Publication Date
2013
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Crystal Lake (Committee Member), Barry Milligan (Committee Member), Andrew Strombeck (Advisor)
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Abstract
The structures of power in the Potter universe are both evident and insidious. Whether one considers the disciplinary influences enforced by Headmaster and mentor Albus Dumbledore; The Ministry of Magic's Fudge, Umbridge, and Scrimgeour; or, the power watching over them all: Voldemort, J.K. Rowling presents a world marked by surveillance and self-policing in her Harry Potter novels. These three levels of the Panoptic Gaze discipline Harry in various ways that ultimately result in producing him as a self-sacrificing hero at the series' close. Rowling depicts an individual completely shaped by the authoritative gazes that inhabit his world; even the freedom he finds from those gazes is possible only because the gazes have created such spaces for him. In a series that seems to promote choice and agency for the day's youth, one finds that in fact the hero has been trapped in his role since the night he received his lightning-bolt shaped scar.
Page Count
86
Department or Program
Department of English Language and Literatures
Year Degree Awarded
2013
Copyright
Copyright 2013, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
