"Beasts," "Beings," and Everything Between: Environmental and Social Ethics in Harry Potter

Abstract

This paper examines J.K. Rowling's fictional textbook, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, alongside the Harry Potter series, exploring how Rowling questions official academic discourse that defines boundaries between the human and nonhuman. By creating magical characters that straddle the line between "beast" and "being," as defined by fictional scholar Newt Scamander, Rowling blurs the boundary between human and animal and questions the treatment of the nonhuman as subhuman that results from such firm boundaries. At the same time, in other areas of her novels Rowling seems to reiterate the division of the human from the nonhuman, and seems to maintain a hierarchy of power that positions fully human characters over their nonhuman - and "part-human" - counterparts. The weakened boundary between beast and being complicates any discussion of the novels' social agenda, particularly regarding what many critics have perceived as Rowling's racial stereotyping of her part-human characters according to white, imperialist tropes. The result is an ambiguous code of environmental and social ethics that hinges on the question of what it means to be a being - human - as opposed to a beast - animal - and whose right it is to define these important legal and social categories.