Blog Post 9

Blog Post 9

Read “‘Kidlit’ as ‘Law-And-Lit’: Harry Potter and the Scales of Justice” by William P. MacNeil

Choose a complex passage or idea to read closely and actively:

• What is it saying generally?
• What specific phrases or ideas do you need to focus on?
• How does it connect to surrounding passages, or to the broader point of the essay?
• What interpretive questions does it raise for you?
• How would you present “the work” of this passage to another reader?

Male house elves are from Mars, female house elves are from Venus?  The text seems to cock a satirical snook at the current “battle of the sexes” in exchanges like these, but may also point to a more serious proposition, long maintained by critical legal feminists:¹⁶ that what may work for men — contract, autonomy, rights — may not even speak to, let alone address women’s concerns for connection, community and context, and, often, will result in a juridico-political “silencing,” even more final and forceful than the one Winky “keeps,” as a good house elf, over her master’s secrets (p. 467). So the narrative airs, here, a wider “hermeneutics of suspicion,” rife  in, and bedeviling critical legal circles, that rights discourse, and indeed the law itself, might be  highly problematic strategies for change: something that “you can’t live with, and can’t live without.” Specifically, how do you change a system’s status inequities — its gender, race and class “intersections”¹⁷ through the very instrument of those inequities, namely the law? Or to reformulate the question in terms of agency rather than structure: how do you name someone as  a legal subject  —  that is,  the bearer of rights — without negating her through the “lack” that the law installs in its severance of feudalism’s ties?¹⁸In short, is the law a symptom or a solution? a hindrance or a help? a friend or a foe? That seems to be the philosophical  anxiety driving the novel’s very ambiguous representation of rights, and, perforce, the law.

MacNeil comments on a distinction between male and female house elves he witnesses in Harry Potter.  This passage takes a feminist approach through analyzing inequities women face.  The previous passage notes the difficulty of assuming elves’ gender based on physical appearance alone.  It’s Winky’s voice, which women are often denied, that genders her when compared to Dobby’s.  MacNeil situates the feminist approach within the broader context of the article by focusing on law.  Of course law favors men – it has historically and still does in many contemporary settings.  More specifically it favors whitemen.  I question, however, from where MacNeil concludes that women seek connection and community (not that they don’t, but I’m not sure I see the evidence).  The inadequacies of the law, as MacNeil suggests, make it susceptible as a mechanism of change.  A radical approach (like one Angela Davis dreams of) is the only solution; I believe Marxist critics would agree.  Law appears to create more questions than answers.  The questions MacNeil raises do lead to “philosophical anxiety,” as the law is supposed to be self-evident.  If it’s not the agency we desire, how do we change it?