Virginia Woolf Would Want You to Read Harry Potter

But maybe fiction is out of style?

When I was seven years old, I began what would become a years-long, life-altering journey: my love for Harry Potter.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number Four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

This opening line of The Sorcerer’s Stone remains seared in my memory. I originally started reading Harry Potter because my older sister said I should, and when you’re seven and your sister is 12, what she says goes.

As time went on, I grew obsessed with the series, devouring one book after the next. After about a year, I finished Harry Potter, and then I watched all the movies—whichever ones had come out at that point—and then I started the books all over again.

I have lately found myself reminiscing over the reader I once was. As a child, I wanted to drown out the world and delve into my stories. I waited until I could get to bed at night and pick up right where I left off the night before. I would stay up all Friday night reading and finish my novel before shul the next day.

But as I grew older, fiction fell out of style. Suddenly everyone around me was reading books with intelligent-sounding titles and fancy covers; books about real-world problems and statistics and our ever-evolving society. I didn’t find those books interesting. I didn’t want books that reflected reality. I wanted books that transported me to other worlds.

But is fiction truly detached from reality?

In her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” where Virginia Woolf examines women’s place in literature, she tries to understand why so few women have written fiction.

For fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

For Woolf, fiction is quite realistic, and we ought not to take its connection to reality lightly. Novels contain other worlds that are written and illustrated by real people in our own world. Fiction may not be real, but it is simultaneously as real as it gets. It reflects problems, queries, dilemmas, dynamics—all taken from our own society. Fiction gives us the opportunity to think about our own world through the lens of an imaginary world.

In Harry Potter, I learned how to analyze characters and their various complexities. Growing up was understanding that the most complex character in the series is not Severus Snape, like I was always wont to believe, rather it is Albus Dumbledore—a man who is wise and clever and manipulative, all traits that help ensure his side ultimately wins. Analyzing fictional people in Harry Potter taught me how to analyze real people in my life.

If you haven’t gotten tired of the Harry Potter references yet, I will tie this back to The Deathly Hallows (major spoiler alert in the next line). After Harry dies and wakes up in what looks to him like Kings Cross Station, he meets Dumbledore:

“Professor, is this all real? Or is it just happening inside my head?”

“Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry. Why should that mean that it’s not real?”

Books don’t need to feel real in order to teach us about reality. As Woolf teaches us, fiction is the work of human beings, people who have seen the world and have something to say about it.

Perhaps this has inspired you to pick up a work of fiction this week—personally, I reread (and rewatched!) many scenes from Harry Potter to glean inspiration for this newsletter. Whatever you choose to read this week, I would love to hear about it!

Here’s to a good week, and to besorot tovot,

Rivka

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