Harry Potter and the Master Race: A Deconstruction of the Superiority of Wizards over Muggles
I. Introduction
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been heralded as an allegory vilifying the evils of Nazism. There are similarities between how Nazis determined blood purity and the difference between ‘Jewish blood’ and ‘Aryan blood’ and the Mudbloods, Half-bloods and Purebloods of the novel. In the face of all this, it still seems as though there is a superior ‘race’ or group of people in the novel: the Wizards, at least in comparison to the Muggles, because Wizards have magical powers and Muggles do not. The true status of Muggles in relation to Wizards, in an objective sense, is an open question. This paper reasons towards the equality between both magical and non-magical people.
II. The Flawed Logic of Pureblood Enthusiasts
Pureblood enthusiasts believe that Wizard involvement with Muggles is a horrendous travesty, and ‘Mudblood’ and ‘Half-blood’ are used as insults to show the lower status of Wizards who come from a Muggle or part-Muggle background. Ron Weasley explains the insult in more detail after Draco calls Hermione a Mudblood: “Mudblood’s a really foul name for someone who is Muggle-born – you know, non-magic parents. There are some Wizards – like Malfoy’s family – who think they’re better than everyone else because they’re what people call Pureblood” (The Chamber of Secrets (TCS) 116). Some see Wizards as more ‘pure’ and therefore more powerful when born into a purely magical family. Voldemort restates this point of view when explaining why he picked a new name for himself. He asks Harry, “You think I was going to use my filthy Muggle father’s name forever? I, in whose veins runs the blood of Salazar Slytherin himself, through my mother’s side? I, keep the name of a foul, common Muggle?” (TCS 314). Voldemort calls his own father “filthy” because the man did not have the ability to use magic. Voldemort also goes on to kill his own father. It is no accident that this kind of thinking is aligned with the villain’s side, the evil side, of the story.
This way of thinking is flawed because the degree of Muggle blood does not indicate by any means a person’s magical abilities. Hermione, a Mudblood, is the top student in her class, whereas Neville Longbottom, from a Pureblood family, is a poor student at least in his first few years of schooling (TCS). When Voldemort gains power over the Ministry, he makes it the purview of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to enforce Wizardry descent, and Wizards are stripped of their wands when they are unable to prove Pureblood ancestry. The courtroom scene is chilling; a Witch faces persecution, and Dolores Umbridge presides. She is asked “Could you please tell us from which witch or wizard you took that wand?” and she answers truthfully “It – it chose me”; Umbridge laughs while she cries (TDH 262). Of course, the Witch in question is telling the truth; Ollivander gives wands only to the magical community, and the wand chooses the Wizard. The discrimination between different sorts of Wizarding blood seems pointless because every Wizard can perform the same quality of magic regardless of who their parents are. The prejudice towards Muggles seems to have some objective, rational, and true basis, as they are not magical.
III. The (Correct?) Logic of Wizard Supremacists
Albus Dumbledore, who goes on to be a staunch advocate of Muggle rights, explicitly states the supposed superiority of Wizards in his youth. He makes plans with dark Wizard Grindelwald to take over the Muggle world because of the non-magic population’s inferiority, for their own good. In a letter to Grindelwald, Dumbledore writes, “Your point about Wizard dominance being FOR THE MUGGLES’ OWN GOOD – this, I think, is the crucial point. Yes, we have been given power and yes, that power gives us the right to rule, but it also gives us responsibilities over the ruled” (The Deathly Hallows (TDH) 357). His point that “we have been given power” and that “power gives us the right to rule” makes clear that Wizard supremacists believe magical ability makes them worth more than Muggles. When Harry infiltrates the Ministry of Magic while it is under Voldemort’s control, he finds similar rhetoric. In a file on Arthur Weasley, he finds the description “Pureblood, but with unacceptable pro-Muggle leanings” (TDH 251). Voldemort’s uncle Morfin attacked Muggles, and Voldemort himself threatens Minister Fudge with Muggle, revealing severe anti-Muggle tendencies, tendencies that are also alluded to in Malfoy’s ancestors (The Half-Blood Prince (THBP)). The violence towards Muggles may be misplaced, but perhaps not the Wizard supremacist attitudes; after all, Wizards are endowed with tremendous powers not available to Muggles.
So far the only evidence presented for Wizard superiority has come from Pureblood enthusiasts and Wizard supremacists, but there does seem to be an objective answer to the question of Wizard superiority. This comes from a conversation between the Muggle Prime Minister and Minister of Magic in THBP. The Minister of Magic forces a meeting with the Muggle Minister, a process which includes the promise to “arrange for the President to forget to call. He will telephone tomorrow night instead,” a feat which itself offers reasons to believe in the superiority of Wizards, who can rearrange Muggle affairs with ease (THBP 3). When Fudge arrives, the Muggle Minister tells him, “I have a country to run and quite enough concerns at the moment,” in answer to not knowing the goings-on of the Wizarding world (THBP 10). Fudge’s reply is the first in a series that suggests an objective reason for the superiority of the Wizarding ‘race,’ “We have the same concerns… The Brockdale Bridge didn’t wear out. That wasn’t really a hurricane. Those murders were not the work of Muggles” (THBP 10). The reason is this: Muggles see the world, not as it is, but as Wizards want them to see it. Muggles do not know the truth of a lot of what happens, and this is a result of magic. When Muggles see events as they unfold, Wizards have methods to change how Muggles perceive what occurred. For example, when Muggles see the true cause of “trees uprooted, roofs ripped off, lampposts bent,” which is not a hurricane, like Muggles think, but Death Eaters and giants, “Obliviators [modify] the memories of all the Muggles who saw what really happened” (THBP 13). The magical ability to tinker with Muggle minds, and therefore not just the world, but how they see it, should cement the superiority of Wizards.
It seems intuitive that people with magic are ‘better’ than people without magic. At first glance, this view seems counter to J.K. Rowling’s intentions as an author because one commonly noted theme of the series is equality, particularly among Wizards, as well as equality between Wizards and other magical creatures such as house elves and goblins. However, she is quoted in an interview as saying, “I saw [a Nazi blood chart] in the Holocaust Museum in Washington when I had already devised the ‘pure-blood’, ‘half-blood’ and ‘muggle-born’ definitions and was chilled to see that the Nazis used precisely the same warped logic as the Death Eaters,” parallels which further show the flaws in Pureblood logic ("Author 'chilled' to Learn..."). She calls the distinctions between Pureblood, Half-blood, and Muggle-born as “warped logic” similar to Nazism, but is noticeably silent on the status of Muggles in her universe. The delineations among Wizards are clearly wrong, but whether Wizards are superior to Muggles is an open question.
IV. Moving Towards a Total Equality
The answer, which affirms the other themes of equality and extends it to apply to Muggles as well, in part lies in the reasoning of Wizards who defend Muggle rights. On the underground radio, auror Kingsley tells stories of wizards and witches “risking their own safety to protect Muggle friends and neighbors, often without the Muggles’ knowledge” and goes on to justify these actions with the following logic: “We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving” (TDH 440). It is clear from this statement that Wizards who believe in the equality of Muggles believe so because of a fundamental humanity that extends to both Wizards and Muggles.
It is more than just being human that makes Wizards equal to Muggles, it is the possession of a soul. The fact that Muggles have souls is proven through how the Dementors behave towards Harry Potter’s cousin Dudley in The Order of the Phoenix (TOP). Dementors can ‘kiss’ a person and remove his or her soul, so when a Dementor is seen “lowering its hooded head towards Dudley’s face as though about to kiss him” it proves that Muggles have souls; if Muggles did not have souls, Dementors would not be able to kiss them (TOP 19). Harry later explains the incident to his aunt and uncle, saying “Of course they didn’t get his soul, you’d know if they had” (TOP 34). Because Dementors can kiss Muggles, and because (according to Harry) a Muggle would look or act differently if his soul had been taken, Muggles have souls just like Wizards. Even though Muggles do not share in Wizards’ magical abilities, both groups of people have some fundamental part of them that is the same.
The soul does not seem to connote the same meaning of ‘soul’ in the Christian sense of the word as an answer to what happens after death because the series does not offer any conclusive answers to that question. An example of the non-answers the series provides is Nearly-Headless Nick’s reply to Harry’s question “what happens when you die, anyway,” which is simply “I cannot answer” (TOP 861). Because Rowling does not get any plot value out of the souls, they operate as more of a symbol than a literal Christian ‘soul’ because of the non-answers to the afterlife. The symbolic soul is just an intrinsic part of being human that both Muggles and Wizards have, and Dumbledore offers an answer for what this intrinsic part is when he talks to Harry after his adventures in the Chamber of Secrets. Harry wants to know what makes him different from Voldemort when they share so many similarities and the Sorting Hat wanted to put him in Slytherin. Dumbledore answers him with the following: “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities” (TCS 333). In context, “abilities” means parseltongue and other abilities Voldemort transferred to Harry when trying to kill him, but the same exact logic can also be applied to magical abilities. Therefore, Muggles and Wizards are equalized because both groups share in the basic human quality of choice. Even though Wizards have extraordinary powers compared to Muggles, both have the same fundamental power intrinsic to being human, the freedom to choose and therefore decide for themselves “what [they] truly are.”
V. Conclusion
On the surface, the Harry Potter series offers a clear-cut theme of equality between all people, particularly through how the novel handles the distinctions between Purebloods, Half-bloods, and Mudbloods. On further examination, the issue is more complicated than that – one begins to wonder if there is a ‘master race’ of sorts in that the Wizards possess great powers that Muggles do not, which suggests the superiority of the Wizard 'race.' However, Wizards and Muggles are fundamentally equal because both groups possess a soul, which is perhaps symbolic for the shared and intrinsically human power to choose. Even though there is a divide in the abilities between the two groups, abilities matter less than the freedom of choice, as Dumbledore says. This provides reason to believe Kingsley when he says all human lives are worth the same, even in the face of all evidence that points to the contrary. The level of ability does not matter; it is what a person chooses to do with those abilities that really counts.
Works Cited
"Author 'chilled' to Learn Harry's Half-blood Status Has Nazi Parallels." The Scotsman. The
Scotsman, 28 July 2004. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter: And The Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic, 1999. Print.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York: Scholastic, 2004. Print.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. New York: Random House/Listening Library,
- Print.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. New York, NY: Arthur A. Levine, 2007. Print.
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