Photos: Maddie Kauffman
With Sept. 2018 marking the 20th anniversary of “Harry Potter’s” release in the United States, Elizabethtown College has been giving the beloved young adult (YA) fantasy series its due appreciation.
Visiting assistant professor of English Dr. Tara Moore has played a significant role in the Harry Potter craze of the semester, as she has a number of published works about the series and is currently teaching a First Year Seminar entitled “Harry Potter and the Spell of Story.”
Some of the works that Moore has published have covered topics such as the teaching styles of professors at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the representation of adults in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”
Her latest essay regarding the series is to be published in an anthology, entitled “Inside the World of Harry Potter,” and focused on the ways in which adoptive families have been discussed all throughout the extended canon of Harry Potter.
Moore read from an essay, entitled “Dangerous Depictions of Adoption in the World of Harry Potter,” Oct. 17 2018 in the Winters Alcove of the High Library.
Moore has long worked to write about YA literature and will be teaching a course on it in the 2019 spring semester.
Likewise, she has an established ethos in writing about adoption, having more broadly talked in the ALAN Review about how sci-fi and fantasy works tend to handle the subject.
Adoption, in particular, has been such a gripping subject for Moore to write about due to its connection to her own family. One of her daughters is adopted, and for that reason, Moore commented that she “pays more attention to [adoption in literature]” with that consideration in mind.
Due to her fascination with the YA genre, Moore hopes that she will be able to have access to texts that will contribute to her being able to have “more open and critical” discussions about adoption with her daughter once she is older.
Moore is able to effectively and convincingly show that admiration for any given subject is not by any means the same as blind praise. She is able to hold a critical lens to the ways in which Rowling has handled the subject of adoption across the extended Harry Potter Universe—ranging from the original series to the Fantastic Beasts films to works published by Rowling on Pottermore to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”
Moore expressed that the overall thesis of her essay was “the representation of adoption in the franchise is very problematic and disrespectful to the adoptive family bond.”
Additionally, Moore emphasized that this critique “doesn’t mean we can’t still love the series, [it] just means we should be aware of how that effects young readers and talk about it.”
During her presentation in the High Library, Moore handed out blue notecards and instructed the students in the audience to create a list of as many orphaned or adopted characters across the Harry Potter canon as they could think of.
This activity served to highlight the fact that while the Harry Potter series has numerous depictions of adopted families, few of them are positive.
The main issue with adoption in the series is that adopted children continue to fill the archetypal role of orphan, a sentiment echoed by first-year Max Miller who mentioned that even as an adopted child himself, he “looked at [Harry Potter] as an orphan” and not as a child of adoption.
Another first-year, Allison Nardi, commented on how as a casual reader it had never occurred to her “that the adoption theme was so prevalent.”
“Harry Potter seems a series that is built on heroism from personal quality and yet the bloodlines are still in there. What are bloodlines doing there in the first place?” professor of English and women and gender studies Dr. Kimberly V. Adams said, following Moore’s presentation.
When the idea of bloodlines is so often used by Rowling to, as Moore stated, “talk about race without talking about race,” the impacts of its continued reference in the conversation of family does become startling.
While Harry Potter has done a great deal to give children a sense of identity and community, it is important to also be aware of the narratives that Rowling has not given voice to.
Moore makes reference to the fact that Rowling’s handling of adoption in the series violates some of the most basic guidelines of adoption training. Most notably missing is the notion of the “Adoption Triad”—a parenting style that gives equal weight to the child’s connection to their birth parents and to their adoptive parents.
Harry wasn’t allowed that and was continually denied his “healthy curiosity” about his birth parents to the extent to which it grew into an obsession.
Moore’s main concern about this is that Rowling has continued to use adoption as a “provocative” narrative device, without giving concern to the impacts of such portrayals upon real adoptive families.
