Harry’s Mirror: Desire, fantasy and the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The British edition of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone () celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2022. The American edition (1998) will follow suit in 2023. The series comprises seven books that follow the conventional seven years of UK secondary schooling between years seven and thirteen (i.e., grades six to twelve in the United States). In this article, I celebrate this first novel by examining Rowling’s commentary on desire. Writers of imaginative fiction have always been interested in this theme. Rowling is no exception. The Sorting Hat, which organizes Hogwarts’ new pupils into the school’s four houses, is a case in point: it recognizes Harry’s potentials were he to follow Voldemort’s footsteps and join the Slytherins, but, ultimately, it respects and prioritizes his desires. ‘Are you sure?’ it asks Harry, in response to his reluctance to be placed there, ‘You could be great, you know, it’s all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that – no? Well, if you’re sure – better be GRYFFINDOR!’ ([: 130) The Harry Potter series (1997–2007) follows Harry’s growth, which necessitates curbing his desires so that he does not become another Voldemort. The Mirror of Erised offers, I argue, an especially interesting case study for investigating this theme. My sustained attention on this device and its effects on characters and what they do exposes some of Philosopher’s Stone’s complexities, while enhancing our appreciation for Rowling’s characters and for her project.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".