I’ll admit it, I read this article for the title, “Harry Potter and the Terrors of the Toilet” by Alice Mills from the March 2006 issues of Children’s Literature in Education (Vol 37 No. 1).
Mills says that the toilet is a place for heroic action and a way to travel between worlds. It is also a place where boys are bullied and girls go to cry in the series. (Also, this article was written before the series was complete and it’s been awhile since I’ve read the later books in the series.)
Mills says that toilets and bathrooms are typically censored or downplayed in books, except for potty training books and what she calls “scatological books”. She mentions specifically Fungus the Bogeyman as a scatological book. She does not mention the Captain Underpants books which were the first books that came to mind for me when I thought about poop joke books. Mills writes that when talking about toilets in literature the only fluids that come out are tears, never poop or pee. I scribbled in the margin that is because bathroom talk doesn’t come out in polite conversation very often, why would it come about in literature.
The article talks about the bathroom being a typical place for bullying and crying in children’s literature. Offering examples of boys getting their heads dunked in the toilet and Moaning Myrtle and Hermione crying in the bathroom. Another typical thing to happen in the bathroom that I noticed wasn’t discussed is the bathroom as a confessional location. I’ve seen my fair share of teen television and teen movies. Two that specifically come to mind where the bathroom is the place to make confessions include Secret Life of the American Teenager and My So-Called Life. The bathroom is a place to speak to someone in private sometimes with not so private consequences (There’s always someone behind the stall door who wasn’t meant to hear the confession.)
Mills does a Fruedian and a Kristevan analysis of key plot points in the book. In Freud’s anal stage of psychosexual development the child learns to say no and has a power over its own body. Kristeva’s description of the anal stage talks about the disgust with the process of using the bathroom (and mom). During this stage the child is establishing a boundary between mom and child. The fluidity of that boundary between mom and child is a threat to one’s independent identity.
Mills talks about the bathroom as Moaning Myrtle’s home. She says that Moaning Myrtle doesn’t like Hermione (which is true) but then she says that Moaning Myrtle is threatening and sexual towards Harry because she’s fond if him. Mills writes that, “The chamber of secrets, in this reading, is simultaneously the toilet, the murderer’s lair and the female body.” I consider Moaning Myrtle a friendly pest, rather than creepy and sexually inappropriate. She even writes of Myrtle that, “like the basilisk, can be construed as a mobile, murderous piece of shit.”
She writes about Harry’s idealization of his parents. She said that Harry has to modify his believe in his dad as an ideal. He in some ways resembles the book’s villains. Harry’s dad was a bully who got the girl. Harry’s dad was not someone that Harry and Hermione chose to name a baby after. They did choose to name a baby after the kid that Harry’s dad bullied. (Although, this article came out before the last book.) Throughout the series Harry does not get this kind of up close look at his mom. He hears that his mom died to save him and her love left a mark. That physical mark threatens Harry’s right to his own identity.
Like I said, I read this article because of the title. As I was reading I found myself saying, “bah” she’s reading too much into this with the Kristevan descriptions of disgust with things that come from the body and the maternal. It’s been awhile since I’ve read psychoanalytical discussion of anything and it’s been awhile since I’ve re-read the Harry Potter series, so perhaps given that, this article wasn’t for me. Although now I’m curious about other discussion of Moaning Myrtle as a character.
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