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Becoming Familiar: Witches and Companion Animals in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.2019.0009

1543-3374

Elizabeth Ezra,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

Becoming Familiar:Witches and Companion Animals in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials Elizabeth Ezra (bio) It is notable that two of the most popular YA series of the last twenty-five years depict significant relationships between witches, or female sorcerers, and their companion animals. In both the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling (1997–2007) and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), witches are marked out as different from other characters largely by virtue of their totemic association with a particular animal—in Rowling's series, the cat, and in the Pullman trilogy, the bird. Through their portrayal of witches and the animals associated with them, Harry Potter and His Dark Materials not only reveal the links between two marginalized groups—animals and women—but they also allegorize different ways of negotiating differences between oneself and others. The most prominent witches in Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Minerva McGonagall, exist in proximity with and are even shown (to varying degrees) transforming into cats, suggesting a model of social relations based on fluidity and identification; whereas in His Dark Materials, witches display an unusual capacity to be separated from their bird daemons, evoking an ethics of alterity based on distance or differentiation. Examining these series in tandem makes legible these alternatives, highlighting the liminal status of both women and animals while at the same time providing a sense of some characters' alliances with—or against—oppressive hierarchical structures. This essay will explore each model of social relations in turn (depicted in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, respectively) in order, finally, to propose a third ethical model that draws on aspects of each and that may be extended beyond the fictional worlds of these works. While there are a number of studies devoted to religion in Harry Potter and especially in His Dark Materials,1 few have examined the ethical dimension of these works outside a religious context, and those that have done so have taken a different approach to the one I adopt here.2 Similarly, a number of scholars have focused on gender in Harry Potter or in His Dark Materials,3 but none has examined the representation of witches and their companion animals as a potential allegory of the negotiation of difference among human beings. Although this essay focuses on different types of relationships between witches and their [End Page 175] companion animals, the allegorical force of these connections extends beyond the specific contours of each relationship, suggesting different ethical frameworks of social relations based on identification and alterity, respectively. This essay will explore the limits and possibilities of each framework within the works studied, ultimately proposing an ethical model that recognizes both the differences between individual subjects (whether human or nonhuman) and the importance of minimizing those differences. The word "familiar" is a cognate of "family," and familiars certainly exhibit a closeness and companionship with their witches, with whom they share certain attributes—e.g., a perceived aloofness, as with cats, or the ability to fly, in the case of birds. Witches and familiars are also linked by magic, which in some cases gives the former the ability to transform into the latter. I will use the term "familiar" to refer to any animal that acts as a companion to a witch, although the term will be applied here specifically to cats in Harry Potter and birds in His Dark Materials. This use of "familiar" diverges from Rowling's use of the term in her epitextual comments on Pottermore, the official Web site devoted to promoting the Harry Potter series, where she contends that the animals in these books are not technically familiars: Familiars, in the strictest sense, do not exist within the world of Harry Potter. Although Hogwarts students are permitted to bring animals to school with them, the cats and rats we see there are, broadly speaking, pets. (Rowling, "Familiars") Despite the author's own rejection of the term "familiar" to describe some of the animals in Harry Potter, two of the animal companions of the three central characters do in fact fulfill at least some of the functions of familiars as Rowling describes them: The concept of "familiars" has...