Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

I’ve always liked the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, if largely for the sheer spectacle of the Triwizard Tournament. Unlike its predecessors, the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is very different from the book – necessitated in part because the book is almost twice the length of Prisoner of Azkaban.

Goblet of Fire contains an entire subplot about House-elf rights not even referenced in the films. It’s an interesting social commentary and adds another layer of moral complexity to the Harry Potter series. Unfortunately, the characters’ responses to the House-elves plight puzzles me, to say the least.

Harry, Hermione, and Ron learn that Dobby now works at Hogwarts as a free Elf. However, they also learn that hundreds of House-elves work in Hogwarts, basically as slaves. This immediately strains credibility. Harry, Hermione, and Ron have all snuck around Hogwarts at night. In Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry even learns about the secret passageways. I simply cannot believe that they’d never spotted any House-elves during their three years at the school. Up to this point. Hermione seemed to know every minute detail about the school and its history. Perhaps they were simply never curious and, like many kids, never wondered about the domestic help who cleaned up after them.

Hermione takes a strong interest in the plight of the House-elves and decides to form the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (S.P.E.W.) to advocate for Elf rights. Despite her best efforts, neither Harry nor Ron join her crusade. In fact, they seem blasé about the House-elf situation and believe that the Elves are happy to work at Hogwarts. Harry even seems a tad insensitive; for Christmas, he gives Dobby – who risked his life for Harry in Chamber of Secrets – an old sock. Meanwhile, Ron teases Hermione for being obsessed with S.P.E.W.

I’m all for letting Harry and Ron’s characters wade into morally ambiguous territory, but this setup doesn’t quite ring true. If anything, given his backgrounds, Harry should have been more sympathetic to the plight of House-elves than Hermione. When we first met him in Sorcerer’s Stone, the Dursleys basically treated Harry like a House-elf, forcing him to do chores and otherwise stay out of sight. In Chamber of Secrets, he actually developed a friendship with Dobby, and thus should have had a personal stake in the House-elf question.

As any social activist knows, personal appeals are often the most effective. I kept waiting for Hermione to say something like: “Harry, did you like the way your uncle and aunt treated you? Living under that staircase? Didn’t they order you to act happy in front of guests? Imagine your life if Hagrid hadn’t come to rescue you. How different is your situation from the House-elves, really? Except they don’t have a Hagrid.” Even if such an appeal didn’t convince Harry to wholeheartedly join S.P.E.W., I think the character really need to confront the fact that he was turning his back on individuals in a situation similar to what he experienced under the Dursleys.

Maybe Hermione should have written a book about the House-elves, "Uncle Dobby's Cabin"

Believability aside, the House-elf subplot adds an interesting twist by suggesting that the world readers saw simply as “magical” in Sorcerer’s Stone actually runs on slave labor. Again, as Harry grows up, the world is no longer black and white. As Sirius Black says, “If you want to know what a man’s really like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors…” At the same time, Rowling strikes a delicate balance. Despite Hermione’s pleading, the plight of the House-elves isn’t so desperate that readers become disgusted with Harry or Ron. The House-elves have always been somewhat comical figures and do seem to genuinely prefer servitude. We might admire Dobby’s Braveheart-like passion for freedom, and we be frustrated by the limits of Harry’s compassion, but I doubt many readers come away from Goblet of Fire thinking that Harry condones slavery.

If anything, Goblet of Fire seems to use the House-elf subplot as social commentary on society’s blind neglect of societal injustice. We know that problems exist in the world but rarely do we do anything about them. Most of us – and Rowling’s largely Western, middle-class readership – never dig too deeply into the lives janitors, waiters, bus drivers, etc. A news article about Asian companies using slaves to catch seafood might jolt some readers, but will probably prevent few from taking action – if they even remember the following day. Goblet of Fire doesn’t seem to imply that, in accepting House-elf servitude, Harry – or readers who engage in similar blind neglect – is becoming like Voldemort. It does make clear though that Harry will have to learn pity before he can become a truly admirable adult.

For all my discussion about the House-elves, they’re a small part of Goblet of Fire. The later Harry Potter books continue the House-elf subplot. There’s some payoff for Harry and Ron’s character development, but oddly the larger issue of House-elf rights remains unresolved by the final book. Perhaps this is meant to convey the difficult of social change? In any case, the House-elf question provides an interesting subplot throughout he series, but I wish the characters had had more meaningful and personal conversations about the subject.         

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

In some ways, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix marks the true beginning of Harry’s maturation as a character and as a person. As I noted in my review of Chamber of Secrets, Dumbledore misrepresented the nature of Harry’s character arc by focusing on moral choices. Even in this book, Harry is never confronted with a choice between good and evil, much less to join Voldemort’s Death Eaters.

Order of the Phoenix does three crucial things for Harry’s character. First, the book forces him to confront his emotions. Second, it challenges his preconceptions about friendship. Finally, it forces him to confront death.

Harry begins Order of the Phoenix in a darker place. He’s moody, angry at the world, and doesn’t want to sit next to the unpopular kids (i.e., Neville Longbottom) on the train to Hogwarts. In short, he’s a teenager. Some Harry Potter fans disliked Harry’s darker turn (calling him “EMO-Harry”). Although that’s not entirely unfair, Harry’s character needed to go in this direction. I found Harry’s unadulterated goodness in the first four books somewhat tiresome and unrealistic. After all Harry has suffered, I’m surprised he has so few emotional issues. I found Harry’s happy-go-lucky goodness in the first four books somewhat tiresome and unrealistic. Moreover, Harry has faced problems that presented physically, mentally, and magically, but never one that challenged him emotionally.

Harry’s emotional turmoil deepens as his faith in his friends and mentors suffers. Ron and Hermione keep secrets from him and don’t write to him during the summer. Dumbledore refuses to speak to him. The entire wizarding government turns on him as the Ministry of Magic rejects Harry’s claims about Voldemort. Perhaps most importantly, through occlumency lessons, Harry sees Snape’s memories of his father James Potter and godfather Sirius Black as bullies. If the lesson of Prisoner of Azkaban was that sometimes society shuns and wrongly condemns good people, Order of the Phoenix tells Harry that even his dearest friends and role models have flaws.

On top of that, Order of the Phoenix kills one of Harry’s key mentors. Ironically, for all the danger Harry has experienced at Hogwarts, nobody close to him had ever died (Cedric Diggory in Goblet of Fire was at best an acquaintance, never a close friend). Nor have any of the adults in Harry’s life died. Harry’s parents died when he was too young to remember, and by Sorcerer’s Stone he had no firsthand memories of them. When Bellatrix Lestrange kills Sirius Black at the end of Order of the Phoenix, we see how Harry reacts to loss for the first time.

Harry goes through the classic phases of grief. He denies that Sirius is truly gone, even asking a resident Hogwarts ghost if perhaps Sirius could reappear in ghost form. He lashes out in anger at those around him. When Dumbledore tries to console Harry by telling him that “This pain is part of being human,” Harry responds, “Then I don’t want to be human!” This is the closest Harry ever comes to Voldemort. Harry would never knowingly join the Death Eaters, but, like Voldemort, his initial instinct is to want to use his power to overcome (i.e., “eat”) death (in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, we learn how far Voldemort takes this obsession).

To some extent, Harry resolves the first two problems by learning to trust in those who have shown loyalty and can admit their flaws. Dumbledore, Sirius Black, and Harry’s friends are all able to admit their mistakes. Dumbledore had valid reasons for not talking to Harry – he feared Voldemort’s connection to Harry’s mind – but realizes that his actions hurt Harry. When Neville, Ginny Weasley, and Luna Lovegood volunteer to help Harry rescue Sirius at the Ministry of Magic, they join Harry’s inner circle of friends (on the train ride back to London, he sits with them).

Those characters who refuse to reflect on their flaws lose Harry’s trust. It’s telling that Harry’s relationship with Cho Chang dissolves because she is unable to admit that her best friend, Marietta Edgecombe, acted improperly in exposing Dumbledore’s Army. Even when centaurs threaten to carry off Dolores Umbridge, she never apologizes to Harry or appeals to his conscience; Harry in turn refuses to rescue her. In short, Harry figures out when he can overlook character flaws and when they indicate deeper personal weakness.

Although Harry doesn’t quite come to accept death in this novel (that won’t come until Deathly Hallows), at least by the end of the book he focuses more on the problems of the living than the dead. I particularly liked how Harry is pulled out of his depression – or at least distracted – when he sees Luna searching for her clothes. Luna tells Harry about her deceased mother and her hopes that they’ll meet again in the afterlife. By helping his friends, focusing on the living, Harry receives some comfort and consolation – something he wouldn’t have gotten had he followed Voldemort’s path in trying to cheat death.

Order of the Phoenix isn’t perfect – I found the satire of public education via Dolores Umbridge a bit heavy-handed, and the book suffers from numerous plot contrivances – but it takes real risks with Harry’s character, most of which work. Although Harry does begin the novel as an angsty teen, he emerges with a greater capacity for compassion and humility. Unfortunately, the film adaptation seemed unable or unwilling to convey the depths of Harry’s emotional turmoil. Perhaps “EMO-Harry” proved too controversial for fans; indeed the subsequent novels never challenge Harry emotionally to quite this extent.

Next week, I review Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in the Harry Potter series…