THE HOUSE SYSTEM IN DREARCLIFF GRANGE SCHOOL

• House-Based (absurd school divisions): Usually limited to old-fashioned British private/boarding schools (and those modelled on them), the House system is distinguished primarily by the fact that it's officially imposed by the school to foster competition (academic, athletic, etc.). In real life, Houses are distinguished by Theme Naming, Colour-Coded for Your Convenience, and often not much else, with student placement being either random or legacy-based. In fiction, they will frequently represent different personality types in the same way as organic cliques — you can expect to find an academic House, a sporty one, and so on.

Notably, in Drearcliff Grange School (a historical fantasy - Hogwarts but all-female instead of co-ed, located in Roaring 20s London) by Kim Newman, there is a house system based upon Shakespearean characters (both heroines and villainesses) and the Spice Girls of all things! So there are five houses!

• The five Houses in The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (each named after a Shakespeare heroine, with the exception of villainous Tamora) are presented as not mixing much, and each having a unique character (defined as scary, sporty, babies, posh, and "red-headed stepchildren", the ones who don't fit anywhere else). We're not told how Houses are assigned to girls who started as Firsts, but when Amy joins the school as a Third, she's put in Desdemona (the red-headed stepchildren) simply because a Desdemona Third has transferred out, and therefore there's a spare bed. Presumably, if she'd been put in one of the other Houses, she'd have been pressured into following the House stereotype. The school is further divided into Unusuals and Ordinaries.

• The traditional attributes of the five school Houses — Goneril, Tamora, Viola, Ariel, and Desdemona — are summarized as "sporty", "terrifying", "babies", "posh", and "red-headed stepchildren", respectively.

1. Goneril - sporty (Mel C): Gryffindor in its "athletic" aspect
2. Tamora: terrifying/scary (Mel B): Slytherin/Ravenclaw goths
3. Viola: babies (Emma): Hufflepuff womanchildren, the Maknae/Kouhai at least in spirit
4. Ariel: posh (Victoria): Slytherin upper-class toffs
5. Desdemona: redheaded stepchildren/gingers (Geri): Gryffindor and Hufflepuff in their "underdog" aspect; the house that the heroine and her friends are obviously in.

OTHER HOUSE SYSTEMS:

• Hogwarts students are divided into four houses (Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw) when they join the Wizarding School. Each year, they compete in a contest about getting the most school points on good behavior, and whichever house gets the most points at the end of the school year wins the House Cup. In addition, they also compete in a Quidditch tournament every year. This results in Hogwarts Houses being very tribalistic (especially between Gryffindor and Slytherin) and have wildly differing cultures, such as Slytherin having more support for blood purity and Ravenclaw being more intellectual. This setup derived from a dispute among the Hogwarts founders about which personality type (and in Salazar Slytherin's case, which ancestry) the school should recruit.
• While not every Slytherin turned out evil (they like to remind people that Merlin went there), almost every villain, jerk or unpleasant wizard in the series goes/went there, which explains why when Slytherin loses the House cup, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw gleefully celebrate Slytherin's defeat.
• Hermione actually lampshades the tribal nature of the whole arrangement, having little interest in it. Dumbledore himself wonders if maybe the Sorting should be done later, on seeing Slytherin Snape displaying considerable courage, a trait hardly common among Slytherins.
• Other good eggs in Slytherin were Horace Slughorn, Narcissa Malfoy, and her son Draco (post-redemption), and Andromeda Black, due to her lineage, was also surely a Slyth who turned out good (married a Muggle for love and was disowned, she and Ted were loving parents)
• Bad eggs in the other houses: Gryffindor Peter "Wormtail" Pettigrew (traitor to the Potters and an important Death Eater), Ravenclaws Quirinius Quirrell (the Dark Lord's meatsuit)  and Gilderoy Lockhart (miles gloriosus impostor), and Hufflepuff Cedric Diggory (becomes Umbridge's head inquisitor in the bad future where he survived).

• Impractical Magic: Istima is referred to as the 'Six Court Academy'. There are stereotypes based on each court's unique hierarchy structure, public reputation, and how their different magics impact their world view. For instance, the rigid magic of the Autumn Court means the students are taught to follow rules and protocols strictly. They tend to be bureaucrats and lawyers. However, the Night Court's magic is based on individual will power and obstinance. They tend to have stubborn and personally charismatic leaders with little consistency between regimes. The story has a great deal of mingling between courts and lets characters be informed by learning to thrive in their specific court without being completely defined by it. Language of Magic: The Autumn and Summer Courts each use a language of magic. The Summer Court uses a strict written language that causes whatever is written/drawn to happen exactly as the runes describe, much like a programming language. The Autumn Court uses spoken languages and dialects that have more complex rules and room for interpretation.
• In The Magicians, third-year students at Brakebills are tested for their magical specialties (commonly known as Disciplines) and sorted into groups based on power categories: healing, knowledge, illusion, nature, and so on. Quentin Coldwater and Alice Quinn (protagonist and love interest, respectively) are sorted into the Physical Kids - the rarest grouping of all, known for practicing messy, brutal physic-based magic (the counterpart of the underdog aspect of Gryffindor). Each group has their own elaborate dorm room, though they're more like exclusive clubhouses - all of them strictly off-limits to outsiders. Several long-standing rivalries exist between each faction, especially between the Naturals and the Physical Kids (the Slytherin and Gryffindor counterparts in this universe); the only point in which the competition between them is put on hold occurs during the Training from Hell at Brakebills South (Antarctica) in the Fourth Year.

• Students in Fire Emblem: Three Houses are divided into the titular three houses depending upon their region of origin: the Black Eagles for the Adrestrian Empire, the Blue Lions for the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and the Golden Deer for the Leicester Alliance, with each house specialising in certain weapons; the DLC adds the Ashen Wolves, a semi-official house for homeless students. You can recruit students to your house if you meet their requirements or your Support Points are high enough. Once the Time Skip occurs, everyone (with some exceptions) is united under your chosen house (or the Church of Seiros depending on your route).

• Twisted-Wonderland: The all-male Night Raven College, being based on the British house system in general and Harry Potter in particular, also has colour-coded houses where students are mostly grouped based on shared character traits, also the character traits of the houses' respective founders. The difference is that there are seven of them. And each house was founded by one of the villains from Disney Classics (Maleficent, Scar, Jafar, Hades, Grimhilde, Ursula, and the Queen of Hearts respectively), who here are reincarnated as the handsome prefects of each house.

• Gunnerkrigg Court: The school is divided into four houses, although they're not shown to compete with each other. Queslett and Thornhill are made up of ordinary human students, while Chester features students with magical abilities or supernatural backgrounds such as Brinnie (actually the Valkyrie Brünhilde) and Foley is made up of fairies and forest creatures who have taken on human bodies. Each house is further divided into north and south sections, making for eight classes in each year.
• Inverted in The Owl House. Despite students being divided based on what magic track they're taking (to the point of wearing different coloured uniforms), there isn't any social stigma involving inter-track friendships or romances. In fact, it's so common that there are only four intra-track relationships seen in the entire series (including background characters) that don't involve immediate family members.
• Not academic, but the Cabins in Camp Half-Blood are all with demigods sharing a divine parent: children of Hephaestus, of Ares, of Aphrodite, of Hermes... Hermes' children are the underdog misfits, like Desdemona and Gryffindor/Hufflepuffs and Physical Kids, while the Hephaestus Cabin includes a workshop for crafting anything, etc. At first there were no cabins for children of the Big 3 (Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon) because they swore an oath after WW2 not to sire any more children, since these were too powerful (Hitler was a son of Hades, and the Allied leaders were sons of Poseidon and Zeus; the war was also about their power struggles). However at the time the saga takes place, all three of the Big 3 have broken their oaths, which has repercussions - and the children they have had in the 90s and 2000s also get their cabins; as do the children of lesser gods like Nyx, Iris, Hecate, the Fates, etc.

WHAT IS MY HARDING-PENCROFT HOUSE?

 Harding-Pencroft Academy, a five-year high school that graduates the best marine scientists, naval warriors, navigators, and underwater explorers in the world.

Basically, Hogwarts with an aquatic twist, courtesy of Rick Riordan.

As would be de rigueur, there are four houses in this academy of adventure - and I'm in House ORCA which is right up my alley, as it centers on life and health sciences but also on PSYCHOLOGY and EDUCATION. Not only that, but the most prominent character in Orca in the novel, Ester Harding, is autistic like yours truly (the third verbally autistic major female character so far in mainstream youth fiction, after Entrapta of Dryl and Futaba Sakura)!!!

(PS. This scenario kind of reminds me of Luna Lovegood being a Ravenclaw like yours truly -also an autistic or somehow on-the-spectrum character being on the intellectual house of the four-house academy of adventure...)

ALISON LURIE ON HOGWARTS

THE PERILS OF HARRY POTTER

Like many famous children’s authors, J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling, author of the brilliant and phenomenally successful Harry Potter books, remains in close touch with her own childhood. “I really can, with no difficulty at all, think myself back to 11 years old,” she has told Time  magazine. Rowling is also clearly on the side of children. She has created a world in which her young heroic trio have special abilities, while conventional adults are either clueless or cruel or both. Her heroes’ secret power takes traditional folktale forms (flying brooms, ghosts, transformation, speaking animals, spells, and potions). But it can also be seen as a metaphor for the special powers of childhood: imagination, creativity, and especially humor—as well as being exciting, her books are often very funny.

The Harry Potter stories belong to an ongoing tradition of Anglo-Saxon youth fantasy that begins with Tolkien and T. H. White, and has been continued splendidly by writers like Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Philip Pullman, and Diana Wynne Jones. (Jones’s excellent Charmed Life, like the Potter books, takes place in a school for juvenile witches and wizards located in an enchanted castle.) What sets Rowling’s books apart from their predecessors is partly a lighthearted fertility of invention that recalls L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Even more important is the fact that hers, like Baum’s, is a fully imagined world, to which she has a deep, ongoing commitment. For six years, even before she began the first book in the series, Rowling was imagining and elaborating its fantasy universe. She has already planned seven Harry Potter novels, one for each year Harry will spend at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, an institution that seems to be located (like J. K. Rowling herself) somewhere in Scotland.

Harry, Rowling’s hero, is a natural-born wizard, but at first he doesn’t know it. When we meet him he is ten years old and in the classic Cinderlad situation: a poor, lonely orphan, despised and abused. Harry lives with his deeply unpleasant aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, in a country that much resembles Britain in the 1960s or 1970s, before the Internet, digital phones, and interactive video.

The Dursleys live in a village (actually a London suburb; one of Lurie's mistakes here) called Little Whinging (a joke that most readers may not get: the mainstream, untrained in dialects, would call such a place Little Whining) and, like most of the locals, are Muggles—people who have no magic powers. They hate the very mention of the supernatural, and refuse to give Harry any information about his dead parents. (“They were weirdos, no denying it, and the world’s better off without them in my opinion,” Vernon declares.) Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia are as cruel to Harry as any fairy-tale stepparent: they feed him poorly and clothe him shabbily; they make him sleep in a dark, spider-infested cupboard under the stairs; and they destroy his mail. Even worse is their son, Dudley, a spoiled, overweight, greedy bully who, with the help of his large and hateful bully friends, makes Harry’s school and home life actively miserable.

From the point of view of an imaginative child, the world is full of Muggles: people who don’t understand you, make stupid rules, and want nothing to do with the unexpected or the unseen. Harry’s story also embodies the common childhood fantasy that the dreary adults and siblings you live with are not your real family; that you have more exciting parents, and are somehow special and gifted. Harry has an outward manifestation of his gift: a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead, the sign that even as a baby he could not be killed by the evil offstage Dark Lord Voldemort, whose very name most people fear to utter.

As in many folktales, you can often tell a character’s character from his or her name, and “Voldemort” neatly combines the ideas of theft, mold, and death. Harry Potter, on the other hand, has a name that suggests not only craftsmanship but both English literature—Shakespeare’s Prince Hal and Harry Hotspur, the brave, charming, impulsive heroes of Henry IV —and Beatrix Potter, who created that other charming and impulsive classic hero, Peter Rabbit.

At the start of each story Harry Potter is living in exile at the Dursleys’. But presently, with the help of magic, he is rescued and enters an alternate world in which imagination and adventurousness are rewarded. A comic cockney (actually West Country; Lurie does not bother with the accent shibboleths) half-giant named Hagrid introduces him to a parallel magical Britain, one entrance to which is through the back door of a scruffy London pub called The Leaky Cauldron. After a shopping trip in which Harry visits a bank run by goblins and purchases unusual school supplies, including “one plain pointed hat (black) for day wear” and the Standard Book of Spells  (Grade 1), he takes a special train to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from Track Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station—a train and track that are invisible to Muggles.

Hogwarts School, it turns out, is located in a huge ancient castle, well equipped with towers, dungeons, ghosts, secret passages, and enchanted paintings and mirrors. The subjects taught there include Divination, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Care of Magical Creatures. But in other ways Hogwarts resembles a classic English boarding school—one that, in keeping with the times, is co-ed and multiracial. There are four houses, which compete intensely in the school sport of Quidditch, a sort of combination cricket, basketball, European football, and hockey played on flying broomsticks, in which Harry turns out to excel. The teachers wear black gowns and dine at a head table, and there are prefects and a Head Boy and a Head Girl.

Just as in many schools, however, the student population is roughly divided into jocks, brains, nice guys, and dangerous Goths. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are in the jock house, Gryffindor, where, according to tradition, “dwell the brave at heart.” Ravenclaw House emphasizes “wit and learning,” while the kids in Hufflepuff are described as “just and loyal . . . And unafraid of toil.” The bad characters live in Slytherin House, where they “use any means / to achieve their ends.”

Even before he arrives at Hogwarts, Harry acquires an enemy in Slytherin House, the mean, snobbish, unscrupulous Draco Malfoy, whose name translates readily into “Dragon Bad-Faith.” Draco has a couple of goons (these are surnamed Crabbe and Goyle) to back up his constant sneering and bullying. As a hero and local sports star, Harry also attracts fans; naturally modest, he finds their intense admiration and constant attention as embarrassing as J. K. Rowling reportedly does.

But Harry has more serious problems. The plot of each book essentially centers on the attempts of dark forces to destroy him. As is customary in modern fantasies, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings  to Star Wars, lurking in the background is an evil, powerful figure (almost always male) who wants to rule the world. Often these characters at first they seem impressive and even glamorous. There is something admirable in their desire for knowledge and power, whereas their followers, motivated mainly by fear, greed, and revenge, are wholly repulsive.

Harry, of course, always escapes his enemies, but this gets harder with each book. Rowling has said that as time passes the stories will turn darker. “There will be deaths,” she informed Time magazine (in . Already in volumes 3 and 4 it is not so easy to tell which side anyone is on. Characters who at first seem friends may be foes, or vice versa; and good but weak people may be seduced into doing evil because of their own fear or folly. In the third volume, Prisoner of Azkaban, for instance, a scruffy but harmless-looking pet rat called Scabbers turns out to be a wicked traitor who, even in human form, has a pointed nose, prominent ears and incisors, and small watery eyes.

Rowling describes her characters with a psychological subtlety rare in children’s books and even in much adult fiction. In Chamber of Secrets  a ragged, oppressed house-elf named Dobby is constantly torn between loyalty to his evil masters the Malfoys and his wish to save Harry’s life. Whenever he is on the edge of revealing their plots, Dobby hits himself over the head with the nearest blunt object, repeating “Bad Dobby!”

Another attraction of the Potter books is that the good characters are not perfect. Harry excels at Quidditch, but he is only an average student, unlike  Hermione, who studies for the fun of it and is a bit of a prig. Hagrid, the lovable half-giant gamekeeper, has a weakness for dangerous magical creatures: he sees his vicious pet dragon Norbert and the acromantulas (huge spiders) that live in the Forbidden Forest as cute and cuddly. The British, of course, are fanatic animal-lovers; and it may be that this is Rowling’s comment on the peculiar or even dangerous but beloved pets that visitors to England sometimes encounter.

Though Rowling’s child heroes are imperfect, they are usually smarter and braver than adults. Some of the nicest teachers at Hogwarts, though friendly and knowledgeable, often don’t have a clue as to what’s going on around them. Others are weak and incompetent, or complete phonies like the handsome media-intoxicated Professor Lockhart, who claims to have performed the magical exploits of other, less photogenic wizards. A few have even sold out to the Dark Powers or their representatives.

The headmaster of Hogwarts, the elderly silver-haired Professor Dumbledore (like Tolkien’s Gandalf, whom he much resembles), maintains a kind of benign detachment from events except in moments of great crisis. A. O. Scott, writing in the online magazine Slate, has perceptively remarked that “Dumbledore’s benevolent but strict theology, involving the operations of free will in a supernaturally determined world, is classically Miltonian.”

The appeal of the Harry Potter books, to judge by the flood of reviews and essays that greeted their appearance, is wide and varied. They can be enjoyed, for instance, as the celebration of a pre-industrial world: Hogwarts Castle is lit by torches and heated by fireplaces, and mail is carried by owls of different sizes, including tiny little scops owls (“Local Deliveries Only”). As with most first-rate children’s and young adult books, there is something here for everyone. Pico Iyer sees the stories as only half-fantastic accounts of life in an English public school (in his case, Eton), “designed to train the elite in a system that other mortals cannot follow.” There, as at Hogwarts, he claims, “we were in an alternative reality where none of the usual rules applied.” A. O. Scott, on the other hand, thinks that “being a wizard is very much like being gay: you grow up in a hostile world governed by codes and norms that seem nonsensical to you, and you discover at a certain age that there are people like you.” (It seems unlikely that Harry Potter is gay; in the third volume he shows romantic interest in an extremely pretty Ravenclaw Quidditch player called Cho Chang, and in volume 4 he and Ron proudly take twin students called Padme and Parvati Patil, dressed in saris, to the Yule Ball.)

Any wildly successful work of art attracts detractors as well as admirers of all sorts. The most famous liberal scholar of the folktale, Jack Zipes, has called the books overrated, and criticized them for promoting a conventional, patriarchal view of the world. On the other hand, the sort of conservatives who object to the teaching of evolution and the big bang theory of creation have complained that the stories portray witchcraft in a favorable light. This is not a new idea: from time to time the same accusation has been made against the Oz books, which in some cases have then been removed from schools and libraries along with all other representations of cute or friendly wizards and witches.

In my favorite local bookshop the other day, I saw what at first seemed to be two new Harry Potter books displayed on the counter. One was called Pokémon and Harry Potter , the other Harry Potter and the Bible. But instead of additions to the series, they turned out to be warnings. In the first, by Phil Arms, I read that “the dark occultic nature of Harry Potter . . . is opening the lives and homes of countless millions of parents and children to satanic influences.” The second went even further, suggesting that “an unseen spiritual force of darkness” may be driving the Potter phenomenon.

According to Richard Abanes, the Hogwarts books are “filled with potentially harmful messages exalting occultism and moral relativism.” Abanes is dismayed by the many parallels between the authors of the magical textbooks Harry studies and the names of historical occultists, and hints that J. K. Rowling may be more involved in contemporary witchcraft than she admits. He speaks of “the very tangible possibility that many children will become so enthralled with magic and wizardry that they will seek out the paganism that is available in the real world.”

Abanes also complains that Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione are not model children. They break rules, disobey orders, and sometimes conceal their rebellious behavior by lying. Moreover, “they are often rather proud of themselves and their misdeeds.” The books contain what he calls “countless examples of behavior that parents would deem less than admirable, ....” This is quite true, and is probably one of the reasons for Harry Potter’s popularity with kids; it is also in the great tradition of children’s literature. Tom Sawyer and his friends drink, smoke tobacco, swear, and play truant from school. In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy refuses to do housework for the Wicked Witch of the West, and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden  disobeys and deceives adults, finding her way not only into the forbidden garden but into the room of her invalid cousin Colin, whose bedridden existence has been concealed from her. Books like these do not present their child characters as perfect and obedient, but as curious, independent, and enterprising.

The world of Narnia is simple and eternal: goodness, peace, and beauty will eventually triumph. The world of Harry Potter is complex and ambiguous and fluid. And in this, of course, it is far more like our own world, in which it is not always easy to tell the ogres from the gentle giants. When we choose books for our children, do we want them to teach obedience to authority or skepticism, acceptance of the status quo or a determination to change what needs to be changed?

Joanne Rowling’s own story, like Harry’s, is in the classic European folklore tradition. As almost everyone now knows, when she was working on Philosopher’s Stone, she was a young single mother with long red hair, living on public assistance in Edinburgh. Because her flat was unheated, she would put her small daughter into a stroller and push her about the streets until the child fell asleep. Then she would go to a cafe, order a cup of coffee, and write.

Rowling’s fairy goodmother was the Scottish Arts Council, which gave her a grant that made it possible for her to finish the first volume. But even then she had trouble getting transportation to the ball. Nine English publishers rejected Philosopher’s Stone before Bloomsbury took it, and her editors had no idea it would be a success. At first they made no special attempt to promote the book, and printed only a small number of copies.

Now, of course, all that is history. At one point the first three volumes of the series were number one, two, and three on best-seller lists. This annoyed publishers of adult fiction so much, and their protests were so vociferous, that the editors of the paper finally agreed to begin listing juvenile bestsellers separately. The first volume has been translated into (at last count) twenty-eight languages. A plain-cover edition has also appeared in England, for adults who are embarrassed to be seen reading a children’s book. Though this edition costs two pounds more than the original, it very soon sold twenty thousand copies.

In the fall of 2001 the Warner Brothers film of Sorcerer’s Stone (US title) opened to generally good reviews and crowds of fans. To accompany the release there were Harry Potter T-shirts, lunch boxes, video games, and action figures. There were also even more interviews with J. K. Rowling, and more intrusive articles about her life.

For Rowling herself this was clearly not an unmixed blessing. In the fourth volume of the series, Goblet of Fire, Harry and Hermione are persecuted by the repellent Rita Skeeter, a scandal-sniffing female reporter for the tabloid Daily Prophet, who does her best to persuade their friends to betray personal secrets, and nearly causes a disaster.

Whatever she feels about all this attention and success, the folktale heroine J. K. Rowling, once a welfare mother, has clearly now become a fabulously rich princess. Will she now find true love and live happily ever after? Will she be destroyed by the curses of religious fundamentalists, or fall under the spell of wicked merchandisers and publicists? Her story promises to be almost as interesting as the future adventures of Harry Potter himself.

Not all classic children’s books, of course, present nature as wholly benevolent or even manageable. In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien, for instance, some trees, like Treebeard, are wise and good; others are malevolent. I love willows, which here in Ithaca are the first to put out leaves in the spring and the last to lose them in the fall. But in English folk tradition, as Tolkien knew, the willow plays an ambiguous role, and his willows are dangerous. This is also true in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, where the Whomping Willows delight in slapping and hitting anyone who gets too close to them.