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such, divorced from familial intimacy and forced to fend for themselves.
As such, the recovery of family and/or family history is often crucial to
the plotlines of Gothic novels.^ Such Gothic orphans include Edmund of
Reeve’s The Old English Baron, who not only recovers estates but
recovers his own origins as he turns out to be the son of the late Baron
and Baroness. The same holds true for Alleyn of Radcliffe’s The Castles
o f Athlin and Dunbayne, as he discovers in the Baroness a mother and in
Laura a sister. Perhaps the most striking recovery of family is seen in
Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, a novel in which the heroine, Julia,
recovers a mother thought long dead. As Julia’s mother explains her own
sad history, Julia is able to recover a mother and solve the mystery (or
secret) of the haunting light in the recesses of the castle: the light was the
servants/jailors coming to bring her mother food. Moreover, Julia’s
mother is able to provide Julia with a real sense of her own history as
well as a sense of the true character of her father, a man who imprisoned
his wife so that he could marry another woman. This history is in stark
contrast to the lies she has been fed about her mother by her father her
entire life and represents a radical departure from the sanitized version of
events she has been subjected to. In this way, a mystery is solved but,
more importantly, a family is recovered. Read this way, recovery of
family brings both a sense of identity and a sense of place in the world.
Harry Potter spends the first part of his life as an orphan at the
mercy of his Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, and terrorized by his
cousin, Dudley. Far from a family, the Dursleys barely tolerate Harry and
he is constantly mistreated at their hands. The Dursleys treatment of
Harry is so bad that it prompts Dumbledore to indict the Dursleys,
saying: “You have never treated Harry as a son. He has known nothing
but neglect and often cruelty at your hands” {HBP 55). Amanda Cockrell
picks up on Harry’s status as an orphan and posits that an essential part
of his character is his status as “outcast” and “different” (19). This status
is only more inflated by the strange series of events that seem to follow
Harry wherever he goes and the fact that he has no real family to turn to.
In fact, Harry’s family history is actively denied to him via the Dursleys.
He is told that his parents were killed in a car accident and the car
accident is also used to explain the lightning shaped scar on his forehead.
When Harry reaches the age to attend Hogwarts he has no idea that a
wizarding world exists, let alone that he is an important part of its
history. But Hogwarts supplies that history to him. It provides him with
his own family history and a sense of place in the world. When Harry is
first tracked down by Hagrid, he is as amazed by his real history as