Margaret S. Mauk is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Florida State University specializing in 20th-century transatlantic literature and modernism. Her work has been featured in publications including Mythlore, The Marginalia Review of Books, and The Modernist Review. Her research interests include motherhood, violence and eugenics, and political identity formation. Her work has been presented at Feminisms and Rhetorics, the North American James Joyce Conference, and the University of Portsmouth in England. She is a recipient of the May Alexander Ryburn fellowship. Margaret received her MA in English from the College of Charleston and The Citadel after earning her BA in English and Communication and Media Studies from Fordham University.
Her recent article in Mythlore, “Your Mother Died to Save You,” examines motherhood and morality in the Harry Potter series:
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been heralded as a literary phenomenon, but critics are a bit more split on its depiction of good and evil. Rowling’s series has had an undeniable impact on her young fans’ burgeoning understandings of morality, yet in critical discussions, the role of the mother in creating these moral frameworks has been overlooked. The mothers in Rowling’s series act as indicators of potential goodness or possible redemption in characters; furthermore, mothers set the standard for appropriate responses in the face of evil. By exploring the role of the mother in Harry Potter, readers can better examine our cultural definitions of justified violence and moral violence.
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