I’m glad that it’s becoming increasingly well known what a despicable human being JK Rowling is. Now that it no longer feels like people are sweeping her negative impact on an marginalized population under the rug, shall we take a look at the Harry Potter series in the absence of the persona of the author?
The Harry Potter series is a foundational element of many people’s childhoods, including mine. For me, and I’m guessing many others, it was one of the first “real” stories I read. Children’s literature rarely incorporates the full suite of wholly-developed characters, engaging plot, well-formed setting, so when you finally get out of the children's section and take your first hit of “story”, well, it tends to stick with you.
But you know what else sticks with me? Even in the midst of my first-ever “real story” high, I found the house elf portion of book three deeply uncomfortable. I wasn’t the only one. The discomfort radiates off the page. So much so that now, as an adult, I’m pretty sure our good friend the high TERF-ess was deeply uncomfortable writing it too. Let’s take a hypothetical journey into the mind of the author of Harry Potter (don’t worry we won’t be mentioning anyone’s genitals).
So, say you’re JKR. You’ve written book two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. You’ve introduced this little guy, Dobby the house elf. He was an antagonist, but also was very sympathetic. Gave some events to get you through the middle of the book and keep readers on your toes. Not bad. Now it’s time to write book three and you think to yourself, “Ah, fuck. I just introduced an oppressed underclass, didn’t I?”
You’ve got slaves in your world now, JKR. And, as JKR, you think of yourself as the kind of person who thinks that slavery is bad. Maybe you could just gloss over it and never mention the house elves again? But glossing over slavery is a thing “bad” people do. Maybe just the evil wizards use house elves? But then what about all the wizards that just let the evil wizards use their house elves? Don’t they become complicit in their non-action? Is the whole system under trial? Are we going to have to liberate the house elves? Fuck, you just wanted this to be about a teenager at a wizard-themed boarding school not Harry Potter and the House Elf Liberation Army.
There’s only one way out of this. Retcon the whole thing.
Of course, you can’t retcon stuff in a whole-ass book that’s either (a) deep in the publishing pipeline or (b) already in the hands of readers. So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna retcon just the “oppression” aspect of it. Turns out the house elves like servitude, and Dobby, desiring his freedom, was kinda a weird freak. See, even Hogwarts (the epitome of good) uses house elves? That reaction your audience is having, “hey isn’t this kind of fucked up?”, see, Hermione is having that too, and look how awkward and uncomfortable it’s making everyone. Look how silly and naive she is. SPEW. What a silly acronym. Okay, great, now the oppression issue is Addressed and we can all move on now, right?
So, yes, in the fiction, the problem is “solved”. But outside of the fiction, they’ve compounded severely. (1) We’re now depicting the desire for liberation as anomalous and quirky, (2) We’ve taught our young impressionable audience that calling out injustices makes people feel awkward and you look silly, so never do it, (3) We are now straight up invoking the myth of the happy slave. Oops.
Consider instead, an alternative solution here, which is say, the house elves are happy to work for, perhaps, a glass of milk. And say our audience surrogate Hermione has, again, the typical audience reaction of “wait, that’s not real payment. You gotta get paid in cash, like Real People do”, and then someone sits Hermione down and says “Listen, you don’t get to decide what people think is most important to them.” In this case, our audience takes home “money isn’t everything,” “don’t be so quick to apply your standards to others” (you know, classic criticisms of neoliberalism, but I digress). It’s especially odd that JKR didn’t turn to this solution considering house elves were directly inspired by brownies, too (maybe that digression actually is more relevant than I thought).
There are also some questions that the audience should be asking of JK Rowling (and our terf-y friend should be asking herself). First of which, what’s wrong with stories about oppressed underclasses?
Now admittedly, as a kid, I was also mildly relieved to not be reading Harry Potter and the Elf Labor Act. Some of which was because JKR made the situation so painfully awkward, but some of which was that I, too, was more excited to be reading about school aged kids like myself not dealing with the injustices of the world, also like myself. There are heavy market pressures away from that kind of story. But there are also choices JKR made in the depiction of house elves: small, wearing tattered clothes, goofy looking—traits that are fundamentally unsexy, much unlike Katniss and friends in the Hunger Games. This sort of portrayal would’ve made house elves a very hard swallow for the focus of a whole book. Compare, perhaps, Harry Potter and the Liberation of the Hippogriffs, Harry Potter and the Unchained Dragon, Harry Potter and the Escape of the Fae. It might be stretching it too far, but I think you could argue that this view of the oppressed is reflective of an unconscious bias that if JKR could’ve interrogated and avoided, she might’ve given herself a way out of her happy-house-elf retcon.
(Aside: or in fairness to JKR, if we, as the audience, would’ve been less biased ourselves against the traits of small, unfashionable, and goofy! Also publishers, as well, are very accountable for this.)
And then, our next question, which is, shouldn’t you have seen this dilemma coming when you introduced the oppressed underclass?
We arrive now at the title of our essay, which is, for JKR, and doubtless many others, oppression is entertainment. It’s a good plot point. It adds drama. You can “show don’t tell” that the bad guys are bad. Oppression is convenient and entertaining when its used against your foes, but then becomes inconvenient when, like in real life, it turns out that “good guys” isn’t a real thing, and “your side” is implicated as well. And like JKR, you find yourself denying, minimizing, “what-about”-ing the oppressed to maintain the illusion of “goodness”. Writing about oppression might make you feel good, that you’re giving a voice to a minority, that you’re making the world a better place, but all of this smells of charity: a small sacrifice that you make to make yourself feel good, where the benefit towards the oppressed is merely a tool to that end. But really what we need here is solidarity, something we saw glimmers of in book two, before the retraction. Harry helps Dobby not because he feels bad for him or even some moral compunction, but an understanding that their fates are tied together: when Dobby succeeds, so does he. When Harry succeeds, so does Dobby. When the house elves work for a glass of milk, the differences in their needs allow everyone to benefit. When the house elves are freed, the wizards learn to feed each other and care for a home. And maybe together, they would have found new branches of magic that allowed them to make spells beyond anyone’s imagination.
Or maybe the house elves are happily oppressed. Silly me.
Also, now that we’ve arrived at the end of this essay, it would be hypocritical of me to benefit off of HP’s cultural zeitgeist and not use this opportunity to rep works to try to break the terf lady’s stranglehold on our literary childhoods.
Other works that filled a similar role for me personally:
- the Artemis Fowl series
- Tamora Pierce’s Wild Magic series
- Warrior Cats
- Deltora Quest
- the Bartimaeus Sequence
- the Wizard of Earthsea.
I’ve crowd sourced some more alternatives. For similar kids-discovering-magic, see:
- Worst Witch
- Percy Jackson
- The Snow Spider
- The Chrestomanci Series
- The House in the Cerulean Sea
- The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
- The Young Wizards books
- Nsibid Scripts
- The Tiffany Aching series
And slightly further afield but still formative:
- How to train your dragon.
- Phoenix Files
- 39 Clues
- Animorphs