Rowling Reconsidered: Part 3
This is the third part of my attempt to cast light on the writing of J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series using the new information of her subsequent works. Part 1 (feminism) is here. Part 2 (weight prejudice and plot holes) is here.
I promised to reconsider the following:
Are her books unfeminist, fat-phobic, full of plot-holes and bad messages, "Calvinistic" in morality, unsatisfying in romance, and supportive of slavery?
Now come the really fun stuff: morals and romance! (I'm assuming that slavery-support can fit in under "messages and morals")
‘The Boy Who Lived’ Remains a Symbol of Everything for Which We Are Fighting
Critiques of morality and messages in J.K. Rowling's writings is a huge and amorphous topic, but I will try to pin it down into a few categories.
First I would make a distinction between the two groups of people the Bad Morality is said to affect: either "children" or "me and readers like me." Obviously, I grant a whole bunch more validity to those speaking for the second audience than the first. I think people who go on about Rowling's Influence on Our Youth and her Responsibility to Her Child Audience are, in many cases, vastly underestimating the perceptiveness of young people and/or vastly overestimating their susceptibility to influence. Often I find their criticisms quite ridiculous, as does Rowling:
After The Chamber of Secrets was published, this grandmother wrote to me and said, 'I was appalled to see you encouraging joyriding.' It was like, 'Okay, hello?!' I read the letter, and for a moment I thought, 'Where did I say joyriding was good?' And then I realized, it's a very, very literal approach to things. Harry steals a car, so it's good to steal cars-no! I didn't say that.'
That said, I can certainly think of works that I would not want young children exposed to, so I'm not going to toss this category away completely. I'm just not going to give it much attention.
On the other hand, a complaint that the moral messages of a book destroyed or diminished your pleasure in it, or your respect for it, or detracted from its aesthetic or emotional effect is one I take seriously. This type of thing can affect your trust in the author, your ability to identify with characters, even your understanding of what makes a "happy ending." Obviously, an author can't please everyone but that doesn't mean we should just wave away complaints, especially if large numbers of people are making similar ones. In general, we seek some kind of consensus among readers (including readers who are children, who are perfectly able to express their own opinions).
I would divide the criticisms I have seen about morality and messages in Harry Potter into five categories, in descending order of frequency/importance:
It Is Our Choices, Harry, That Show What We Truly Are
I think every reader has experienced a moment of being taken aback at some point in the Harry Potter series at some action by a favorite character. For some of us there are many such moments. Perhaps it is Hagrid giving Dudley a pig's tail---that has to be removed surgically. Perhaps it is Hermione Confunding Cormac McLaggen. Perhaps it is Dumbledore's bait and switch with the House Cup in Book One, or Snape forcing Neville to feed possibly-poison potion to his pet toad, or Mrs. Weasley sending Hermione a small egg, or the twins forcing Montague into the Vanishing Cabinet, or Harry using the Cruciatus Curse. Different things stick in different people's craws but for most of us there is something. Now, I have to subdivide even further because there are three different ways/reasons these things bother us.
First, there is the simple way, which I will call the Gryffindor perspective. It bothers us because when we like a character we expect them to be nice. When a character you identify with does something cruel or unethical, something against your own personal moral standards, you almost feel like you have to feel guilty about it, which is deeply annoying because you (you think) wouldn't have done that bad thing! (Or would you?---and it doesn't necessarily feel good to think about that, either.) So then do you have to like the character less? Or convince yourself the action was "out of character" or justified or necessary and somehow doesn't count? Or even---and I don't generally recommend this---adjust your own moral code to declare the act acceptable?
Second, there is the "double standard" or "hypocrisy" way, which I will call the Slytherin perspective. This has to do with why some people describe Rowling's morality as "Calvinist." It bothers us if we feel the author is being inconsistent in her moral judgments, giving leeway to "good" characters who we are supposed to like when they do something wrong, but harshly judging "bad" characters who we aren't supposed to like for the same or similar behavior. It seems to many people that Rowling/the narrative judges people as good or bad not so much on the morality of their actions but on whether they are friendly and helpful to Harry or are on the good side (against Voldemort). Or, simply (I think simplistically), whether they are Gryffindors. Or that she encourages readers to judge characters in this unfair and prejudiced way---and not just temporarily, so that they might be caught up and surprised when they are forced to realize their bias, but enduringly.
Third, there is the "justice" way, which I will call the Barty Crouch Sr. perspective. Many readers are perfectly fine with their favorite characters doing something bad, as long as they get punished for it. This could be literally, like Harry getting a well-deserved detention for nearly killing Malfoy with the Sectumsempra Curse, or karmically, like Sirius's ill-treatment of Kreacher resulting in his own death. Other readers don't really demand punishment, but simply want explicit acknowledgement that a given action is wrong, perhaps by the guilty character feeling remorse for it, or losing respect from other characters. Or at least having the narrative voice treat the act with distance and irony.
All three of these objections to "good" characters doing bad things can be from the "Think About the Children" angle or from the "This Doesn't Work For Me" angle. And, at its worst, it can go so far as to destroy the reader's natural identification with and liking for the main character Harry. You can decide he's just not nice enough or a good enough person to spend your time reading about. Or you can think he's acceptable in himself (self-sacrificing heroism atoning for many sins), but you just can't put up with the kind of people he likes, approves of, and associates with.
So how do Rowling's subsequent works add to these perspectives? I see the two book examples going in opposite directions.
To me, The Casual Vacancy has some of the moral characteristics of the Harry Potter series, except much more so. In both works, there is an over-arching good vs. evil dichotomy: in HP the world is divided between those who support a Nazi-style evil dictatorship and those who oppose it; in TCV the village is divided between the forces for compassion and generous social services and the forces for exclusion and judgmental complacency in the face of suffering. In both works, as well, it is hard to find anyone who is truly GOOD, even if they are on the good side of the divide. Everyone has flaws, people hurt each other, there is a lot of conflict, a lot of rule-breaking and law-breaking, violence, unfairness, and selfishness.
In both works, however, there is a general impression that these people, as flawed as they are, are worthwhile and worthy of love. Certainly it is shown that they need love and compassion. The message is clearer in HP, where the tone is strikingly warm and cozy. As my friend connielane put it:
"we'll probably have more fun with Rowling's story and her people if we have some tolerance for human frailty."
I know everything comes back to movies with me :P, but I couldn't resist the Philadelphia Story connection here. I'm sure you remember the scene - Dexter and Tracy and Mike by the pool, and Dexter is commenting about Tracy being generous to a fault, except to other people's faults. He proceeds with this bit of brilliance:
"I'm contemptuous of something inside you you either can't help or make no attempt to - your so-called strength, your prejudice against weakness, your blank intolerance ... [snip] ... because you'll never be a first class human being or a first class woman until you've learned to have some regard for human frailty. It's a pity your own foot can't slip a little sometimes, but your sense of inner divinity wouldn't allow that."
Obviously, Dext is referring to real people as opposed to characters in a book, but I think the same principle applies. This pretty accurately sums up a lot of the "intellectuals" I've come across in the HP fandom. It goes back to the flattening and polarizing impulse. Characters who have weaknesses aren't interesting figures in a rich tapestry of human interactions and emotions, they're blights on imagination, and bad examples for readers (thank goodness there are so many conscientious wannabe-mommies out there to tell us how bad all this stuff is for us!)
Of course, Dexter's rant is echoed later in the movie by Tracy herself, when - after Mike shows disdain for the upper class - she says "You'll never be a first rate writer or a first rate human being until you've learned to have some small regard for human frailty" (Oh, and "I should think that of all people a writer would need tolerance" and "You're so much thought and so little feeling, Professor.").
So much thought and so little feeling" is the only thing I can think of that would lead people to think of these books in such a flat, judgemental way and miss all of the affection JKR has for her characters - affection which is practically jumping up and down on the page in blinding neon lights saying "(((((HUGS)))))".
It is actually weird to me how true this is. It boggles my mind that I'm so FOND of what are by any measure terrible people, people like Marvolo Gaunt and Lucius Malfoy and even Fenrir Grayback. I suspect this may be a specifically Christian perspective on Rowling's part, seeing people as presumably God sees them, reeking in filthy garments of sin and yet terribly valuable and infinitely lovable.
The tone in The Casual Vacancy isn't nearly as warm or cozy but the reader is led to the same conclusion in the end. These people, horrible as most of them are, must be loved because they are the only people there are. They are vulnerable. They hurt. They are capable of goodness and love. They matter.
Interestingly, though, this portrayal of human nature doesn't seem (to me) to carry over to the Cormoran Strike books. That series seems to fit much better into the usual moral universe of mystery novels, where there are a whole bunch of good/acceptable regular mostly-law-abiding people, then there are murderers (who are BAD), and the especially-gifted (though not necessarily especially-moral) people, our protagonists, who catch the murderers and bring them to justice.
There is another kind of moral situation often seen in murder mysteries where a lot of people are very bad. This might come in the form of there being a lot of suspects for the murder and it seems like any one of them could have done it because they're all rotten people in a rotten world. But only one (or some) of them actually did it and our hero reveals that truth in the end. It seems to me that given her earlier works J.K. Rowling could easily have written this kind of moral world for the Cormoran Strike series but I don't see it that way at all. Most of the characters in her books, even the murder suspects, seem like they wouldn't commit murder. Or at least not easily.
Cormoran Strike is a very different kind of hero than Harry Potter. He thinks before he acts. He has a clear moral code with rules that he verbalizes to himself and follows. He is willing to follow other people's rules as well---the army's, the law. He has a passion for justice and feels a duty to protect the weak, even though he's not particularly kind or empathetic. Most important to this discussion, he hasn't, as best I remember, ever caused me to feel taken-aback by his actions, or violated my moral code.
Nor has Robin. Robin is truly a good and kind person. The same is true of Hermione, of course, but Hermione has a ruthless streak and moral relativism that I haven't seen in Robin. I once said of the Harry Potter series:
I have found since the first book that Rowling is apt to give us what I'll call challenging moments - times when it isn't easy and pleasant to simply identify with the good guys, root against the bad guys, and relax in complacent certainty that you're on the side of the angels.
So far I haven't found this to be true of the Cormoran Strike series. It is easy and pleasant to root for Cormoran and Robin and against the murdering murderers who murder. These books also lack the almost supernatural magic coziness that makes me love Harry Potter characters against my better judgment. This is not to say that there aren't lovable characters in the Strike books, because there are, but I find many of the characters annoying and unlikeable, even basically decent people like Cormoran's sister Lucy and Robin's fiancé Matthew.
It remains to be seen whether, and how, good people will do bad things in The Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and how we will feel about it if they do.
"You Are Nearly There," Said James. "Very Close. We Are . . . So Proud of You."
I can't leave the topic of good people doing bad things without discussing what you might call the pro-suicide message in the Harry Potter series. Albus Dumbledore, Rowling's "epitome of goodness," arranges a suicide for both himself and Harry. What's almost worse, the reincarnated shadows of James and Lily Potter seem to approve of their only son walking voluntarily to his certain death at age seventeen.
Here is a good essay critiquing Dumbledore's actions from a moral perspective. Did Dumbledore know that Harry would not have to die for real? It's not clear, but I think he did. He apparently did not, however, share that knowledge with Snape and Harry, not even to hint at it. I can't tell if the shades of Harry's parents and Sirius and Remus understood it or not. Of course I can see that, as a writer, Rowling wanted Harry to believe he was dying permanently, but to do that she had to make Dumbledore withhold knowledge again, which was cruel to Snape and cruel to Harry. I am not going to argue about Dumbledore's morals here, though I love him more than any character in the books. But whether he did what he had to do or not, it is indisputable that Rowling created the circumstances where these two voluntary deaths were the correct and successful actions.
So do we see anything in Rowling's later works that contributes to this discussion? The Casual Vacancy deals with the subject of suicide and, to my perception, is strongly against it (though strongly for risking your life to save the life of another). I don't actually remember any treatment of suicide or self-sacrificial death in the Cormoran Strike books, except, I suppose, the fact that the murder victim in the first book is wrongly thought to have committed suicide at first, and there is some slight discussion about that. For some reason (probably because of the name of the play), I wouldn't be surprised if The Cursed Child does have some material bearing on this. However, Fantastic Beasts seems, to me, to promise a more light-hearted adventure.
There's Not a Single Witch or Wizard Who Went Bad Who Wasn't in Slytherin
If people are annoyed by "good" people doing bad things in the Harry Potter books, they are also sometimes annoyed by "bad" people doing bad things, in a way that feels unrealistic or stereotyped. This includes the disappointment people feel that Rowling created one of her four houses as "the bad house," especially annoying, of course, if you suspect that you would have been sorted into Slytherin. I want to group in this category the unhappiness that people feel about no Slytherin students remaining in the Great Hall to fight Voldemort, as well as the frustration some feel about characters like, say, Gregory Goyle having to be stupid, and greedy, and ugly, and mean, as well as being a son of a Death Eater and a Slytherin. I suppose the critique is really an aesthetic one, protesting an unrealistically flattened moral universe, an absence of nuance and empathy.
There is also the fact that though Rowling says that not all Slytherins come from Death Eater families or hate Muggleborns, we never see one in Harry's time who doesn't (as far as we can tell). And if such students do exist, what must their school years be like, living in a Common Room that has "pure-blood" as a password, honoring Salazar Slytherin as their House founder, and dealing with Draco Malfoy as a Prefect? Even their House ghost, the Bloody Baron, is revealed to be a murderer.
This also relates to the "Calvinist" argument, basically saying that kids are labeled either "good" or "bad" (or "in between and no one cares about them") when they are labeled by the Sorting Hat as Gryff, Slyth, or Huff/Claw, and then no matter how they act they're still considered good, bad, or "who cares?" according to their House. I actually think this is a dumb argument (which is not the same as saying I think the Sorting Hat situation is a good arrangement), but if you have accepted this argument you tend to be annoyed by Slytherin characters doing bad things because it's like they don't have a choice or free will or something. Or because they were put into a situation that socializes them to behave badly.
Again, you can protest this because you think it teaches kids harmful lessons ("some people are just bad and don't matter") or because it decreases your enjoyment of the work.
So, does this criticism apply to Rowling's later works? I ... don't know. There are three characters in The Casual Vacancy who struck me as really, really bad people. One is Simon Price, an abusive husband and father who is also a petty thief, almost completely selfish and self-centered. His son says of him: "Lately, Andrew had asked himself whether Simon even saw other humans as real." But, lacking in any likable traits as he may be, Simon is a point of view character. We hear many of his thoughts, and are told why he is the way he is. He is given serious treatment as a full human being. There was also one moment of ... I don't know if I'd say insight, but a moment that surprised me about Simon: "For once he was not angry. Ruth was not there, so he did not have to prove himself bigger or smarter than his sons."
The next one is Shirley Mollison. Shirley does have likable traits: she is a loving wife, mother, and grandmother, she is a cheerful and uncomplaining cook, housewife, hospital volunteer, public servant, etc. She takes care of people. She is loyal to those she loves. But her inner life, as revealed by her point-of-view narration, is a vile stream of self-regard, jealousy, snobbishness, complacency, and hate. And late in the book she plans what I consider the worst act by anyone in the book.
Finally, there is Obbo, a drug dealer and rapist. We don't have his point-of-view or see much of him so he is more a plot device than a person. He may actually have all sorts of good qualities and be redeemable, I don't know. I suppose he's the closest thing this book has to a Crabbe-and-Goyle type.
Interestingly, two out of three of these people are from a development called "the Fields" (what we in America would call the projects, or perhaps the "slum"). The Mollison faction in the book would have it that the Fields are in some sense the Slytherin House of this village, dark and suspect, bringing forth evil people, while Pagford proper is, as some see Gryffindor House, a bulwark and nurturer of virtue:
Howard carried the mental image of the Fields with him always, like the memory of a nightmare: boarded windows daubed with obscenities, smoking teenagers loitering in the perennially defaced bus shelters; satellite dishes everywhere, turned to the skies like the denuded ovules of grim metal flowers.
...
Pagford, by contrast, shone with a kind of moral radiance in Howard's mind, as though the collective soul of the community was made manifest in its cobbled streets, its hills, its picturesque housing. ... For him the town was an ideal, a way of being; a micro-civilization that stood firmly against a national decline.
Shirley Mollison was not born in the Fields but she was brought up in similar conditions in the nearby city of Yarvil. However, her childhood is long suppressed and forgotten.
But Howard, of course, is not right that only badness can come from the Fields, any more than Voldemort is right that only badness can come from Muggles. The dead main character Barry Fairbrother, deservedly beloved, came from the Fields. So did Krystal Weedon, a troubled but extremely sympathetic young character. And other really terrible people, like Gavin Hughes, Stuart Wall, and Samantha Mollison, were brought up in Pagford, or perhaps in some other pleasant middle class burb. However---and perhaps this makes it a relevant comparison with Slytherin House after all---it is harder to grow up to be a good person in the Fields. You are likely to be affected by drugs, violence, poverty, bad parenting, crime, hopelessness, and people whose "smiles stiffen" when you mention where you live.
I don't have any criticisms of Rowling's treatment of Fields residents or of her treatment of bad characters in this book (other than the Crabbe-Goyle thing with people like Obbo but she can't make every person a POV character). On the other hand, I might not be the right person to look for it. I also don't see anything like that in the Cormoran Strike books.
Of course, some segments of the Harry Potter fandom are awaiting the Cursed Child play with anxious dread (or hope), wondering what House Albus will be sorted into, how Scorpius will be treated, and just where the "darkness comes from unexpected places." I must say I'm pretty interested myself. In Fantastic Beasts, it looks like Newt may face opposition from two different groups, the magical government of the US and the anti-magical Muggles, the Second Salemers. Speaking as a Muggle myself, I definitely prefer seeing my kind as scary antagonists rather than clueless bystanders and collateral damage. And, even more fun, one of us gets to be one of the four protagonists!
Progress For Progress's Sake Must Be Discouraged, For Our Tried and Tested Traditions Often Require No Tinkering
The next most common moral criticism I've seen of the Harry Potter books involves the fact that, as I once put it, "wizarding society is based on some pretty disturbing institutions and assumptions." The argument seems to go that Rowling is presenting her invented world as superior to our real world---more fun, more colorful, beloved by Harry and by readers---so if aspects of it are problematical, which they SO OBVIOUSLY VERY MUCH ARE, she is responsible for that and it is immoral. I don't really have a lot of patience with this criticism but I will try to be fair to it.
Obviously, Harry is happier in the world of witches and wizards than in the Muggle world for the most self-evident of reasons. Obviously, readers find Rowling's invented world charming and inviting. She has made it so by taking her favorite bits of British culture from Medieval times to the 1950's or so and mashing them together to create a cozy, colorful, humorous, romanticized, fairly simple society. A lot of us are very fond of it.
But of course she has also, from the very beginning of the very first book, established her magical world as a wildly unfair and corrupt society, its quirky eccentricity and intimacy in no way masking its fundamental flaws. Harry is introduced to the society's prejudices by Draco Malfoy the very first time he enters Diagon Alley: class prejudice ("He's a sort of servant, isn't he?"), House prejudice, and prejudice against Muggles and Muggleborns. The awarding and taking away of house points is quite random and unfair from the very beginning. And almost the first thing that happens to Harry at Hogwarts is to learn that "PARENTS ARE REMINDED THAT FIRST YEARS ARE NOT ALLOWED THEIR OWN BROOMSTICKS" doesn't apply to him, nor does "You leave those brooms where they are or you'll be out of Hogwarts before you can say 'Quidditch.'"
At the beginning of the second book Harry gets threatened with expulsion for magic he didn't do; at the beginning of the second book Harry does do magic and gets no punishment at all ("We don't send people to Azkaban just for blowing up their aunts!"). By the end of the third book we have seen Lucius Malfoy pressuring the Hogwarts board into firing Dumbledore and pressuring the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures into condemning Buckbeak.
This is obviously a very unfair and unjust world. They have slaves! (Book 2) They treat nice werewolves terribly! (Book 3) They have Azkaban and Dementors and plan to perform the Dementor's Kiss on innocent Sirius without the slightest semblance of a trial or even letting him have a last meal. Followers of Voldemort get away scot free by falsely claiming to have been Imperiused. Then comes the beginning of Goblet of Fire and we see how they treat us Muggles. The bad wizards suspend Muggles sixty feet in the air, turning them over and revealing their underwear; the good wizards only Obliviate them so many times they say "Merry Christmas" instead of goodbye.
We don't have to think very hard to realize why Rowling created her world this way. It makes for a better story and allows her to torture Harry or conveniently help Harry past obstacles in whichever way best fits her needs at the time. It makes a world where a trio of silly school kids might as well take over justice and exercise the power of life and death because they can't possibly do a worse job of it than the Ministry for Magic. And it's not like we're going to find it unrealistic because our real world is such a paradise of perfect justice, equality, and universal well-being.
Are there difficulties because of the conflict between making Dumbledore wise, brilliant, competent, and all-knowing and making the school he heads ludicrously, outrageously dangerous, inefficient, and unfair? Of course there are. Does it strike many people as deeply problematic that Harry's last thought before the end of the book is that he'll have his slave bring him a sandwich? (why not a beer, while he's at it?) HELL YES it does, even though we know---because Rowling has set up her world that way---that House Elves are never happier than when serving their kind masters. We can't hold Harry responsible for the many atrocities of the magical world when he's eleven and just starting to learn about it. But by the time he's seventeen, the acknowledged savior of wizarding society, coolly defying and dismissing the Minister for Magic (who subsequently dies protecting him), we tend to think he has a moral responsibility to use some of his power to change things for the better.
But then we must remember that super-noble, super-powerful Dumbledore couldn't even keep Dementors out of the school's Quidditch pitch, so maybe we shouldn't expect too much from Harry.
Since The Casual Vacancy and the Cormoran Strike books are set in the real world, we can't hold Rowling morally responsible for its injustice the way we're inclined to in her fictional world. The Cursed Child, in contrast, will be quite interesting. Will Rowling hold to her statements from interviews that Kingsley Shacklebolt has "de-corrupted" the Ministry for Magic and removed the Dementors from Azkaban, Harry and Ron have "utterly revolutionized the Auror Department" and Hermione has "greatly improv[ed] life for house-elves and their ilk" and "ensured the eradication of oppressive, pro-pureblood laws"? Or will she return to the messy injustice that seems to make for a much better story?
Of course, I'm sure Fantastic Beasts, set in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, will show us a society exemplary in its pure, uncorrupted justice and order. :)
Peeves Was the School Poltergeist, a Grinning, Airborne Menace Who Lived to Cause Havoc and Distress
What do I mean by "the books are inappropriate"? The moral qualities of a work of fiction are not determined solely by the actions of its "good guys." Their choices take place within an environment, an atmosphere created by the choices of the author of what to portray and how to portray it.
The environment of the Harry Potter books is rude, crude, and bumptious. It is also very, very violent. Rowling's witches and wizards are physically very tough, unable to be killed by a car accident or from being dropped out of a high window. Perhaps because of this, they hex, jinx, and curse each other copiously, get into fist fights in book stores, fool around with exploding playing cards, fireworks, and candy that bites back, sell cursed necklaces and Ton-Tongue Toffee, and make regurgitating toilets, books that burn your eyes out or make you speak in limericks for the rest of your life, and shoes that eat your feet. They grow incredibly dangerous plants, keep incredibly dangerous animals, and we laugh lightly at Professor Kettleburn retiring to spend more time with his remaining limbs and a Quidditch referee disappearing from a match and turning up months later in the Sahara Desert.
The wizarding world is also barbaric. Filch claims to have used manacles on students during his time at Hogwarts. Dangerous animals are dispatched by an executioner with a huge axe. Prisoners on trial are chained to their chairs and escorted by Dementors. A dragon is cruelly chained to guard vaults in Gringotts. House Elves who disobey their masters iron their fingers and shut their ears in oven doors.
And it is icky and gross. There are bogies and slime and slugs and vomit and pus and Dungbombs and Cockroach Clusters and Blood Pops and earwax-flavored jelly beans and lots and lots of blood. Of course there is nothing immoral about this, but it contributes to an atmosphere where there is very little decorum, or dignity, or respect for authority. It is very much a Peeves kind of world and the people who go against that, who care about tidiness and manners and try to impose order, are awful: Umbridge and Filch and Vernon and Petunia Dursley.
Obviously all this is calculated to appeal to children and presumably does. But not everyone will be comfortable with such a message. Surely I am not the only one who often identifies more with Filch than with the people making swamps in the corridors that he has to clean up without magic, and sometimes wishes that people would stop SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. Wouldn't it be nice if just once, somewhere in the books, people had a difference of opinion and sat down and talked about it? What if a bullied child could complain to his teachers and get actual useful help?
I am reminded of a passage from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
“I thought there was a Ministry of Magic?” asked Vernon Dursley abruptly.
“There is,” said Harry, surprised.
“Well, then, why can’t they protect us? It seems to me that, as innocent victims, guilty of nothing more than harboring a marked man, we ought to qualify for government protection!”
Harry laughed; he could not help himself. It was so very typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the establishment, even within this world that he despised and mistrusted.
Hahaha, yes, what an idiot Vernon Dursley must be to think there's such a thing as civilization! Law and order? Government services? Legitimate authority based on the just consent of the governed? What a putz!
I have never seen anyone point to the chaotic, unruly atmosphere of the books as a moral issue in itself, but a lot of criticism seems to be influenced by it. Many of the bad things good characters do can best be understood within the context of humorous crudeness and violence. This is one of the things I meant when I said long ago that "it isn't clear to me now which things are HP (or Harry, even), which things are due to the intended audience, and which things are Rowling."
Now, having read her other books, I'd say that most of the chaos and violence seems to be specifically a wizarding world thing, probably related to the child audience (even though Rowling always denied consciously writing for children). I don't find much of this quality either in Pagford or in the London of Cormoran Strike (I mean, no more chaos and violence than seems realistic for the real world, especially considering we are dealing with murder suspects). However, some of the crudeness, the, for want of a better word, ickyness, seems to be a Rowling thing. She certainly doesn't shy away from unpleasant physical details or embarrassing, undignified incidents. Her characters even sometimes urinate and defecate, which is something you very rarely find in genre fiction (or at least the genre fiction I'm used to reading).
How Could You Think We'd Care What That - Woman - Wrote About You?
Finally, at long last, I have reached the fifth category. Some criticisms of Rowling's writing are really moral judgments of her, the writer. Sometimes, people think that Rowling deliberately made fun of people in her texts (renaming Buckbeak to Witherwings to make fun of Harry/Hermione shippers' "Symbolic Flight") or put things in to spitefully refute fandom theories ("it turns out that Sirius has girly pics on his bedroom walls. Just to make it absolutely clear that he's straight, completely straight, you got that slashers?").
And, of course, sometimes Rowling clearly is making fun of people in her texts, though I think she is innocent on Witherwings. Obviously Rita Skeeter is a direct satire on her own bad experiences with aggressive and imaginative members of the press. When Dumbledore writes, in his commentary on The Tales of Beedle the Bard...
In the end, a tiny minority of the Wizarding community persists in believing that Beedle was sending them a coded message, which is the exact reverse of the one set down in it, and that they alone are clever enough to understand it.
... does anyone doubt that she is making fun of some of her more ingenious and stubborn fans?
Many people strongly hold it against her that she showed married pairings in her epilogue, placing significant constraints on what people can imagine happening in the nineteen intervening years. They fume every time she releases a post-publication "fact," seeing it as a violation of the implied contract that she can write the books but must then leave them open to any interpretation or speculation by readers that can be made to fit the text.
And some are furious about Dumbledore---either that she said he's gay, or that she made her only known gay character a lifelong celibate after a single youthful infatuation, which also had disastrous results, and/or that she only mentioned his sexual orientation outside the books. All of the criticism related to Dumbledore's sexuality is essentially extra-textual; it is criticism of her, not of the books (though of course the "findings" of her moral shortcomings are then applied back to analysis of her books).
Of course this kind of criticism has continued for Rowling's subsequent works, though with reduced vehemence since the subsequent works have been less popular. She has been criticized for making The Casual Vacancy a not-very-subtle argument for her preferred political philosophy. In Cuckoo's Calling she pokes some more fun at the press and she satirizes the publishing industry and the self-publishing industry in Silkworm. And it is perfectly clear that the character of Mary Lou in the Fantastic Beasts movie owes something to the American woman Laura Mallory, who sued to remove the Harry Potter books from her school district's libraries because they promote evil witchcraft.
However, Rowling has not faced much criticism for making fun of the press, the publishing industry, or conservative Christian book-banners. Fans only get really mad when she makes fun of them. But she has faced criticism for issues such as minority representation, feminism, and all the other things we expect from authors who aspire to be liberal and inclusive. Most recently, she has come under fire for her choices in creating Uagadou, the only major school for witches and wizards in the continent of Africa.
There has also been resentment that "the eighth book" of the beloved Potter series is being released in a play that only a few of us, predominantly wealthier people, can see, but I suppose that's not a moral issue that applies to the text itself, so I guess I shouldn't have mentioned it.
Phew. Enough of morality, now I can write about LOVE! And yes, of course I'm going to talk about "that" interview.
Part 4 is here.
I promised to reconsider the following:
Are her books unfeminist, fat-phobic, full of plot-holes and bad messages, "Calvinistic" in morality, unsatisfying in romance, and supportive of slavery?
Now come the really fun stuff: morals and romance! (I'm assuming that slavery-support can fit in under "messages and morals")
‘The Boy Who Lived’ Remains a Symbol of Everything for Which We Are Fighting
Critiques of morality and messages in J.K. Rowling's writings is a huge and amorphous topic, but I will try to pin it down into a few categories.
First I would make a distinction between the two groups of people the Bad Morality is said to affect: either "children" or "me and readers like me." Obviously, I grant a whole bunch more validity to those speaking for the second audience than the first. I think people who go on about Rowling's Influence on Our Youth and her Responsibility to Her Child Audience are, in many cases, vastly underestimating the perceptiveness of young people and/or vastly overestimating their susceptibility to influence. Often I find their criticisms quite ridiculous, as does Rowling:
After The Chamber of Secrets was published, this grandmother wrote to me and said, 'I was appalled to see you encouraging joyriding.' It was like, 'Okay, hello?!' I read the letter, and for a moment I thought, 'Where did I say joyriding was good?' And then I realized, it's a very, very literal approach to things. Harry steals a car, so it's good to steal cars-no! I didn't say that.'
That said, I can certainly think of works that I would not want young children exposed to, so I'm not going to toss this category away completely. I'm just not going to give it much attention.
On the other hand, a complaint that the moral messages of a book destroyed or diminished your pleasure in it, or your respect for it, or detracted from its aesthetic or emotional effect is one I take seriously. This type of thing can affect your trust in the author, your ability to identify with characters, even your understanding of what makes a "happy ending." Obviously, an author can't please everyone but that doesn't mean we should just wave away complaints, especially if large numbers of people are making similar ones. In general, we seek some kind of consensus among readers (including readers who are children, who are perfectly able to express their own opinions).
I would divide the criticisms I have seen about morality and messages in Harry Potter into five categories, in descending order of frequency/importance:
- Good Characters Do Bad Things
- "Bad" Characters Do Bad Things
- The Wizarding World is Unjust
- The Books Are Inappropriate
- The Author is Mean or Unfair.
It Is Our Choices, Harry, That Show What We Truly Are
I think every reader has experienced a moment of being taken aback at some point in the Harry Potter series at some action by a favorite character. For some of us there are many such moments. Perhaps it is Hagrid giving Dudley a pig's tail---that has to be removed surgically. Perhaps it is Hermione Confunding Cormac McLaggen. Perhaps it is Dumbledore's bait and switch with the House Cup in Book One, or Snape forcing Neville to feed possibly-poison potion to his pet toad, or Mrs. Weasley sending Hermione a small egg, or the twins forcing Montague into the Vanishing Cabinet, or Harry using the Cruciatus Curse. Different things stick in different people's craws but for most of us there is something. Now, I have to subdivide even further because there are three different ways/reasons these things bother us.
First, there is the simple way, which I will call the Gryffindor perspective. It bothers us because when we like a character we expect them to be nice. When a character you identify with does something cruel or unethical, something against your own personal moral standards, you almost feel like you have to feel guilty about it, which is deeply annoying because you (you think) wouldn't have done that bad thing! (Or would you?---and it doesn't necessarily feel good to think about that, either.) So then do you have to like the character less? Or convince yourself the action was "out of character" or justified or necessary and somehow doesn't count? Or even---and I don't generally recommend this---adjust your own moral code to declare the act acceptable?
Second, there is the "double standard" or "hypocrisy" way, which I will call the Slytherin perspective. This has to do with why some people describe Rowling's morality as "Calvinist." It bothers us if we feel the author is being inconsistent in her moral judgments, giving leeway to "good" characters who we are supposed to like when they do something wrong, but harshly judging "bad" characters who we aren't supposed to like for the same or similar behavior. It seems to many people that Rowling/the narrative judges people as good or bad not so much on the morality of their actions but on whether they are friendly and helpful to Harry or are on the good side (against Voldemort). Or, simply (I think simplistically), whether they are Gryffindors. Or that she encourages readers to judge characters in this unfair and prejudiced way---and not just temporarily, so that they might be caught up and surprised when they are forced to realize their bias, but enduringly.
Third, there is the "justice" way, which I will call the Barty Crouch Sr. perspective. Many readers are perfectly fine with their favorite characters doing something bad, as long as they get punished for it. This could be literally, like Harry getting a well-deserved detention for nearly killing Malfoy with the Sectumsempra Curse, or karmically, like Sirius's ill-treatment of Kreacher resulting in his own death. Other readers don't really demand punishment, but simply want explicit acknowledgement that a given action is wrong, perhaps by the guilty character feeling remorse for it, or losing respect from other characters. Or at least having the narrative voice treat the act with distance and irony.
All three of these objections to "good" characters doing bad things can be from the "Think About the Children" angle or from the "This Doesn't Work For Me" angle. And, at its worst, it can go so far as to destroy the reader's natural identification with and liking for the main character Harry. You can decide he's just not nice enough or a good enough person to spend your time reading about. Or you can think he's acceptable in himself (self-sacrificing heroism atoning for many sins), but you just can't put up with the kind of people he likes, approves of, and associates with.
So how do Rowling's subsequent works add to these perspectives? I see the two book examples going in opposite directions.
To me, The Casual Vacancy has some of the moral characteristics of the Harry Potter series, except much more so. In both works, there is an over-arching good vs. evil dichotomy: in HP the world is divided between those who support a Nazi-style evil dictatorship and those who oppose it; in TCV the village is divided between the forces for compassion and generous social services and the forces for exclusion and judgmental complacency in the face of suffering. In both works, as well, it is hard to find anyone who is truly GOOD, even if they are on the good side of the divide. Everyone has flaws, people hurt each other, there is a lot of conflict, a lot of rule-breaking and law-breaking, violence, unfairness, and selfishness.
In both works, however, there is a general impression that these people, as flawed as they are, are worthwhile and worthy of love. Certainly it is shown that they need love and compassion. The message is clearer in HP, where the tone is strikingly warm and cozy. As my friend connielane put it:
"we'll probably have more fun with Rowling's story and her people if we have some tolerance for human frailty."
I know everything comes back to movies with me :P, but I couldn't resist the Philadelphia Story connection here. I'm sure you remember the scene - Dexter and Tracy and Mike by the pool, and Dexter is commenting about Tracy being generous to a fault, except to other people's faults. He proceeds with this bit of brilliance:
"I'm contemptuous of something inside you you either can't help or make no attempt to - your so-called strength, your prejudice against weakness, your blank intolerance ... [snip] ... because you'll never be a first class human being or a first class woman until you've learned to have some regard for human frailty. It's a pity your own foot can't slip a little sometimes, but your sense of inner divinity wouldn't allow that."
Obviously, Dext is referring to real people as opposed to characters in a book, but I think the same principle applies. This pretty accurately sums up a lot of the "intellectuals" I've come across in the HP fandom. It goes back to the flattening and polarizing impulse. Characters who have weaknesses aren't interesting figures in a rich tapestry of human interactions and emotions, they're blights on imagination, and bad examples for readers (thank goodness there are so many conscientious wannabe-mommies out there to tell us how bad all this stuff is for us!)
Of course, Dexter's rant is echoed later in the movie by Tracy herself, when - after Mike shows disdain for the upper class - she says "You'll never be a first rate writer or a first rate human being until you've learned to have some small regard for human frailty" (Oh, and "I should think that of all people a writer would need tolerance" and "You're so much thought and so little feeling, Professor.").
So much thought and so little feeling" is the only thing I can think of that would lead people to think of these books in such a flat, judgemental way and miss all of the affection JKR has for her characters - affection which is practically jumping up and down on the page in blinding neon lights saying "(((((HUGS)))))".
It is actually weird to me how true this is. It boggles my mind that I'm so FOND of what are by any measure terrible people, people like Marvolo Gaunt and Lucius Malfoy and even Fenrir Grayback. I suspect this may be a specifically Christian perspective on Rowling's part, seeing people as presumably God sees them, reeking in filthy garments of sin and yet terribly valuable and infinitely lovable.
The tone in The Casual Vacancy isn't nearly as warm or cozy but the reader is led to the same conclusion in the end. These people, horrible as most of them are, must be loved because they are the only people there are. They are vulnerable. They hurt. They are capable of goodness and love. They matter.
Interestingly, though, this portrayal of human nature doesn't seem (to me) to carry over to the Cormoran Strike books. That series seems to fit much better into the usual moral universe of mystery novels, where there are a whole bunch of good/acceptable regular mostly-law-abiding people, then there are murderers (who are BAD), and the especially-gifted (though not necessarily especially-moral) people, our protagonists, who catch the murderers and bring them to justice.
There is another kind of moral situation often seen in murder mysteries where a lot of people are very bad. This might come in the form of there being a lot of suspects for the murder and it seems like any one of them could have done it because they're all rotten people in a rotten world. But only one (or some) of them actually did it and our hero reveals that truth in the end. It seems to me that given her earlier works J.K. Rowling could easily have written this kind of moral world for the Cormoran Strike series but I don't see it that way at all. Most of the characters in her books, even the murder suspects, seem like they wouldn't commit murder. Or at least not easily.
Cormoran Strike is a very different kind of hero than Harry Potter. He thinks before he acts. He has a clear moral code with rules that he verbalizes to himself and follows. He is willing to follow other people's rules as well---the army's, the law. He has a passion for justice and feels a duty to protect the weak, even though he's not particularly kind or empathetic. Most important to this discussion, he hasn't, as best I remember, ever caused me to feel taken-aback by his actions, or violated my moral code.
Nor has Robin. Robin is truly a good and kind person. The same is true of Hermione, of course, but Hermione has a ruthless streak and moral relativism that I haven't seen in Robin. I once said of the Harry Potter series:
I have found since the first book that Rowling is apt to give us what I'll call challenging moments - times when it isn't easy and pleasant to simply identify with the good guys, root against the bad guys, and relax in complacent certainty that you're on the side of the angels.
So far I haven't found this to be true of the Cormoran Strike series. It is easy and pleasant to root for Cormoran and Robin and against the murdering murderers who murder. These books also lack the almost supernatural magic coziness that makes me love Harry Potter characters against my better judgment. This is not to say that there aren't lovable characters in the Strike books, because there are, but I find many of the characters annoying and unlikeable, even basically decent people like Cormoran's sister Lucy and Robin's fiancé Matthew.
It remains to be seen whether, and how, good people will do bad things in The Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and how we will feel about it if they do.
"You Are Nearly There," Said James. "Very Close. We Are . . . So Proud of You."
I can't leave the topic of good people doing bad things without discussing what you might call the pro-suicide message in the Harry Potter series. Albus Dumbledore, Rowling's "epitome of goodness," arranges a suicide for both himself and Harry. What's almost worse, the reincarnated shadows of James and Lily Potter seem to approve of their only son walking voluntarily to his certain death at age seventeen.
Here is a good essay critiquing Dumbledore's actions from a moral perspective. Did Dumbledore know that Harry would not have to die for real? It's not clear, but I think he did. He apparently did not, however, share that knowledge with Snape and Harry, not even to hint at it. I can't tell if the shades of Harry's parents and Sirius and Remus understood it or not. Of course I can see that, as a writer, Rowling wanted Harry to believe he was dying permanently, but to do that she had to make Dumbledore withhold knowledge again, which was cruel to Snape and cruel to Harry. I am not going to argue about Dumbledore's morals here, though I love him more than any character in the books. But whether he did what he had to do or not, it is indisputable that Rowling created the circumstances where these two voluntary deaths were the correct and successful actions.
So do we see anything in Rowling's later works that contributes to this discussion? The Casual Vacancy deals with the subject of suicide and, to my perception, is strongly against it (though strongly for risking your life to save the life of another). I don't actually remember any treatment of suicide or self-sacrificial death in the Cormoran Strike books, except, I suppose, the fact that the murder victim in the first book is wrongly thought to have committed suicide at first, and there is some slight discussion about that. For some reason (probably because of the name of the play), I wouldn't be surprised if The Cursed Child does have some material bearing on this. However, Fantastic Beasts seems, to me, to promise a more light-hearted adventure.
There's Not a Single Witch or Wizard Who Went Bad Who Wasn't in Slytherin
If people are annoyed by "good" people doing bad things in the Harry Potter books, they are also sometimes annoyed by "bad" people doing bad things, in a way that feels unrealistic or stereotyped. This includes the disappointment people feel that Rowling created one of her four houses as "the bad house," especially annoying, of course, if you suspect that you would have been sorted into Slytherin. I want to group in this category the unhappiness that people feel about no Slytherin students remaining in the Great Hall to fight Voldemort, as well as the frustration some feel about characters like, say, Gregory Goyle having to be stupid, and greedy, and ugly, and mean, as well as being a son of a Death Eater and a Slytherin. I suppose the critique is really an aesthetic one, protesting an unrealistically flattened moral universe, an absence of nuance and empathy.
There is also the fact that though Rowling says that not all Slytherins come from Death Eater families or hate Muggleborns, we never see one in Harry's time who doesn't (as far as we can tell). And if such students do exist, what must their school years be like, living in a Common Room that has "pure-blood" as a password, honoring Salazar Slytherin as their House founder, and dealing with Draco Malfoy as a Prefect? Even their House ghost, the Bloody Baron, is revealed to be a murderer.
This also relates to the "Calvinist" argument, basically saying that kids are labeled either "good" or "bad" (or "in between and no one cares about them") when they are labeled by the Sorting Hat as Gryff, Slyth, or Huff/Claw, and then no matter how they act they're still considered good, bad, or "who cares?" according to their House. I actually think this is a dumb argument (which is not the same as saying I think the Sorting Hat situation is a good arrangement), but if you have accepted this argument you tend to be annoyed by Slytherin characters doing bad things because it's like they don't have a choice or free will or something. Or because they were put into a situation that socializes them to behave badly.
Again, you can protest this because you think it teaches kids harmful lessons ("some people are just bad and don't matter") or because it decreases your enjoyment of the work.
So, does this criticism apply to Rowling's later works? I ... don't know. There are three characters in The Casual Vacancy who struck me as really, really bad people. One is Simon Price, an abusive husband and father who is also a petty thief, almost completely selfish and self-centered. His son says of him: "Lately, Andrew had asked himself whether Simon even saw other humans as real." But, lacking in any likable traits as he may be, Simon is a point of view character. We hear many of his thoughts, and are told why he is the way he is. He is given serious treatment as a full human being. There was also one moment of ... I don't know if I'd say insight, but a moment that surprised me about Simon: "For once he was not angry. Ruth was not there, so he did not have to prove himself bigger or smarter than his sons."
The next one is Shirley Mollison. Shirley does have likable traits: she is a loving wife, mother, and grandmother, she is a cheerful and uncomplaining cook, housewife, hospital volunteer, public servant, etc. She takes care of people. She is loyal to those she loves. But her inner life, as revealed by her point-of-view narration, is a vile stream of self-regard, jealousy, snobbishness, complacency, and hate. And late in the book she plans what I consider the worst act by anyone in the book.
Finally, there is Obbo, a drug dealer and rapist. We don't have his point-of-view or see much of him so he is more a plot device than a person. He may actually have all sorts of good qualities and be redeemable, I don't know. I suppose he's the closest thing this book has to a Crabbe-and-Goyle type.
Interestingly, two out of three of these people are from a development called "the Fields" (what we in America would call the projects, or perhaps the "slum"). The Mollison faction in the book would have it that the Fields are in some sense the Slytherin House of this village, dark and suspect, bringing forth evil people, while Pagford proper is, as some see Gryffindor House, a bulwark and nurturer of virtue:
Howard carried the mental image of the Fields with him always, like the memory of a nightmare: boarded windows daubed with obscenities, smoking teenagers loitering in the perennially defaced bus shelters; satellite dishes everywhere, turned to the skies like the denuded ovules of grim metal flowers.
...
Pagford, by contrast, shone with a kind of moral radiance in Howard's mind, as though the collective soul of the community was made manifest in its cobbled streets, its hills, its picturesque housing. ... For him the town was an ideal, a way of being; a micro-civilization that stood firmly against a national decline.
Shirley Mollison was not born in the Fields but she was brought up in similar conditions in the nearby city of Yarvil. However, her childhood is long suppressed and forgotten.
But Howard, of course, is not right that only badness can come from the Fields, any more than Voldemort is right that only badness can come from Muggles. The dead main character Barry Fairbrother, deservedly beloved, came from the Fields. So did Krystal Weedon, a troubled but extremely sympathetic young character. And other really terrible people, like Gavin Hughes, Stuart Wall, and Samantha Mollison, were brought up in Pagford, or perhaps in some other pleasant middle class burb. However---and perhaps this makes it a relevant comparison with Slytherin House after all---it is harder to grow up to be a good person in the Fields. You are likely to be affected by drugs, violence, poverty, bad parenting, crime, hopelessness, and people whose "smiles stiffen" when you mention where you live.
I don't have any criticisms of Rowling's treatment of Fields residents or of her treatment of bad characters in this book (other than the Crabbe-Goyle thing with people like Obbo but she can't make every person a POV character). On the other hand, I might not be the right person to look for it. I also don't see anything like that in the Cormoran Strike books.
Of course, some segments of the Harry Potter fandom are awaiting the Cursed Child play with anxious dread (or hope), wondering what House Albus will be sorted into, how Scorpius will be treated, and just where the "darkness comes from unexpected places." I must say I'm pretty interested myself. In Fantastic Beasts, it looks like Newt may face opposition from two different groups, the magical government of the US and the anti-magical Muggles, the Second Salemers. Speaking as a Muggle myself, I definitely prefer seeing my kind as scary antagonists rather than clueless bystanders and collateral damage. And, even more fun, one of us gets to be one of the four protagonists!
Progress For Progress's Sake Must Be Discouraged, For Our Tried and Tested Traditions Often Require No Tinkering
The next most common moral criticism I've seen of the Harry Potter books involves the fact that, as I once put it, "wizarding society is based on some pretty disturbing institutions and assumptions." The argument seems to go that Rowling is presenting her invented world as superior to our real world---more fun, more colorful, beloved by Harry and by readers---so if aspects of it are problematical, which they SO OBVIOUSLY VERY MUCH ARE, she is responsible for that and it is immoral. I don't really have a lot of patience with this criticism but I will try to be fair to it.
Obviously, Harry is happier in the world of witches and wizards than in the Muggle world for the most self-evident of reasons. Obviously, readers find Rowling's invented world charming and inviting. She has made it so by taking her favorite bits of British culture from Medieval times to the 1950's or so and mashing them together to create a cozy, colorful, humorous, romanticized, fairly simple society. A lot of us are very fond of it.
But of course she has also, from the very beginning of the very first book, established her magical world as a wildly unfair and corrupt society, its quirky eccentricity and intimacy in no way masking its fundamental flaws. Harry is introduced to the society's prejudices by Draco Malfoy the very first time he enters Diagon Alley: class prejudice ("He's a sort of servant, isn't he?"), House prejudice, and prejudice against Muggles and Muggleborns. The awarding and taking away of house points is quite random and unfair from the very beginning. And almost the first thing that happens to Harry at Hogwarts is to learn that "PARENTS ARE REMINDED THAT FIRST YEARS ARE NOT ALLOWED THEIR OWN BROOMSTICKS" doesn't apply to him, nor does "You leave those brooms where they are or you'll be out of Hogwarts before you can say 'Quidditch.'"
At the beginning of the second book Harry gets threatened with expulsion for magic he didn't do; at the beginning of the second book Harry does do magic and gets no punishment at all ("We don't send people to Azkaban just for blowing up their aunts!"). By the end of the third book we have seen Lucius Malfoy pressuring the Hogwarts board into firing Dumbledore and pressuring the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures into condemning Buckbeak.
This is obviously a very unfair and unjust world. They have slaves! (Book 2) They treat nice werewolves terribly! (Book 3) They have Azkaban and Dementors and plan to perform the Dementor's Kiss on innocent Sirius without the slightest semblance of a trial or even letting him have a last meal. Followers of Voldemort get away scot free by falsely claiming to have been Imperiused. Then comes the beginning of Goblet of Fire and we see how they treat us Muggles. The bad wizards suspend Muggles sixty feet in the air, turning them over and revealing their underwear; the good wizards only Obliviate them so many times they say "Merry Christmas" instead of goodbye.
We don't have to think very hard to realize why Rowling created her world this way. It makes for a better story and allows her to torture Harry or conveniently help Harry past obstacles in whichever way best fits her needs at the time. It makes a world where a trio of silly school kids might as well take over justice and exercise the power of life and death because they can't possibly do a worse job of it than the Ministry for Magic. And it's not like we're going to find it unrealistic because our real world is such a paradise of perfect justice, equality, and universal well-being.
Are there difficulties because of the conflict between making Dumbledore wise, brilliant, competent, and all-knowing and making the school he heads ludicrously, outrageously dangerous, inefficient, and unfair? Of course there are. Does it strike many people as deeply problematic that Harry's last thought before the end of the book is that he'll have his slave bring him a sandwich? (why not a beer, while he's at it?) HELL YES it does, even though we know---because Rowling has set up her world that way---that House Elves are never happier than when serving their kind masters. We can't hold Harry responsible for the many atrocities of the magical world when he's eleven and just starting to learn about it. But by the time he's seventeen, the acknowledged savior of wizarding society, coolly defying and dismissing the Minister for Magic (who subsequently dies protecting him), we tend to think he has a moral responsibility to use some of his power to change things for the better.
But then we must remember that super-noble, super-powerful Dumbledore couldn't even keep Dementors out of the school's Quidditch pitch, so maybe we shouldn't expect too much from Harry.
Since The Casual Vacancy and the Cormoran Strike books are set in the real world, we can't hold Rowling morally responsible for its injustice the way we're inclined to in her fictional world. The Cursed Child, in contrast, will be quite interesting. Will Rowling hold to her statements from interviews that Kingsley Shacklebolt has "de-corrupted" the Ministry for Magic and removed the Dementors from Azkaban, Harry and Ron have "utterly revolutionized the Auror Department" and Hermione has "greatly improv[ed] life for house-elves and their ilk" and "ensured the eradication of oppressive, pro-pureblood laws"? Or will she return to the messy injustice that seems to make for a much better story?
Of course, I'm sure Fantastic Beasts, set in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, will show us a society exemplary in its pure, uncorrupted justice and order. :)
Peeves Was the School Poltergeist, a Grinning, Airborne Menace Who Lived to Cause Havoc and Distress
What do I mean by "the books are inappropriate"? The moral qualities of a work of fiction are not determined solely by the actions of its "good guys." Their choices take place within an environment, an atmosphere created by the choices of the author of what to portray and how to portray it.
The environment of the Harry Potter books is rude, crude, and bumptious. It is also very, very violent. Rowling's witches and wizards are physically very tough, unable to be killed by a car accident or from being dropped out of a high window. Perhaps because of this, they hex, jinx, and curse each other copiously, get into fist fights in book stores, fool around with exploding playing cards, fireworks, and candy that bites back, sell cursed necklaces and Ton-Tongue Toffee, and make regurgitating toilets, books that burn your eyes out or make you speak in limericks for the rest of your life, and shoes that eat your feet. They grow incredibly dangerous plants, keep incredibly dangerous animals, and we laugh lightly at Professor Kettleburn retiring to spend more time with his remaining limbs and a Quidditch referee disappearing from a match and turning up months later in the Sahara Desert.
The wizarding world is also barbaric. Filch claims to have used manacles on students during his time at Hogwarts. Dangerous animals are dispatched by an executioner with a huge axe. Prisoners on trial are chained to their chairs and escorted by Dementors. A dragon is cruelly chained to guard vaults in Gringotts. House Elves who disobey their masters iron their fingers and shut their ears in oven doors.
And it is icky and gross. There are bogies and slime and slugs and vomit and pus and Dungbombs and Cockroach Clusters and Blood Pops and earwax-flavored jelly beans and lots and lots of blood. Of course there is nothing immoral about this, but it contributes to an atmosphere where there is very little decorum, or dignity, or respect for authority. It is very much a Peeves kind of world and the people who go against that, who care about tidiness and manners and try to impose order, are awful: Umbridge and Filch and Vernon and Petunia Dursley.
Obviously all this is calculated to appeal to children and presumably does. But not everyone will be comfortable with such a message. Surely I am not the only one who often identifies more with Filch than with the people making swamps in the corridors that he has to clean up without magic, and sometimes wishes that people would stop SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. Wouldn't it be nice if just once, somewhere in the books, people had a difference of opinion and sat down and talked about it? What if a bullied child could complain to his teachers and get actual useful help?
I am reminded of a passage from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:
“I thought there was a Ministry of Magic?” asked Vernon Dursley abruptly.
“There is,” said Harry, surprised.
“Well, then, why can’t they protect us? It seems to me that, as innocent victims, guilty of nothing more than harboring a marked man, we ought to qualify for government protection!”
Harry laughed; he could not help himself. It was so very typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the establishment, even within this world that he despised and mistrusted.
Hahaha, yes, what an idiot Vernon Dursley must be to think there's such a thing as civilization! Law and order? Government services? Legitimate authority based on the just consent of the governed? What a putz!
I have never seen anyone point to the chaotic, unruly atmosphere of the books as a moral issue in itself, but a lot of criticism seems to be influenced by it. Many of the bad things good characters do can best be understood within the context of humorous crudeness and violence. This is one of the things I meant when I said long ago that "it isn't clear to me now which things are HP (or Harry, even), which things are due to the intended audience, and which things are Rowling."
Now, having read her other books, I'd say that most of the chaos and violence seems to be specifically a wizarding world thing, probably related to the child audience (even though Rowling always denied consciously writing for children). I don't find much of this quality either in Pagford or in the London of Cormoran Strike (I mean, no more chaos and violence than seems realistic for the real world, especially considering we are dealing with murder suspects). However, some of the crudeness, the, for want of a better word, ickyness, seems to be a Rowling thing. She certainly doesn't shy away from unpleasant physical details or embarrassing, undignified incidents. Her characters even sometimes urinate and defecate, which is something you very rarely find in genre fiction (or at least the genre fiction I'm used to reading).
How Could You Think We'd Care What That - Woman - Wrote About You?
Finally, at long last, I have reached the fifth category. Some criticisms of Rowling's writing are really moral judgments of her, the writer. Sometimes, people think that Rowling deliberately made fun of people in her texts (renaming Buckbeak to Witherwings to make fun of Harry/Hermione shippers' "Symbolic Flight") or put things in to spitefully refute fandom theories ("it turns out that Sirius has girly pics on his bedroom walls. Just to make it absolutely clear that he's straight, completely straight, you got that slashers?").
And, of course, sometimes Rowling clearly is making fun of people in her texts, though I think she is innocent on Witherwings. Obviously Rita Skeeter is a direct satire on her own bad experiences with aggressive and imaginative members of the press. When Dumbledore writes, in his commentary on The Tales of Beedle the Bard...
In the end, a tiny minority of the Wizarding community persists in believing that Beedle was sending them a coded message, which is the exact reverse of the one set down in it, and that they alone are clever enough to understand it.
... does anyone doubt that she is making fun of some of her more ingenious and stubborn fans?
Many people strongly hold it against her that she showed married pairings in her epilogue, placing significant constraints on what people can imagine happening in the nineteen intervening years. They fume every time she releases a post-publication "fact," seeing it as a violation of the implied contract that she can write the books but must then leave them open to any interpretation or speculation by readers that can be made to fit the text.
And some are furious about Dumbledore---either that she said he's gay, or that she made her only known gay character a lifelong celibate after a single youthful infatuation, which also had disastrous results, and/or that she only mentioned his sexual orientation outside the books. All of the criticism related to Dumbledore's sexuality is essentially extra-textual; it is criticism of her, not of the books (though of course the "findings" of her moral shortcomings are then applied back to analysis of her books).
Of course this kind of criticism has continued for Rowling's subsequent works, though with reduced vehemence since the subsequent works have been less popular. She has been criticized for making The Casual Vacancy a not-very-subtle argument for her preferred political philosophy. In Cuckoo's Calling she pokes some more fun at the press and she satirizes the publishing industry and the self-publishing industry in Silkworm. And it is perfectly clear that the character of Mary Lou in the Fantastic Beasts movie owes something to the American woman Laura Mallory, who sued to remove the Harry Potter books from her school district's libraries because they promote evil witchcraft.
However, Rowling has not faced much criticism for making fun of the press, the publishing industry, or conservative Christian book-banners. Fans only get really mad when she makes fun of them. But she has faced criticism for issues such as minority representation, feminism, and all the other things we expect from authors who aspire to be liberal and inclusive. Most recently, she has come under fire for her choices in creating Uagadou, the only major school for witches and wizards in the continent of Africa.
There has also been resentment that "the eighth book" of the beloved Potter series is being released in a play that only a few of us, predominantly wealthier people, can see, but I suppose that's not a moral issue that applies to the text itself, so I guess I shouldn't have mentioned it.
Phew. Enough of morality, now I can write about LOVE! And yes, of course I'm going to talk about "that" interview.
Part 4 is here.