I. Introduction
To understand how unique Rowling’s vision is in the context of children’s fiction, one need only compare it to modern classics and note, for example, that in contrast Harry Potter, Tolkien’s fantasy world is devoid of 20th century paraphernalia and souvenirs. Plus, in Tolkien’s work the forces of darkness employ medieval kinds of machines and technology, while in Rowling’s world the hero uses technology. Kenneth Grahame George Orwell’s Animal Farm, The Heart of Darkness, “Cock-A-Doodle-Do” and possibly The Bible provided dystopian visions of technology. Why does Rowling appear to side with the world rather than with books? And why is the answer a complicated one?
II. Technology and Nature
In Narnia, Lewis informs us that the train accident was real and that it is responsible for the death of the entire Pevensie family. Rowling inverts this example by presenting technology as if it were a pleasant amusement park. Except in association with Dudley, technology is portrayed as harmless, necessary and fun. Motorbikes fall from the sky without harming their riders; magical locomotives transport students to Hogwarts and to its pristine Forbidden Forest; Harry rides a bus moving at speeds that would surely kill its occupants; and Harry and Ron, though under-aged, fly an automobile, crash into the Whomping Willow, and emerge unscathed and unconcerned.
The case of the Whomping Willow and the flying appliance is typical of Rowling’s medieval representation of Nature and modern representations of technology. To my knowledge, willows are not commonly associated with evil or brutality; nevertheless, Rowling’s willow “was a very violent tree” (TPOA 136), one that moves and guards a scary secret entrance to Hogwarts, an entrance used by the werewolf Lupin. Apparently, the Whomping Willow intentionally obstructed the movement of the flying automobile in order to prevent the boys from discovering a trapdoor and to prevent them from solving and stopping the murders at Hogwarts. This bad, oh-so bad tree, rather than being a romantic symbol of grief, like its common cousin ‘Weeping Willow,’ seems instead to be the cause of grief, and that’s funny, right? I wholly support creative licence, Rowling’s representation of Nature is a case of a biased licence, a licence that only permits negative representations of Nature.
Rowling contrasts her intentionally rosy depictions of technology with depictions of Nature that are, with few exceptions, forbidding, dark, and worrisome. In his third year at Hogwarts “Harry had had enough unpleasant experiences in [the Forbidden Forest] to last him a lifetime” (TPA 86). But as the series progresses, the Forbidden Forest continues to live up to its slanderous name, a name that, with no counterpart, can only reinforce a medieval mindset about the evils lurking in forests.
Spiders are common objects of irrational fear, so in HP they are portrayed as a definite danger to human life. Aragog, supreme spider leader, cannot restrain his mob’s lust to devour Harry and Ron (Ch. 15, TCOS). Luckily the boys are saved by the flying Ford Anglia “thundering down the slope, headlamps glaring, its horn screeching, knocking spiders aside” (207). Ugh! What nonsense! The scene tells us more about the effects of pop culture and education on the minds of our children than it does about Nature. I would laugh at its absurdity if doing so didn’t mean ignoring the reality that automobiles are a far more common source of death than spiders.
Moving on, after the flying car crash, Harry, Ron, and Hermione pass through the trapdoor and land on some “sort of plant thing” (TPS 201). Like the Whomping Willow, this plant thing is no friendly plant. “[T]he plant had started to twist snakelike tendrils around her ankles” and tries to suffocate her and her friends (203; italics mine). Afterwards, Harry hunts birdlike creatures. Harry assures us that “[t]hey’re not birds,” and perhaps that’s true, but we can hardly think that these flying and winged creatures are not alive. When Harry “pinned [one] against the stone” and causes “a nasty crunching noise” (TPS 204) we might rightfully suspect that this painful detail was meant to remind us that Harry has no feelings for other living things.
Rowling’s anthropocentric stereotyping of non-human Nature also extends into the human world. There are evil and dangerous human beings in Harry Potter, but even those evil human beings are typically ugly, and are often ugly insofar as they resemble animals. Voldemort, the most evil ‘person,’ says of himself, “I am much, much more than a man” (TGOF 19); indeed, he has a “snake-like face” (573). The ugly Moody seems to delight in causing pain and anxiety, but again, with his magical eye, one leg, and deformed face, he hardly seems human. The Hungarian Veela use their beauty for evil, but they too are said to be more than human (TGOF 101). Why more than human rather than less? To mock conventional estimations of what it means to be evil or to test our ability to remain blind to what we read?
In Chapter Three of TPS, Vernon Dursley, who is no Nature lover, is so disturbed by the flood of letters sent to Harry that he takes Harry and his family out of their comfortable suburban home and into a remote wilderness, apparently with the intent to abandon Harry like Hansel and Gretel and Ishmael before them. “[I]cy sea spray and rain crept down their necks and a chilly wind whipped their faces” (37). The family takes an old rowing boat to the “what looked like a large rock way out to sea” and they settle in a hut with a moth-eaten sofa, reinforcing the negative representation of Nature. Could Rowling possibly provide a less polarized view of Nature and technology?
Hagrid’s garden and pumpkin patch seem friendly enough. Unfortunately, this traditional food source is destined to be wasted on Hollowe’en (TCOS 100). Two years later its pumpkins are intended for a class gold-hunting lesson (TGOF 471-72). The pumpkins are never associated with food because vegetables hardly exist on the Hogwarts menu, and when they are they are rarely eaten. Why? Surely eating a vegetable as funny as sitting in one so large you can sit in it for a day before tossing it in the garbage (TCOS 100).
Another failed connection between Nature and the human need for food occurs when “Ron’s eyes strayed to the pile of chocolate frogs waiting to be unwrapped” and when “Ron was more interested in eating the [chocolate] frogs” (TPS 77,78). This example of the cocoaification of Nature exists alongside the frightful portrayal of Nature as a forbidding and dangerous place. As such, this divided and conflicted relationship to Nature perfectly mimics the cultural reality of First World countries where Nature is served in the form of chocolate bunnies, manicured lawns and the modern myth that Nature is beautiful, something to be photographed on weekends while our economies treat it as an object and a source of money.
Rowling’s “Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans” (TPS 78) come in all assorted flavours, including vegetable flavours. Ron bites into a sprout-flavoured ‘bean’ and expresses his disgust. In reality a sprout could be one of the healthiest foods eaten in HP, but in all likelihood even a sprout-flavoured bean would provide none of the roughage and nutrients that the unprocessed vegetable could provide. What kind of example is Rowling setting for our children? In a world already littered with sugar, salt, fat and meat products, my fatherly talent for persuasion is already humbled; I do not need Rowling’s anti-vegetable gags to make matters worse.
The pattern of representing Nature, at least raw Nature, as something inedible, nicely conserves technological man’s relationship to the Earth, enabling him to live, in the words of Jacques Ellul, “[e]nclosed within his artificial creation” (The Technological Society 428).
The Hogwarts grounds include a vegetable patch and greenhouses (TCOS 70). The vegetables are never described. The greenhouses only contain “interesting and dangerous plants” (71). By ‘interesting’ Rowling seems to mean showy things like the “umbrella-sized flowers,” “Venemous Tentacula” (73), a choking plant, and the dangerous Mandrake that serves as an antidote to magic. The occult associated the vegetable world with poisons, and this view partly survived in the Jewish myth of the forbidden fruit, and it survives today, as greed has made expensive unnatural medicines more available than cheap and easily reproduced natural medicines.
The Weasley garden, despite being owned by wizards, reflects a typically useless and purely aesthetic suburban garden. “[T]here were plenty of weeds …, gnarled trees all around the walls, plants Harry had never seen spilling from every flowerbed and a big green pond full of [real] frogs” (TCOS 32). Some peonies are mentioned, no vegetables. In other words, the Weasley garden exists solely as organic decoration. The Weasley garden might still have some value if the children appreciated its flowers, but perhaps boy wizards should not venture into territory traditionally forbidden to the masculine gender.
Death is the ultimate part of Nature, and of course it is also represented in the manner that best conserves popular sentiment, a sentiment that is not quite religious and certainly not atheistic. Thus, in TDH, Harry kind of resurrects.
III. Animal Abuse
Hagrid, the Hogwarts gamekeeper, apparently knows nothing about the shy nature of owls or about their nocturnal ways and nesting habits. He keeps his mail-owl in a “pocket inside his overcoat” (TPS 43). While visiting the Dursleys he decides to send his owl on an errand, and instead of gently releasing the owl and instead of waiting for clear skies he “threw the owl into the storm” (43). In Lewis’ series, animals are also abused, but by the evil powers, as when the Witch’s dwarf whips the reindeer (The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, 108). Rowling’s uncritical identification of environmentally ignorant behaviour with Hagrid either reflects a culturally conservative philosophy or challenges readers to finally ask an important question!!!
“Hedwig was shut safely in her cage,” writes Rowling of Harry’s owl (TPS 68). She does not say why Hedwig is safer in a cage than not in a cage. In all likelihood the cage serves only to protect the environmentally ignorant Harry from losing his owl. Certainly there is no evidence that Harry ever wondered if “a wild animal imprisoned in a small cage […] removed from its habitat and forced to conform to the impositions of our demands, [can] ever be considered ‘happy’?” (Suzuki 682) And besides owls, dragons are equally mistreated. To satisfy the human appetite for gladiator-like entertainment, dragons are restrained with “chains connected to heavy leather straps around their necks and legs” (TGOF 286).
In TPOA an owl has worked itself to the point of unconsciousness by carrying a large parcel for Harry (11). Harry does not bring the owl some water or food; he carries it to his own owl’s cage, so that it can refresh itself there. The nitwit did not realize that owls are solitary creatures.
Errol, the Weasley owl, flies mail from the Weasley household in England to Hogwarts, to Egypt and wherever else the Weasley boys work. Overworked, Errol falls unconscious into a jug of milk. Hermione assures Ron that Errol is still alive, but Ron says he wasn’t concerned about Errol; indeed, what concerns him is the letter delivered by Errol (TCOS 68).
Rowling’s employment of owls as mail carriers is based on the historical use of carrier pigeons. While the use of pigeons was environmentally suspect in and of itself, the use of owls is more troublesome. Consider that the snowy owl has become extinct in Britain since 1975, and four other species of owl are on the Birds of Conservation Concern list (http://www.britishbirds.co.uk/BoCC3final.pdf).
In light of their environmental sensitivity, why did R-owl-ing choose owls? Was it because writers are owl-like and owls were once associated with wisdom, death and sorcery? Perhaps? And why dub the errant, prone to error owl, ‘Errol’? Rowling may be familiar with a Scottish settlement with winding streets bearing the same name, a name which appears derived from the Latin root for ‘erratic’ and ‘err’, which may also be related to Eris, the goddess of chaos. Plus, in a world where messaging is done electronically, and ‘e’ commonly denotes ‘electronic,’ we may read Errol as a kind of ‘e-roll,’ for medieval times ‘roll’ meant a scroll or roll of parchment or paper. Finally, not only is Errol an owl, but the syllable ‘roll’ is homophonous with the first syllable of Rowling’s name.
To return to less convoluted and possibly less esoteric matters, in TGOF Moody teaches his class three powerful curses: the Imperius curse gives the magician power over other creatures; the Cruciatus curse gives the magician the power to inflict extraordinary pain on other creatures; the Avada Kedavra curse gives the magician the power to kill other creatures. Moody demonstrates each curse on a spider and says to his students, “You’d like it, would you, if I did it to you?” (188). If we infer from this that Moody understands that his lesson is morally reprehensible, we might be mistaken. In fact, Moody is not beyond torturing anyone he suspects of evil, although he prefers to quiet his conscience by turning his human victims into animals first. Thus, when he catches Malfoy fighting with Harry, he turns Malfoy into a ferret before sending him through the air and “smack to the floor, and then bounce upwards … squealing in pain” (TGOF 181). When Professor McGonagall inquires what Moody is doing, Moody responds that he is teaching a lesson. This defense of corporeal punishment outrages McGonagall, but Ron cherishes Malfoy’s pain and Hermione and Harry laugh about it. Afterwards, Hermione feels concern for the abused young Malfoy, but she stands alone; Harry Potter’s fans have not protested, suggesting that they are in urgent need of a lesson.
Professor Flitwick teaches his students to “make a pineapple dance across a desk [and] turn a mouse into a snuff-box” (TPS 190). Such is the lowest form of magic; mere circus sensationalism that glosses over the misuse and waste of life which it entails, waste cunningly hinted at by the first half the compound word, snuff, as in to snuff out. Of course, ha-ha, it was a magic act and can be reversed, but it was not, and the lesson resembles certain feats of engineering such as the transformation of forests into toilet paper. On the other hand, Flitwick’s frivolous magic demonstration does seem to fall into Lewis’ second of two categories of magic, the good sort of magic (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children” 236). Kidding. As frivolous and silly as Flitwick’s demonstration may seem, it actually conserves our dominant culture’s destructive relationship to Nature.
Rodents are pests, and as pests they have no higher function than to be flung to their death. I refer to the gnome-like pests that Harry, Ron and the twins expel from the Weasley garden. The rodent-like creatures symbolize the natural food source of the weasel-like Weasleys. However, the Weasley boys, rather than eating the gnome-like pests, capture and hurl them: “[Ron] raised the gnome above his head … and started to swing it in great circles like a lasso … it flew twenty feet into the air and landed with a thud” (TCOS 33). Ron assures Harry that this does not hurt the gnomes, but I’m not convinced, and must sadly draw the usual depressing conclusions. Even the ironic use of the Weasley name, while hinting at the author’s consciousness of the stupidity she depicts, does little more than to raise a crucial question about the author’s intentions.
HP’s anti-environmental pattern continues when Ron expresses his bourgeois and instrumentalist relationship to the Earth. We catch Ron in the act when his pet rat disappears and he coldly says of his escaped rat, “he was a bit useless.” Then, without grieving or reflecting on precisely why his rat was useless to him, he expresses his hope for a new pet, “You never know, Mum and Dad might get me an owl now” (TPOA 215). That Ron does not grieve his rat’s disappearance is strange because he previously expressed much anger at the mere thought its loss. Ron does not seem capable of dealing with the loss, and finds refuge in the consumerist philosophy that everything is disposable and replaceable, a philosophy whose true import may not be grasped until it is applied to oneself.
Although domesticated animals seem to receive friendlier treatment, consider the wisdom of Dumbledore’s “faithful pets,” and consider that pets HP are never faithful, never quite dumbesticated. Not only does Ron’s rat leave him without warning, but “Cat, Rat, and Dog” (TPOA) raises very serious questions about the loyalty of Hermione’s pet cat and about man’s so-called best friend. The first five letters of Hermione’s cat Crookshanks is sufficient warning about its allegiance. Concerning the great dog, namely Sirius Black, the semantic connection between this surname and Voldemort’s title ‘Dark Lord’ should raise enough questions about Black’s loyalty to Harry. In short, even domestic animals do not present morally unambiguous figures. While this moral ambiguity also exists in books by Tolkien and Lewis, in their work this is a product of the Fall and is meant to be rectified in the new Heaven and the new Earth. Rowling offers no such religio-eschatological vision, and hardly needs to, as most readers ignore the ‘evils’ present in the series.
Rowling’s conservation of modern science’s right to experiment on animals continues in other Hogwarts classroom scenes. Hermione’s magical transfiguration act creates a “tortoise [that] looked more like a turtle” (TPOA 233). More amusingly, I mean more disturbingly, a single guinea-fowl is transformed into several guinea-pigs, but “Neville’s guinea-pig still had feathers” (TGOF 336). Earlier, Neville is “made to disembowel a barrel-ful of horned toads” (185) simply because Snape needed to punish Neville. Animals are routinely vivisected, desiccated, and their bodies or parts stored or hung from ceilings. Rowling never suggests that these natural resources are being conserved and that the magicians do not waste what they kill in their scary, Nazi-like, corporate-like world.
The veneer of comedy can help readers swallow just about anything, as when Hagrid tries to satisfy the monstrous appetite of his newborn baby Norwegian Ridgeback dragon by feeding it “rats by the crate” (TPS 173). Beyond the issue of packaging animals in crates, the dragon’s origin raises the issue of importing potentially aggressive and invasive species. Rachel Carson notes that “nearly half of the 180 or so major insect enemies of plants in the United States are accidental imports from abroad [and are] our most troublesome insects” (195). Yes, I keep telling myself that we are discussing fantasy, not reality, but I consider it suspect that so many real modern ‘sins’ are replicated in Rowling’s works, often without any hint of conscience or consequence, as if her entire aim was either to desensitize children to the atrocities committed by the real world or to….
The sanctity of birth, or at least of childrearing, is also violated. The first task of the wizard champions is to “collect the golden egg” from a dragon (TGOF 305). ‘Collect’ is surely a euphemism when used to describe the act of stealing eggs from nesting mothers (288), but it reflects Harry’s insulated conscience and consistent indifference towards the cruelty he participates in. Harry even foolishly remarks that his dragon is “too protective of her eggs” (310; italics mine). Pardon? Was the author trying to be funny? And Hagrid, despite being keeper of magical creatures, is no better. When he wins a dragon egg from a fellow boozer in a game of cards he does not wonder about the ethical implications of possessing the unborn offspring of a parent who, in all likelihood, did not consent to her loss.
Finally, if you’ll excuse me for conclude with a bit of humour, Rowling even the portrays the human animal is as something unnatural and denatured. Consider the subject of sexuality, a subject largely invisible in the series. This self-imposed censorship agrees with the conservative convention in children’s literature, but here too, Rowling cannot resist whispering a few sly jokes. Thus, when Ron fears Hermione’s cat will eat his rat, Hermione, in a nice bit of foreshadowing, informs him that “[a]ll cats chase rats, Ron!” (TPOA 111). Other allusions to sexuality include scenes in which animals are born from Ron’s mouth, hair appears on Hermione’s face, pimples appear on her hands, and that special a scene in which, thanks to a nasty spell, Harry walks with a boneless appendage.
IV. Environmentally Deprecating Language
Leaving our deplorable inventory of environmentally ignorant scenes behind, we can begin collecting evidence of environmentally deprecating language.
An all-too-common example environmentally deprecating language is the following description of young Dudley: “[H]is piggy little eyes fixed on the [television] screen and his five chins wobbling as he ate continuously” (TPOA 18). In TPS Hagrid loses his temper with Uncle Vernon and attempts to turn him into a pig. He only succeeds in putting a pig’s tail on Vernon. He then comments that he “[m]eant ter turn him into a pig, but I suppose he was so much like a pig anyway there wasn’t much left ter do” (48). The ‘narrator’ associates the Dudleys with pigs because the pig stereotype assumes a gluttonous nature. But this stereotype is not based on reality. Pigs, like most creatures, will only eat too much or too often if held captive and overfed. The stereotype reflects society’s ignorance of animals and implies a lack of compassion for the obese Dudley.
Though we are all familiar with the stereotypical image of the pig, and although pigs have as yet no voice to defend them, these are not valid excuses for perpetuating an unjust stereotype. Pigs might spend more time eating than the average human being, but that does not make them gluttons. To be a glutton one must act in ignorance of one’s proper nature, and because animals typically do this far less often than human beings, animals are really, in essence rather than in specifics, examples to be imitated.
A similar misunderstanding of Nature is evident in Sirius Black’s response to Peter Pettigrew’s attempt to defend himself by telling Ron that “I was your rat” (274). Black says, “[i]f you made a better rat than human, it’s not much to boast about, Peter.” This sounds agreeable enough, but any suggestion that human beings should be better than rats is anthropocentric vanity. Human beings might be higher in the food chain, but only ignorance of human history could inspire Black’s narcissistic opinion. Moreover, if we’re going to judge humans better than rats, let us also compare worms to fleas, oranges to petunias, and all the parts of life that cannot be comparatively judged.
Another meaningless and ignorant comparison occurs when Ron calls Professor Trelawney an “ugly old bat” (TGOF 325). Pansy Parkinson screams, “Stunningly pretty? Her? … What was she judging against – a chipmunk?” (TGOF 277). Imagine telling a woman that she looks beautiful in relation to a man: not only would it be cruel but it ignores the fact that between men and women, as between humans and chipmunks, different aesthetic standards apply.
“Uncle Vernon made another funny noise, like a mouse being trodden on” (TPS 40). Combining incongruous images like a mouse and a large uncle can be humorous, but not every instance of incongruity is humorous. Indeed, I fail to see how the thought of a mouse being crushed can ever be comical. Did the author think otherwise? How could she? Didn’t she work for Amnesty International? But that’s a human rights organization, not an animal rights organization.
Uncle Vernon accuses Hagrid of trespassing, and Hagrid, unable to deny this, calls Uncle Vernon a “great prune” (TPS 40). Rather than come to the defense of prunes I suggest Hagrid has spoken in slang, making this a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In fact, readers ought to sympathize with Vernon, who really had good intentions in protecting Harry from the supernatural. And how would you feel if a giant busted through your door with his bare hands?
But Uncle Vernon is painted with the brush as every other character. He compares insane people to dogs, saying they are barking and howling mad (68). Later, the narrator compares the angry verbal response of Hermione to the hissing of an angry goose (116). When the centaur Bane sees his companion carrying Harry on his back he says in disgust, “Are you a common mule?” (187). Rowling uses common bovine and canine stereotypes to deprecate another character: the horrible Aunt Marge is beefy (TPOA 22). She has also acquired some of her pet dogs’ characteristics, for we read that she barked and growled (23). These insults might be conventional; they are not for that reason justified or intelligent. Why should Nature imagery be used exclusively to coin insults? Jesus called Herod “that fox” and warned against ‘wolves,’ but he validated this language by himself becoming the lamb.
Not surprisingly, metaphors and similes of animals are used to describe Lord Voldemort. His hands are like “large, pale spiders” and his pupils are “like a cat’s” (TGOF 559). His cat-like eyes are repeatedly mentioned in the final battle, which made me wonder if Mr. Riddle isn’t Mrs J. Kat. Rowling. He is the only character with a middle name….
Another trope of environmentally deprecating images comprises Rowling’s names for certain characters. One of Harry’s enemies is ‘Crabbe,’ a name evoking a crab-like image. The morally ambiguous Snape has a name resembling snake. The hero’s team is named after a pagan supernatural creature, the griffin; in contrast, Harry’s enemies belong to the house of ‘Slytherin,’ and the snake stereotype is shamelessly exploited in TCOS, where a snake is provoked to anger by Lockhart and prepares to strike (145).
The snake is also the foremost exception to the rule of environmentally deprecating language. Just as Lockhart is about to be bitten, Harry subdues it using parseltongue, and witnesses fear he will “sprout fangs or spit poison” (157), suggesting the hero has become snakelike. In fact, the hero is snakelike. He has qualities that make him a good candidate for the Slytherin team (TCOS 245), and his snakelike nature is the best explanation for why he expressed sympathy for the dangerous snake in the zoo (TPS 23).
The culturally conservative stereotyping of the snake continues in the following:
Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land, there is none more curious or more deadly than the Basilisk, known also as the King of Serpents … aside from its deadly and venomous fangs, the Basilisk has a murderous stare, and all who are fixed with the beam of its eye shall suffer instant death. (TCOS 215)
However, almost humorously, this monstrous snake will flee “only from the crowing of the rooster” (215). Similarly, in the Bible the crowing of the rooster follows Peter’s loss of faith and causes him to flee from Jesus, who was symbolized by a rooster, a noisy bird that, thanks to its habit of waking people up, is readily associated with resurrection, but more on this connection later.
We might credit Rowling for challenging her readers by associating her hero with a negative animal stereotype, but—and not surprisingly—the point seems utterly lost on her young readers. Of course, she must have foreseen this, and since she has made no effort to cure the Pottermania epidemic, one can only speculate about the motivation behind the literary subtleties, ambiguities and violations of good sense.
V. Exceptions to the Anti-Environmental Trend
Harry is more a clown than an environmental hero. While he shows little pity for humans, he does for a dead domestic cat, about whom he stupidly suggests, “Shouldn’t we try and help –” (TCOS 106).
In contrast to Harry, Hermoine is a beacon of sanity. In the fourth book she actually engages in a bit of non-self-serving social activism by investigating the rights of the kitchen staff at Hogwarts. Had she pursued this more actively, the whole story would have been derailed, and so her interest and the episode is quickly abandoned, not to be revived until she graduates—I mean escapes—from Hogwarts.
Love and compassion are actually shown towards Hagrid’s Hippogriff; unfortunately, the Hippogriff is an imaginary creature. In a series where animals are treated so cruelly, the Hippogriff exception seems like a cynical joke.
Before being corrupted by Hogwarts, Hagrid may well have been an animal rights activist. In TCOS we learn that a young Hagrid “opened the Chamber of Secrets”, thereby freeing a spider armed with “razor-sharp pincers” (184). The spider—Aragog—vowed that he and his descendants would be Hagrid’s friends. Thus, according to one reading, Hagrid was expelled from Hogwarts for an act of environmental activism, Tom Riddle’s falsehoods about the evil spiders notwithstanding.
The Mandrake is either the only plant to receive a positive role in the first four books of HP, or its role exemplifies the subtle currents of the series. Mandrake is used as an antidote to sorcery and supernaturalism, making it a likely symbol for Nature or intelligence. But the name ‘Mandrake’ also hints at a connection to the evil Malfoy, whose first name is Draco. Does this mean that Rowling associated the forces of ‘evil’ with pro-environmentalism? This would explain why green is associated with Voldemort and the Slytherins, right? Perhaps. But, assuming I am not dreaming all this up, what on Earth was Rowling thinking when she inscribed these subtleties into children’s fiction?
In the middle of her projected middle book, in the chapter titled “The House-Elf Liberation Front,” the narrator proposes that perhaps the dragon-like Skrewts “did not appreciate being forced into pillow-lined boxes and nailed in” (TGOF 321). This rare evidence of an environmental-conscience occurs in a chapter whose title contains the word ‘Elf’ and the initials of this same chapter contain the letters ELF. Coincidence? Consider that ELF is the acronym for the environmentally active Earth Liberation Front, and that this organisation was founded in Britain, Rowling’s own land of citizenship. She could hardly not be aware, and the textual references suggest an intention
VI. Conclusion
The intense anti-environmental currents in HP make it unique in the literary world. From folklore to the Bible to The Chronicles of Narnia, no other writing compares. Adherents of ancient religions worshipped natural objects, and Jesus’s parables use images of Nature to help him communicate spiritual ideas, but in Harry Potter characters almost always use images of Nature to deprecate Nature or to slander parts of Nature. HP also departs from examples set by Tolkien, Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis, for whom animals were often the mouthpieces of riddles and wisdom. And C.S. Lewis’ pro-environmental themes (like saving trees) in the Chronicles of Narnia seem utterly remote from Harry’s world.
The scant and obscure evidence found in “Exceptions to the Anti-Environmental Trend” provides some basis for an argument that HP has an enlightened undercurrent, so why is that evidence is utterly overwhelmed by the anti-environmental current?
Rowling’s work does not appear to be an example of the genre Tolkien called fairy-stories in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” There he spoke with contempt of technology and claimed fairy-stories contain an implicit condemnation of “progressive things like factories, or the machineguns and bombs that appear to be their most natural … products” (78). Perhaps even more significantly, Tolkien claimed that all good “fairy-stories deal largely … with simple or fundamental things [meaning ‘Nature’]” (75).
HP is hardly simple. It is quite possibly the most complex children’s series ever written. What was Rowling’s intention? Is her provocative work intended to awaken the public’s sleeping conscience? That might have been a legitimate tactic in a work of adult fiction, but in children’s fiction? Isn’t something askew?
