Harry Potter and the House Elf Manifesto

The protagonists, with their house elves

Apparently J.K. Rowling can’t help herself. She knows her audience—mostly young, mostly center-left—doesn’t agree with her gender politics, yet she keeps tweeting about it. Her readers, incensed at her deafness, have begun combing her novels for evidence that she’s secretly been awful this entire time. Many nuggets they’ve uncovered are, indeed, chilling. But I must take exception with one piece I’ve seen thrown around recently.

Some jaded fans see Rowling’s house elves, a species of apparently willing domestic slaves, as proof that Rowling excuses slavery, and harbors secret racist sympathies. I have trouble seeing it that way. Harry Potter, the eponymous hero whom Rowling coaches us to consider our viewpoint into the Wizarding World, makes it his mission to free the first house elf he encounters, Dobby. We’re clearly meant to participate in this liberation.

In general, Rowling depicts the Wizarding World as resplendent with wonder, full of sensory pleasures, just waiting for anybody who approaches with enough childlike wonder to still believe in magic. From this, it’s easy to construe that she intends us to consider everything which happens in Potter’s world admirable. Far from it: she also depicts the Wizarding World as rife with racism, class conflict, and outright Naziism.

This includes house elves. We don’t encounter them until the second novel, which partly reflects how thoroughly the wizards take their elves for granted. Their labor is so completely pushed into the background of Hogwarts’ splendor that even the religiously bookish Hermione is astonished to discover their existence. This from the girl who prides herself on already knowing everything before Day One! Racism is just the Wizarding World’s background noise.

Harry is initially shocked at the house elves’ abjection. Dobby’s wretched clothes and submissive attitude offend Harry. This becomes more pronounced as the story progresses: elves, we learn, make all the students’ food, maintain their building, clean their quarters. Moreover, they do all this willingly; when Hermione attempts to liberate elves, they balk and act offended. This derives from Rowling’s source, the myths of brownies and other house spirits.

I understand Hermione’s revulsion, for reasons Rowling perhaps intended: because when I realized, in my youth, how thoroughly my American life depends on exporting misery onto others, it forced me to re-examine my presumptions. Americans, and citizens of other First-World countries, have cheap clothes because they’re manufactured in sweatshops in Latin America and Asia. Same goes for the cheap networked electronics we all carry in our pockets anymore.

This dualism becomes most visible where it concerns food. Anybody who’s ever grown a vegetable garden knows the autumn harvest is slow, difficult, tedious work. Now imagine doing that over tens of thousands of acres. American food is so cheap that, on a typical grocery run, you probably pay more for packaging than for food. This affordability only happens because impoverished workers, mostly undocumented immigrants, bring the harvest in seasonally.

The superficial splendor of Harry Potter’s Wizarding World requires unpaid labor. Rowling, who is economically progressive, notwithstanding her reactionary attitudes on gender politics, knows this, and I believe she inserted this deliberately. Because Harry Potter’s world only differs from ours in degree, not kind. Our lifestyles absolutely depend on somebody else making our cheap clothes, cheap food, cheap consumer goods. We know that, too, if we’re honest.

Worse, Harry, like us, becomes inured to this reality. Where Hermione maintains her anger, and purposes herself to liberate Hogwarts’ house elves one-by-one, Harry quickly realizes the problem isn’t individual, it’s systematic. He can’t change things by himself, especially while fighting Voldemort, Rowling’s in-house Hitler analogue. Liberating house elves would require re-orienting the entire wizard economy, which poor, working-class Harry doesn’t know how to do.

Already I envision one counter-argument to my read. Critics will assert that house elves aren’t coerced into labor, they give it freely, and Kreacher, Sirius Black’s house elf, resents even fleeting attempts at respect. I respond by restating my real-world analogue. I work daily around people who believe self-abnegation makes them moral, who feel false class solidarity with rich employers. I find Rowling’s house elf symbolism entirely too plausible.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Rowling has internalized a truckload of cultural baggage and vomited it onto the page: the anti-Semitic stereotypes inherent in her Gringott’s Bank springs immediately to mind. But house elves don’t say something similar to me. I see critique of an economic system that exports poverty to maintain an illusion of splendor, and workers who hug their chains. On this topic, I’m still with her.