Quirinus Quirrell (Professor Quirrell): The professor who went looking for Voldemort so people would stop laughing at him

In chapter 5 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (J. K. Rowling, 1997), Hagrid takes Harry into the Leaky Cauldron, and half the room gets up to shake his hand. Among them, very nervously, comes a pale young man with an eye that will not stop twitching. He is Professor Quirrell, who will teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, and he can barely finish a sentence without stuttering. Hagrid explains on the way out: a brilliant mind who was fine while he was studying from books, until he took a year off to get some firsthand experience. They say he ran into vampires in the Black Forest and had a nasty run-in with a hag, and that ever since he has been scared of his students and of his own subject. That same day, someone tries to rob a vault at Gringotts. This case file reveals who Quirrell really is: if you plan to watch the HBO series without having read the book, consider yourself warned.

// The theoryPushes, pulls and two walls

Walter Reckless, a sociologist at Ohio State University, turned criminology’s question around: if temptation is everywhere, why does almost nobody commit crime? In “A New Theory of Delinquency and Crime” (1961) he proposed containment theory. Every person is acted on by inner pushes, such as discontent, hostility or feelings of inferiority, and by outer pulls, such as bad company, subcultures or illegitimate opportunities. Against them stand two walls. Outer containment is the environment that holds a person up: a meaningful role, supervision, belonging to a group. Inner containment is what a person carries inside, and its centerpiece, according to the study he signed with Simon Dinitz and Ellen Murray in 1956, is self-concept: someone who sees themselves as a person who does not do certain things is insulated against them. Crime appears when pushes and pulls overcome both walls at once.

// The subjectThe man in the turban

For most of the book, Quirrell is background. In chapter 10, on Halloween night, he runs into the Great Hall to warn that there is a troll in the dungeons, and faints. In chapter 11, during Harry’s first Quidditch match, the boy’s broom goes wild in midair and nearly throws him. Hermione sees Snape staring at him without blinking, crosses the stands to set his robes on fire and, on the way, knocks Quirrell headfirst into the row in front. The broom settles down. In chapter 13, Harry follows Snape into the forest and hears him pressing a terrified Quirrell to tell him how to get past the Stone’s defenses. The three friends draw the conclusion the book wants them to draw, and from then on they stand up for the poor professor whenever someone laughs at his stutter.

(Spoiler warning.) In chapter 17, at the foot of the Mirror of Erised, the one waiting is not Snape but Quirrell, and his face is no longer twitching. He let the troll in, he jinxed the broom, and Snape, who suspected him, had spent the year trying to stop him. He says he met Voldemort on his travels, when he was a foolish young man full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil, and that he has served him ever since, though he has let him down many times. After the failure at Gringotts, his master punished him and decided to keep a closer watch on him. When he unwinds the turban, Voldemort’s face is on the back of his head. Back in chapter 15, he was the hooded figure drinking unicorn blood in the Forbidden Forest to keep them both alive. When he touches Harry, the protection his mother left burns his skin; Voldemort abandons his body and, as Dumbledore puts it, leaves him to die. In Chris Columbus’s film (2001), with Ian Hart in the role, Quirrell crumbles to dust. In the HBO series he is played by Luke Thallon.

// The crackA wall inferred from the fall

The classic criticism of Reckless weighs more here than in any other case: the theory is circular. If we infer that Quirrell lacked inner containment because he gave way, we have explained nothing we did not already know. What partly rescues the analysis is that the wounded wall is described before the fall, in the portrait of the boy who was teased, rather than inferred from it. But that portrait arrived in 2015, eighteen years after the book, and the reader of 1997 had only Hagrid and a teacher who stuttered. There is a second crack: from the moment Voldemort possesses him, containment stops being the question. According to the book itself and to Rowling’s piece, Quirrell sometimes tried to resist, feebly, and his master was far stronger. The sobs Harry hears from him behind a door, in chapter 15, belong to a man who no longer rules his own body.

None of this makes him a victim. Explaining Quirrell is not excusing him. Nobody took him to the forests of Albania: he went looking for what was left of a murderer, hoping to learn from him how to make sure no one laughed at him again. He made his own the idea that there is no good and evil, only power, and in chapter 17 he still speaks of serving his master faithfully. With Voldemort already on the back of his head, he tried to kill an eleven-year-old boy, and his words before the mirror are those of a believer, not a hostage. Containment theory describes why the dam was weak; it does not take away Quirrell’s decision to open it from the inside.