Yeah, that scene with Molly Weasley being tormented by visions of the deaths of her children really got me too. I remember reading it aloud to my kids and having to stop because I was near tears.
I do think, though, that the YA trope of resisting bureaucratic authority goes way back, long before Harry Potter. As soon as kids are old enough to be able to read and choose books for themselves, they are becoming aware that they are stuck having to follow rules that don’t always make sense to them, rules that are set by authorities who are sometimes benign (their parents, if the kids are lucky) and sometimes capricious and cruel (teachers and principals, religious leaders, older or higher-status kids). Stories about pioneers, independent adventures, orphans, and runaways have always been popular, because they get at kids’ developmentally-appropriate desire to escape the rules. Rowling tapped into the desire especially well, in how she makes the incompetent and malign bureaucracy of the Ministry of Magic so flagrant, but she was tapping in, not creating anew, in my opinion.
Rowling has this strange tendency to insist she was influenced by almost no one and I think it's clearly not true, in part, because it simply can't be true.
I really didn’t like the 5th book. I thought the whole Umbridge thing was unnecessarily long and cruel. I got bored about 2/3 through and had to force myself to pick it back up.
Re-reading it to my daughter didn’t change that opinion, you could chop 100 pages out of it and not change the story.
See, I think cutting pages out of these books is sort of beside the point. People are here to hangout and so all the extra pages are a benefit rather than a deterrent.
1) I love this book. It’s the best one. I know the “fight the power” thing can seem overdone, but I think it’s actually a great set of portrayals of bad, weak power. The hole at the center of the Harry Potter books, for me, is that I don’t find Voldemort that scary. And if he DID show up, I think it would be pretty clear that he was terrible. Like, he could take power by force, but you wouldn’t expect to see him actually fooling anyone into GIVING him power. Whereas the simpering, prissy, but ultimately vicious way Umbridge acquires power seems much more insidious. She’s my favorite villain in the series.
2) I agree Snape is awful — insecure, bullying, personally gross, a whiny incel: just a real asshole in every way. I think that’s what makes the whole thing work. Harry isn’t wrong! He’s a dick! He’s not a good person on an interpersonal level. But he’s important for the side of good. He’s a good man in the sense that he helps the fight against actual evil — but really in no other sense.
3) I think I’ve already explained my theory about the house elves, but I don’t think Hermione IS in the right. I think Rowling is kind of playing around with the idea, mostly for comedy but with traces of seriousness, “What if something you perceived as oppression wasn’t oppressive to the people it’s actually happening to?” There’s obviously a way that could be a just so story to justify actual oppression. But I also think it has real life application. I tend to think unions are good, for example, and “right to work” laws are oppressive. But I have to admit that a lot of people just don’t want to be in a union! I can grumble about false consciousness or internalized oppression or whatever. But at the end of the day, maybe they just see the cost and benefits differently! And part of adulthood is recognizing that.
Thanks! And, yeah, I agree: I think this is the best one.
I also think Voldemort's power is really latching onto privately held beliefs that are quite popular, like pureblood wizards and witches being *better* than muggle born ones. I think we can point to many political analogues throughout history that demonstrate how this kind of thing can lead to unpleasantness! Which is maybe why the series seems to invite this kind of comparison to the real world, where it ultimately becomes messy and kind of awkward and confusing. Too, I think Umbridge is the real terrible villainy at play! I think it's why Rowlings ends up focusing so much on bureaucracy for these middle books.
I'm glad I'm not alone in disliking Snape! What an asshole!
This is so awesome. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Edward—impressed by your ability to articulate the mechanics of the HP world and of the story itself.
Hmmm: why do you think it is that the "moral" of Harry Potter is "centrism is a bad political ideology that enables fascism to thrive," when Harry Potter is - to a certain type of super-online left-winger - a fundamentally neoliberal cultural phenomenon that brainwashed a generation of readers into becoming low-IQ centrists?
Not meant as a gotcha, since my assumption here is "people need Harry Potter to be morally bankrupt because its fandom is mostly female" - I think this is the subtext with the vilification of something like The West Wing (which of course is absolutely a Clintonian third-way fantasia but the hateboner some guys have for Sorkin is wildly out of proportion)
I think because Rowling presents it sort of both ways because I think she never thought much of this stuff through.
The elves are a useful example: Hermoine quite seriously wants to emancipate the elves, but the narrative treats this mostly as silly and idealistic. Many even tell her that the elves WANT to be slaves so there's no point in freeing them, because that would make them even more miserable (this could be taken direct from the 1830s in every newspaper in the US!)
Further, the worldbuilding essentially demonstrates that Voldemort is correct in the hierarchical differences between wizards and muggles and most of the "good" characters go along with this sort of classification. Even Arthur Weasley's fetishization of muggle technology has the amusement of a parent watching a toddler build a castle out of blocks.
Even in this novel, Umbridge is torturing students and the "good" teachers are just looking the other way. But they're still good! McGonagall isn't confronted at any point with the fact that she allowed Harry to have words carved into the back of his hand repeatedly, for example. This isn't even to mention how all the good guys live on the backs of enslaved elves.
And so even though I think Rowling believes that centrism leads to fascism, her response to it isn't radical ideology, but rather radical manners.
The politics become messier as the series goes on, I think, in part because everyone works for the government already. Even as she builds this terrible bureaucracy, she doesn't really have a response for how to deal with it except, perhaps, to have better people fill that Machine.
I read a lot of this differently. I’m not wholly disagreeing with you about her thoughts on centrism and fascism but I think you’re leaving out a huge aspect of this which is that her main message is telling kids that they have agency, real agency to follow their own moral compass and that this takes both endurance and sacrifice. So for example when McGonagall doesn’t save Harry from being tortured by Umbridge, it’s not because she’s a gutless bureaucrat, it’s because she sees Potter as a near equal in the fight against fascism, a person who needs to endure for the long game. They have to bide their time and pick their battles so that their true radical aim of deposing the current ministry succeeds. As time goes on in these books, Mrs Weasley is really the only one still trying to protect them as children. McGonagall etc know Harry and crew are capable of and must be willing to endure the same or similar sacrifices as the older generation of the Order of the Phoenix did in order to triumph over death eaters. This culminates eventually in Harry giving up his life at Hogwarts itself to do what needs to be done. No one makes any effort to stop him because they take him seriously. This being taken seriously is a very important aspect of successful kids’ lit. The adults can’t protect the children from the enemy because they need the children to defeat the enemy with them.
Hermione and the elves is a little bit less successfully done, in my opinion, but I see Rowling not as mocking Hermione but attempting to show how complicated civil rights progress can be - platitudes really aren’t enough. Seemingly good people can be blind to horrific injustice. Often even those who are the victims of injustice are resistant to change, as Dobby found with his fellow elves. I don’t think Rowling was really wrong in her approach to this, I just don’t think she executed it it all that well. I do maintain that Hermione is unquestionably portrayed as being in the right regarding elf enslavement, but she never got a chance to mature from a bright eyed optimistic save the world student activist to someone doing real work to partner with the elves themselves to fight for freedom because everything got consumed by the main event of the war against Voldemort.
This is very insightful! I think you're absolutely right about the aim of the novel, which is something I guess I forgot here as I got stuck thinking about its relation to the real world.
Me transposing this to real life makes me fall in with the people I've been critiquing! This isn't a template for real life or politics, but books for maturing readers who began this when Harry and they were all nine years old. And I think this is why most of these political questions become messy: she didn't write political novels. She wrote books about growing up.
I do think Rowling's aim with the emancipation of the elves is just a bit confused. Because Hermoine really is the only one in the entire world of Harry Potter who even seems to see anything wrong with enslaving elves. Even Harry is mostly put out by Hermoine making a big deal of it. So I don't think Rowling is mocking Hermoine but, narratively, she is often telling us that we don't need to take this seriously. Which brings a strange tension to the inclusion of this subplot, because most readers have been taught about the horrors of slavery, and even read the arguments from slavery advocates that the slaves wanted to remain slaves and were happier as slaves. So hearing someone like Arthur Weasley use the same arguments is, frankly, quite odd. But I also think it goes hand in hand with the foundational belief that most wizards have, which is that they deserve to oversee all human and non-human affairs in the world. So even the good wizards implicitly believe that muggles and other magical creatures are beneath them.
But this is kind of the problem of all of this. If you keep scratching at the worldbuilding, it gets sloppier and more confusing! And I do think many of the problems stem from those early novels where she was just tossing out errata on a whim. As the fandom grew and solidified, she felt the need to keep all the amusing whimsical things that defined this world but tried to make them make sense as her story grew darker. And I think it just buckles a bit.
Much of this can be set aside, I think. Despite the holes I poke here and there, the series does mostly work, and this book in particular succeeds. I actually think this might be the best of the series.
Yeah, that scene with Molly Weasley being tormented by visions of the deaths of her children really got me too. I remember reading it aloud to my kids and having to stop because I was near tears.
I do think, though, that the YA trope of resisting bureaucratic authority goes way back, long before Harry Potter. As soon as kids are old enough to be able to read and choose books for themselves, they are becoming aware that they are stuck having to follow rules that don’t always make sense to them, rules that are set by authorities who are sometimes benign (their parents, if the kids are lucky) and sometimes capricious and cruel (teachers and principals, religious leaders, older or higher-status kids). Stories about pioneers, independent adventures, orphans, and runaways have always been popular, because they get at kids’ developmentally-appropriate desire to escape the rules. Rowling tapped into the desire especially well, in how she makes the incompetent and malign bureaucracy of the Ministry of Magic so flagrant, but she was tapping in, not creating anew, in my opinion.
Great point!
Rowling has this strange tendency to insist she was influenced by almost no one and I think it's clearly not true, in part, because it simply can't be true.
I really didn’t like the 5th book. I thought the whole Umbridge thing was unnecessarily long and cruel. I got bored about 2/3 through and had to force myself to pick it back up.
Re-reading it to my daughter didn’t change that opinion, you could chop 100 pages out of it and not change the story.
Ah, interesting!
See, I think cutting pages out of these books is sort of beside the point. People are here to hangout and so all the extra pages are a benefit rather than a deterrent.
I hadn’t thought about it that way I like it.
I know I’m coming very late to this, sorry!
1) I love this book. It’s the best one. I know the “fight the power” thing can seem overdone, but I think it’s actually a great set of portrayals of bad, weak power. The hole at the center of the Harry Potter books, for me, is that I don’t find Voldemort that scary. And if he DID show up, I think it would be pretty clear that he was terrible. Like, he could take power by force, but you wouldn’t expect to see him actually fooling anyone into GIVING him power. Whereas the simpering, prissy, but ultimately vicious way Umbridge acquires power seems much more insidious. She’s my favorite villain in the series.
2) I agree Snape is awful — insecure, bullying, personally gross, a whiny incel: just a real asshole in every way. I think that’s what makes the whole thing work. Harry isn’t wrong! He’s a dick! He’s not a good person on an interpersonal level. But he’s important for the side of good. He’s a good man in the sense that he helps the fight against actual evil — but really in no other sense.
3) I think I’ve already explained my theory about the house elves, but I don’t think Hermione IS in the right. I think Rowling is kind of playing around with the idea, mostly for comedy but with traces of seriousness, “What if something you perceived as oppression wasn’t oppressive to the people it’s actually happening to?” There’s obviously a way that could be a just so story to justify actual oppression. But I also think it has real life application. I tend to think unions are good, for example, and “right to work” laws are oppressive. But I have to admit that a lot of people just don’t want to be in a union! I can grumble about false consciousness or internalized oppression or whatever. But at the end of the day, maybe they just see the cost and benefits differently! And part of adulthood is recognizing that.
Anyway — great review and great discussion here.
Thanks! And, yeah, I agree: I think this is the best one.
I also think Voldemort's power is really latching onto privately held beliefs that are quite popular, like pureblood wizards and witches being *better* than muggle born ones. I think we can point to many political analogues throughout history that demonstrate how this kind of thing can lead to unpleasantness! Which is maybe why the series seems to invite this kind of comparison to the real world, where it ultimately becomes messy and kind of awkward and confusing. Too, I think Umbridge is the real terrible villainy at play! I think it's why Rowlings ends up focusing so much on bureaucracy for these middle books.
I'm glad I'm not alone in disliking Snape! What an asshole!
This is so awesome. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Edward—impressed by your ability to articulate the mechanics of the HP world and of the story itself.
Thanks!
Hmmm: why do you think it is that the "moral" of Harry Potter is "centrism is a bad political ideology that enables fascism to thrive," when Harry Potter is - to a certain type of super-online left-winger - a fundamentally neoliberal cultural phenomenon that brainwashed a generation of readers into becoming low-IQ centrists?
Not meant as a gotcha, since my assumption here is "people need Harry Potter to be morally bankrupt because its fandom is mostly female" - I think this is the subtext with the vilification of something like The West Wing (which of course is absolutely a Clintonian third-way fantasia but the hateboner some guys have for Sorkin is wildly out of proportion)
I think because Rowling presents it sort of both ways because I think she never thought much of this stuff through.
The elves are a useful example: Hermoine quite seriously wants to emancipate the elves, but the narrative treats this mostly as silly and idealistic. Many even tell her that the elves WANT to be slaves so there's no point in freeing them, because that would make them even more miserable (this could be taken direct from the 1830s in every newspaper in the US!)
Further, the worldbuilding essentially demonstrates that Voldemort is correct in the hierarchical differences between wizards and muggles and most of the "good" characters go along with this sort of classification. Even Arthur Weasley's fetishization of muggle technology has the amusement of a parent watching a toddler build a castle out of blocks.
Even in this novel, Umbridge is torturing students and the "good" teachers are just looking the other way. But they're still good! McGonagall isn't confronted at any point with the fact that she allowed Harry to have words carved into the back of his hand repeatedly, for example. This isn't even to mention how all the good guys live on the backs of enslaved elves.
And so even though I think Rowling believes that centrism leads to fascism, her response to it isn't radical ideology, but rather radical manners.
The politics become messier as the series goes on, I think, in part because everyone works for the government already. Even as she builds this terrible bureaucracy, she doesn't really have a response for how to deal with it except, perhaps, to have better people fill that Machine.
I read a lot of this differently. I’m not wholly disagreeing with you about her thoughts on centrism and fascism but I think you’re leaving out a huge aspect of this which is that her main message is telling kids that they have agency, real agency to follow their own moral compass and that this takes both endurance and sacrifice. So for example when McGonagall doesn’t save Harry from being tortured by Umbridge, it’s not because she’s a gutless bureaucrat, it’s because she sees Potter as a near equal in the fight against fascism, a person who needs to endure for the long game. They have to bide their time and pick their battles so that their true radical aim of deposing the current ministry succeeds. As time goes on in these books, Mrs Weasley is really the only one still trying to protect them as children. McGonagall etc know Harry and crew are capable of and must be willing to endure the same or similar sacrifices as the older generation of the Order of the Phoenix did in order to triumph over death eaters. This culminates eventually in Harry giving up his life at Hogwarts itself to do what needs to be done. No one makes any effort to stop him because they take him seriously. This being taken seriously is a very important aspect of successful kids’ lit. The adults can’t protect the children from the enemy because they need the children to defeat the enemy with them.
Hermione and the elves is a little bit less successfully done, in my opinion, but I see Rowling not as mocking Hermione but attempting to show how complicated civil rights progress can be - platitudes really aren’t enough. Seemingly good people can be blind to horrific injustice. Often even those who are the victims of injustice are resistant to change, as Dobby found with his fellow elves. I don’t think Rowling was really wrong in her approach to this, I just don’t think she executed it it all that well. I do maintain that Hermione is unquestionably portrayed as being in the right regarding elf enslavement, but she never got a chance to mature from a bright eyed optimistic save the world student activist to someone doing real work to partner with the elves themselves to fight for freedom because everything got consumed by the main event of the war against Voldemort.
This is very insightful! I think you're absolutely right about the aim of the novel, which is something I guess I forgot here as I got stuck thinking about its relation to the real world.
Me transposing this to real life makes me fall in with the people I've been critiquing! This isn't a template for real life or politics, but books for maturing readers who began this when Harry and they were all nine years old. And I think this is why most of these political questions become messy: she didn't write political novels. She wrote books about growing up.
I do think Rowling's aim with the emancipation of the elves is just a bit confused. Because Hermoine really is the only one in the entire world of Harry Potter who even seems to see anything wrong with enslaving elves. Even Harry is mostly put out by Hermoine making a big deal of it. So I don't think Rowling is mocking Hermoine but, narratively, she is often telling us that we don't need to take this seriously. Which brings a strange tension to the inclusion of this subplot, because most readers have been taught about the horrors of slavery, and even read the arguments from slavery advocates that the slaves wanted to remain slaves and were happier as slaves. So hearing someone like Arthur Weasley use the same arguments is, frankly, quite odd. But I also think it goes hand in hand with the foundational belief that most wizards have, which is that they deserve to oversee all human and non-human affairs in the world. So even the good wizards implicitly believe that muggles and other magical creatures are beneath them.
But this is kind of the problem of all of this. If you keep scratching at the worldbuilding, it gets sloppier and more confusing! And I do think many of the problems stem from those early novels where she was just tossing out errata on a whim. As the fandom grew and solidified, she felt the need to keep all the amusing whimsical things that defined this world but tried to make them make sense as her story grew darker. And I think it just buckles a bit.
Much of this can be set aside, I think. Despite the holes I poke here and there, the series does mostly work, and this book in particular succeeds. I actually think this might be the best of the series.