Horcrux or Hallow? Magical projections of the psyche in Harry Potter

As Harry Potter and his friends grow, so do the intended readers, who supposedly mirror the protagonist’s age and expectations: no longer children eager for amusing, occasionally even gratuitous, bits of magic, the intended readers of the second half of the series are adolescents who set their own experience in the context of a wider perspective, absorbing everyday reality through the news and the media. Rowling’s consciousness of the shift is underlined by a greater stress on events set in the non-magical world in the opening pages of the volumes following Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The radical change of tone imposed by this structure cannot but bear deep implications for a number of factors in the narrative, from the development of the characters to the relation between events far apart in time; and since one of the most important factors in the novels is magic, it is interesting to explore what happens to it in this pattern of change that entails the abandonment of illusions. Rowling’s departure within a well-established genre from the imaginary into the real, first observed in her decision to set her novels in contemporary England though focussing on a fantastical setting, makes her handling of magic an extremely delicate matter. The Harry Potter saga, for all its insistence on enchanted castles and scarlet steam engines, is in fact a study in Bildungsroman, and the characters’ psychology maintains primary importance in spite of the richness of details in the settings. It is only once Rowling makes magic part of the characters that it becomes structurally, not just superficially, satisfying. In the second part of the series magic becomes at last part of the story, while hitherto it had been used as an element of entertaining but almost superfluous decoration. The present paper studies this evolution, identifying in the dichotomy between horcruxes and hallows, highlighted in the final volume, an articulate metaphor of the ways in which good and evil are reflected in the individual psyche.