Expelliarmus!: Retaliation and peaceable outcomes in the Harry Potter series.

  • Janet Iafrate St Basil Academy

Abstract

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga can be considered, in a contemporary political context, a liberal-slanted series with a setting that includes corrupt government, resistance to injustices, ideal characters, and underlying messages about how to treat people.  This focus is enlarged in this article to include the treatment of, and retaliation against, criminals, enemies and villains.  While compassion toward kind, lovable characters like Hagrid and Lupin is easy to achieve, Rowling does something even more radical when she asks her readers to examine the actual treatment of the unlovable, irredeemable enemies in the story, and suggests that in order to defeat our enemies, we must make different and ultimately better choices than those enemies. 

Author Biography

Janet Iafrate, St Basil Academy
Javid Beagley is Lecturer in Children's Literature and Literacy at La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, Victoria, Australia, where he teaches units in Genres, History, Australian and Post-colonial children's literature. He has previously taught in secondary schools, and has been a school and university librarian.
Issue
Vol. 13 No. 3 (2009)
Section
Jabberwocky
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