back with Harry (part 5)

How many orphans do you know?

In my childhood I was close with two, and in my adult life I've picked up two more. Undoubtedly the low percentage of orphans among my friends and close acquaintances has much to do with my "position of ignorance and privilege," in the words of one of my future wedding guests. But it could also suggest--and I have no statistics to back this up--that in the modern developed world, notwithstanding times of war, plague, or famine, most people through their childhood tend to have at least one surviving parent.

Why then do orphans so disproportionally people our most beloved stories? (Again I'm working with no statistics here.) A list of famous fictional orphans or veritable orphans is very nearly a list of our best child characters: it includes Huck, Dorothy, Peter Pan, Alice, Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, and James of the Giant Peach fame; it features countless leading characters from classic and supposedly classic literature, among them Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights's Heathcliffe, War & Peace's Pierre Bezukhov, Moby Dick's Ishmael, and Dickens's Pip, Esther, Oliver, and David; the list also comprises fairytale protagonists like Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and (in some versions) Hansel and Gretel, King Arthur, and Sir Lancelot; the list also boasts comic book heroes like Superman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Batman, and all three Robins; and it includes contemporary mythic figures like Frodo Baggins, both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the Baudelaire children, and of course Harry Potter.

This is, as I said, a selected list, but I think it's long enough to raise my question: why are orphans so attractive to storytellers and audiences?

Let's turn now to The Order of the Phoenix. It's my favorite book in the Harry Potter series, and any broad attempt I could make to discuss it would result in an embarrassment of superlatives. (The funniest! The most complex! The rootin'-tootin' bestest!...) So instead I'm going to use this post to propose a tentative answer to the orphan question; Harry will be my case study, and I'm confident that he'll survive my psychobabble.

My tentative answer: Little orphan Harry is the anomaly that represents the norm.

Aspects of my tentative answer:

1) Loneliness: Although most people I know aren't orphans, everyone at some point feels like one. This goes back to our oldest, most primal experiences, and continues even as we're tossed into our solitary graves. I remember visiting my friends the Bs a couple of years ago; when, at bedtime, baby M was put into his crib--his bedroom lights were turned off, his door was gently shut--he screamed as though he had been left in a ditch to die. He continued screaming for a full half hour, and I was startled to hear in his cry a portion of my own emotional makeup. M's feeling, though grotesquely distilled, to me was unmistakable: Come back, don't leave me...Harry Potter's lonely-orphan bit works the same way. It's an exaggeration, but through exaggeration we can recognize it as our own.

2) Family Romance: I first came upon this theory in Maynard Solomon's biography of Beethoven. Dig this: when rumors circulated that Beethoven was the illegitimate son of the king of Prussia, Beethoven didn't rush to refute them. This was because, Solomon argues, Beethoven himself partly wanted it to be true. His actual father was a "wastrel, second-rate musician, toady, possible police agent, drunkard, and hapless extortionist"; understandably, Beethoven thought he and his mother deserved better, and enjoyed the fantasy that he was some kind of fallen prince.

The gist of the Family Romance theory is that at some point in a child's life, he becomes disillusioned with his parents, and dreams that he came from someone worthier : "[T]he child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from [his parents] and of replacing them by others, occupying, as a rule, a higher social station." (For an abridgment of Freud's essay, look here.)

A child may pretend, as Beethoven did, that he is a prince; a child may also half-convince himself, as I did when I was seventeen, that he is the long-lost great-grandchild of James Joyce; or a child can imagine that his true parents are not the fat, stuffy, foolish, shamelessly pedestrian Dursley people raising him, but once-powerful, now-dead wizards. This last fantasy is Harry's life. It's not ours, of course, but it's one we feel we're living.