Harry Potter and historical consciousness
Harry Potter and historical consciousness
Reflections on history and fiction
Ann Curthoys
The enormous popularity of J K Rowling’s series of Harry Potter novels
makes it an important part of contemporary popular culture and
consciousness. Debate over the novels’ meaning and significance is lively,
not only on innumerable fan-based websites but also in a range of academic
disciplines, including education, literary and cultural studies, sociology,
law, political science and international relations. History, however, is
scarcely represented in this scholarship, and this article argues that
were historians to join the discussion, they would have much to gain and
contribute. It goes on to suggest that history is important in the novels
both as a form of useful knowledge and as powerful allusion. In this
discussion, I am less interested in the (very real) divergences between
history and fiction than in the ways each draws on and illuminates the
other. Historians have reason to welcome the popularity of Rowling’s
novels, given their sense of the importance of the archive and of critical
historical knowledge.
This article has been peer-reviewed.
On the weekend of 21 and 22 July 2007, I, along with millions of other
people, read the seventh volume of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hallows. I had started reading the Harry Potter series in
2000, borrowing a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from
my mother, who in her dying months was enjoying it. I became hooked
and joined the ranks of those who bought and began reading each new
volume the day it appeared. As I read the seventh volume, I was struck
by its resonances with aspects of twentieth century history, such as the
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History Australia | Volume 8 | Number 1
developments in Nazi Germany of the 1930s leading up to the Final
Solution. As I read on, I noticed how much this novel and its predecessors
were a fascinating exploration of the varying uses and meanings of
history. Throughout the novels, and especially in the last three of the
series, there is a tension between history as dead, dull and boring, and
living history, the kind of history that is necessary for action in the
present. The Harry Potter novels, that is to say, evoke not only their own
magical world but also the magic of history.
Given the enormous popularity of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
which broke all previous records for initial sales by selling at least 14
million copies around the world on its first day, it is clear that the Harry
Potter novels are part of contemporary consciousness. They are not
only popular reading matter for all ages and in many countries, but are
also the focus of a burgeoning academic study of their themes and the
reasons for their popularity. Scholars in many disciplines have used the
novels to explore all manner of issues, often in a most entertaining and
enlightening way. The educationists write about schools and schooling,
and the specialists in literacy ponder the possible effects of these novels
on children’s, especially boys’, reading habits. The literary critics are
fascinated by the novels’ form, a hybrid of school and fantasy literature,
but drawing on many other literary traditions as well, including fairy tale,
folk tale, myth and legend, as well as incorporating classical, biblical and
medieval allusions. Several have noted the books’ use of the genre of the
bildungsroman, the novel of moral formation, while others have traced the
antecedents of the Harry Potter novels, numbering among them Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings, C S Lewis’s Narnia series and Ursula Le Guin’s
Earthsea quintet. Edith Nesbit’s many novels, including The Enchanted
Castle and The Phoenix and the Carpet, which developed a clash between
the magical and the ordinary, are seen as clear forerunners.1 There
are also clear parallels to the mythological battles between oppressive
empires and those who resist in the Star Wars series. Less obviously, but just as productively, scholars in cultural studies,
sociology, law, political science and international relations have used
the novels to explore key themes, such as religion, law and gender.2
Even the medical specialists have contributed, with a specialist journal
1
2
For an excellent summary of this scholarship see Jill Reading, Critical Literacy in a
Global Context: Reading Harry Potter (PhD thesis, Edith Cowan University, Perth,
2006), 62–84. Accessed 20 September 2010. Available from: http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/
viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=theses.
See Lana A Whited, editor, The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary
Phenomenon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002); Giselle Liza Anatol,
editor, Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (Westport: Praeger, 2003); Elizabeth E
8
Harry Potter and historical consciousness
carrying a series of discussions on Harry Potter’s headaches.3 One of the
most enjoyable and illuminating of these academic essays is William P
MacNeil’s essay, ‘“Kidlit” as “Law-and-Lit”: Harry Potter and the Scales
of Justice’, which appeared in 2002. In this essay MacNeil argues for
‘the pervasive presence in the texts’ setting, language and theme, of
what James Boyd White would call the “legal imagination”’. 4 He draws
attention to the importance in Harry Potter’s world of trials and, more
broadly, of notions of right and justice. There are good reasons for this burgeoning academic interest. One is the
immense popularity of the series: if we can understand the reasons for
this popularity, perhaps we will know more about our own society and our
own time. As a political scientist examining the view of politics expressed
in volume 6 noted, ‘no book released in 2005 will have more influence
on what kids and adults around the world think about government than
The Half-Blood Prince. It would be difficult to overstate the influence
and market penetration of the Harry Potter series’.5 Another reason is
intrinsic to the novels themselves, with their complex and changing story
lines, large cast of characters, series of ethical and practical dilemmas,
and unmistakable resonances with the modern world. The books are open
to widely divergent interpretations: they are often criticised in Britain for
being conservative and in the US for being dangerously liberal and pagan. Just as mythology functioned for the ancient Greeks as a theatre of values,
characters and stories, permitting interpretation and re-interpretation
of humanity’s profoundest dilemmas, so these novels seem to operate in
modern scholarship and popular culture.
History is, however, scarcely represented in this growing and lively
scholarship. My searches of history journals have yielded very little
indeed, even in special issues devoted to questions of history and fiction. I have found nothing, for example, in either Rethinking History or History
and Theory, two journals that do explore the relations between fiction and
history. One exception to this pattern of historians’ lack of interest is
Heilman, editor, Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives (New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2003); Daniel H Nexon and Iver B Neumann, editors, Harry Potter and
International Relations (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006).
3 Fred Sheftell, Timothy J Steiner and Hallie Thomas, ‘Harry Potter and the curse of the
headache’, Headache 47, no. 6 (June 2007), 911–916.
4
William P MacNeil, ‘“Kidlit” as “Law-and-Lit”: Harry Potter and the scales of justice’, Law
and Literature 14 (2002), 545–664, quote on 546. A revised version appears as a chapter
in the same author’s book, MacNeil, Lex Populi, Jurisprudence in Popular Culture (Stanford
University Press, 2007), in which he draws our attention to the very large legal literature
on Harry Potter. 5
Benjamin H Barton, ‘Harry Potter and the half-crazed bureaucracy’, Michigan Law Review
104 (May 2006), 1525. 9
History Australia | Volume 8 | Number 1
the work of Edmund M Kern, a historian of witchcraft in early modern
Europe, who argues that Rowling ‘draws extensively upon history,
legend, and myth – in both prosaic and preposterous ways – to establish
the features of her imagined world’. Kern also explores the different ways
history is used in the novels – as a source for the features of their magical
world and as something their characters must come to understand.6
In this essay, I argue that the Harry Potter series takes history very
seriously, and we can profit by returning the compliment. We can consider
what, as fiction, it has to say about history. For history and fiction are, we
know, closely related, squabbling siblings with common ancestry and yet
each with its own path to follow. In a book I wrote with John Docker,
called Is History Fiction?, we argued that history is both like and unlike
fiction, in that it has a double character. History is on the one hand a
rigorous search for truth about the past based on a study of the traces
that the past leaves behind, in documents, memories, visual images,
landscapes. On the other, it is a form of narrative that shapes accounts of
the past in particular, culture-specific ways, the narrative form being not
embroidery or decoration but an integral part of the search for truth about
how and why things happened the way they did. Historical writing and
fiction share a great deal in their concerns; they are both shaped by various
generic forms, both use character, plot, action and description to tell a
story and both, of necessity, construct and narrate a past. However, they
do so using different materials and under different constraints. History
is tied to the sources, the archive in its broadest sense, in a way fiction is
not. As many have pointed out, history cannot imagine characters, places
or times in the way fiction can. Here I want to ponder the implications of
our argument about history and fiction a little further, through analysis
of the Potter novels and their relation to history and historical practice. I am treating them not as historical fiction, but rather as works of fiction
that allude in significant ways to historical events and historical practice.
My argument, I hope, will be of interest even if you have not read the
Harry Potter books. For those unfamiliar with the novels, which are
written for and read by both children and adults, I will say here simply
6
See Edmund M Kern, ‘The phoenix in Harry Potter: the metaphoric power of the past’,
Harry Potter for Seekers, 2005. Accessed 30 November 2010. Available from: http://www.
harrypotterforseekers.com/articles/thephoenixinhp.php?PHPSESSID=fb5cc8c0f5fe55
b6038a936128d7f49e. Kern develops his argument in more detail in Edmund M Kern,
The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us about Moral Choices (New
York: Prometheus Books, 2003). See also Brycchan Carey, ‘Hermione and the houseelves: the literary and historical contexts of J K Rowling’s antislavery campaign’, in
Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, edited by Giselle Liza Anatol (Connecticut: Praeger
Publishers, 2003), 103–116.
10
Harry Potter and historical consciousness
that in seven volumes they trace the story of Harry Potter and his
friends, especially Ron and Hermione, as they go through high school. High school is Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, whose
headmaster is Professor Dumbledore, and each book covers one school
year. Through the series, we learn that around the time Harry Potter was
born, the evil wizard Voldemort was terrorising the wizard community. When he heard of a prophecy naming a one-year-old boy, Harry, the
son of former Hogwarts students James and Lily, as the one who would
eventually kill him, he attempted to kill Harry instead. However, though
he murdered Harry’s parents, the curse with which he attempted to kill
Harry failed, leaving only a scar, and rebounded, severing Voldemort’s
soul from his body. We are told in the third volume: ‘His powers gone,
his life almost extinguished, Voldemort had fled; the terror in which the
secret community of witches and wizards had lived for so long had lifted,
Voldemort’s followers had disbanded, and Harry Potter had become
famous’.7 The series outlines not only Harry’s progress through school,
but also Voldemort’s fight to reconstruct his body, destroy Harry Potter
and again rule the wizarding world.8 The wizard world, however, is not a
totally separate world; it interacts frequently with the ordinary human
world, in which humans are known as Muggles. Harry, for instance,
lives in the Muggle world until he goes to school, and the school enrols
students such as Hermione who, although possessing wizardly powers, is
Muggle-born. The Harry Potter novels, then, incorporate a wide range of
genres to tell exciting stories of conflict, fights, battles, contests, escapes
and conspiracies, along with school stories and stories about adolescence,
friendships, crushes, betrayals, falling out, making up and much else.
History dead and alive
A perenially troubling issue for historians is, ‘how can we understand the
past from the vantage point of the present?’ How do we both acknowledge
our present day standpoint and at the same time fully recognise the
alterity of the past, its profound otherness? The thinker whose name is
most associated with the point that all history is in that sense a history of
the present is Benedetto Croce, especially in his 1917 essay, ‘History and
Chronicle’. In that essay, Croce argued that ‘only an interest in the life of
the present can move one to investigate past fact’, for ‘past fact’ comes
alive when it is ‘unified with an interest in the present life’. A past deed
7
8
J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 23.
For an excellent summary of the plotline of the series, see Reading, 124.
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History Australia | Volume 8 | Number 1
or event must vibrate in the ‘soul of the historian’.9 Just as ‘the Romans
and the Greeks lay in their sepulchres, until awakened at the Renaissance
by the new maturity of the European spirit’, so, in the future, will ‘great
tracts of history which are now chronicle for us, many documents now
mute … in their turn be traversed with new flashes of life and will speak
again’.10 Accounts of the past that do not relate to an interest in the present
are, in Croce’s view, mere chronicle. This idea, that we write history out
of the urgent concerns of the present, has been taken up by a variety
of subsequent thinkers about the nature of history, notably Collingwood
and Foucault.
Croce’s proposition, I suggest, is strongly borne out in the Harry Potter
novels. They set up an opposition between history as a dead subject, as
mere chronicle, and history as necessary for life, for action. Where we
do not have a sense of the past as providing, however indirectly, clues to
action in the future, history will seem dead and boring. Where present
concerns, especially present dangers, awaken that sense, history comes
alive; indeed, it becomes essential. In volume 5, Harry Potter and the Order
of the Phoenix, for example, we find this:
History of Magic was by common consent the most boring subject
ever devised by wizard kind. Professor Binns, their ghost teacher,
had a wheezy, droning voice that was almost guaranteed to cause
severe drowsiness within ten minutes, five in warm weather. He
never varied the form of their lessons, but lectured them without
pausing while they took notes, or rather, gazed sleepily into space
… Today they suffered an hour and half’s droning on the subject of
giant wars.11
Towards the end of that volume, we come to the History of Magic exam. Harry is sitting in the exam room unable to concentrate.
He was finding it very difficult to remember names and kept
confusing dates. He simply skipped question four (In your opinion,
did wand legislation contribute to, or lead to better control of, goblin
riots of the eighteenth century?) thinking that he would go back to
it if he had time at the end. He had a stab at question five (How
was the statute of secrecy breached in 1749 and what measures were
introduced to prevent a recurrence?) but had a nagging suspicion that
9
10
11
Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice, translated by Douglas Ainslie (Harcourt,
Brace and Co: New York, 1921), 11–26, reprinted as Benedetto Croce, ‘History and
chronicle’, in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, edited by Hans Meyerhoff (Doubleday
Anchor: New York, 1959), 45. This discussion is drawn from Ann Curthoys and John
Docker, Is History Fiction? (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005), 91–93.
Croce, ‘History and Chronicle’, 55.
J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (London: Bloomsbury, 2003),
206–207.
12
Harry Potter and historical consciousness
he had missed several important points … He looked ahead for
a question he could definitely answer and his eyes alighted upon
number ten. Describe the circumstances that led to the formation of the
International Confederation of Wizards and explain why the warlocks
of Liechtenstein refused to join.
I know this, Harry thought, though his brain felt torpid and slack.12
This is a devastatingly accurate portrayal of a particularly boring
kind of school history, imposed rather than chosen. It is a series of
poorly connected facts, and the teacher has been unable to explain
the importance and relevance of the past, to tell stories or capture his
students’ imagination. History teachers everywhere might wince at the
examination questions, so like those we have ourselves laboriously set,
now seen from the point of view of the uninspired student.
In contrast to this irrelevant dead history, the logic of the story
through the Potter novels is always that one can only go forward
by going back, by understanding one’s enemy and his or her moral
formation and motivation. The characters in these novels learn in
different ways to recognise how past events continue to influence and
shape their own and others’ character. Harry becomes a historical
detective, attempting to find out what motivates Voldemort and his
followers, and why he finds himself so much the focus of Voldemort’s
attentions. This is especially true of volume 6, Harry Potter and the HalfBlood Prince, much of which concerns the headmaster of Hogwarts,
Dumbledore, taking Harry back into the past through the mechanism
of the Pensieve. A shallow stone basin, the Pensieve stores thoughts
and memories in the form of a silvery substance. When Harry puts
his face into this substance, he can share those memories. Some are
Dumbledore’s and some belong to other people that Dumbledore has
collected over time. Through the Pensieve, Harry is taken back to the past, the past of his
father’s generation, and to the generation before that, a past that involves
dangers of various pressing kinds. The past is no longer chronicle but an
essential aspect of the present. The volume is in fact one long history
lesson, not the droning about the giant wars of Professor Binns, but the
exciting though disturbing experience of being hurtled back into the past
itself. It is a very personal past, a form of genealogy, a kind of popular
history that seeks to connect the individual to his or her forbears and
through them to the broader patterns of history. Through accessing
12
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 639.
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History Australia | Volume 8 | Number 1
Dumbledore’s own memories and other memories Dumbledore has
collected, Harry learns about Voldemort’s past and what made him the
fiend that he is, a lesson seen as necessary preparation for their final
battle. He learns about Voldemort’s parents, his poverty-stricken but
pure-blood wizard mother and rich Muggle father, the father’s desertion
and the mother’s death, his childhood in a Dickensian orphanage and
then his time at Hogwarts, where he descends into the Dark Arts and
begins a campaign for power. Through his access to the memories of a
variety of people with their different points of view, Harry is able to
arrive at a quite complex understanding. He learns morally confronting
lessons, observing that his father was not always right and was at times
a bully, and that his revered godfather Sirius was also not as perfect as
he would have wished. He also learns, towards the end of volume 7, that
he has been wrong in his judgement of a key figure in his life, Professor
Severus Snape. A double agent whose true allegiance we as readers cannot
be sure of for most of the novels, Snape is finally killed by Voldemort. The dying Snape gives Harry his memories (‘silvery blue, neither gas nor
liquid’), and when he accesses them in the Pensieve, Harry finally learns
that Snape has secretly been his protector all along.13 The novels are
suggesting that to understand history we need to know the subjectivity
of the people of the past – their fears and desires, their motivations and
beliefs. We need to understand how each of them experienced events
and relationships differently. For historians, of course, this is one of
the most difficult aspects of our endeavours; our sources, whether oral
history, written sources such as diaries and letters, or visual and material
sources, are often limited in extent, representing only one point of view,
or of doubtful reliability. If memory gives us access to people’s emotions and feelings in the
past, it is not the only important source of historical knowledge in the
Potter series. Harry and his friends must access a range of primary and
secondary sources if they are to understand the past and learn what they
need to know to defeat the forces of evil. One of the more conventional
methods they use is oral history, especially when Harry persists in
questioning Dumbledore about what happened in the past. Another is
accessing old letters, photographs, tombstone inscriptions, every trace
from the past they can find. In doing so, they experience the thrill of the
archive, the excitement and emotional connection that so often arise in
the course of historical research. When Harry finds in volume 7 a letter
from his mother, for example, he thinks:
13
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 528.
14
Harry Potter and historical consciousness
The letter was an incredible treasure, proof that Lily Potter had
lived, really lived, that her warm hand had once moved across this
parchment, tracing ink into these letters, these words, words about
him, Harry, her son.14
Harry looks at a picture of Dumbledore with his family when a small
boy, seeking to understand Dumbledore’s family history.15 Later he
sees a photograph of an original letter written by Dumbledore, ‘with
Dumbledore’s familiar thin, slanting writing’.16 Sometimes information
comes from old newspapers. Hermione, who helps Harry investigate
what he needs to know about the past, tells him near the end of volume
6, in a manner that would do any biographer proud: ‘I was going through
the rest of the old Prophets and there was a tiny announcement about
Eileen Prince marrying a man called Tobias Snape, and then later an
announcement saying she’d given birth’17
Diaries also figure as sources of information. In volume 2, Harry
discovers a fifty-year-old diary with blank pages, finding that if he
writes in it, its former owner, Tom Riddle (in fact Voldemort as a boy,
though Harry does not yet know this), writes back. Riddle’s name, in fact,
allegorises the enigma of the past. Through this exchange, Harry is taken
back into the past, to Tom Riddle’s schooldays. What a metaphor this is,
I think, for the ways in which historians read the archives. They are as
if blank until we open them, with some kind of question in our minds. Until we want to know something, they are just there, inert; but if we
ask questions, they might yield answers. The archive lives when we use it. Harry and Ron also learn about the past from Hermione, who gains
much of her information and understanding from books, especially a
school textbook, Bathilda Bagshot’s The History of Magic. In historians’
language, Hermione accesses and shares with the others the historical
knowledge to be gained from secondary sources. Hermione’s book learning
is often important at crucial danger points in the novels, and this is one
of the series’ most radical themes: the value of book learning for dealing
with present challenges. At the same time, she is no mere uncritical
reader of these texts: she clearly sees their limitations, especially those
of another history book, Hogwarts: A History. In volume 4, Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire, when it emerges that Hermione knows details about
the forthcoming interschool Tournament that none of the others do, she
tells her friends:
14
15
16
17
Ibid., 150.
Ibid., 178.
Ibid., 319.
Ibid., 594.
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History Australia | Volume 8 | Number 1
It’s all in Hogwarts: A History. Though of course that book’s not
entirely reliable. ‘A Revised History of Hogwarts’ would be a
more accurate title. Or ‘A Highly Biased and Selective History of
Hogwarts, Which Glosses over the Nastier Aspects of the School’.18
Written histories are, then, both valuable sources of information and, at
the same time, to be read critically.
Volume 7 and totalitarian regimes
The Potter series not only engages with the purpose and practice of
history, but also has many historical references of its own. Amongst the
most powerful are the frequent allusions to the rise of authoritarian
regimes during the twentieth century. The attempts by Voldemort and
his followers to take over the wizarding world grow with each volume,
reaching a crescendo in volume 7, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Voldemort from early on seems to be a Hitler or Stalin or perhaps Pol Pot
or Idi Amin figure, a figure seeking absolute power. In narrating his rise
to power, the novels evoke several key themes here: the importance of
racism and the exploitation and exclusion of people on the basis of race;
the creation of an atmosphere of terror so great that for many the best
option is to flee; and the move of Voldemort’s forces from paramilitary
private forces to the centre of government. The theme of race and racism permeates nearly all the novels, with an
ongoing struggle within the wizard world between the desire by some for
racial purity and the acceptance and welcoming by others of all ‘races’
– wizards, Muggles and those descended from both. In volume 4, Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Dumbledore tells the ineffectual government
minister, Cornelius Fudge, that he places too much importance on ‘the
so-called purity of blood’. ‘You fail to notice’, Dumbledore says, ‘that
it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be’.19 This
reminds us, among many other possibilities, of Martin Luther King’s ‘I
Have a Dream’ speech, in which he looked forward to the day when people
would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their
character. Against Dumbledore are the racists such as the Malfoy family,
who desire the supremacy of the ‘pure-bloods’ and hate Muggles, whom
they dehumanise as Mudbloods. Draco Malfoy calls Hermione a ‘filthy
little Mudblood’.20 The question of purity is complicated, though, by the
fact that, like Harry, Voldemort himself is a half blood. He is, perhaps,
18 Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 209–210.
19 Ibid., 614.
20 Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 86.
16
Harry Potter and historical consciousness
rejecting a past he now considers shameful and impure. While the parallels
are, of course, only partial, this emphasis on race purity calls to mind a
variety of other racialised regimes through history, not least among them
apartheid South Africa and the American South. The lack of emphasis
on physical appearance, though, would perhaps suggest strongly to many
readers Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Then there is the depiction of the rise of a terrorist organisation, which
eventually seizes power. The government, the Ministry of Magic, for a long
time refuses to believe there is any danger from Voldemort, and directs
its attention against those who say there is, including Dumbledore and
Harry. In volume 5, the Ministry attempts to expel Harry from the school
and strips Dumbledore of his various government positions, including
Headmaster of Hogwarts.21 The sinister and authoritarian Dolores
Umbridge is appointed High Inquisitor at the school; she introduces
limitations on freedom of speech and movement, alters the curriculum to
diminish dissent and produce obedient subjects, and tortures Harry when
he insists that Voldemort has returned. Volume 6 sees a government that
does acknowledge Voldemort’s rise, but tackles the issue ineffectively. In
the final volume, Voldemort seizes control of the government and his
troops, the Death Eaters, become government troops. The task of Harry
and his friends now becomes one of resistance, as outlaws. This image of takeover by evil forces suggests any one of a number of
histories, but perhaps the clearest and most readily available analogy for
many readers is Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany. The Death Eaters,
who wear black, hooded robes and face-concealing masks, set out to break
up the oppositional Order of the Phoenix, purge the Wizarding world of
Muggle-borns and create a new world order through the Ministry of Magic. ‘What you’ve got to realize, Harry’, says Remus Lupin, former teacher at
Hogwarts and long time opponent of Voldemort, ‘is that the Death Eaters
have got the full might of the Ministry on their side now … They’ve got the
power to perform brutal spells without fear of identification or arrest.’ The
Death Eaters take over the Daily Prophet, the leading but often unreliable
newspaper, whose very name has sinister millenarial overtones reminiscent
of totalitarian claims to the future. ‘But surely people realize what’s going
on?’ Hermione asks, and is then told, ‘The coup has been smooth and
virtually silent’. The official version is that the previous Minister for Magic
has resigned. Although many people have deduced there has been a coup,
given the dramatic change in Ministry policy, they merely whisper it. ‘They
daren’t confide in each other, not knowing whom to trust; they are scared to
21
See Barton, 1528.
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History Australia | Volume 8 | Number 1
speak out, in case their suspicions are true and their families are targeted.’22
The Ministry starts to move against the Muggle-borns, those with
wizard powers who were born to human parents. Hermione reads from
the Daily Prophet:
‘Muggle-born Register’, she read aloud. ‘The Ministry of Magic is
undertaking a survey of so-called “Muggle-borns”, the better to
understand how they came to possess magical secrets. Recent research undertaken by the Department of Mysteries reveals
that magic can only be passed from person to person when wizards
reproduce. Where no proven wizarding ancestry exists, therefore,
the so-called Muggle-born is likely to have obtained magical power
by theft or force. The ministry is determined to root out such usurpers of magical
power, and to this end has issued an invitation to every so-called
Muggle-born to present themselves for interview by the newly
appointed Muggle-born Registration Commission’.23
When Ron says ‘People won’t let this happen’, Lupin replies, ‘It is happening. Muggle borns are being rounded up as we speak.’24 He goes on, ‘unless you
can prove that you have at least one close wizarding relative, you are now
deemed to have obtained your magical power illegally and must suffer
the punishment’.25 The Ministry produces propaganda pamphlets headed
‘MUDBLOODS and the Dangers They Pose to a Peaceful Pure-Blood
Society’.26 Furthermore, to attend Hogwarts, students must henceforth
be given ‘Blood Status – meaning that they have proven to the ministry
that they are of wizard descent – before they are allowed to attend’. Hermione, the smartest student at Hogwarts, is Muggle-born and under
the new rules would be excluded. And it is not only the Muggle-born who
are under threat, but also those who sympathise with and support them. The puppet prime minister, Pius Thicknesse, declares, ‘If you ask me, the
blood traitors are as bad as the Mudbloods’.27
Under the leadership of Dolores Umbridge, now Head of the Muggleborn Registration Commission,28 the Muggle-borns are taken to the
Ministry. In disguise, Harry sees them:
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 171.
Ibid., 172. Ibid., 172.
Ibid., 173.
Ibid., 205.
Ibid., 204.
Ibid., 206.
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Harry Potter and historical consciousness
The petrified Muggle-borns brought in for questioning sat huddled
and shivering on hard wooden benches. Most of them were hiding
their faces in their hands … some were accompanied by families,
others sat alone. And then, abruptly and shockingly amid the frozen silence, one of
the dungeon doors on the left of the corridor was flung open and
screams echoed out of it. ‘No no, I’m half blood. I’m half blood, I tell you! My father was a
wizard, he was, look him up, Arkie Alderton, he’s a well known
broomstick designer, look him up, I tell you – get your hands off
me, get your hands off –.’29
Still in disguise, Harry then takes action, telling a character named Mrs
Cattermole:
Go home, grab your children and get out, get out of the country if
you’ve got to. Disguise yourselves and run. You’ve seen how it is,
you won’t get anything like a fair hearing here.30
He then tells the rest of the Muggle-borns waiting to be interrogated, ‘you
should all go home and go into hiding with your families … Go abroad if
you can. Just get well away from the Ministry.’
Some Muggle-borns do flee. Hermione sends her Muggle parents off
to Australia, having modified their memories so that they believe that
migration to Australia is their life’s ambition.31 Australia here functions,
as it has in English literature since at least Dickens’ David Copperfield,
as a place of sanctuary and even renewal. In general, Muggles remain
ignorant of the source of their suffering as they continue to sustain heavy
casualties, and we hear truly inspirational stories of wizards and witches
risking their own safety to protect Muggle friends and neighbours, often
without the Muggles’ knowledge.32 Meanwhile, under the new regime at
Hogwarts, Muggle Studies is made compulsory. Students are taught that
‘Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty’, that they ‘drove wizards into
hiding by being vicious towards them’, but now the natural order is being
re-established.33
Interestingly, while the wizard–Muggle distinction dominates, there is
also another form of race-like division: this is the distinction between
the wizards and their elves. The elves work for the wizards, in conditions
29
30
31
32
33
Ibid., 211–212.
Ibid., 216.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 357.
Ibid., 462.
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close to slavery, and are generally regarded as without true feelings or
rights. We can read them perhaps as slaves or indentured labourers or
colonised indigenous peoples. Hermione throughout has been a champion
of the elves and their rights. When she refers in volume 4 to Hogwarts: A
History as being biased and selective, Ron asks her what she means. She
replies, ‘House-elves! Not once, in over a thousand pages, does Hogwarts:
A History mention that we are all colluding in the oppression of a hundred
slaves’.34 She returns to the theme in volume 7, commenting that,
‘Wizarding history often skates over what the wizards have done to other
magical races’, by which she means goblins, elves and the like. She also
tells Ron that ‘Goblins have got good reason to dislike wizards. They’ve
been treated brutally in the past’.35 In the earlier novels, Hermione’s
support for elves’ rights is somewhat mocked, even by her friends, and
she is portrayed as possibly a little too zealous, somewhat inappropriate
in her fervour, perhaps too politically correct. However, in this final
volume, we come to see that perhaps she has a point; indeed, there is a
strong suggestion that she has been more or less right about the issue all
along. Furthermore, Harry, Hermione and Ron have come to recognise
that the elves have their own magic, their own forms of knowledge, and
can do things the wizards cannot.36
In the seventh novel, Harry, Ron and Hermione are on the run, living
in a tent and protecting themselves with various defensive spells and
charms. Hermione reads A History of Magic by the light of her wand.37 They
have few sources of information, but Ron has a small wooden wireless,
through which he can tune into a fugitive radio station, calling to mind
the history of clandestine radio stations used by the French resistance
and others in the Second World War. Ron finds the only program that
‘tells the news like it really is. All the others are on You-Know-Who’s side
and are following the Ministry line, but this one … you wait ’til you hear
it, it’s great. Only they can’t do it every night, they have to keep changing
locations in case they’re raided, and you need a password to tune in.’38
Eventually, they find a programme called ‘Potterwatch’.39 Here they hear
about the murders of Muggle-borns, goblins and the celebrated historian
Bathilda Bagshot. They also hear about some resistance developing at the
School, and soon after go there to assist. 34
35
36
37
38
39
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 209–210.
Ibid., 409.
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 161.
Ibid., 296.
Ibid., 319.
Ibid., 335.
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Harry Potter and historical consciousness
These are powerful allegorical images, drawn from popular cultural
knowledge of oppressive and totalitarian regimes, involving censorship,
suppression of opposition, the media’s role as pro-government
propaganda, use of torture, the hunting down of suspects, people being
forced to flee and the emergence of an underground resistance. Within
that popular understanding of history, the Second World War, Nazism,
and the Holocaust, loom very large indeed; it is little, wonder, then,
that some of the strongest and most compelling historical allusions and
suggestions in the Harry Potter series relate to that era.
Conclusion
Many historians and novelists have pondered and fretted over the
differences between history and fiction. It is an old debate which, given
history’s double character, its attachment both to literature and science,
never goes away but continually re-emerges in new forms. In this essay,
I have been interested less in those places where history and fiction
diverge, than in those vast spaces in which they meet. For historians,
our challenge is to provide, through our reading of the archive in its most
inclusive sense, a rich source of information, analysis and understanding
by which we can contribute to the maintenance of informed public
memory, the circulation of knowledge and the development of historical
insight in a critical and lively public sphere. As such, we should welcome
a novelist who understands that challenge so well. J K Rowling’s sense of
the importance of the archive and of critical historical knowledge is, in
any case, right now, influencing the next generation of historians. I think
that is all to the good.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Anthea Hyslop, Stephen Gapps, Ned Curthoys, Jessie
Mitchell, Penny Russell and John Docker for their helpful comments on
earlier versions of this essay.
About the author
Ann Curthoys is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the
University of Sydney. She has written on questions of Aboriginal history,
race relations and gender in colonial and modern Australia, as well as
on issues of historical theory and writing. Her books include: Freedom
Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (2002); (with John Docker) Is History
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Fiction? (2005, revised edn 2010); (with Ann Genovese and Alexander
Reilly), Rights and Redemption: History, Law, and Indigenous People (2008),
and (with Ann McGrath), How to Write History that People Want to Read
(2009). She is co-editor with Frances Peters-Little and John Docker of
a new essay collection entitled Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and
Indigenous Australia (2010).
Correspondence to Ann Curthoys: ann.curthoys@sydney.edu.au
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