25 years.
This has been 25 years of my life.
I first read these books in early 2002, in my freshman year of college. We had a cheap, late-run movie theater in my college town that charged $1 for movies that were nearing the end of their theatrical run. My girlfriend and I went to see virtually every movie that got a screening. When Harry Potter came to the theater, she wanted to go. I didn’t. But, as is the case in every relationship, you pick your battles. I ended up loving the movie to a degree I wholly didn’t expect, and immediately went out and bought all four books that had been published to that point, devouring them immediately.
I’m sure this story is common for a lot of millennials.
The movies – after that first experience, never really held much sway over me. The child actors looked the part, but weren’t very good. A lot of the things I loved about the books were left out of the movies due to time constraints, and some of the divergences from the books were questionable and jarring (famously). But the books have always been there to enjoy. And I’ve returned to them multiple times over the years.
More discerning readers noticed problems with the books. Individually, they all work pretty well, but you can tell that she was building the airplane while it was on the tarmac, because it doesn’t always make sense across the series. For instance, polyjuice potion is a difficult concoction and can go wrong incredibly easily….until that isn’t necessary for the plot, and characters take it all the time. There are lots of little things like that.
But I’m not really reviewing these books to pick them apart and cry about inconsistencies across the books. That’s not my problem.
My real problem is that I loathe J.K. Rowling. I always looked at her a little skeptically. The house elf storyline was the first thing that made me wonder how she saw the world. In all the times I’ve read these books, it’s seemed obvious that her point was to draw an allusion to slavery, and pairing that with the obvious muggle/pureblood subject, it seemed obvious she wanted to say something about racism. But…..what? Is she trying to say that slavery is bad? I mean, is that something that needed to be said in the 1990s? It’s weird, because other than Hermione – no one cares. No one really joins her cause. Harry and Ron are, at best, tolerant of her activism. Almost everyone else is annoyed. Even the teachers don’t care. She can’t draw from any historic activist groups. Hell, even the house elves themselves enjoy their status in wizarding society.
I’ve never understood what she was trying to get across with this story line. I didn’t understand while the books were being written, and I don’t understand it now. Especially considering it just kind of gets dropped. There’s no great revelation where everyone acknowledges that yes, holding an entire group of beings in forced servitude where they are required to torture themselves for saying anything against their masters is actually a bad thing. It just kind of gets forgotten about, apart from a brief moment at the end where Ron thinks the house elves at Hogwarts should be freed before Voldemort storms the castle.
And then there was the whole “Dumbledore is gay” addendum. Say what you will about Rowling, but I believe she actually supports the gay community….in her own, warped TERFY way. Or, at least, she thinks she is supportive. But the “Dumbledore was actually gay the whole time” seemed like a performative, “look at me being such an ally! Aren’t I wonderful?” attempt at latching on to the moment. And that his homosexuality led to him abandoning his moral principles, flirting with wizarding domination of muggles, and subsequent life of asexuality and celibacy was just…gross. You have one gay character in the books, hide his sexuality, and have him spend his life turning away from it because it so poisoned his view of the world…..and we’re supposed to think this is a good thing?
Reading these books, now, this kind of stuff really leaps off the page. It’s hard to not see this stuff when she’s revealed herself to be such a toxic and hateful bigot. The things that bothered me 20 years ago are now really hard to overlook.
It’s weird returning to these books. They haven’t changed over the last couple decades. And I don’t feel like I’ve changed that much, either. But I have. Politically, I’m in a very different place than I was twenty years ago (if not necessarily in belief, certainly in self-identification). How I engage with the world is very different. My life couldn’t be more different. That I’m even having kids to read these books to is something I couldn’t have imagined while reading these books in college.
But it is through introducing this world to children that my problems with it are no longer something I can brush aside or shrug off. How the house elves are treated is something I couldn’t not draw attention to. How Snape and the other adults treat children isn’t just a convenient plot device. What the Death Eaters are doing to society is certainly not something I can gloss over at a time when I’m trying to explain why the real world is so terrible. These books are a good springboard for deeper conversations about how we live in the world, and how we treat people different from ourselves.
I’ve written about this elsewhere, but I had a class in high school on 20th century literature. And I vividly remember my teacher explaining to us – in the context of Hiroshima by John Hersey and Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut – how American exceptionalism was a myth, and what happened in Germany in the 1930s could happen here. That always stuck with me. I don’t know if that was the first time that thought had been presented to me – but my son won’t have to wait until high school. He made that connection himself, between the Death Eaters and MAGA.
Not that he’s politically literate – he’s only 11. But he knows enough to know that Trump isn’t a good guy. And he knows enough to know that bigotry is wrong.
He doesn’t know about J.K. Rowling, though. As was the case with Santa Claus, some magic is worth preserving for children.
