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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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Recent Posts
The Know-Nothing Party | Comment [5]
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Featured Articles By the Author
J. K. Rowling at Harvard 2
J. K. Rowling spoke at Harvard’s commencement this month, and as I noted in the previous post the uplifting theme of her speech was the creative imagination and the classics she read to cultivate it. But in the brief plot of her career, the classics have an antagonist: her parents.
They were poor, Rowling says, and as she grew up and pondered a vocation, they had an oppressive influence. She recalls:
“I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
“They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. . . .
“I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
“I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. . . .”
Is this not a strange drama for a wildly successful writer to recount at a graduation ceremony of the best and brightest?
The phrases “keys to an executive bathroom” and “wrong direction” make the assertion “I do not blame my parents for their point of view” sound condescending, and in light of her spectacular wealth their notion that her imagination “was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension” looks all the worse, both dead wrong and unappreciative of her talent back then. She didn’t even want to tell them about her studies, the ancient books that inspired her — that’s how anti-intellectual they were.
On the other hand, Rowling notes their poverty and lack of schooling as causes for vocational visions, and many practical parents would act the same way. Indeed, we don’t need to note how many teenage writers leave college with no marketable skills and never make it as paid scribes.
Instead, we might consider how complex and mysterious is the alchemy of experience and talent and discipline and conviction and, yes, parents that make a successful writer. Isn’t it entirely possible that if Rowling’s parents didn’t disparage her literary studies, if they didn’t discourage her writing ambitions, she wouldn’t have concocted the settings and characters and situations that make Harry Potter so popular? In Rowling’s rendition at Harvard, they play a simple negative role in her development. Surely, their role was more dynamic than that.
An added point: here is an opening for Harry Potter criticism, especially given the status of parents and substitute-parent figures in the series.
Posted at 06:22:45 AM on June 25, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
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I am 38 years old and my working class parents still make fun of me every time I use a word they don’t know. I have always said they would have been more proud of me if I had been a manager of a Burger King than they are of any degree I have earned.
No number of awards or accolades will change the sometimes venomous commentary from people who do not respect your achievements or capabilities. Perhaps Rowling simply understands that, in terms of her career, her parents truly were nothing but a negative influence and she succeeded in spite of them rather than because of them.
I find that a refreshingly honest counter to the often trite myth of hindrance really being the inspiration to success. Horatio Alger stories are so passe.
— TM · Jun 26, 02:12 AM · #
Don’t you think Horatio Alger books are good juvenile literature? I have several on my shelf, such as Brave and Bold, Risen in the Ranks, and Paul the Peddler, and the writing is, in fact, pretty darn good.
— Mark Bauerlein · Jun 26, 01:20 PM · #
Professor Bauerlein, did you hear/read the entire speech, or just the part where she talked about her parents? You may very well have a point, but it is out of context, considering that the details about Rowling’s studies and her parents’ opposition to her being a writer only serve as an introduction into the central
to her speechtopics of “The benefits of failure” and “The power of imagination”. I found much more interesting, for commentary, her appeal to the 2008 Harvard graduates to use their position among the powerfullactual or futureto influence a positive change in the world by remembering the powerless. What is your opinion about that?Thanks
— Carmen · Jun 27, 05:49 PM · #
Check my first post on Rowling’s speech, Carmen. I’m not sure, though, that Rowling asserts much about “a positive change in the world,” though.
— Mark Bauerlein · Jun 30, 08:59 AM · #