effect on Arthur Weasley and his Muggle Protection Act, if his daughter was discovered attacking and—killing Muggle-borns” (Rowling 166). Dumbledore’s implication is that Arthur Weasley was targeted because of the successful creation of the Muggle Protection Act. Arthur’s hard work within the Ministry becomes a bane to Lucius Malfoy that he can’t overcome despite his great power and privilege. Harry realizes that Lucius Malfoy is the one to blame for trying to ruin the Weasley’s when he discovers that Malfoy planted the diary (Rowling, 166). As a result, Malfoy is tricked into losing his house elf Dobby, serving as a final consequence in the novel for his misdeeds (Rowling 167). In this final chapter, Rowling takes the established classist divide and twists it to display the actual power that the proletariat within the wizarding world has against the bourgeoisie. Arthur’s success in stopping Lucius’s plans to hurt muggles is proof of the hidden power that the lower wizards have over the higher class ones. Despite this, by the end of the novel Arthur Weasley still struggles to make ends meet while  Lucius Malfoy maintains his power and wealth. His superior status is only undermined by the similarly wealthy Harry Potter. This class disparity is suggested by the lack of change or economic consequences present within the end of the novel. This is evidenced by Ron’s broken wand which the Weasley’s are too poor to fix throughout the entire story (Rowling 150). Rowling maintains both a positive and negative vision of the base with the novel’s ending by displaying both the power and lack of power that the proletariat Weasleys have over the Bourgeoisie Malfoys in an ending realistic to real life but not satisfying in a fantasy one.

Escapist literature such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets frequently depicts settings, sciences, and scenarios that go beyond the rules of our reality but still depict real-world issues through fantasy comparisons. This element of escapism is something that proponents of escapist literature argue helps make escapism more valid than critics give it credit for. One of these proponents, Sana Hussein of The Missing Slate literary blog, argues that, “The social and emotional value of escapism in fiction cannot be ignored just because it affords the readers an escape into an alternate world. In fact, by allowing its readers to become absorbed into the world of fictional characters, escapist fiction enables them to be more compassionate” (Hussein). Escapism provides useful tools to help readers escape into a world where they can address problems that seem insurmountable in our current grounded reality. Hussein mirrors this sentiment by quoting and analyzing famous fantasy writer J.R.R Tolkien. Hussein cites a quote from Tolkien that compares “all complex reality to a mere shadow of creation’s true wonders” and uses it to argue that “escape from the weariness brought on by modernity is not the same as an escaping from reality” (Hussein). Within Harry Potter, this escapist principle represents Harry’s escape from adolescence into adulthood. Harry’s journey from Privet Drive to Hogwarts gives him freedom and knowledge that he never previously had as a child. From this freedom and newfound responsibility Harry can face mature issues that he would not have been prepared to face before his exit from Privet Drive at the beginning of the novel. With this analysis, the escapism present within Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets can be seen as the necessary transition between a classist society and one that has moved beyond classism. This transition doesn’t empower classism but rather it gives readers the freedom that Harry has throughout his story to confront the harsh realities such as classism in their own stories.

As critics have challenged realistic and non-realistic literature, the culmination of these arguments results in an unclear view of the superstructure’s role in perpetuating bourgeois beliefs, as well as the role that escapist literature can play in dismantling them. These inconclusive results are reflected throughout the historical developments of Marxist criticism. Marx believed that all literature existed within the superstructure and was influenced solely by the base, but a later prominent Marxist theorist Louis Althusser developed Marx’s theories to establish the “production theory” in which he argued that “art can inspire revolution” (Bressler 199). Althusser’s ideas support the impact that stories like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets can have on children reading the novel. A young child reading Harry Potter is exposed to classist issues and is presented with a positive ending that empowers the working class by offering solutions and the same “revolution” that Althusser suggested. If this literature depicted an entirely classless society or one where the working class already had power over their base, then while going against the existence of a superstructure, this literature would not represent the reader’s reality and instead would serve to perpetuate the superstructure’s existence by maintaining societal ignorance of the importance of transition

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets does not hide from issues present within more mature and more realistic Marxist literature. The inclusion of classist issues provides education about these issues and presents young readers with solutions by confronting them in a separated environment where children leave their own Privet Drives to travel through Hogwarts and mature subjects such as classism in a different world before applying it in their own world. Escapist literature such as Rowling’s do not support a bourgeois-controlled superstructure as some Marxist critics may suggest, but rather they combine the mundane and the magical to create tools for preparing children and adults alike to combat classism in the real world through maturing alongside Harry and his friends within the fictional one. These fantastic stories through the eyes of aliens, hobbits, and wizards continue to utilize fantasy and reality together to build  better worlds for their reader.

References

Bressler E. Charles. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.

Hussein Sara. “Literary or Not: The Reality of Escapist Fiction”. The Missing Slate, 2014.

Rowling J.K.. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Bloomsbury, 1999.

Poojaasri, K. and S. Vanitha. “Distinct Stratums and Distorted Society : A Study on The Socio-Economic Stratification represented in J.K.Rowling’s The Harry Potter Series”. Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research, 2020.