Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Inquiry Question #1

The book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling is an engaging book about three wizards on a quest to find all of Voldemort’s (an evil wizard who is trying to rule over both the wizard and muggle—human—worlds) horcruxes (an object that has a piece of your soul in it and keeps you from completely dying if someone kills you) so that they can destroy the horcruxes and kill Voldemort to keep him from terrorizing the wizard and muggle worlds. In the story, muggles are often seen as an inferior race, below the wizards or just useless and stupid. As well, House Elves (elves that are usually enslaved to do a wizard’s bidding) are also treated very poorly and without much thought. This reminds me a lot of racism in our non-fantastical real world. I think J.K. Rowling is trying to tell us something about racism through an allegory in her book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

One example of this allegory is when the Ministry of Magic (the government of the wizard world) puts a statue in their government building of a bunch of very tiny muggles all stacked up and being sat upon by very large wizards. On pages 241—242, “A gigantic statue of black stone dominated the scene. It was rather frightening, this vast sculpture of a witch and a wizard sitting upon ornately carved thrones… Engraved in foot-high letters at the base of the statue were the words MAGIC IS MIGHT... Harry looked more closely and realized that what he thought were decoratively carved thrones were actually mounds of carved humans… ‘Muggles’ whispered Hermione ‘In their rightful place.’” This kind of belittlement of a race (whether it be Muggles, House Elves, of African Americans) is highly unacceptable and distasteful. As well, I noticed that Rowling makes all of the “evil” characters (the Ministry of Magic, Voldemort and the purebloods) the most discriminative and racist towards Muggles, and the “good” characters (Hermione, Harry and Ron) look upon the injustice with disgust and act the kindest towards the Muggles. By making the discrimination happen because of the bad guys, J.K. Rowling puts racism in a bad light and seems to want us to think inequity is undeniably lousy. With which I completely agree.

Another example of this allegory is on page 195, when Hermione speaks of house elves and Voldemort, “Of course Voldemort would have considered the ways of house elves far beneath his notice, just like all the purebloods who treat them like animals… It would never have occurred to him that they might have magic that he didn’t.” This quote displays that the characters in the book not only encounter problems with muggle-wizard equity but with House Elf intolerance too. Most of the people who treat House Elves badly are, in fact, Purebloods who persecute Muggles. These purebloods and evil-doers often think that muggles and house elves are only capable of unimportant and useless things when there actually are muggles who have magical abilities, House Elves who’s magic extends far beyond any wizard’s reach, and pureblood wizards who are squibs and can’t do magic at all. This whole idea of shaming or disrespecting someone because you think they are inferior to you is horrific. Who knows, maybe you aren’t better than that person or group. Even if you claim to be, you most certainly shouldn’t make them feel bad about themselves for it.

All in all, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a great book and an allegory for racism, discrimination, and persecution.  There are many real world problems that are reflected in certain books and that ensures that these problems are noticed and considered. J.K. Rowling makes it very clear that these acts are distasteful, disrespectful, and altogether, wrong. She is entirely correct in that matter; the world would be a much better place without discrimination.