A "Enchantez" with Oneself

Harry Potter grows up on 4 Privet Drive in “The Cupboard under the Stairs,” deprived of many important part of boyhood. The Dursleys never gave him anything close to love. His knowledge about his parents almost amounted to nothing. The celebration of his birthday was, of course, denied. That was the only life he knew until his eleventh birthday, when his life completely changes.

Birthdays are liminal. It occurs at the awkward time when one is a certain age but feeling he/she is still in the previous one. Therefore, it is an important rite of passage. It is a vital passageway for one to go through each year.

On his eleventh birthday, Harry is celebrated for the first time, by a stranger. The eleven years worth of celebration comes with the sudden realization that he doesn’t know a lot about himself. He is rushed into a world foreign from what he knew for eleven years—a world in which everybody knows him.

At the welcoming ceremony at Hogwarts, all the new students are sorted by the Sorting Hat. This itself is like a re-baptizing ceremony, where each student is led out of the un-belonging state into one of the four houses. The students find themselves more comfortable I their new home.

Harry, however, is handicapped with the fame he had: “Famous before he can walk and talk! Famous for something he won’t even remember!” (Rowling 13). It was not a fame he had earned himself. He is, therefore, still uncomfortable: being in a completely new environment where he never knew about before, surrounded by people who know him—his name, his scar, and his fame.

When he won the Quidditch match for the second time, by catching the snitch and not “nearly swallowing it” this time, therefore, he had finally earned his fame: “He’d really done something to be proud of now—no one could he was just a famous name any more” (Rowling 225). Through his first year at Hogwarts, Harry fills himself little by little with what was deprived from him—self identity. He slowly finds out more and more about his parents and about himself, and goes through tasks which helps him live up to his own name.


Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter. New York: Scholastics. 1997.