Sorcerer. Wizard. Witch. What in the heck do these words
even mean? Are they titles given to those who have worked hard to study the
magical arts, or are they labels for beings we are too afraid of not to give a
name to?
I actually do not care much for J.K. Rowling’s celebrated Harry Potter series. I didn’t like it as
a kid and my opinion hasn’t been reformed for having read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for a third time now. Everyone
keeps trying to convince me that the series is so great and J.K. Rowling is
such a wonderful writer. It’s not that I dislike her writing…okay well maybe it
is a little bit of that. What can I say? I never liked Charles Dickens either.
Putting everything that annoys me personally aside though, I believe that there
are several things that Rowling does really well with this story.
First of all she defines the extremely complicated concept
of magic in terms that a child could understand. She takes the medium of school
(something that I will argue here that most people have been tortured with) and
makes it fantastical. The typical history class is now the history of magic
class –and what child wouldn’t think that was cool. Potions = chemistry class.
Flying lessons would be something like gym, etc. Secondly, she makes magic less
scary through the idea of education and the tool of the magic wand. In Harry’s
world wizards aren’t just wandering around waving wands without any clue what
they are doing. All witches and wizards receive an education, and can
therefore, practice magic responsibly. Then there is the magic wand. Without a
wand the wizard is unable to practice spells –rendering them basically human. (The
first book doesn’t get much into the ministry of magic, so I won’t touch it
here. But as a limitation on magic it is also important to my point.)
My absolute favorite thing that J.K. Rowling does for magic
is exploring the concept of the fear of the unknown or the nameless. Witches
and wizards have been feared for centuries because science and general
reasoning cannot define magic. People are scared of them because they can’t
quite explain what they are. This same concept goes along with any humanoid
mythical creature you might want to name: vampire, werewolf, demigod. Yet, we
still think that they are cool. Ex: TWILIGHT (yes I went there), Teen Wolf,
Hercules.
We are afraid of vampires, yes? But are we all afraid of
sparkly Edward Cullen? I’m not really trembling over here. Are we afraid of the
Disney movie Hercules? Not a chance, we can go the distance. And we aren’t
really afraid of Merlin or Harry Potter either. But we ARE afraid of A vampire; of
A sorcerer. Voldemort is a kind of
tool for this. “He who must not be named” is terrifying before we ever meet him
because he is without a name. He is undefined and without limitation. As
Dumbledore says to Harry, “Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper
name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself” (298). Perhaps
this is the reason that the name/term “wizard” even exists at all.
How do we account for the fact that these different names - witch, wizard, sorcerer - are seemingly interchangeable on one level and yet have come to have different connotations? Why is a "wizard" generally associated with a wise old man who uses his powers for good, for education, for whatever type of benevolent reason you can conceive ... but a witch has come to have a negative, if not evil, connotation? Is this a simple matter of gender bias? Do women with mysterious and unknown sources of power automatically trigger a fear response?
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that Rowling does use the gendered names - that there aren't girl-wizards as well as boy-wizards at Hogwarts. Perhaps this is an attempt to put these words - and thus the associations of women and men who wield power - on a level playing field?