Imaginary Worlds - Caps Lock Harry

Episode Date: November 3, 2016

Harry was being a jerk -- or that's what a lot of kids and teens thought when they read the last few books of JK Rowling's series. Some adult readers chocked up Harry's quick temper, anxiety and defensiveness to typical teen angst. But what if Harry Potter was suffering from PTSD? The writers July Westhale and Sarah Gailey explain how JK Rowling captured the nature of trauma, and why re-reading Harry Potter helped them heal. Also, Casper ter Kuile and Vanessa Zoltan of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text discuss the burden of being the boy who lived. ** This is part 5 of a 6-part series on magic and fantasy. **Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. By the way, in this episode, I'm going to talk about details of the Harry Potter stories, so spoilers ahead if you've managed to avoid them this far. A few years ago, J.K. Rowling was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, and Rowling teared up when talking about 9-11, which happened when she was writing book five of the Harry Potter series, The Order of the Phoenix. It is a defining moment in our lives. I remember thinking, they can't...

I've come down. They've come down, yes. Yeah. And I panicked because I have good friends in New York, and I emailed my two best friends in New York. One of them is my editor, Arthur Levine. Bizarrely, he was able to email me back virtually immediately, and his last line in his email was, and they say we shouldn't teach children about evil.

Because we had had many a discussion about that. about evil. Because we had had many a discussion about that. Now when J.K. Rowling first started writing Harry Potter, she intended it to be much deeper and darker than a typical children's book. At the time, she was working at Amnesty International in London, and that experience had a profound effect on her. But after 9-11, she thought even more about sacrifice, trauma, and war.

And the tone of the books got much darker. Now, I was already an adult when the books came out. And when I read them, I felt huge empathy for Harry. I mean, this poor kid was clearly traumatized after seeing Voldemort kill Cedric Diggory, a fellow student who was very much an innocent, a civilian in this war. And as more of Harry's friends and mentors died, I kept thinking, God, this poor kid needs therapy or some kind of counseling. But the adults in his life either don't believe him,

or they're keeping their distance for their own reasons. So Harry has to be strong, and he loses patience for characters that fall apart weeping or want to hide from their responsibilities. And this is a big difference between the books and the movies. Besides trimming some of the subplots, the movies just don't delve as deeply into what Harry's thinking and feeling. But a lot of kids and teenagers who were reading the books when they came out, like the writer Sarah Gailey, were too young to have that perspective. I was confused and upset and had this feeling like, why would she think that teenagers act like this? I definitely was kind of like, hey, man,

teenagers can communicate better than that. Give us some credit. But when Vanessa Zoltan read the last few books, she was in her 20s and she thought, Harry's just being a typical teenager. Kids often suck when they're 15. I sucked when I was 15. Vanessa co-hosts a podcast called Harry Potter in the Sacred Text

with her friend Casper Turquile. You probably remember them from my last episode. Now today, Vanessa sees a lot more than just teen angst in the series. I mean, looking at the bigger picture, Voldemort wants to cleanse the wizarding world of mudbloods to make way for a fascist rule of pureblood wizards. Well, I see the Holocaust everywhere in these books. So that's me. You know, Vanessa's family background with four grandparents who are Holocaust survivors totally shapes the way that she read it. And it's funny because I kind of came to the book once I'd read it the first time and reading it that second time, I was like, oh, this is such a Christian story and sat down with Vanessa and Vanessa was saying, oh, this is such a Christian story and sat down with Vanessa and Vanessa was saying, oh, this is such a Jewish story. And so it really speaks to the way that, you know,

our own experiences really shape what we what we hear from the from the pages. Oh, yeah. I saw it as a Holocaust story without question. Thank you. But then again, I'm Jewish. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. I thought about being a survivor, you know, how hard it is to be the boy who lived and all the sort of guilt and, you mean, he was the boy who lived. I think that to a certain extent my grandparents, you know, a version of them died in the camps even though they survived. But my father, so much hope was put into my father.

And I think that a lot of people in oppressed situations or who have gone through traumatic situations, we get a lot of emails from people who have gone through trauma and really see themselves in these books. And I talked with some people who said that J.K. Rowling absolutely nailed down every aspect of what it's like to have PTSD. every aspect of what it's like to have PTSD. And for these people, rereading Harry Potter as adults has helped them see their trauma in new ways and helped them heal. More on that after the break. So let's get back to Sarah Gailey. When she first read Harry Potter as a kid,

she understood it at the level of a typical kid. And then she decided to return to the books last Christmas. And I was reading book five, and book five, chapter one, he has his first flashback. And I just, it was like getting hit by lightning. And all of a sudden it was familiar and resonant and painful, but in that good way when you're reading something that is just right on the money. Now Sarah doesn't talk publicly about the nature of her trauma.

And she says we can look at Harry's life to understand why. His first trauma was when he was a baby, right? His parents were killed in front of him. Someone tries to kill him. That's a huge trauma, and there are a lot of developmental ideas about when trauma starts affecting your development. But for Harry specifically, I mean, he's got flashes of this throughout his entire life. And as soon as he goes into this new world of wizards where everyone is, you know, he's got a fresh start and he can make friends finally,

he walks in and all of a sudden everyone is saying, oh, your parents died horribly right in front of you and someone tried to kill you. And people are trying to touch him without his permission. And all they want to see is the scar. It's a really visceral, physical version of what a lot of people who've experienced trauma go through. It's part of the reason I don't like talking about my trauma because it's something that people would look at voyeuristically and have before, and then it's all they want to talk about. It's all they want to think about. All that they want to say to you is, wow, I can't believe that you are where you are after having gone through that. He can't ever just be Harry Potter, right? He's always the boy who lived.

So I want to bring someone else in this conversation, another writer in the Bay Area named July Westhale. You know, my partner likes to joke that I, and this is true, I make a Harry Potter reference every single day. July does talk publicly about her trauma, partially because she feels that her childhood was similar to Harry Potter's. She was orphaned at a young age, and like Harry, she was adopted by her maternal aunt. And living in that household was traumatic, mostly because of her uncle. He was psychologically extremely abusive and very manipulative. So there was a lot of gaslighting. There was a lot of not understanding.

And this is common for children who have developmental trauma and or live in these sort of dictatorial, strict, abusive households that I really questioned if I was real. I still struggle with this as an adult, despite years and years of therapy and all kinds of things. I still have to have constant reminders that I'm a real person. And I think that there is a moment where Harry Potter has that realization that he's a real person. I think he lives in disbelief for a lot of the books. I mean, he never seems to come to terms with his sudden history, his sudden fame. But it's like he becomes a person or he realizes he's a person when he gets this letter from Hogwarts. Otherwise, he's kind of numbly and disassociated, stumbling through this family.

Sarah Gailey says when you read the first book, which is very much a children's book, it's easy to miss the darker nuance of what's going on. Like the scene where Harry comes into the kitchen and Aunt Petunia is cooking breakfast. She swings a frying pan at his head. And it's, I mean, he wakes up in the morning, he walks into the kitchen, and he ducks a frying pan. And it's this very like physical comedy moment, right, kind of slapsticky, that he's ducking the swinging frying pan. But again, reading it as an adult, it's like, oh, that's an 11-year-old kid. He's getting a pretty heavy skillet swung at his head by his aunt. And it's such a matter of course that he just ducks it,

and it's no big deal. Once Harry gets to Hogwarts, he becomes more like a stand-in for the reader. He's discovering this magical world and learning who the important characters are. But Sarah Gailey says Harry is still comprehending everything through his own trauma. Throughout all of the books, really, but especially in the first one, you see Harry doing this thing that is pretty common for people who have grown up in abusive households, which is he polarizes the adult figures in his life.

I mean, he's grown up without any friends, so he polarizes everybody, but especially authority figures are categorized as either, um, I trust you with my life and you are nice to me and you're a hero to me like Dumbledore, or I hate you and you hate me and you're going to try and kill me. And I'm going to do whatever I can, no matter what it takes to make sure that you don't manage to do what you're going to try and kill me and I'm going to do whatever I can no matter what it takes to make sure that you don't manage to do what you're going to try to do to hurt me like Snape and it's funny because I think that's why later on he feels so betrayed by Dumbledore absolutely I mean he's the moment of him realizing that Dumbledore isn't perfect is huge for him it's a a huge shift in his entire worldview. The most devastating thing of all about Harry Potter for me is the Mirror of Erised.

Again, July Westhale. He can sit in front of this mirror and he can see the thing he wants the most, which is his parents. sit in front of this mirror and he can see the thing he wants the most, which is his parents, and how Dumbledore walks in and he says, I'm going to move this mirror, you're never going to see it again because men have wasted in front of it. There's a little bit of that when it comes to being an orphan and engaging with these kinds of narratives, that you have to create a little bit of a distance, take what you can from it and yet keep distance from them because you can waste away in front of fantasy worlds. The mirror of Erised for her was a storage unit in Glendale, Arizona that contained her mother's belongings.

I was supposed to get access to it when I turned 18, but when I turned 18, I came out to my adoptive family. So that delayed the process of getting access to the storage unit for about 10 years. Finally, they accepted her as gay and gave her access to the storage locker. Suddenly, for the first time, I had baby pictures. And my mom was also a writer, so she had a habit of writing letters to me when I was a baby and I had access to them. In a big way, it was an incredible experience to be able to feel connected to this person that I didn't know very well. And on the other hand, it was a reminder of all of these things that I didn't have. And that was like sitting in front of a mirror and seeing the

thing that you wanted most and knowing that it could never come to pass. Another aspect of the books which he identifies with is the Horcrux. The Horcrux is a series of objects where Voldemort has stored scattered pieces of his soul. Harry eventually learns that he's a living Horcrux, of his soul. Harry eventually learns that he's a living horcrux, which explains why he has unwanted visions and flashbacks. When something happens to you, let's say you get mugged, right? And you completely check out while it's happening. Because your brain loves you and wants to take care of you and try to save you from damage. So it's practicing harm reduction, right? So it takes you cognitively out of a situation so that when you try to recall it later, you can't maybe recall it linearly, step by step. It's not just her early childhood either. I mean,

I actually found July online because she had written an article about a relationship she was in with a woman who was very manipulative and abusive. It happened when I was 17, and I didn't acknowledge that it happened until I was 27, when I ran into this person at Pride. And suddenly it was a massive horcrux. If someone is reliving their trauma, they can have that response. They can go into a fight or flight mode. We see that happen with Harry in books five and six, right?

People are saying, we don't believe that you saw what you saw, what happened to you. And his heart starts beating fast and he starts sweating and he gets angry and he's shouting in all caps in the books. A lot of people call him Caps Lock Harry in those books. And Caps Lock Harry is feeling a fight or flight response because he's reliving his trauma, having it denied, having to force himself to do the thing that his brain least wants to do, which is face, acknowledge, accept, and affirm that this horrible thing happened over and over again. I think that anger is this extremely valuable thing. It's an undervalued or over-stigmatized concept in our society. Whereas maybe we should start thinking about anger as something that illuminates our boundaries. And it was something that helped him to survive.

Both Sarah and July each had somebody like Dolores Umbridge in their life who didn't want to believe them and insisted they were making things up. They say that's pretty common with people experiencing trauma. This is a personal theory, but I think we don't want to believe that such horrible things happen, oftentimes senselessly. experiencing trauma. This is a personal theory, but I think we don't want to believe that such horrible things happen, oftentimes senselessly, right? We frequently try to assign a reason that something bad happened to someone. And that can take the form of blaming them or of blaming society or of saying, oh, you shouldn't, you know, walk alone at night through that neighborhood,

because we don't want to just believe that it could happen because then it could happen to us. July says if there's one lesson we can learn from Harry's experience it's that your support system is crucial. There's no way he would have made it out alive without Ron, Hermione and all the adults that looked after them even if they were highly flawed characters. For me growing up, that was my English teachers.

I had an English teacher in high school who was the first real paternal figure I had in my life. And he meant everything to me. And he was the first person who was like, you are smart and you are talented and you are an actual person. And also very tough love, like very, very tough love. And he introduced me to poetry. He introduced me to writing and gave me a lot of tools to be able to go into adulthood, knowing that there were other possibilities of family connection and support. There's a play in London now called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

J.K. Rowling didn't write the play herself, but she did plot out the story. It's about Harry Potter at the age of 40. His glory days as a world-saving hero are long behind him. He works as middle management in the Ministry of Magic, and he's struggling to be a good father because he didn't have any role models. But there's one thing that this older Harry is pretty certain about. He has learned to live with his trauma and accept the fact that he will always have scars,

whether they're visible or not. He has learned to live with his trauma and accept the fact that he will always have scars, whether they're visible or not. Well, that is it for this week. Special thanks to July Westhale, Sarah Gailey, Vanessa Zoltan, and Casper Turquile. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook, I tweet at emolinski, and on my site I will have links to the articles that July and Sarah have written about Harry Potter and PTSD. That's at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. I mean, Voldemort wants to cleanse the wizarding world. Wizarding? Oh my god, I just said that with a Boston accent.