A sandwich

[stephab67]

No: HPFGUIDX 178659

Eggplant:
> > I profoundly disagree! I believe the house elf sub thread is
> > one of the (but adamantly not the only) things that elevates
> > Rowling's story from being just a very entertaining tale into
> > being a work of art.
<SNIP>

> Prep0strus:
<SNIP>
> Originally, it appeared to be a very obvious treatise on
> slavery (much as the pureblood storyline was an obvious
> analogy for nazis), which was fine.  We got our adorable
> sidekick Dobby, longing for freedom, which is granted by
> Harry. Then our moral center, Hermione, has learned something
> about the world and tries to change it for the better, helping
> wizards and elves alike see how things could be different.
<SNIP>

Steph:
Part of the problem here is that, with the exception of the
Epilogue, which is just a small snapshot of the future, we
actually don't know what happened to the house elves after
Voldemort's defeat.  Did Hermione go on to help free them?
Maybe she did.  Given that there was so much else going on
in the WW at the time, freeing the house-elves was probably
fairly low on the priorities list.  Getting rid of Voldemort,
the guy who was the biggest proponent of racism in the WW, was.
For all we know, all the house-elves were freed, and the goblins
got wands.

I might have mentioned this in another thread, but we have to
remember that JKR wrote the house-elves as NOT wanting to be
freed, and in fact, it was seen by most of them to be a
dishonorable situation (see Winky - she considered it to
be akin to being fired).  I didn't read this to mean that
she thought that they SHOULDN'T be freed, just that they'd
been slaves for so long (maybe forever?) that it wasn't a
situation they had even considered and therefore was completely
out of their frame of reference. They were mostly concerned with
being treated well and respected by their masters.  This is what
the discussions the characters had about the house-elves were
primarily about.  Hermione was our stand-in (and I'm going to
step out on a limb to say JKR's as well): the house-elves are
slaves, and anything less than freeing them and paying them for
their work is unacceptable.

Harry is oddly oblivious to the situation, which is strange
because he grew up in the Muggle world, where slavery is
considered to be utterly morally wrong.  His only opinions
of house elves come from Dobby and Kreacher. Ron, not really
ever having a house-elf serve him until he gets to Hogwarts,
is somewhere  in the middle: he thinks they should be treated
well, but also thinks they want to be slaves.

I don't really think Hermione changed her mind about freeing the
elves, I think she just might have realized that it would take a
lot of education on a lot of people's parts to get the ELVES to
realize that they shouldn't be slaves.  Ron seems to have made
the biggest leap as he realizes that it's morally wrong to ask
them to die for the people who own them (and gets his snog out
of Hermione).  Harry, I think, just really wants a sandwich and
probably wasn't thinking of the moral implications of asking
Kreacher to get him one after what he'd just been through. Not
saying it's right, I'm just sayin'.

Lealess wrote:
It seemed to be an anti-slavery story at one time. It ended up
being anything but.

Steph:
Well, I think that's going a bit too far in the opposite direction.
I'm with those who think that the writing was a bit sloppy in this
storyline, but I don't think that JKR was being nefarious on this
point, trying to send a message that slavery is OK, after spending
seven books telling people that racism is bad.