Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

You’re a liar, Harry.
You’re a show-off, Harry.
You’re a psycho, Harry.
You’re a fool, Harry Potter.
Please save us, Harry.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was published in 2003. It falls into the fantasy genre and depicts students at a magical school—Hogwarts—of witchcraft and wizardry. Harry Potter is, of course, the main protagonist. As it is the fifth book in the series, it is operating on the premise that Harry’s backstory is already understood. He had learned on his eleventh birthday that he was a wizard and would be going to Hogwarts to train in all sorts of magical areas of study. Now, four and a half years after that happy revelation, Harry is having to deal with a few internal and external issues. Though these issues are not what the average teenager might encounter, the emotions behind them are certainly common enough. Any teenager reading the novel will understand much of what Harry is feeling: depression, anxiety, fear, loss, anger, pain, confusion, defiance, and many other emotions and mental states throughout the book.

When Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix opens, Harry is attempting to cope (and failing) with a fellow student’s death from the end of the previous book. He is, once again, spending the summer at his aunt and uncle’s home in Surrey, where he is not only unwanted but also feared and despised. He receives the wizarding newspaper, the Daily Prophet, and learns that the Ministry for Magic is denying the dark lord Voldemort return. They blatantly call him a liar and speculate on his mental state. They do the same to his mentor, Albus Dumbledore.

Harry’s aunt and uncle blame him for anything that may go wrong. When his cousin Dudley is attacked by a Dementor (soul-sucking depression monster), Harry is blamed because he was there. His uncle thinks he attacked Dudley, and Dudley agrees. Muggles (non-magical people like Dudley and his parents) can’t see Dementors, so Dudley thinks Harry made him feel terrible things. They often lock him in his room when they feel he’s done something “freaky” like that. Their treatment of him borders on outright abuse, though it is mostly just highly neglectful.

At school, everyone has heard what Harry and Dumbledore said at the end of last year: Voldemort is back. Few people believe them. Many think Harry is flat-out lying. Many think Dumbledore has gone senile. No one wants to believe something so terrible could be true. One of Harry’s friends and dormmates, Seamus Finnegan, and his mother believe Harry is dangerous. Seamus actually goes to ask their head of house if he can change rooms because he feels unsafe sharing with Harry. It seems as though Harry has lost at least one friend.

Harry is completely ostracized. Very few people believe him, and to make matters worse, the Ministry is actively working against him and Dumbledore. The new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor is the minister’s undersecretary and reports directly to him. She prevents them from learning practical magic and gives Harry numerous detentions with a special quill. It requires no ink, instead using his own blood. It writes in red across the parchment as it magically etches the words “I must not tell lies” into the back of Harry’s left hand. He tells no one. He does not wish to give her the satisfaction of letting her know he complained. He is advised by his head of house to keep his head down, but he can’t allow himself to do so. It really doesn’t matter either way, though. Umbridge would find a way to punish him no matter what he did or didn’t do.

Then there’s Professor Snape. The potions master has always hated Harry and verbally provokes him often. He projects his hatred of Harry’s father onto Harry, and they often verbally have at each other, ending with Harry in detention and Gryffindor House several points lower. This year, though, Harry is forced after Christmas break to begin Occlumency training with Snape. Dumbledore fears Voldemort will try to use the connection with Harry to trick Harry into leaving the safety of the castle or to spy on the Order. Snape does not wish to teach Harry, and Harry does not wish to learn from Snape. At one point, after Harry crosses a line, Snape launches a jar of cockroaches over his head.

Speaking of people who hate Harry, there’s the fellow who started all this. Voldemort killed Harry’s parents fourteen years ago. He tried to kill Harry again in his first year, second year, and his fourth year. He will try again, sort of, at the end of this fifth year. The man is convinced Harry somehow has the power to destroy him for good and is determined to remove the threat. Basically, Harry’s life has been in danger since he was less than a year old.

To top all of this off, the Occlumency that Harry was supposed to be learning with Snape fails. He doesn’t learn it. Voldemort plants a trick in his mind and convinces him that he has Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, in the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry for Magic. Harry goes to save Sirius and finds that he was tricked into coming to retrieve an object only he or Voldemort could hold. Sirius and the rest of the Order show up; they battle the Death Eaters. In a slightly warped moment, Sirius takes a curse and falls through a veil of death on a raised dais. Now, Harry has lost both of his parents and his godfather.

By the time everyone comes to realize that Harry was, in fact, telling the truth all along, the book is a few chapters from ending. Harry spends essentially the entire school year as an outcast. The average teenager may not be under attack from a dark wizard out for blood, but these accusations and feelings are all too familiar for most. He is accused of lying, of seeking attention, of being mentally unstable, and yet is still expected at the end to be the person everyone else wants him to be. He spends a year as an outcast just to turn around at the moment everything seems to be at its very worst and see he is expected to keep himself together. He has a moment in Dumbledore’s office where he smashes everything he can reach. He simply cannot handle any more, and all the walls come down. After this, he slowly starts to heal. The explosive climax to his frustration and depression was the spark needed to work through it all, especially his godfather’s and classmate’s deaths. Just as with any adolescent, frustration builds until something has to give. Any teenager can look at this book and see similar emotions if not similar situations and see that Harry, though the savior of the wizarding world, has problems just like anybody else.

This book in particular shows adolescence as a stormy phase. This is the part where nothing goes right. This mid-point is exactly halfway between childhood and adulthood, and no one, including the adults, knows what exactly to make of it. Harry would be a ninth grader if he was at a public school in the United States. He would be one of the little kids that make seniors wonder if they were ever that small. Every ninth grader knows the awe of staring up at one of those seniors and feeling like a little minnow in the pond. Ninth grade is the big transition to high school from junior high, and all of the students are edgy about how they should act and what they should do. This mid-point is the gray area that no one knows what to do with. Harry’s experience with these issues reflects the innate gray zone of adolescence that everyone hits at some point.

As a point of controversy, the Harry Potter series is grouped as a single target. Challengers of Harry Potter do not seem to have much of a problem with the issues of the story, however. Instead, they have oddly focused on fundamental characteristics, the number one being magic. For the most part, extremely strict religious people seem to be the majority of challengers, and their main concern is that the series might teach their children that witchcraft is a good thing or somehow make their children think that the wizarding world is real. Other concerns are that it promotes violence, rebellion, killing, and anti-family sentiment. No real evidence is given to these claims, and many people who made the claims have admitted to not even reading the books at all (Dunne). The challenges made are nearly based completely off of hearsay and assumptions. This speaks somewhat to the pliability of the parents and other opposition. The particular group that opposes the book does so based on a very clear-cut, happy-little-ending story format. They fear for the corruption of their children and do not believe that the children are capable of separating the fiction from their reality (Dunne). Adolescence is a formative stage, and the issue is that the line between fantasy and reality may be blurred by the magic of the series. It would seem as though the opposition gives little credit to the adolescent readers in question and operates on an almost Puritan strictness of ideals. Faith in the adolescents themselves is not in this equation. Harry Potter continues to be challenged on these same issues, and while many libraries and schools have given in to the demands, the series remains a popular escape for teenagers, who see Harry as the ordinary hero that could be anyone.

 

 

Works Cited
Dunne, Diane Weaver. “Look Out Harry Potter! — Book Banning Heats Up.” Education World:. Education World, 4 Oct. 2000. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.
Rowling, JK. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print.