Die if you must, Harry. It might be good for all of us.
There are so many grand literary precedents for Harry Potter to take that last broom ride into the sky, and so many cathartic possibilities for families should he pass on, that it would almost be a shame not to off the wildly popular teenage wizard.
Speculation runs rampant that Harry, or at least a major character until now considered safe, will die in the seventh and final Potter book by J.K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” to be released the second that calendar pages flip to July 21. With death looming near someone as important to kids as Harry – more than 300 million books sold worldwide – many Potter fans worry a fictional demise might leave scars on real children.
Not to worry, say literature experts and careful parents. Beloved characters have been dying in books and movies revered by children since Charles Dickens’ Little Nell, E.B. White’s Charlotte the spider, Bambi’s mom and “Sesame Street’s” Mr. Hooper. An important death written with care and consideration not only offers emotional growth to the young reader but makes for a great plot they’ll never forget.
“Better a beloved character dies and we are truly moved, than a faceless group or a flat type is killed for mere plot needs,” said Craig Svonkin, a literature instructor at the University of California, Riverside. As with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” and other great works, the engrossing battle of good versus evil in Harry Potter books makes “real loss a necessity,” Svonkin said.
One teen is worried, prepared
At nearly 15, Sophia Matuszewicz doesn’t have the academic remove to call Harry’s death a “necessity,” but the Denver teenager is prepared for the worst.
“I’m pretty worried Harry will die,” said Sophia, who has been at the bookstore on release day for the past four Rowling books. “I think there will be widespread mourning. I’ll probably cry.”
But she has cried at deaths in other books too and wouldn’t for anything give up the relationships with characters that made their demise so important.
“It’s actually a good thing,” Sophia said, “because it means the characters felt so real to me.”
The modern nanny state needn’t worry so much that kids are shocked when exposed to death, said Dave Kopel. By day, he is the research director of the libertarian Independence Institute in Golden; by night – or weekends – he is a detailed analyst of the Harry Potter series. Death in great books has precedents far earlier than Charlotte the spider.
“If the family is Christian, the biggest guy they hear about in the Bible was tortured to death,” Kopel said. “If you’re Jewish, like my family, the big story at Passover is about the plague killing all the firstborn children of Egypt.”
“The Chronicles of Narnia,” C.S. Lewis’ revered children’s book series, saw a revival with a blockbuster 2005 movie version. People overlooked the fact that at the end of the book series, the entire Pevensie family dies in a train wreck. Lewis’ Christian allegory concludes with Aslan, the Christlike lion, escorting the children to Narnia- heaven.
“As a child, I always thought that was such a cop-out,” said Anne Alton, a professor of children’s literature at Central Michigan University. If big characters must die, let them die, Alton said, don’t “sugarcoat” the grief by having a lion tell the kids that Narnia-heaven is even better than real life.
Alton eagerly awaits the last Potter book and is certain there will be important – and justified – questions of death.
“We learn that bad things happen, and we can’t always control them, but we can learn to control ourselves,” Alton said. “And kids judge Harry’s reactions to death, which is in itself a catalyst for growth.”
Alton also argues that avoiding death in children’s works is a post- World War II phenomenon.
“Characters dying in children’s literature is pretty common until the late 20th century,” she said. “Children used to die quite regularly in books, as they did in life.”
Rowling’s groundwork solid
When Dickens serialized “The Old Curiosity Shop” in the 1840s, thousands of readers wrote begging him not to kill Little Nell. Just as kids line up to buy “Harry Potter” at midnight, crowds gathered at New York’s harbor for the latest in the serial, asking those on the ship if Nell had died. (She did.)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off master detective Sherlock Holmes in 1893, only to bring him back after 10 years of public outcry.
Younger Harry Potter readers will be fine with anything that happens, because Rowling has been consistent and every scene is justified. “I haven’t heard a peep from kids about Harry,” Alton said. “All I hear is adults not wanting him to die.”
Parents’ trying to avoid the topic of death with their children is also a recent development, Svonkin said.
“Nineteenth-century children were pretty sure to know someone who had died, quite possibly a sibling or parent, and not just an older grandparent,” Svonkin said. “Children will eventually be confronted with loss, and not being prepared will harm them much more than knowledge will.”
Sophia’s mother, Emily, agrees whole-heartedly. The Matuszewicz family just experienced a death close to home, and Emily felt her daughters were ready to attend the funeral in part because of their handling of death through literature.
“The power of story is so compelling,” she said. “It’s the way they learn about life.”
Judging from the long-term effects on the literature experts, parents should worry less about “Harry” 7 and more about hiding copies of “Charlotte’s Web.”
“Charlotte’s death was more than I could stand, and I still cry reading about it or seeing it dramatized,” said Lana Whited, professor of English and literature at Ferrum College in Virginia and a scholar on children’s reading habits. “I can’t imagine how I might have parted with Wilbur himself.”
Svonkin’s third-grade teacher read “Charlotte’s Web” out loud, “only to have most of the class sobbing when Charlotte died,” he said. Even Dickens wanted to save Little Nell, “but the rules of the real world, or of the universe the author has created, must overrule the desire to hand a happy ending.”
If all else fails, said Philip Nel, associate professor of children’s literature at Kansas State University, you can point children back toward the immutable truth of written words: We can always turn back to the beginning of a book.
“Fictional characters do not really die,” Nel said. “Dumbledore is still alive in the first six Harry Potter books.”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
