The realease today of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2 brings to an end the long-running Harry Potter film franchise, which began – hard as it is to believe – 10 years ago, with the release in 2001 of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone. Many children have grown up watching the films, so it seems safe to predict a fair amount of sadness at the series’ end that is not unlike grief: saying goodbye to people we love, knowing that we will never see them again in quite the same way.
However, the grief of an ending series is probably more akin to the bitter-sweet sense of loss a parent feels at the little deaths that mark a child’s development: the baby is gone, but the toddler who replaces her maintains the emotional continuity. Nonetheless, there is real poignancy at the irreversible loss of that infant.
This poignancy is analogous to the feeling of the end of a series – sadness that it’s over, but satisfaction at the emotional closure achieved by moving on to the next stage, a closure we all experience through various life stages, and like to find mirrored in our fictions. In stories about children, that closure is traditionally achieved through their coming of age, usually measured by marriage, family or other symbols of the successful acquisition of adulthood.
Harry Potter is just such a classic coming-of-age tale in a series of quest narratives. Each tale sets Harry on a search for a magical object, which helps him on the larger quest to find and defeat Voldemort, all of which symbolise the largest quest of all, to discover one’s adult identity and place in the world. In the case of the fairytales to which the series consistently alludes, this place is traditionally one of great power – the orphan boy becomes a king, or Cinderella escapes from her wicked stepfamily and becomes a queen (a story from which much of Harry Potter’s plot derives). In the more realist Bildungsroman, such as Oliver Twist, the young Oliver doesn’t become a king, but he does discover he is a rich man’s heir, which to a destitute, abandoned child in Victorian London would be about the same.
And this is why so many readers experienced the epilogue of JK Rowling’s final instalment of the book series, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, as a disappointment. After an adolescence defined by fantastic power, Harry and his friends settle down to an ordinary, middle-class life.
I wondered when I read it whether Rowling wasn’t, perhaps unconsciously, reflecting her own ambivalent feelings about Harry and his friends growing up. Like any parent, she must have been sad to let go, yet partly ready to move on, and so the ending reflects that ambivalence, as it is both triumphant and disappointing. Just like life, some of us might think.
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