Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling has to be one of my favorite books in the Harry Potter series. If you don't know, Harry Potter is a young wizard who is famous for defeating the most evil wizard of all time. This evil wizard is named Voldemort, and as he slowly regains power, he is after revenge. Voldemort in this book is finally about to regain power completely, and his followers called Death Eaters are returning to him. Harry has two best friends, Hermione and Ron. In this book Harry is entered into a dangerous competition in which the person that entered him hopes he will die. This person ends up being one of Voldemorts followers. But as Harry struggles to survive, I noticed that there are other things going on in the text that are more complex than they seem. These things generally represent racism and equality.
One example of this is when Hermione starts a campaign for Elf rights. In the book, there are creatures called House Elves and they serve as slaves to wizard families. I found that these elves may represent those who are discriminated against in our world such as African Americans in the United States of America or Jews in Europe during World War II. Another thing to prove this is that the wizards are actually against the elves having equal rights much like Americans after the Civil War. For example on page 114 it says, "Even as Hermione began to plead with him, Hagrid still refused to sign up for S.P.E.W." Hagrid is a good friend of Harry's and he is fascinated by magical creatures such as House Elves, but the fact that he wouldn't help them to obtain equal rights still shows that he is infact racist against these creatures whether they fascinate him or not. And by showing this, you can now see how she represented the controversy that the issues of slavery and equal rights had.
Another thing that really reveals a hidden message about racism is the antagonists. Voldemort's original goal was to rid the world of all people who aren't of pure magical descent. Before Harry defeated him, Voldemort led his Death Eaters on campaigns in which he terrorized Muggles ( regular people who aren't magic), Mudbloods ( those who are magic but have non-magic parents), and anyone who got in there way. Young readers don't really have to wonder why he did this, because all they have to know is that he was evil. But if you look deeper, the real reason that Voldemort treated these people this way was because he was racist! And if you look even further, Voldemort is a lot like Adolf Hitler, and the Death Eaters are a lot like the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. And since J.K. Rowling portrayed these people as the bad guys, you can clearly see that her view on racism was that it was bad. So a hidden message that I found is that racism is wrong and unjust.
So despite the amazing stories that the Harry Potter books contain, there are also hidden messages about our world within the pages that are represented by symbolism and just the way she describes these symbols that eventually gave way to show that she was against racism. But a person wouldn't read these books once and say that the stories are about racism. Infact, they may not even notice that there was anything about this issue. And that is why when you can look closer at the text, you can find these hidden themes. I think it is amazing that J.K. Rowling could create such an amazing story and still include such a meaningful and interesting message, hidden within those hundreds of pages.
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