The Harry Potter series focuses upon the toilet as a site for heroic action and a threshold between worlds as well as a more
traditional place for boys to be bullied and girls to weep. This article offers a Kristevan reading of the toilets as abject
in Harry Potter, and shows how this concept helps us make sense of wider issues within the series, especially Harry’s uneasy
relation to the maternal.
Alice Mills is associate professor of literature and children’s literature at the University of Ballarat. She has edited two
collections of scholarly essays, on the grotesque and the unspeakable, and a number of anthologies of children’s literature.
Her research interests lie mainly in the psychoanalytic and Jungian interpretation of fantasy and the picture story book.
Briggs, Fungus the Bogeyman
Holzwarth and Erlbruch, The story of the little mole who knew it was
none of his business
Griffiths, The Day My Bum Went Psycho
Griffiths, Zombie Bums of Uranus