ABSTRACT
Myrtle Elizabeth Warren was fourteen years old when she became the first person killed by Lord Voldemort in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Known after her death as Moaning Myrtle, she provides both comic relief and vital information as she haunts a first-floor girls’ bathroom, spying on the living and “sitting in the U-Bend, thinking about death”. The perpetual “coming of age” phenomenon that Zimmerman notes is indicative of a pervasive desire on the part of contemporary adults to deny death. This desire, according to psychotherapist Nick Luxmoore, results in an unwillingness to talk openly and honestly about the inevitability of death with teens, and instead to project fantasies of perpetual youth and vaulted expectations onto young people in an attempt to defend ourselves against the knowledge of mortality. Luxmoore offers a different explanation, suggesting that risky behaviors are to some degree performances in rebellious response to death as the ultimate authority figure in teen’s lives.
