Only a woman could have written Harry Potter
Tiana Lowe
The New York Times probably regrets letting staffers bully Bari Weiss to the point of resignation. Weiss’s new journalism project, the Free Press, continues to embarrass the corporate media and transform Substack into a legitimate competitor.
Standing out from the Free Press’s already prolific reporting is its new podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.
The show, which includes exclusive interviews with the Harry Potter author, delves into the controversy surrounding her. This includes not only contemporary liberals protesting Rowling over her opposition to letting men into women’s shelters and prisons, but also the initial protests from religious fundamentalists, who first turned Rowling’s legendary series into the most banned books of the 21st century.
So far, the Free Press has published just three riveting episodes, but they already confirm the obvious: The literary triumph of Harry Potter could only have ever been written by a woman.
As devotees of the series likely know, the first book emerged from the ashes of Rowling’s most troubled years. Shortly after the premature death of her mother, Rowling, who moved to Portugal to teach English and escape her grief, wound up pregnant in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship. After dreaming up the concept of “a scrawny, little, black-haired, bespectacled boy [who] became more and more of a wizard to” her, Rowling began writing the manuscript for what would become the third bestselling novel of all time. In the podcast, Rowling details her clandestine mission to sneak pages of the book from her home to her office as she planned to leave her abusive husband. After six years of writing and an escape to her sister in Scotland, a publisher finally picked up the book with one crucial revision: Her name was edited to J.K. Rowling, as marketers feared that a woman author would fail in the fantasy genre.
Although the book became a global phenomenon beloved by boy and girls, men and women alike, the story contains insights, allegories, and relationship dynamics that only a woman dealing with the loss of her mother, becoming a mother herself, and surviving the abuse of a man would have created.
Consider what Dumbledore tells Harry when the boy finds the visages of his late parents in the magical mirror of Erised: “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” The mythical Dementors, which can administer a “kiss” to suck the soul out of a human body, reflect the depression and suicidality Rowling struggled with as a consequence of abuse and loss. The most crucial relationship in the book, other than between Harry and Voldemort, is between Harry and his mother. Her sacrifice of her own life to save her son marks Harry as the world’s only hope to defeat the Hitlerian Voldemort.
Obviously, it is not that men cannot experience painful grief or be victims of abuse themselves. It is rather that Rowling’s specific female experience of that chain of motherhood and pain — as well as the idiosyncratically female perspective of trying to gestate and protect the human living inside her from the violence of an intimate partner and a cruel world — are fundamental to the magic of Harry Potter.