Chapter Four Dumbledore’S Queer Ghost Homosexuality and Its Heterosexual Afterlives in J

Chapter Four Dumbledore’s Queer Ghost Homosexuality and Its Heterosexual Afterlives in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels When do the dead truly die? Jacques Derrida cautions against the presump- tion that the dead can be put to rest: “Vigilance, therefore: the cadaver is perhaps not as dead, as simply dead as the conjuration tries to delude us into believing.” He proceeds to suggest that ghosts register long after their passing and to act despite their absence: “The one who has disappeared appears still to be there, and his apparition is not nothing. It does not do nothing. Assuming that the remains can be identifi ed, we know better than ever today that the dead must be able to work. And to cause to work, perhaps more than ever.”1 For readers of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Derrida’s words might call to mind the untimely passing of Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumb- ledore, Order of Merlin (First Class), Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Supreme Mugwump of the International Confed- eration of Wizards, and Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot (BB x–xi).2 Despite his self-sacrifi cial death at the conclusion of Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore continues to function both textually and metatextually after his demise, most notably due to Rowling’s surprising announcement of his homosexuality. Dumbledore’s work throughout and beyond the Harry Potter series includes guiding Harry to heroic and heteronormative masculinity, and his ghostly model of queer masculinity provides a touchstone hermeneutic for understanding Rowling’s confl icted treatment of childhood innocence as a theme in her novels. That the Harry Potter books validate heteronormativity as the preferred outcome of adolescence provides the foundational premise of this chapter.3 83 84 • Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature By rejecting normality as a virtue, Rowling endorses non-normativity as a key trait of her heroic protagonist. Readers learn that “Harry Potter wasn’t a normal boy. As a matter of fact, he was as not normal as it is possible to be” (CS 3), and Uncle Vernon, whose opinions readers quickly learn to reject, condemns wizardry: “Marge doesn’t know anything about your abnormality” (PA 19), he warns Harry. Vernon’s discomfort with abnormality and wizardry valorizes them in contrast to his arid conformity, and celebrations of wizardry as a priv- ileged state for those fortunate enough to escape Muggle normativity occur throughout the series. Wizardry thus provides a model through which homosexuals can allegorize their unique sense of difference. Several aspects of the novels—including Harry’s “coming out” as a wizard, the necessity for wizards occasionally to “pass” as Muggles, and the unwarranted cultural prejudices against werewolves—invite readings of Rowling’s novels as embracing a range of queer acts and identities. From this perspective, Vernon’s discriminatory attitude toward gendered and sexual difference, as evident when he declares that he “didn’t want some swotty little nancy boy for a son anyway” (GF 27), affi rms that which this unlikable character denigrates. Nancy is a slang term for homosexual, and Vernon’s homophobia reveals that Rowling thematically endorses homosexuality: quite simply, if Vernon Dursley opposes someone or something, readers are encouraged to support them, including “swotty little nancy boy[s].”4 These dynamics, however queer friendly they may be, remain mostly subtextual or otherwise peripheral to Harry’s narrative trajectory and do not measurably undermine the series’ powerful investment in heteronormativity, in which Harry’s path to heroic manhood necessitates the rejection of femininity and a concomitant apotheosis into heterosexuality. In conjunction with Harry’s heteronormative brand of heroism, stereotypical depictions of women undermine the apparent gendered egalitarian- ism of the wizarding world. Despite the novels’ post-feminist façade, in which women are generally treated as equals to men and sexist attitudes are regis- tered as regressive, Elizabeth Heilman contends that “the Harry Potter books feature females in secondary positions of power and authority and replicate some of the most demeaning, yet familiar, cultural stereotypes for both males and females.”5 Beyond the stereotypical depictions of many female characters, numerous male characters, notably Ron Weasley, Sirius Black, and Albus Dumbledore, stand in secondary positions to Harry so that his masculinity reigns triumphant at the narrative’s conclusion; such hierarchical paradigms of masculine identity cement the predominant heroic heteronormativity of the series.6 In this chapter, I expand upon these previous arguments to dem- onstrate the ways in which Dumbledore and the specter of his homosexuality fortify the heteronormativity of the series by promoting children’s innocence as a virtue, despite Rowling’s mostly deprecatory treatment of this “virtue.” For even when homosexuals such as Dumbledore do not die within a text, they are often metaphorically ghosts and specters, apparitional fi gures who bolster an ideological agenda without being seen to do so, and often one that J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels • 85 is antithetical to queer agency. In her readings of literary representations of lesbianism, Terry Castle observes the ways in which the apparitional and the spectral become metaphors for addressing lesbianism: “The spectral fi gure is a perfect vehicle for conveying what must be called—though without a doubt paradoxically—that ‘recognition through negation’ which has taken place with regard to female homosexuality in Western culture since the Enlightenment.”7 This dynamic of “recognition through negation” encapsulates many treat- ments of homosexuality in children’s literature, in which childhood’s homo- sociality must be sacrifi ced when protagonists assume heterosexual identities. So too is Dumbledore recognized yet negated in the Harry Potter series: he is insistently present as Harry’s primary mentor to whom the young hero turns during moments of distress, yet he is spectral in his sexuality that fails to register within the pages of the series. This key aspect of his character appears at best obliquely, but it is key to understanding the position of abnormality in the series, in which Dumbledore fractures the expected innocence within children’s fi ction—few other texts of children’s literature afford a gay character such a central role—while nonetheless preserving this innocence through Rowling’s occluded treatment of it. Because Dumbledore refuses the possibility of continuing his earthly existence beyond death, analyzing him as a spectral presence may appear coun- terintuitive to his and the novels’ ethos. Numerous ghosts and poltergeists participate in the unfolding plot (including the Bloody Baron, Nearly Head- less Nick, Peeves, and Moaning Myrtle), but Harry is certain that Dumbledore would reject returning to earth after his demise: “Dumbledore wouldn’t come back as a ghost” (DH 504). Dumbledore’s decision not to cling to Hogwarts as a ghostly presence confi rms his thematic embrace of death: death is not to be feared (as he teaches Harry at the conclusion of Sorcerer’s Stone [297]), and Voldemort’s vain efforts to elude death provoke his depraved acts. Remain- ing on earth as a ghost also reveals one’s emotional immaturity, as evident when Nearly Headless Nick informs Harry of his regret for undertaking such a transformation: “I was afraid of death . I chose to remain behind. I some- times wonder whether I oughtn’t to have” (OP 861). Two different types of ghosts are in play in the Harry Potter books and in this analysis of them: the ghost as a tool of social, cultural, and literary analysis, as Derrida and Castle outline, and the ghost as a supernatural being, as a type of character in Rowl- ing’s fantasy world, one which she defi nes as “transparent, moving, talking, and thinking versions of wizards and witches who wished, for whatever rea- son, to remain on earth” (BB 79). These disparate models of ghosts converge in Albus Dumbledore, as the work he performs requires both his death and the continual effacement of his queer role in leading Harry out of childhood and into salvifi c heroism through death. As he models for Harry and readers the undesirability of a ghostly existence, his homosexuality works spectrally to imbue sexual otherness into children’s literature but only so that its presence can be mostly overlooked to preserve young readers’ innocence (cum 86 • Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature ignorance) of homosexuality. In her reading of Harry Potter and its uncanny and gothic edges, Stacy Gillis argues that “adult desires are embedded within these texts,”8 and such is the case with Dumbledore’s desires to have sex with other men, which can only be declared openly outside the novels’ pages. This chapter’s fi rst unit explores how Rowling condemns innocence as a virtue for children and as a theme in children’s literature. By slyly introducing numerous topics typically considered taboo for children—vulgarity, bestial- ity, alcoholism, excrementality—she undermines innocence within her fi c- tional world while simultaneously dismissing critics who argue that her books are inappropriate fare for young readers. Given this investment in dismantling children’s innocence as a virtue, Rowling’s reticence to address Dumbledore’s queerness renders homosexuality more taboo than these other topics. The following section addresses Dumbledore’s character in light of his homosexuality, pinpointing textual moments when Rowling obliquely limns the possibility of his queerness and thus subverts expectations of innocence within children’s fi ction while nonetheless upholding them through the obliquity of her depictions. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Dumbledore’s role in constructing Harry’s heterosexuality, as the young hero successfully traf- fi cs in women and defeats death to emerge as heteronormatively triumphant at the series’ end.

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