One day, when my daughter was 11, she found a thick, cream-colored envelope on the doormat outside. The envelope bore a wax seal. Inside was an invitation in English, in some curlicued font, to attend Hogwarts on the upcoming September 1. Further instructions would follow.
Boundless excitement. At age 11 you know this can’t be real, but it was still thrilling. All my daughter’s friends denied vehemently that they were behind the mysterious initiative. As did their parents. We denied it, too, when she asked us, because it really wasn’t us. For months the mystery remained unsolved. It was only quite a while afterward (an eternity, especially in the world of children) that the mother of her classmate Michael Abutboul confessed that her son was behind the idea and had devised the marvelous invitation with her help.
I’m an editor of books for children and young adults. If that story had appeared in a book, I’d have written in the blurb on the jacket that it proves that “friendship is the greatest magic of all.” My children like to laugh at catchphrases like that.
My daughter was born in 1997, the year that also saw the birth of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” It was the brink of the new millennium. It took a few years for the book to be translated into Hebrew, and another few years for my daughter to grow up a little. But from the moment those two things converged, it was overwhelming love. She read that book more than 45 times, could rattle off every bit of trivia from the series. In general, this marked the starting point for a girl who grew up at fantasy conventions, including Comic Con in London, including Cosplay, with great personal investment. Like many millennials, my daughter, too, matured with and from within Harry Potter.
But when the name of the author behind the books, J.K. Rowling, is mentioned today, she gets angry. “She’s TERF! If once you could believe that she expresses certain opinions out of ignorance, today it’s clear that these are simply her opinions! We’ve already tried a few times to explain to her where she’s wrong.”
My daughter declined to co-write this article with me. I told her its underlying thesis – that her generation is performing a sort of matricide on Rowling in order to liberate themselves from the powerful influence Harry Potter exerts on them – but she rejected it outright. From her point of view, literary theories aren’t germane here. There’s a right side: the LGBTQ community, especially those actively promoting the rights of the trans community and supporters from the whole fluid gender spectrum – and a wrong side, in this case the writer she once revered so much.
I suppose it was naïve to think that you could write an article on matricide together with your daughter.
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Your death is my life
In 1973, the American literary scholar Harold Bloom published “The Anxiety of Influence.” It presents the Freudian argument that every great poet, or one who aspires to greatness, must perform a metaphoric patricide on the great poet who preceded them and who influenced them, “so as to clear imaginative space for themselves.” The reverence for one’s forerunners is daunting, and in order to create something new, the novice poet must undermine by diverse means – for example, by misreading – the individual wielding the influence, whom Bloom called “the precursor.” According to Bloom, the “great inhibitor” who cast a shadow over all the poets who followed him, up to the 20th century, was John Milton (1608-1674), of whom Keats wrote in a letter, “Life to him would be death to me.”
The history of Israeli literature also provides classic examples of Bloom’s model. In a Freudian reading, the poet Haim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) can be considered the “precursor” against whom the literary circle of poets known as Yachdav (Together), led by Avraham Shlonsky, rebelled in order to carve a path to the new modernist Hebrew poetry. A generation passed, and Natan Zach “murdered” Nathan Alterman, the leading poet of the Yachdav collective, in his well-known article “Reflections on Alterman’s Poetry.”
Literary patricide not only “clears imaginative space”; it also helps the poet position himself as the leading voice of a new era. When Roy Hasan says of Zach that “he’s not a bad poet, but the distance between him and what people made of him is heaven and earth,” or terms Meir Wieseltier “an old codger,” he is well aware that he is locating himself in the literary dynasty of patricidal offspring. The venomous criticism leveled by Yehuda Vizan at veteran poet Ronny Someck can be read in the same way. It’s a critique by well-educated literary artists who are very familiar with Bloom’s theory and make clever use of it in order to insinuate themselves into Israel’s writing dynasty as the most glittering next best thing. Legitimate. Traditional, even.
Bloom’s theory was severely criticized, mainly for positing a white, male poetic lineage. The history of poetry, and of writing in general, according to Bloom, is a violent relay race involving fathers and sons. But what about the mothers and daughters? Where are the female literary creators in his Freudian theory?
From my daughter’s point of view, literary theories are irrelevant . There’s a right side: the LGBTQ community and its and supporters, and a wrong side, in this case the writer she once revered.
American literary scholars Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar responded to Bloom in their 1979 book “The Madwoman in the Attic.” Female authors, they argued, don’t have the privilege of being tormented by “the anxiety of influence.” What inhibits writing by women is a far more basic anxiety – an “anxiety of authorship.” Because writing was considered a male occupation for centuries, female authors were compelled to overcome not their precursors, but their own anxiety to the effect that they lacked authority and legitimacy to sound any voice at all. The way to overcome the anxiety of authorship, then, was in fact to draw on the dynasty of female writers from the past. Accordingly, these women thirst to draw legitimation for their creative work precisely from their great forerunners. In Israeli children’s literature, one can discern the embrace young female authors give Lea Goldberg and Miriam Yellin Shteklis and others of their generation. No one imagines riding roughshod over their work in order to establish themselves as their successors.
The clarifications begin
Over the past 12 years I worked as a chief editor of children’s and young adult books at a large Hebrew publishing house. I saw the profound and wide-ranging influence that the Harry Potter books exerted on young adult fiction. Some years, every second manuscript I received was a type of reformulation of the series – and the younger the writers, the more obvious it was that they were simply trying to rewrite what they had read and loved. They grew up with Harry Potter, wrote homages to the series, set up chat groups devoted exclusively to them and met at fantasy conventions dressed up as characters from the books.
In the meantime, J.K. Rowling became a legend – she and the coffee shop where she wrote the first book in order to save money heating her house. For a long time she seemed to be carrying her fame and glory impressively. A family women with both feet on the ground, without the mannerisms of stardom, the fifth woman in history to become a billionaire in her own right and who donated hundreds of millions to various causes and thus removed herself from the billionaires’ list.
But the maturation of the young fans brought with it critical thinking. Some of them discovered that the Harry Potter phenomenon is lacking precisely in the areas most important to them, with the preoccupations that define them as a generation: gender criticism, the LGBTQ world and multiculturalism.
Suddenly biting questions erupted: Why is there only one Jewish student at Hogwarts (Anthony Goldstein)? Why do the goblins – the bankers of the wizarding world – recall antisemitic caricatures? If Potter’s fellow student Cho Chang is Chinese, why does her name consist of two Korean surnames? Rowling responded with attempts at damage control aimed at proving that Potter’s world is in fact all-embracing and tolerant. As early as 2007, she made it clear that Hogwarts School headmaster Dumbledore is gay and even had an amorous relationship with his nemesis, the wizard Gellert Grindelwald, though that is not stated explicitly in the books.
As the years passed, however, allegations multiplied to the effect that in addition to the extensive knowledge Rowling displays about Western culture and mythology, the Harry Potter series is still characterized by the under-representation of other cultures and identities. In regard to gender roles and identities, too, Rowling’s protagonists are on the conservative side of the spectrum. Ron’s mother, Molly Weasley, cooks, cleans and scolds; Hermione, though considered admirable, is the stereotype of the diligent, fussy female student; and the partner Harry finally chooses, Ginny, is mainly the little sister of his best friend and an admirer of Harry. Hovering above all these issues is the blurring of the gender of Joanne Rowling herself, who goes by the name J.K. Rowling as an author, as though we haven’t progressed since the days of George Eliot, when a female writer still had to disguise herself as a man in order to succeed.
But that was only a prelude: The gradual decline in the relationship between Rowling and her critical millennial fans spiked into outright contempt on their part when the author began to speak out on social media about biological sex and transgender people.
This is an intergenerational battle. Potterheads are now in their 20s. They are performing an exorcism of the sorcery that bewitched them in their childhood in order to make a place for themselves, in order to stop writing ‘Harry Potter’ over and over.
Twitter wars, death threats
It started in March 2018 with a suspicious Like by the author in response to a tweet that referred to trans women as “men in dresses.” At first Rowling maintained that she had pressed Like accidentally – she said she was only a boomer who wanted to take a screenshot as part of her research for a book, and happened to hit the wrong button. But that Like was only the opening shot in an internet war during which Rowling unerringly positioned herself on the wrong side of the trans and LGBTQ struggle.
In June 2020, she responded on Twitter to an article that dealt with creating a safe space in the post-COVID world for “people who menstruate.” “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” she tweeted mockingly. No one was amused. The need to distinguish between biological phenomena, such as menstruation, and gender is the core thesis of the trans community. By asserting that people who menstruate are necessarily women, Rowling is excluding trans people from the definition of “women” and defining some trans people mistakenly as women even though they define their gender identity as male.
The tweet sparked hundreds of thousands of comments, many of them from the generation that grew up with the Harry Potter books. From their perspective, the woman who wrote the modern fairy tale about a love that conquers all was disseminating hate and supporting the exclusion of a marginalized community.
In June 2020, shortly after that inflammatory tweet, Rowling published a long article on her website, which she shared on Twitter, entitled “TERF Wars” – referring to the acronym “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” In the course of thousands of words, she elaborated on why she is concerned about the activity of the trans community, in part grounding that view in the violence she herself endured at the hands of her first husband, and a sexual assault she suffered. “I want trans women to be safe,” she wrote, and emphasized that she is not transphobic. “At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe.” She warned that if “any man who believes or feels he’s a woman” is allowed into women’s bathrooms and changing rooms, “you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.” The web piece sparked widespread derision. This time the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies also came out in support of the trans community.
Throughout the summer of 2020 – a time of a deadly pandemic and global lockdowns – it seemed as though all authors, intellectuals and English-language writers without exception had joined the fray. Some switched sides after initially supporting Rowling, having belatedly realized that by doing that – or by expressing opposition to cancel culture as a whole – they had inadvertently positioned themselves as enemies of the trans community. Writers such as Margaret Atwood and Stephen King, who signed a public letter together with Rowling decrying what they saw as cancel culture, hurried to make it clear – in the wake of furious reactions – that they definitely support the trans community. Another open letter, published in September 2020, which was signed by King, Neil Gaiman, John Green and others, expressed unequivocal support for the rights of trans and nonbinary people in the United States and Canada.
This battle is far from over. Rowling has not retracted her remarks. LGBTQ activists and their supporters are unleashing their heavy artillery against her, from calls for a boycott to, in one case at least, a public threat to place a bomb in her mailbox.
In September 2020, “Troubled Blood,” the fifth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, was published. Rowling conducted her research about trans women in connection with this book – which, like all the others in the series, she wrote under the pen name Robert Galbraith. (Spoiler) To everyone’s relief, the serial killer is not from the trans community, but is just a regular cisgender man who wears women’s clothing to facilitate his work. Reviewing the book in The Daily Telegraph, Jake Kerridge noted that the moral of the book “seems to be: never trust a man in a dress.”
Former fans from across the gender spectrum responded to the book’s publication under #RIPJKRowling, with the less vehement ones declaring that it’s not J.K. Rowling who died – it’s her career. They may have a point. Rowling was remarkably absent from a recent television special reuniting the stars of the “Harry Potter” films. The woman behind the magic was shown only in archival footage from 2019, before she first “misspoke.” The trailer for the third “Fantastic Beasts” film also shrunk her name down to near-invisibility.
It’s clear that Rowling doesn’t really understand what has happened. Her private life was part of the legend that was built around her: an economically disadvantaged woman who was a victim of male violence, a poor single mother whose talent rescued her from a bitter fate. Suddenly she’s a privileged boomer with feminism mutating before her eyes. Time and again she refers to the recent attacks on her as an expression of misogyny. She made this resoundingly clear in July 2021 when she wrote, after the threat to place a bomb in her mailbox and publication of her address by pro-trans community activists: “To be fair, when you can’t get a woman sacked, arrested or dropped by her publisher, and cancelling her only made her book sales go up, there’s really only one place to go.”
This is an intergenerational battle. The Potterheads – the children who grew up on Harry Potter – are now in their 20s. They are performing an exorcism of the sorcery that bewitched them in their childhood in order to make a place for themselves, in order to stop writing “Harry Potter” over and over. They are doing it by reexamining the books and the films through the cultural correctness filter. They seem to be almost happy to discover that the series they loved so much gets a failing grade in regard to multiculturalism and political correctness.
The final “avada kedavra” (the so-called killing curse, as per the Potter books) is the personal struggle involving J.K. Rowling herself. If she is transphobic, the magic can be shed and people can move on. Outwardly, the former fans are groaning in despair: Why can’t she just keep quiet? They will not admit that canceling her serves them on their path to leave a mark in the world. Perhaps as a feminist Rowling can find an egalitarian ray of light in the battle against her: Not only fathers need to be killed in order to make place for the young generation in the world – mothers need to die, too.