"I solemnly swear I am up to no good": Foucault's

Heterotopias and Deleuze's Any-Spaces-Whatever in J. K.

Rowling's Harry Potter Series

Sarah K. Cantrell

Children's Literature, Volume 39, 2011, pp. 195-212 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2011.0012

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/434083

Access provided by Australian National University (22 Sep 2018 07:27 GMT)
“I solemnly swear I am up to no good”: Foucault’s
Heterotopias and Deleuze’s Any-Spaces-Whatever in
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series
Sarah K. Cantrell

It is no secret that we live on an endangered planet. In the past year,

we have witnessed catastrophic earthquakes, oil spills, floods, and mine
collapses, all of which lend urgency to calls for greater care of our
environment. As the spaces we inhabit become more endangered, it
is not surprising that fictional spaces are also increasingly imperiled.
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is not an ecology oriented fantasy,
but it does dramatize the tenuous existence of space and place that
we confront in our world. From the bridge collapse, crime wave, and
hurricane that threaten Muggle London in the opening chapter of
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to the devolution of Hogwarts
into a dystopic battleground, I argue that the movement from stable,
fixed places to ambiguous ones teaches protagonists and readers how
to cope with the demands and difficulties of a wider, more complex
world.1 I contend that reading the spaces in the Harry Potter books
in light of Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias or “other spaces,”
and Gilles Deleuze’s espace quelconque or any-space-whatever, highlights
the ways in which ambiguous spaces in our world require the same
mental agility and critical flexibility that Harry, Hermione, and Ron
learn throughout the series.
In this article, I argue that Hogwarts functions as a heterotopia,
a space at once other and separate but also intimately connected to
the world beyond its walls. Still more ambiguous spaces like 12 Grim-
mauld Place, the tent that Harry, Ron, and Hermione share in volume
seven, and most notably, the Room of Requirement—a space within
the place of the school proper—occupy positions similar to Deleuzian
any-spaces-whatever.2 Because these spaces exist at the margins of safety
and danger, their liminality requires Harry and his friends to be “up to
no good”: to resist and subvert adult authority, but also to confront the
limits of agency. These shifts from order to disorder and from safety
to danger suggest that participation and activism—particularly on the
part of young adults—can be powerful means of opposing the abuses
that permeate the spaces in our own world.

Children’s Literature 39, Hollins University © 2011. 195

196 Sarah K. Cantrell

Hogwarts: Scholarly Battleground and Heterotopia

In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), French social theorist Michel de

Certeau defines a space as “a practiced place” (117). Indefinite, abstract
space (espace) becomes a concrete, definitive locale or place (lieu) when
others inhabit or frequent it. In Certeau’s analysis, place “implies an
indication of stability” (117). Hermione’s frequent references to the
fictional tome Hogwarts, A History are indicative of the school’s similarly
stable position in the magical world as the place to which students re-
turn each fall. For scholars, Hogwarts is also what Certeau might call a
“practiced place”—one which reflects and comments on the world we
occupy. If Hogwarts serves as Harry and Voldemort’s ultimate battle-
ground, the school is an equally contentious locale in Potter studies. It
is a measure of Rowling’s strength as a writer that her imaginary school
continues to arouse polyvalent interpretations and passionate readings.
Drew Chappell, Roberta Seelinger Trites, and Elisabeth Rose Gruner
all explore how Hogwarts dramatizes the dynamics of control between
adult teachers and their adolescent students. Trites views Hogwarts as
“an institutional setting of socialization that teaches the protagonist
both his abilities and limitations” (474) and one which “simultaneously
increases and decreases adolescents’ sense of their own power” (475).
If we read Hogwarts through the lens of Michel Foucault’s Disci-
pline and Punish (1975), we see that despite its otherworldly charms,
transfigurations, and enchantments, the school is a site where adults
successfully train students to conform to the practices and expectations
of the wizarding world. Like Trites, Chappell makes the convincing case
that Hogwarts’s curriculum promotes compliance rather than critical
thinking: “students are also confined, restricted from areas on the
Hogwarts grounds, curfewed, and banned from using magic outside
school” (287). Hogwarts exemplifies Foucault’s insistence that schools
engage in “a sort of disciplinary ‘training,’ continuous and compelling,
that ha[s] something of the pedagogical curriculum and something
of the professional network” (Discipline and Punish 1642). Accordingly,
Harry is notified when his use of magic at Privet Drive subjects him to
the panoptic eye of the Ministry of Magic. Percy Weasley’s obedience as
a school prefect grooms him for a position in the Ministry in the same
way that British boarding schools of the nineteenth century prepared
the sons of the middle and upper classes to serve the British Empire.3
Like the standardized tests that control access to higher education and
jobs in our world, Hogwarts similarly channels students’ energies into
Heterotopias and Spaces in Harry Potter 197

exams (O.W.L.s, N.E.W.T.s), that assure the continued stability of the

wizarding community.
In addition to the issue of institutional control, Farah Mendlesohn,
Giselle Anatol, and Jack Zipes have all suggested that with its competing
houses and emphasis on bloodlines, Hogwarts replicates the conserva-
tive hierarchies of class and privilege so evident in such British public
school narratives as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857),
Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co. (1899), and Shane Leslie’s The Oppidan
(1922). Zipes remarks that “Rowling’s books conventionally repeat
much of the same sexist and white patriarchal biases of classical fairy
tales” (186). Such readings are generally critical of Hermione’s limited
role and Hogwarts’s house-elves’ unquestioning acceptance of their
subaltern status.4 For queer theorists Tison Pugh and David L. Wallace,
Hogwarts also maintains a troublesome “heteronormative heroism”
(260) that makes less room for alterity and sexual difference than
more celebratory readings of the school commonly allow. Hogwarts,
these scholars argue, replicates the reader’s world so successfully that
uncritical readers scarcely realize the ways in which the text enacts,
rather than combats, the normative status quo they expect.
In counterpoint to these voices, still others read Hogwarts as a place
that deliberately destabilizes societal norms. Nicholas Sheltrown notes
that Rowling’s “immersive, persistent alternate world [. . .] speaks
directly to a number of problems we face” (47). From this angle, we
might say that the Harry Potter books are literary boggarts, forcing
us to recognize and laugh at our fears and the absurdities of our soci-
ety. In Roni Natov’s analysis, Hogwarts pokes fun at “the rigidity and
fraudulence embedded in our institutions [. . .]” (325), while Karin
Westman maintains that Rowling’s intentional replication of racism
and bigotry, as epitomized by Draco Malfoy, asks readers to consider
how unjust treatment of the Other continues apace in our nonmagical
world: “Hogwarts registers the prejudices based on class and racial dif-
ference that inform the world outside its gates” (323). These scholars
argue that the werewolves, giants, goblins, and Muggle-born magicians
in the Harry Potter books prepare readers to engage in similarly diffi-
cult dialogues regarding difference and inclusion, and promote critical
reappraisal of the reader’s world.
Whereas Natov and Westman focus on Rowling’s version of Hogwarts,
Catherine Tosenberger demonstrates how the castle’s hidden dimen-
sions provide adolescent writers with “a safe space to be ‘strange’ and
‘unusual’” (190). Rowling, she avers, “has left an enormous amount of
198 Sarah K. Cantrell

room for speculation” (203). This spacious, figurative “room” creates

what Tosenberger calls a “space of engagement” (185) for readers to
script homosexual relationship narratives absent from Rowling’s origi-
nal text, and opens a space for writers whose voices are overlooked in
traditional publishing markets. Although it is impossible to catalog the
ever-expanding field of Harry Potter scholarship in the limited space
of this article, this overview gestures toward the multiplicity of inter-
pretations that Hogwarts excites as a fictional space existing nowhere,
but which is nonetheless a practiced and frequented place in Certeau’s
sense of the term. Moreover, Hogwarts’s position as an isolated, dif-
ferent, and therefore other space suggests its heterotopic qualities, to
which this essay now turns.
Maria Nikolajeva’s scholarship on young adult literature frequently
invokes Foucault’s heterotopias or “other spaces” as a theoretical con-
struct for understanding the multiple worlds in contemporary young
adult fantasy. Rowling’s overlapping of the wizarding and nonmagical
Muggle worlds, however, seems to have made this construct less vis-
ible in Potter studies.5 Foucault’s heterotopias account for the spaces
Hogwarts’s castle contains as both different from and analogous to
institutional spaces in our world. In his 1967 lecture, “Des Espaces
Autres” (“Of Other Spaces”), Foucault explains heterotopias as sites
or spaces that “exist out of all places” (24), given that these spaces are
separate and distinct from the ordinary, visible places of home and
work. Entry into these “other spaces” can constitute pleasurable escape,
as is the case for gardens, zoos, cinemas, and motel rooms. Conversely,
when individuals break taboos or transgress accepted legal, medical,
or social boundaries, entry can also be compulsory. Heterotopias of
confinement include prisons, barracks, boarding schools like Hogwarts,
psychiatric hospitals, and ultimately, cemeteries. Insofar as heterotopias
are invisible to those outside their confines, these spaces function as
“no wheres”—spaces that conceal the so-called unsightly from public
view, since in Foucault’s analysis these spaces house the sexually active,
the imprisoned, the mentally ill, or the dead. Harry’s presence at the
school detaches him from Privet Drive and permits the Dursleys to
forget his existence. Hogwarts is similarly disguised from Muggle view
as “a moldering old ruin” (Goblet 166) that makes the castle inaccessible
and invisible to nonwizards.
As is the case with the wizarding world and Muggle London, move-
ment between the public sphere and heterotopias is regulated by sign
systems. Foucault notes that in order to enter a heterotopia, “one must
Heterotopias and Spaces in Harry Potter 199

have a certain permission or make certain gestures” (“Other Spaces”

26). Access to these other spaces depends upon one’s knowledge of
the codes that permit or prohibit entry and exit. Thus, Hagrid’s “If
yeh know where to go” (Sorcerer’s 67) suggests the signs that disguise
the wizarding world from Muggles.6 Like the wizarding spaces hidden
in London, Hogwarts also requires passwords that permit and protect
its spaces from entry. Pronouncements like “dilligrout” and “Mimbulus
mimbletonia” regulate entry into Gryffindor tower; “toffee éclairs” and
“acid pops” open Dumbledore’s office. Finding the Sorcerer’s Stone
requires knowing that Rowling’s version of Cerberus, Fluffy, can be
lulled to sleep with music; the Marauder’s Map reveals or conceals
persons and locations depending upon the proclamations, “I solemnly
swear I am up to no good” and “Mischief managed.” Moving through
space at Hogwarts means students must master the signs that regulate
life at their school, just as adolescent readers learn to navigate the
hallways of their high schools, drive cars, and operate independently
of their parents.
Despite these separate, distinctive qualities, heterotopic spaces also
exist in relationship to the places beyond their borders. The hetero-
topia’s difference, Foucault argues, enacts a commentary on those
places where daily routines occur, such that known and frequented
places “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24).
The heterotopia has the potential to “create a space of illusion that
exposes every real space” (27) insofar as the heterotopia’s strangeness
makes visible what entrants are unwilling or unable to see in their own
world. Hermione’s discussions of house-elf labor and her admission
that “Wizarding history often skates over what wizards have done to
other magical races [. . .]” (Deathly 506) are both easily recognizable
commentaries on the similar erasures in Western constructions of
history. Bill Weasley’s explanation of wizard–goblin conflict (“There’s
been fault on both sides, I would never claim that wizards have been
innocent” [Deathly 517]) suggests that the legacies of colonization,
servitude, and slavery continue to haunt the wizarding world as much
as they do our own.
If Foucault sees the heterotopia as a space apart that is at once sepa-
rate and revelatory, heterotopic other spaces also have the potential to
order and shape the ones whose ambiguity and messiness resist easy
classification. Such heterotopias, he argues, exercise a kind of “com-
pensation” (“Other Spaces” 27) because their clarity simplifies the
complicated places in which everyday life unfolds. As a compensatory
200 Sarah K. Cantrell

heterotopia, Hogwarts initially inspires Harry’s wonder and amaze-

ment: “Harry had never imagined such a strange and splendid place”
(Sorcerer’s 116). In contrast to the neglect and abuse he experiences in
the Dursleys’ house, Hogwarts offers Harry a “dream solution” (Tucker
225): delicious, copious meals appear by magic; chessmen, trading
cards, and portraits speak; mail arrives by owl. For the boy who “had
no one” in Little Whinging (Sorcerer’s 30), Hogwarts is initially a place
to belong, to make friends, and to succeed: “The castle felt more like
home than Privet Drive ever had” (Sorcerer’s 170).7 In contrast to his
invisibility at the Dursleys’, Harry is a highly visible celebrity at Hog-
warts, singled out by the cheers of his fellow Gryffindors, selected by
Professor McGonagall for his Quidditch skills, and a frequent subject
for the camera-toting Colin Creevy.
Scholars also point out that Hogwarts’s enchantment exercises a
similar compensatory function for readers, such that the school acts as
“a ‘real-time’ child’s wishful dream” (Pharr 57). The respective analyses
of David Steege, Lisa Hopkins, and Sarah Maier celebrate the school’s
charms and otherworldly transformations as a space of pleasurable
escape. At the same time, Natov asserts that the school’s otherness
“calls attention to the awe and wonder of ordinary life” (315). Wizards’
fascination with Muggle culture transforms the drudgery of the ordinary
because characters like Arthur Weasley celebrate the technological
modernity (such as batteries, electric plugs, stamps, telephones, and
cars) that readers take for granted.
Nevertheless, Rowling’s school also dramatizes its own heterotopic-
ness through its uncertain structure. Harry confronts a castle whose
shifting structure requires creativity and critical thinking:
there were doors that wouldn’t open unless you asked politely,
or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren’t
really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very
hard to remember where everything was, because it all seemed
to move around a lot. (Sorcerer’s 131–32)
The complexity of Hogwarts’s architecture causes no small measure
of frustration and anxiety for Harry and his classmates. The school’s
changing passwords, fickle portraits, and mercurial poltergeist, Peeves,
provoke a sense of unease. Like Firenze’s lessons, Hogwarts’s magically
moving walls also remind students that “nothing [is] foolproof” (Order
604). Natov reads Hogwarts as “a liminal space that tests the mettle of
the child hero [. . .]” (318), with its profusion of Blast-Ended Skrewts,
Heterotopias and Spaces in Harry Potter 201

biting books, hippogriffs, Thestrals, and Cornish pixies. As a space

where “very little stays still” (Cockrell 15), Hogwarts exists on the bor-
ders of students’ comprehension, and simultaneously suggests readers’
limited knowledge of the world they inhabit.
As a heterotopic space, Hogwarts’s fantastic trappings register a
departure from the readers’ world even as the school’s complexity
also raises issues that readers recognize. Brycchan Carey writes that
Rowling’s castle “continuously invites the reader to draw parallels to
the world beyond her text” (162). Gruner astutely points out that the
school “is home to petty tyrants, boring lecturers, and pedagogical
practices that seemed to have changed little, if any, since the school’s
founding” (221). For all the difference that readers may find in its
charms, transfigurations, and magical creatures, Rowling’s school is
no utopia. Homework—defined by lengths of parchment—is tedious,
not thought-provoking. Professor Snape routinely humiliates students
without cause; the ghostly Professor Binns lectures in perpetuity despite
their obvious boredom; Ron accurately describes Professor Trelawney
as “a right old fraud” (Prisoner 321). Harry admits that classes with Quir-
rell are “a bit of a joke” (Sorcerer’s 134), as are those with the narcissistic
Gilderoy Lockhart.8 Far from liberating students, classes at Hogwarts
merely contain their energies. Conversely, mysteries such as the mirror
of Erised and the Chamber of Secrets, and extracurricular activities
like Quidditch, the Tri-Wizard Cup, and visits to Hogsmeade provoke
their interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm.
Moreover, Harry’s celebrity status as Voldemort’s sole survivor, “the
boy who lived” (Sorcerer’s 17) and “the Chosen One” (Half-Blood 180;
emphasis original) makes him highly visible not only to his admirers
but also to his nemeses. He is a target for Professor Snape’s wrath, Rita
Skeeter’s tabloid journalism, and the Ministry’s political ad campaigns.
Compounding Harry’s unwanted visibility and celebrity are the Hog-
warts teachers confining him to the school’s classrooms with frequent
detentions and preventing him from visiting Hagrid’s hut, going to
Hogsmeade, or playing Quidditch. By the end of the sixth volume,
Harry comes to see his celebrity as such an oppressive burden and a
danger to those he loves that he is forced to leave the school entirely.
As a place, Hogwarts’s stability and rules become stifling. Harry’s
maturity and acceptance of his quest require greater space than the
school affords.
In addition to its troubling curriculum, Hogwarts also replicates the
racism, sexism, and class consciousness of the readers’ world. In West-
202 Sarah K. Cantrell

man’s analysis, wizards’ problems are indicative of “the fervent tensions

between race and class in the ‘real’ contemporary British body politic
[. . .]” (305). The Weasley brothers exclaim that house-elves enjoy their
subaltern status (“They like being enslaved” [Goblet 224; emphasis origi-
nal]; “You’ll put them off their cooking” [Goblet 367]), just as Draco
Malfoy maliciously calls attention to Ron’s poverty (“I’ll bet your family
all sleep in one room—is that true?” [Prisoner 279]), and Hermione’s
mixed race (“filthy little Mudblood” [Chamber 112]). Such pronounce-
ments parrot the systems of institutionalized privilege and oppression
which permeate our world. That so many scholars have found Rowl-
ing’s treatment of alterity so troublesome is perhaps a sign that these
problems are not any easier to combat in fiction than they are outside
it. Accordingly, Carey proposes that Hogwarts illustrates how resolving
long-standing injustices takes time: “not all evils can be done away with
in a day” (171). Social justice is no less complex a task in fiction than
it is in reality. Carey’s assertion is consonant with Harry’s own realiza-
tion of his responsibility to “keep fighting, for only then could evil be
kept at bay, though never quite eradicated [. . .]” (Half-Blood 645). By
investing her protagonists with limitations her readers can recognize,
Rowling’s suggestion seems to be that combating apathy and making
room for difference is challenging, ongoing work.9
Chappell accurately remarks that with its political turmoil and un-
equal treatment of house-elves, werewolves, giants, and goblins, “the
wizarding world becomes a reflection of our own” (292). Similarly,
Kate Behr asserts that the wizarding world “exists only in relation to
the ‘real’ world, echoing/mirroring all of its customs and discourse
[. . .]” (261). Given the prominence of the mirror in Foucault’s theory
of heterotopias, Chappell’s and Behr’s respective word choices (“reflec-
tion,” “mirroring”) are instructive. For Foucault, the mirror renders
place “at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that sur-
rounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has
to pass through this virtual point which is over there” (“Other Spaces”
24). Because Hogwarts is intimately “connected with all the space that
surrounds it” (24), the battle for the school is also a battle for the sur-
vival of the wizarding and Muggle worlds, a connection that Cornelius
Fudge and Rufus Scrimgour emphasize in their visit to 10 Downing
Street in Half-Blood Prince.
In its role as heterotopic mirror, Hogwarts remains equally real and,
in Foucault’s terms, “absolutely unreal.” The mirror, he explains, “is
a placeless place” because it allows us to “see [ourselves] where [we]
Heterotopias and Spaces in Harry Potter 203

are not” (“Other Spaces” 24). As a fictional and therefore “placeless”

school, Hogwarts calls to mind past fictional boarding schools—Thomas
Hughes’s Rugby, Talbot Baines Reed’s St. Dominic’s, Shane Leslie’s
Eton, and Hugh Walpole’s Moffat’s—just as its space invites contem-
porary readers to create their own versions of Hogwarts.10 Existing
nowhere, Hogwarts exists everywhere—in readers’ imaginations, on-
line fanfictions, cinema, and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in
Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure theme park.
Rowling further complicates our understanding of Hogwarts’s unre-
ality by allowing it to devolve from a place of security (“the safest place
on earth was wherever Albus Dumbledore happened to be” [Prisoner
67]) to a dystopia. Dolores Umbridge transforms Hogwarts from a
heterotopia into a thinly disguised arm of the Ministry, stamping out
students’ civil liberties, prohibiting freedom of speech and assembly,
and forcing resistant students like Harry to “do lines” in their own
blood.11 As the tyrant whom even Rowling’s critics “love to hate” (Pugh
and Wallace 271), Umbridge refuses to teach Defense against the Dark
Arts, insisting instead that “theoretical knowledge will be more than
sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what
school is all about” (Order 243). Her equation of school with theory is
consistent with Foucault’s argument that schools are regulatory institu-
tions, designed as “engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality”
whose chief goal is “to produce bodies that [are] docile and capable”
(Discipline and Punish 1637). It is hardly surprising that Umbridge
demands that students read silently and avoid asking questions. Their
outward appearance and speech must meet with her approval and with
her insistence on arbitrary norms of adult control.
Under Umbridge, the atmosphere at Hogwarts resembles the dys-
topia outside its walls. The school ceases to be a heterotopic other
space as it comes to reflect the rampant fear and suspicion in the
wizarding world. Umbridge’s dictatorship as High Inquisitor and the
proliferation of her educational decrees bear out Gruner’s remark that
“[e]ducation is centrally concerned, after all, with power” (218). As she
bans Quidditch and The Quibbler, Umbridge’s hostile takeover confirms
Foucault’s assertion that “the power to punish is not essentially different
from that of curing or educating” (Discipline and Punish 1644). True to
her name, Umbridge quite literally takes umbrage with students like
Harry and Hermione who quibble with her pedagogy. Similar abuses
of power are especially true in the final volume, when the battered
Neville Longbottom explains that the Death Eaters torture students
204 Sarah K. Cantrell

into obedience with the Cruciatus Curse, forcing them to relinquish

control over their own bodies (Deathly 574). In both cases, Harry and
his friends must seek out new spaces in which to resist the Ministry’s
systematic denial of danger and prepare for their subsequent battle
against Voldemort.
Seeking spaces for resistance within their carceral school requires
Harry to use the Marauder’s Map. Like the original Marauders—Remus
Lupin, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, and James Potter—Harry and his
friends commit themselves to the agency and resistance of the map’s
signature phrase, “I solemnly swear I am up to no good” (Prisoner 192).
Because the map plots the invisible and erases the visible, its users
must redefine their relationship to space and to the authorities who
govern it. Both the Marauders and the Weasley twins, who give the
map to Harry, are masters of Hogwarts’s hidden spaces, secret rooms,
and passageways. Like the Marauders, whose status as Animagi allows
them to move through space in disguise, the twins’ jokes (“Gred and
Forge” [Sorcerer’s 202]) play on their similarly indistinguishable identi-
ties. Their talent for mastering space, signaled by their flying car in
Chamber of Secrets, permits their spectacular defiance of Umbridge’s
regime in volume five. As the twins’ havoc transforms Hogwarts into an
unmanageable swamp, their disruption highlights the dystopic control
of space under Umbridge’s vice-grip (Order 674). By frustrating her at-
tempts at order, Fred and George give students a model for their own
resistance and subversion. Being “up to no good” means accepting
danger as the prerequisite for creating spaces that both undermine
authority and protect members of Dumbledore’s Army. These spaces
take the form of the Room of Requirement, 12 Grimmauld Place, and
the invisible tent in which Harry, Hermione, and Ron hide in Deathly
Hallows. Managing the mischief of these spaces means balancing the
subversive agency of the twins’ instructions to “Give [Umbridge] hell”
(Order 675) with Harry’s responsibility to the wizarding world, and
finding spaces whose ambiguity allows them to be similarly flexible.

Deleuze’s Any-Space-Whatever and the Room of Requirement

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986), Deleuze defines the any-space-

whatever, or espace quelconque, as follows:
a perfectly singular space which has merely lost its homogeneity,
that is, the principle of metric relations or connection of its own
Heterotopias and Spaces in Harry Potter 205

parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of

ways. (109)
For Deleuze, the any-space-whatever is a way to understand cinematic
images as “potentials” (109) rather than definitive coordinates.12 Such
spaces lack unity and connection to the objects they contain and the
relationships between those disparate objects. For Gregory Flaxman,
any-spaces-whatever are instead “disconnected, aberrant, schizophrenic
spaces—[which] no longer obey laws of traditional commonsensical
causality” (5). As its name suggests, an any-space-whatever possesses an
unlimited potential for transformation and reconfiguration. Ronald
Bogue writes that Deleuze’s any-space-whatever is “a virtual space whose
fragmented components may be assembled in multiple combinations,
a space of as-yet-to-be actualized possibilities” (80). Given the lack of
definitive, unifying relationships between its multiple parts, the any-
space-whatever is a space of infinite assembly and combination. Whereas
heterotopias remain separate from the places that surround them, the
any-space-whatever possesses the capacity to metamorphose into any
number of potential and contradictory spaces.
As the wizarding world becomes more compromised by evil in the
series’ later volumes, unstable spaces abound. Number 12 Grimmauld
Place is one such tenuous shelter. Dominated by the bigoted shrieks
of Mrs. Black’s portrait, the house is both grim and old; it noticeably
dampens Sirius’s and Harry’s enthusiasm even as it offers temporary
protection. Grimmauld Place is a safe harbor for thought and action,
where Rowling’s protagonists can prepare for battles to come. It is,
however, dangerously permeable to thieves like Mundungus Fletcher
as well as to the Ministry’s spies who discover Harry, Hermione, and
Ron’s hiding place in Deathly Hallows. If Hogwarts School prepares
wizards for the larger world, 12 Grimmauld Place, the Room of Require-
ment, and Harry, Hermione, and Ron’s invisible tent are all similarly
preparatory; each space requires exit for the completion and success
of Harry’s mission.
As an any-space-whatever, the Room of Requirement only appears
when a student seeks it, but it withholds total wish fulfillment. The
Room is a space that limits itself only to the student’s needs, but does
not judge the nature of the seeker’s motives—and therein resides
its complexity and potential for abuse. For the D.A., the Room is a
training-ground and release from the pressure of Umbridge’s Inquisi-
tion, but it also acts as a dangerous repository for the Dark Arts objects
that students no longer need but cannot destroy. Because it exists as
206 Sarah K. Cantrell

a “perfectly singular” any-space-whatever, each Room of Requirement

and those it shelters are invisible to the other inhabitants of Hogwarts.
Lacking apparent connection to the rest of the school, the Room’s
uses—its “linkages” to Hogwarts—are infinite.13 As Dobby tells Harry,
the Room’s uncertain existence does not follow ordinary magical rules:
“[s]ometimes it is there, and sometimes it is not, but when it appears,
it is always equipped for the seeker’s needs” (Order 386–87). For Dum­
bledore, the Room becomes a temporary bathroom (Goblet 417); the
same space gives Dobby a place to care for Winky during the latter’s
alcoholic binges; the Room conceals Tom Riddle’s Horcrux-diadem
and Draco’s vanishing cabinet; and it allows Harry to hide Snape’s
annotated Potions textbook. As a multivalent any-space-whatever, the
Room is safe and dangerous, invisible and permeable, as open to evil
intentions as it is to good ones. The ambiguity of its infinite linkages
suggests that negotiating the Room will be both more costly and more
difficult than it was with previous spaces in the series.
As an inversion of Umbridge’s classroom, the Room of Require-
ment first functions as a protected space in which Harry teaches his
classmates the subversive joy of producing a Patronus: “He and the
D.A. were resisting under her very nose, doing the very thing she and
the Ministry most feared” (Phoenix 397). Like the patron or protector
its name implies, a Patronus fends off despair and depression. Having
a space to practice its creation gives Harry and his friends a sense of
agency. As French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard writes, “[s]pace
calls for action, and before action, imagination is at work” (90). Because
Harry and his friends can remember Hogwarts as a safe yet challeng-
ing place, they can also imagine their school without Umbridge. Their
subversion, in turn, invigorates the student body with hope. Social and
academic outsiders like Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom find
a space to experience their own competence as rebels and heroes. The
use of the Room of Requirement as a space for political resistance in
Order of the Phoenix foregrounds Neville’s later creation of a secret dor-
mitory in Deathly Hallows from which to protest the dystopia Hogwarts
becomes in Harry’s absence. Neville tells Harry that the Room—and
the resistance its presence fosters—“gives everyone hope” (Deathly 574).
Hope is thus understood as the refusal to foreclose on possibility and
the persistence of the student body’s belief in Harry’s quest despite
torture by the Carrows. Similarly, the campers’ conversation that Harry,
Ron, and Hermione overhear in their hidden tent (Deathly 297) reveals
the paradox of their absence. Their invisibility within space provides
Heterotopias and Spaces in Harry Potter 207

hope that they are indeed present to those wizards attempting similar
hiding strategies.
Given its imprecise location and constantly changing nature, the
Room echoes Tamsin Lorraine’s reading of Deleuze’s any-space-whatev-
er that “unconventional spatial orientations can make new connections
in keeping with the movement of life as it unfolds” (160). Making these
connections means that students must consider the Room’s capacities
as well as its limitations and calibrate their requests accordingly. Even
as students use the Room for shelter, their hiding is not passive. In
contrast to Umbridge, who demands compliance, Seamus Finnegan
explains that this space requires active engagement: “[y]ou’ve got to
ask it for exactly what you need [. . .] You’ve just got to make sure you
close the loopholes!” (Deathly 578; emphasis original). The presence
of such “loopholes” is indicative of the Room’s uncertain, permeable
status and its potential for misuse. Seamus’s description of the Room
matches Bogue’s assertion that the any-space-whatever “emerges when
a protagonist ‘chooses to choose,’ when he or she becomes conscious
of making a choice” (81). The members of the D.A. must similarly
choose to envision a space that Death Eaters and Slytherins cannot
find, but where other students remain safe. Boys choose to make room
for girls; Gryffindors make room for Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. The
students’ conscious resistance to evil leads to the creation of an equally
resistant space.
The creation of this subversive space also creates a memory that later
saves the students’ lives. It is no accident that when Harry, Hermione,
and Ron nearly succumb to Voldemort’s Dementors, Luna reminds
them of the space as a key to freedom:
“That’s right,” said Luna encouragingly, as if they were back in
the Room of Requirement and this was simply spell practice for
the D.A. “That’s right, Harry [. . .] come on, think of something
happy.” (Deathly 649)
This explicit link between space and happiness recalls the strength
Harry drew from his classmates’ improvement in Order of the Phoenix.
Like the Patronus students produced within its walls, memory of the
Room excites similar feelings of hope. If Harry survives Umbridge’s
classes with his memories of the D.A., Luna’s reminder, “[w]e’re still
here. We’re still fighting” (Deathly 649), emphasizes the link between
past and present. The belief that Hogwarts can once again become
an other, heterotopic space rather than an homogenous arm of the
208 Sarah K. Cantrell

Ministry of Magic gives Harry and his companions the impetus to resist
despair. Even as Voldemort’s forces overrun Hogwarts, Harry and the
D.A. internalize the protective spaces they leave behind, and carry those
spaces with them as they journey toward danger and death.
As positive as this version of subversive, resistant space is, Deleuze
nevertheless defines the any-space-whatever as a “pure locus of the pos-
sible.” Such spaces are “whatever” or quelconque precisely because they
permit infinite connections. Deleuze explains that “the instability, the
heterogeneity, the absence of link of such space is a richness in poten-
tials [. . .]” (Cinema 1 109). Given its heterogeneity, the Room subverts
the transgression taking place within it by also providing Draco with
a space in which to work against Harry. Tracy L. Bealer insists that the
Room functions as “a cartographical metaphor for precisely this negotia-
tion between order and disorder” (181). Whereas members of the D.A.
use the Room as a space for civil disobedience, Harry’s search for the
Horcrux-diadem exposes the Room’s capacity for disorder. The Room’s
transformation from a dormitory into a cache of forbidden objects
reveals “the contraband of generations of hunted students, the guilty
outcomes of a thousand banned experiments [. . .]” (Deathly 632). Such
mountains of evidence suggest that disastrous student experimentation
with the Dark Arts precedes the arrival of Tom Riddle. If Grimmauld
Place contains Mrs. Black’s hate-spewing portrait, malicious boggarts,
and Doxies, the Room’s contents lead to the near-deaths of Draco and
Montague in Half-Blood Prince. The suggestion is that the absence of an
alternate space, or room, in which to air and release forbidden and illicit
knowledge destroys spaces themselves and those within them. Thus,
the Room’s transformation into an inferno in which Crabbe perishes
is likewise a reminder of its instability. The collapse of the Room’s
possibilities in the fiendfyre that engulfs it indicates how this space
destroys its own refugees. If Hogwarts devolves into a dystopia (“it’s not
really like Hogwarts anymore” [Deathly 573]), the Room’s liminal status
makes it a space that is equally open to abuse, devolution, and collapse.
Like the Grimmauld Place that forces Rowling’s three protagonists to
Disapparate into the wilderness, the Room ultimately expels them into
the battle for Hogwarts and the dangerous wider world.
Moreover, because Ron questions the Room’s existence—“d’you
reckon it’ll still work after that fire?” (Deathly 634)—Rowling’s read-
ers must also consider the possibility that the Room is no longer an
any-space-whatever, and that its magical properties are gone. As this
space disappears from view, readers face the same ambiguity Rowling’s
Heterotopias and Spaces in Harry Potter 209

protagonists repeatedly confront. Since the narrative provides no

definitive answer about the Room’s future, readers must admit to all
the unknown spaces and places that remain beyond their knowledge
and grasp. In this light, Professor Dumbledore’s admission, “I would
never dream of assuming I know all of Hogwarts’ secrets” (Goblet 417),
provides a model of the openness to ambiguity and mystery that can
only occur through the admission of one’s limits.

Conclusion

From Hogwarts to the Room of Requirement, the other-spaces in

Rowling’s narrative exercise both reflective and compensatory func-
tions, taking protagonists and readers away from their respective worlds
in order to renew their sense of the conflicts that permeate those worlds
and of the work that remains to be done. As he walks to his death,
Harry confirms Hogwarts’s bidirectional function when he realizes
that “Hogwarts was the first and best home he had known” (Deathly
697). His deliberate choice to return to this place in need of him, “a
world of pain and fear of more loss” (Deathly 722), reverses Certeau’s
assertion that place “implies an indication of stability” (117). In fact,
it is precisely because Harry’s world is so profoundly unstable, because
those he cares for are in such danger, that he understands his return
to place is as much a part of his quest as his original departure from it.
Moreover, Harry’s return also suggests that it would be a mistake for
readers to confine themselves for too long to Rowling’s Potterverse.
This well-known space teaches us that even if we identify more with
Neville’s timidity or Luna’s quirks than with Harry’s bravery or Herm-
ione’s expertise, we can still choose to act courageously. Although we
enjoy the spaces which fantasy, and literature more generally, create,
Rowling’s series offers us the hope that we will choose to move into
the uncertain and uncharted spaces beyond the text. Just as Hogwarts
needs Harry, our families, schools, hospitals, cities, and planet all need
similar commitment, bravery, and skill. Even as Rowling’s narrative
takes us to new spaces, its resolution should renew our hope that the
knowledge we gained on our journey will help us transform the spaces
and places in the world at large.

Notes

I sincerely thank my reviewers at Children’s Literature for their helpful comments and
suggestions. Many of their observations are integrated into this article, and I am grateful
for the care and perspicacity they brought to multiple drafts of my work.
210 Sarah K. Cantrell
1
My argument extends Chappell’s assertion that Rowling’s series acquaints readers
with “the complexities and ambiguities of the contemporary world” (281). Whereas
Chappell focuses on Rowling’s protagonists, my focus on Foucault and Deleuze offers a
way to read the slippage between space and place in Rowling’s narrative.
2
This project is not the first to examine Hogwarts’s spaces: Petrina reads the Forbid-
den Forest as an Arthurian space, and Mills examines Moaning Myrtle’s toilet in light
of Kristeva’s theory of the abject.
3
See Holt’s work on the political ideology underpinning the male British public school
narrative, in which she argues that “public school stories tackled ideas of appropriate
adolescent education in terms of training for citizenship and statesmanship” (4).
4
For additional criticism of class, gender, and race in Harry Potter, see Gupta, Ostry,
Park, and Tucker. Gupta argues that the books’ “well-meaning and anti-fascist veneer
[. . .] is undercut under closer scrutiny by a deeper form of racism [. . .]” (160), while
Tucker contends that “the Potter books still celebrate the notion of a different and ex-
clusive form of education for a privileged few” (223). Critics of Rowling’s gender politics
tend to focus on her treatment of Hermione as what Mendlesohn calls a “second in com-
mand” (174) and read Ron’s exclamation, “ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?” (Sorcerer’s
278; caps in original) as evidence of the series’ male-centered sexism. Curiously, these
readings fail to mention Hermione’s similar question to Ron, “Are you a wizard or what?”
(Deathly 651; emphasis in original), a playful reversal suggesting that Hermione and
Rowling can give as well as they get.
5
For readings of Foucault’s heterotopias in work by Dianna Wynne Jones and Philip
Pullman, see Nikolajeva.
6
Pugh and Wallace read this same phrase as an indication of the ways that queer spaces
remain invisible to heterosexuals: “That the wizards’ London lies openly ‘hidden’ from
Muggle eyes resembles the ways in which queer establishments can likewise be invisible
to straight eyes oblivious to their presence” (266).
7
On the education of young wizards, see Gruner and Pinsent.
8
Natov similarly writes that Hogwarts’s teachers and curriculum “are inspiring and
tedious—as in the best and worst of real schools” (317).
9
See Horne’s argument that “the Harry Potter books are deeply invested in teaching
their protagonists (and through them, their readers) how to confront, eradicate, and
ameliorate racism [. . .]” (76).
10
On British boarding school narratives, see Holt, Clark, Musgrave, and Quigly.
11
On students’ resistance to Umbridge, see Bealer, Chappell, Damour, and Lavoie.
12
In his 1982 lecture on the any-space-whatever, Deleuze focuses on the spaces of
Robert Bresson’s film, The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), in which diverse shots of Joan’s
cell are neither shown in full nor in distinct relationship to each other. In Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image, he notes how Jorge Iven’s seven hundred shots of the Rotterdam Bridge
can be combined in any infinite series, because each shot is not oriented to precede or
follow any other.
13
Tosenberger signals that the Room’s flexibility gives this space a rich online afterlife
in fanfiction, where it “features in enough stories to qualify as a character in its own
right [. . .]” (200).

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