Social Activism
According to Philip Nel of Kansas State University, the Potter series can be seen as "political novels that critique racism and racial superiority. Rowling, who worked for Amnesty International, evokes her social activism through Hermione's passion for oppressed elves and the formation of her "Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare." Dobby the house elf has been compared to the labour lawyer Dobby Walker who introduced Rowling's heroine, Jessica Mitford, to the Communist Party. Hermione is depicted as starting a campaign to emancipate the enslaved House elves, using the methods of real-world campaigns on social and political issues such as badges with slogans. She persists in this campaigning also when it is considered quixotic even by her close friends and not much appreciated even by most of the House elves themselves. But in Deathly Hallows the campaign turns out to have had enormous unforeseen results, with House elves joining the struggle and making several indispensable contributions to Voldemort's final defeat and saving the main protagonists' lives. Rowling said in an early interview that Hermione and her political conscience about the rights of elves was fairly autobiographical.
Read more about this topic: Politics Of Harry Potter
Famous quotes containing the word social:
“After school days are over, the girls ... find no natural connection between their school life and the new one on which they enter, and are apt to be aimless, if not listless, needing external stimulus, and finding it only prepared for them, it may be, in some form of social excitement. ...girls after leaving school need intellectual interests, well regulated and not encroaching on home duties.”
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