"Powerful Infatuations": The Love Potion and Harry Potter’s Ethics of Consent

Abstract

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been remarkably successful on a global scale, and have been lauded for their optimistic, affectively celebratory visions of justice, ethics, and individual freedom. At the same time, a number of scholars including Farah Mendlesohn, Jack Zipes, and Maria Nikolajeva have pointed out the problematic conservatism and ethical insufficiency of the texts’ moral visions, which perpetuate a stultifying vision of autonomy. In this article, I seek to highlight the ideological roots of this vision in a late capitalist rationale of self-interest, with a focus on the texts’ treatment of romantic relationships and issues of consent, by analysing depictions of the love potion. My article explores the different narrative strategies employed in Harry Potter to shift readerly attention away from the problematic aspects of a magical commodity, whose function is to manipulate consent and autonomy, by instead highlighting them as amusing, largely harmless artefacts of wizardly childhood. Such strategies, as shall be explored, range from comic relief and abrupt narrative breaks in the form of foils to reversal of real-world gender associations and sanitisation of teenage romantic narratives. By examining how a popular fantasy text dilutes the issues of consent and coercion with reference to such an object, I seek to illuminate how the contemporary neoliberal ethos of the books participates in the reconfiguration of autonomy in terms of individual self-interest. Such a reconfiguration has a pervasive and significant influence not only on socio-economic behaviour, but also on cultural depictions of socio-romantic agency and perceptions of consent, autonomy, and manipulation