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Love and Power in Harry Potter
By Stephen Proskauer MD | August 23, 2007
WARNING: If you haven’t finished the seventh book in the Harry Potter series and don’t want any clues to the ending, don’t read this!
The relationship between love and power turns out to be the pivotal theme in the Harry Potter saga. As early as the first book we learn that it was his mother’s self-sacrificing love that saved Harry from Voldemort’s killing curse when he was a baby. Over and over again throughout the seven books Harry escapes death by virtue of his selfless motives and acts of compassionate caring for others.
Unlike his nemesis, Voldemort, Harry has no aspirations to lord it over people through mastery of wizardry. He is humble about his heroism and frank about the fear he feels during confrontations with evil, when he is only trying desperately to save himself and those he loves. Harry is free of desire for personal power, and this proves to be the key to his strength. This freedom allows him to transcend feelings of hatred and need for revenge, even against the villain who killed his parents.
Harry’s basic goodness, his role as a giver and receiver of love and friendship, shields him from the ruthless power of Voldemort. At grave risk to himself he even rescues people who persecuted him, like his cousin Dudley at the beginning of the fifth book, when Harry drives away the dementors as they are about to devour Dudley’s soul, and during the final battle in the seventh book when he saves his classmate Draco Malfoy, who did nothing but tease and torment Harry from the start and acted as Voldemort’s pawn in killing Harry’s mentor, Dumbledore.
Being loveless himself, Voldemort is blind to the source of Harry’s strength and consistently underestimates Harry’s capacities just as he underestimates the resources of his friends and supporters. His isolation and arrogance are Voldemort’s undoing. Without power he is nothing, just like the cruel emperor in the Star Wars saga. The black arts of wizardry are the mythic equivalent of the dark side of the Force.
Potentially nothing but another allegorical struggle between good and evil, the Harry Potter saga comes alive with human drama because JK Rowling depicts her characters with precise psychological realism, especially Harry and Hermione and Ron, three friends struggling through the travails of their teens together. Particularly Harry’s battles with grief, isolation and abandonment make him a person of deep feeling, easy to identify with and far from a cardboard cutout. A number of the other characters have positive and negative qualities and mixed motives, much more complex than allegorical figures who are but standard bearers for pure good and pure evil.
In the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort at the end of the seventh book, Harry’s humanity becomes exquisitely poignant. When he resigns himself to death and walks alone and terrified into the forest, determined to sacrifice himself and destroy Voldemort to save the world from enslavement to the remorseless villain, he relies on the support of his dead parents and the spirits of all his deceased guides to drive away the menacing dementors. Harry could not go on without them. He is swept forward on a tide of love. The resonance between vulnerability and strength reaches its highest level at this excruciatingly painful moment. In a recent interview, JK Rowling admitted weeping as she wrote this chapter. Harry’s anguish became unbearably real to her, just as it is to the reader.
Harry has a near death experience but he does not die. Only the part of Voldemort that had lodged itself in him is destroyed, leaving Harry feeling whole and at peace for the first time. With quiet confidence Harry is now able to confront Voldemort and bear witness to the true nature of evil: it is only brute force, not the real power that emanates from love. Still raging instead of grieving for his losses and his crimes, Voldemort is finally destroyed by his own killing curse, turned back upon him as he makes one last desperate attempt to end Harry’s life. In the end, he appears more withered and pathetic than menacing in death.
Power without love is perennially doomed to fail. It is nothing but the fearful and desperate wielding of destructive force, not real strength at all. JK Rowling has created a modern myth of epic proportions that explores the complex relationship between good and evil, between power and force, within us all.
Topics: Books |
September 8th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
I enjoy the theme of love and the power that Harry Potter exhbits as a result of the love he has gained from his mother’s sacrifice.
Love is something that we feel but may not be able to explain the invisible force it has over us.
it is true to life that Voldemort’s character flaw was his inability to recognize the power of love which became his downfall.
Thanks for giving us something more to think about. I love it that a children’s book could be such a great example of a universal truth-LOVE.
THis truth even works half way around the world in Saipan.
October 6th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
I appreciate your comment,Karen. It’s amazing to think of how small the world of communication has become.