- Beth Sutton-Ramspeck
Mischief Managed: Rule Breaking as Resistance in the Harry Potter Novels
Young Harry Potter readers, according to the findings of Anthony Gierzynsk, Loris Vezzali, and their teams, are more empathetic and open to diversity, more politically active, and less authoritarian than non-fans. Ironically, the pushback J.K Rowling has recently received in response to her comments about transgender issues testifies to her books’ influence on readers. Potter readers’ acceptance and antiauthoritarianism are no coincidence. Harry himself engages in resistance, a phenomenon studied by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists. My book, Harry Potter and Resistance, argues that Harry and his allies resist corruption at the Ministry of Magic as well as unwritten racist norms that gave rise to Voldemort in the first place. While the wizarding world is obviously fictional, it resembles most good fantasies in commenting on complex real-world issues, including real-world ethical and political dilemmas.
Harry Potter and Resistance is about rule breaking, distinguishing valuable regulations, like those identifying Unforgivable Curses, from those of debatable value. Hogwarts rules are often ethically trivial compared to larger principles at stake, and those who take school rules most seriously, like Dolores Umbridge, are the more flawed characters. Hogwarts punishments and rewards are subject to whim, favoritism, and sometimes cruelty. That inconsistency pales by comparison with the Ministry of Magic. Many wizard laws are written without input from elected legislators. Laws are enforced unevenly, giving preferential treatment to some, discriminating against others. For example, people are imprisoned without trial, and when trials do occur, rules of evidence and fairness are routinely ignored. Azkaban Prison metes out state-sanctioned psychological torture. In short, British wizarding culture incorporates systemic injustices that practically demand resistance.
The magical world is marred by wizard privilege, analogous to real-world white privilege. To be sure, there are flaws in Rowling’s depictions of issues of race, gender, disability, and so on, for which there is a long history of critical commentary, including, most recently, in an important collection, Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World (2022). Nevertheless, the core point is that wizards are depicted as unjustly dominating other beings, from house-elves to Muggles; and “pure-bloods” have more privilege than “mud-bloods.” This language reflects a pattern of language and imagery about dirt and cleanliness. Anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her 1966 study Purity and Danger, argues that “dirt” is culturally defined, a “by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (35). Recent research on disgust identifies correlations between xenophobia and disgust sensitivity—repulsion by things considered contaminating. In the wizarding world, what characters assess as dirty and disgusting ultimately says more about the characters’ value systems and the prevailing social system than about the person or object being assessed. Those most offended by impurity and dirt—e.g. “mudbloods”—are, of course, Voldemort and his sympathizers. Harry’s allies are more often endearingly messy. By the same token, cleaning may be obsessive like Petunia Dursley’s or shade into Voldemort’s ethnic cleansing; yet it may also express love, as when houses are cleaned for special occasions like Bill and Fleur’s wedding. In a culture premised on hate, oppressing others for being “dirty” is the norm, but cleaning in the service of love represents resistance. Likewise resisting oppressive norms requires recognizing privilege.
Dumbledore’s advocacy of love’s magic to overcome hate resembles psychologist Carol Gilligan’s analysis of an ethic of care to counteract the patriarchy’s antidemocratic effects: Voldemort’s embrace of hierarchy, cruelty to those he perceives as “other,” and rejection of love are quintessentially patriarchal. Some of the most surprising resistance occurs among two analogous groups that seem least rebellious: house-elves and housewives (the consonance is surely no accident). Rowling’s depictions of house-elf slavery and, to a lesser extent, domesticity, have been topics of some of the most heated debates in Potter studies; my own emphasis is on the fact that house-elves, although enslaved and ostensibly submissive, “have a powerful magic of their own” (Chamber 28). Deprived of wands by wizarding fiat, house-elves can nevertheless perform magic that witches and wizards cannot. Exceptions to the norm of the “happy house-elf,” like Dobby and Kreacher, illustrate that house-elf enslavement derives from ancient enchantments rather than from being “natural,” for, as John Stuart Mill points out in The Subjection of Women, there is no need to forbid behaviors someone is incapable of performing. Differences of opinion are common between masters and slaves, and house-elves do rebel. That they generally comply can be attributed to another aspect of their power: their love for their families. House-elves’ protective love is one of several analogies to domestic witches, particularly Molly Weasley and Lily Potter, formidable witches who save their children’s lives. Lily’s sacrificial love, like Dobby’s and Harry’s in Deathly Hallows, overcomes the patriarchal oppression embodied in Lord Voldemort.
Resistance methods employed by Harry and his allies echo World War Two resistance actions, the U.S. Civil Rights movement, and Congressmen John Lewis’s “good trouble.” The Reverend Martin Luther King advocated “creative maladjustment” in the face of “things in our society to which we should never be adjusted” (10). Harry and his allies refuse to adjust to systemic problems in magical culture, their “maladjustment” exemplifying creative “divergent thinking.” Ironically, some of the series’ most creative characters are malevolent rule breakers—Dolores Umbridge, Rita Skeeter, and Lord Voldemort himself, “creator” of Horcruxes. But the magical resistance is ultimately more creative, for they defy the wizarding status quo. Permeated by patriarchal constructs, the Ministry of Magic and its logical product, Lord Voldemort, prove vulnerable to the nonviolent resistance exemplified by Harry’s creatively deploying his “signature move,” the Expelliarmus charm.
Some critics of the series consider lying a major way Harry breaks rules. Indeed, he and his allies do sometimes lie. But official lies and censorship are the modus operandi in the wizarding world’s corrupt autocracy. Thus, to assert the truth, as Harry does, by insisting that Voldemort has returned, represents a radical rebellion—for which Dolores Umbridge sadistically punishes him, forcing him to carve “I must not tell lies” into his hand. In Umbridge’s and the Ministry’s Orwellian approach, truth is what those in power say is true. Harry, by contrast, insists on facts that correspond to actual observed realities.
To be sure, the series leaves unfinished business, like house-elf slavery. Systemic oppression of house-elves, at least a millennium in the making, cannot be conquered in one generation and requires a revolution in wizard ideology. However satisfying we find the defeat of one charismatic leader, it cannot end the underlying social problems that brought him to power. Moreover, even good wizards do bad things, for, as Sirius Black remarks, “the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters” (Order 302). By the same token, even the creator of a beloved series that celebrates acceptance can fall prey to intolerant attitudes. In the face of systemic injustice, all of us must maintain, as Mad-Eye Moody advised, “Constant vigilance!”
Works Cited
Dahlen, Sarah Park, and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, editors. Harry Potter and the Other: Race Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World. UP of Mississippi, 2022.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1966.
Gierzynski, Anthony. Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013.
Gilligan, Carol. Joining the Resistance. Polity Press, 2011.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 24, no. 1, 1968, pp. 1–12.
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor, edited by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson. University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. 303-400.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Scholastic, 1999.
---. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York: Scholastic, 2003.
Vezzali, Loris, et al. “The Greatest Magic of Harry Potter: Reducing Prejudice.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, vol. 45, no. 2, Feb. 2015, pp. 105–21.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Beth Sutton-Ramspeck is Associate Professor Emeritus at the Lima campus of the Ohio State University. Her first research specialty was Victorian literature, and she is the author of the book Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Ohio University Press, 2004), as well as the editor of three turn-of-the-century novels. She began teaching a course in the Harry Potter series around the same time she became politically active, and eventually the two interests came together in her book Harry Potter and Resistance (Routledge, 2023). Beth and her husband now live in beautiful Black Mountain, North Carolina, where they read, write, walk their dog, and enjoy bear watching.