Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Medieval and Imperial Nostalgia and Abolition in Narnia and the Wizarding World

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2023.a903108

1080-6563

Philip Smith,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Medieval and Imperial Nostalgia and Abolition in Narnia and the Wizarding World Philip Smith (bio) It is an oft-made observation that the genre of children's literature embodies an imperialist ideology. As Hunt and Sands argue, readers of postwar British children's literature might be forgiven for "forgetting that the Empire had disappeared" (48). Clare Bradford similarly asserts that children's books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were "produced within a pattern of imperial culture" (196). Not every writer or critic of children's literature would agree with this characterization of the genre. C. S. Lewis saw himself as anti-colonialist and anti-racist.1 In a discussion of interplanetary exploration, for example, he asserts: "We know what our race does to strangers. … Our ambassador to new worlds … will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell" (World's Last Night 89). A similar rhetoric echoes throughout his Chronicles of Narnia, where the colonialist exploitation of lands and people is presented as unambiguously evil, exemplified in the greedy adventurer Andrew Ketterley who sees in Narnia "unbounded … commercial possibilities" (67). The philosophy espoused in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is similarly one of advocating for the oppressed. Her characters sympathize with and defend those who are marginalized be it due to nonmagical parentage, nonhuman parentage, or lycanthropy. If the moral philosophy of the books could be distilled to a single thesis it might be Kingsley Shacklebolt's assertion, "We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving" (Deathly Hallows 440). Reading Rowling's books, as some critics have argued, is correlated with, and may engender, tolerance and political liberalism. Political scientists Anthony Gierzynski and Kathryn Eddy report of their survey of more than a thousand Harry Potter readers, "being a fan of the series is associated with warmer feelings [End Page 1] toward out-groups and lower levels of the authoritarian disposition" (74). The assertion that every human life has equal value, however, elides the fact that not every character in the books qualifies as human; the books abound with (in Rowling's own taxonomy) nonhuman "beings" whose depiction draws heavily upon racist archetypes.2 Despite both series seeming to espouse a philosophy of sympathy and equity, this paper argues, Lewis's and Rowling's works offer a nostalgic, mythic, and celebratory vision of British history freed of the complications of immigration and the violent realities of imperialism. I do not wish to suggest that Lewis or Rowling engage in a conscious or deliberate rewriting of British history; I contend that the representations of abolitionism in these books can be productively mapped onto trends in British memorialization and education, which seek to downplay Britain's role in the slave trade and slavery, displace imperial guilt, and center the narrative on white abolitionists. Lewis disavows any Narnian complicity in the slave trade and characterizes slavery as a Calormene (which is to say, "Oriental") practice. Rowling adds credence to anti-abolitionist arguments and evokes nineteenth and early-twentieth century Black stereotypes in her portrayal of the enslaved. Both series, I argue, engage forms of nostalgia for eras with different and "simpler" racial dynamics; in Lewis's works, British school children find themselves in a pseudo-medieval world before the transatlantic slave trade; in Rowling's works a British school boy finds himself in a pseudo-Victorian world of sharp class distinctions and elaborate balls, where slavery is an integral (indeed, a mutually enriching) part of social life.3 To provide context for Lewis's and Rowling's representations of slavery and abolition, I seek first to describe Britain's national narratives of the slave trade. In 1562, British trader John Hawkins hijacked a Portuguese ship and went on to sell the three hundred enslaved Africans aboard. This moment is generally recognized as the first British intervention in the slave trade. Britain went on to establish territories, beginning with Barbados in 1627, which functioned through the labor of the enslaved. By the eighteenth century, Klas Rönnbäck calculates, between 5% and 11...