John Granger’s How Harry Cast His Spell: In the J. K. Rowling Harry Potter books, Harry and most other characters are well known to have multiple personality
“A Doppelgänger is a character or creature’s complementary figure or shadow, which reveals aspects of its personality otherwise invisible…Rowling has created doppelgängers that, like Jekyll/Hyde, are in the same body, and at least one, like Frankenstein and monster, that is in separate bodies…
“…almost every character in Harry Potter is something of a doppelgänger. Specifically, the Harry/Voldemort relation is key to understanding the meaning of the books and why they are so popular…
“Many of Rowling’s characters, for instance, are animagi. These are masters of the magical subject of transfiguration who can change at will into an animal shape…The shape each animagus takes is a pointer to his or her hidden character…The animal figure is a shadow, or doppelgänger…
“Doppelgängers of the Jekyll and Hyde sort…are often a simple matter of birth…In addition to these half-breeds and shape-changers, we also have…a metamorphmagus…The books also include a host of ‘threshold characters’…These folk stand in the doorway between two worlds…
“And of course there is Polyjuice Potion. By means of this magic draught, Harry Potter characters can for a brief time transform into other characters…
“So far all the shadow characters or doppelgängers I have mentioned have been internal ones; that is, the mirrored aspects are within a single person or creature. It is just as common for there to be two persons, in which one is a revealing reflection of the other…
“…the outcomes of the books hinge on the relation of Harry and Voldemort, a classic doppelgänger pairing…Order of the Phoenix begins with three mentions of Harry’s feeling that his skull has been split in two…It turns out, as we learn by book’s end, that Harry’s head really is divided and he has an unwelcome guest…Harry has a double nature, or shadow, in his link to Voldemort…Harry’s literal…double-mindedness with Voldemort really evidences itself in Order of the Phoenix, but each of the previous books hints at it…
“…it will help here to recall that Voldemort is not the Dark Lord’s given name. His real name is Tom Riddle, which, because Thomas comes from the Aramaic word for ‘twin,’ is a pointer to how important the doppelgänger structure is to these stories. Voldemort’s given name means ‘twin enigma.’
“The riddle we have to solve, then, is what meaning…there is to this doubling or twin motif in Harry Potter” (1, pp. 42-48).
Perhaps it reflects multiple personality in the multiply-named author (see past posts on her use of pseudonyms).
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