An Empowering Hogwarts. Socialization and the Representation of School Experience in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 70, Trinity College Dublin (School of English), course: English Literature, language: English, abstract: A university essay exploring literary notions of boyhood, psychological maturity and the internalization of parental values all in the context of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the school story genre. The essay argues that the rule-breaking culture inherent in Hogwarts lends itself to an overall empowering portrayal of the school. In J.K. Rowling’s third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the school experience is represented as an overall empowering one. I propose to argue against the approaches of Roberta Trites and Mathew Grenby in their respective papers of The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature and The School Story. By evoking the power mechanism of the Foucauldian Panopticon they depict the Hogwarts school experience as one of complete authoritarianism. I will outline how Foucault’s ‘Panopticism’ is entirely inappropriate and unsustainable in the school of Hogwarts due to the impossibility of surveillance in its enchanted halls and the fallibility of its headmaster. Through its rule-breaking culture I will show how the Hogwarts school experience instead celebrates and encourages the independent questioning of existing dysfunctional power structures. I will explore the school experience of Hogwarts with regard to the themes of authority, power and tribal exclusivity, arguing that the overall portrayal of Hogwarts is an empowering one that inspires in its students independent thought and action against existing authority.