9/13 Assignment: Dementors and Cohen's 1st Thesis

For last week's favorite monster of all time assignment, I decided to give in to nostalgia and go with dementors from the Harry Potter series. These guys never failed to frighten me when I was little and even today I still think they’re pretty scary. After reading Cohen’s Seven Theses, I found that his first thesis, The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body, could be used to perfectly describe what a dementor really is. For anyone unfamiliar with Harry Potter, dementors are tall, dark creatures that dress in ragged, black cloaks and fly around feeding on the happy memories and good emotions of anyone they can find. That’s a pretty bare-bones description of them but there’s definitely more to these monsters than that.

As Cohen states, “…the monster signifies something other than itself… (4)” and if this perspective is applied to dementors, it’s obvious that they represent depression. They are sadness and fear incarnate. Everywhere they go turns dark and cold and everyone in the general vicinity of a dementor gets their joy sucked out of them. Cohen also describes the monster “…as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment---of a time, a feeling, and a place. (4)” This statement is also important to consider while analyzing the dementors because Harry Potter is relatively recent. The dementors don’t just symbolize depression in general, but depression as it exists in modern time (our current time). The things the majority of us fear most in the modern age, at least in America and England (the birthplace of Harry Potter’s author), revolve around our emotions and how we feel, such as being alone, being judged by others, or experiencing rejection or failure. These things we fear can often be connected to depression, like when a person with social anxiety becomes more and more engulfed by his/her fear of interacting with people and falls into hopelessness as a result. This is different from other time periods where fears were more focused on physical danger, such as starving to death, finding shelter, or dying because of war.

Dementors tell us a lot about how our society and culture is nowadays. Instead of struggling to find food or scrambling to locate protection from predators, we struggle with the stress and fears caused by going to school, starting and maintaining interpersonal relationships, and finding jobs. To fear a dementor means to fear being overwhelmed by your negative feelings and falling into a depression from which you cannot escape. Many people would say being in such a state is worse than being dead, which is similar to the state of victims that have been given a “dementor’s kiss.” This is the term for when dementors suck out the soul of people they wish to finish off so that all that remains is an empty husk of a person, unable to live but also unable to move on. That, I believe, is one of the greatest fears people have today: to experience an emptiness so strong that there’s no hope of ever recovering.