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inherited beliefs.

“Pride and Prejudice” in Harry Potter
    Austen showed the cathartic transformation of her principal players (and thereby her readers) from proud, prejudiced figures wholly subject to first impressions into loving couples who have seen the greater truth about others beyond sensorial knowledge. Ms. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, too, turn on this theme.
    There are at least four principal themes running through these novels: prejudice, choice, change, and love’s victory over death—and prejudice may be the pivotal theme of the four. Every book is loaded with reminders of how everyone but the long-suffering, brilliant, and saintly (Lupin, Hermione, and Dumbledore, respectively) is captive to their preconceptions about others and usually almost brutal in their unkindness to the objects of their prejudice.
    We have, of course, the constant of “proper wizard pride” by which all nonmagical people, indeed, even magical brethren that are not “pure-blood” witches and wizards, are held in disdain. The Muggles we meet, too, hate the abnormality of the people living in Harry’s world. The poor, the clumsy, the awkward, the stupid, the ugly, and the unpopular at Hogwarts are also shown to have a hard time. Even the “Nearly Headless” ghost is a second-class citizen among the properly “Headless” ghosts and prevented from participating in the annual Headless hunt.
    Magical folk seem preoccupied, like Jane Austen’s characters, with the birth condition or circumstances of others over which they had no choice or control rather than on the quality of their characters. Ron learns Hagrid is a half-giant in Goblet of Fire , and, though he has been Hagrid’s friend for three years, learning this news really disturbs him because of the wizard prejudice against giants. We see the same or similar responses with respect to noble centaurs, house-elves, and even werewolves. Hagrid even has a few unkind words for foreigners in Goblet of Fire to show he has his own prejudices to get over.
    And this prejudice is institutional as well. The Ministry of Magic refuses to promote Arthur Weasley, in the opinion of his wife, because he lacks proper wizard pride, and though the Ministry opposes the Death Eaters’ attacks on Muggles, they certainly share Voldemort’s contempt for them. Magical media, too, especially the Daily Prophet , transmits and reinforces the prejudices of witches and wizards in almost every story we read. The coverage of news is so biased and irresponsible that when they do report a story correctly Dumbledore notes that “even the Daily Prophet ” gets one right on occasion.
    The ubiquity of prejudice in the magical and Muggle worlds isn’t what makes the prejudice theme the pivotal one in the series. The obstacles to the successful resolution of the other themes—love’s defeat of death, freewill choice, and personal transformation or change—are essentially prejudice. You simply cannot be loving, capable of unjaundiced decision making, or capable of change when bound by personal prejudice and pride. The big twist at which the books aim, too, turns on the revelation of Harry’s foundational misconception and the change in him if he realizes and transcends this misunderstanding.
    You’ll recall that Ms. Rowling believes that the surprise ending of Emma is “the best twist ever in literature.” She has said that this finish is “the target of perfection” at which she is aiming with her plot construction. Just as the key to Darcy and Elizabeth’s engagement in Pride and Prejudice was his seeing past his pride and her overcoming her prejudice, a victory repeated with Emma Woodhouse in the later novel, Harry’s victory over Lord Voldemort must come through love and after the revelation of an unexpected “back” to a revered or reviled “front.” Harry, like Emma, Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Elizabeth, however, had to transcend his pride as a Gryffindor and free himself of his “old