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I see these creatures have recently been deemed 'problematic' and JKR is accused of 'promoting slavery', amid other nonsense.
Despite being British, I wasn't aware of the folklore of these creatures cleaning homes and being too proud to accept payment. Instead, I always assumed they were an allegory for stay-at-home mothers.
Many people look down on SAHM, calling them lazy, unambitious and so on. Sometimes they're accused of wasting opportunities - "Feminists didn't fight for freedom so you could carry on being helpless and dependent upon a man". People make comments like "You must get bored at home all day" and "Don't you want to earn some money too?". You've probably heard about it.
Of course a lot of them are fed up with such social pressure. They say they want to be at home, enjoy looking after kids, and would prefer not to be out working, even if it's the norm and would make life easier. (I don't understand it, but respect it)
Since I was 10 and reading HP for the first time, the house elves always reminded me of that. Activists like Hermione just cannot believe that they're happy in their lifestyle, and try to coax and forcibly drag them out of it. They must be freed!
Did anyone else have similar thoughts, before finding out about the folklore and what these creatures were really based on?
I think you’re overthinking it.
She needed a generic cast of thousands to do the cooking and cleaning, thought of the folklore about pixies and brownies cleaning dairies and houses in exchange for a sauces of milk, and went “right, house elves, cool”, then later she’d thought it through and realised that it wasn’t viable for them to be part of the economy (they hugely outweigh the number of wizards and would skew it), thought “bugger, I’ve accidentally put slaves in the books” and had Hermione get worked up about it to show she didn’t condone it.
But then I think people overthink a lot of things about HP!
I agree. The books are really not that deep.
I think there's a lot of symbolism in the Harry Potter books. Yes, they aren't deep at all in some sort of groundbreaking philosophical sense, but they definitely do have layered meanings. Positively packed with symbolism. For example, the first thing Snape says to Harry in book one has a hidden meaning that is perfectly useless to the plot and readers wouldn't understand until book seven (although they don't ever need to understand it).
The books are clever, that's one of the reasons they're entertaining. I just don't think JK Rowling put as much thought into her worldbuilding* as her fans do. At a certain point you have to be doing a symptomatic reading of the text, not looking for her motivations and judging them as such.
One particular example I can think of is that Seamus Finnigan is always exploding things. Irish readers noticed that because they're used to English people associating them with bombs. There's no way Rowling would have done that intentionally, but you can't rule out an unconscious association on her part.
*I was frustrated as a teen reading these books because the worldbuilding didn't hang together for me. Like, why do the racial minorities at Hogwarts seem to resemble the British empire so closely? Are Padma and Parvati Muggleborn or did British wizards colonize wizard India in their parallel world?
Sorry to be replying so long after, but if you look at the 1991 census for the UK, Harry’s year at Hogwarts matches the ethnic make-up pretty perfectly.
It’s entirely consistent with magical people being evenly distributed through the population regardless of race. Why would there need to be a separate wizarding colonisation of India?
That's my point, though. The parallel wizarding world has the exact same ethnic make-up as the UK, and the UK's ethnic make-up is a direct product of its colonial history. Given that wizards live in a parallel world, have their own history/culture/economy, and rarely take much interest in Muggles, it doesn't make sense that they would have the exact same immigration patterns as Muggles.
I think it does make sense if you assume wizards are equally distributed through the population, and the muggle and wizarding worlds are much more mingled than the purebloods we meet like to pretend. And why wouldn’t Indian and Pakistani wizards immigrate to a country with strong links to their own?
But I also agree that Rowling is writing more as a satire on British society (and school stories) than as a fantasy writer seeking to create a parallel world, and we probably should be reading the books more through that lens.