The whole SPEW thing reminds me of a lot of older British fiction. It's pretty clear that Hermione is at least misguided, but we definitely also see that she's tenderhearted. This is the same sort of ploy used in [Austen's] Emma, for example. A favorite tactic of pro-empire and pro-class system literature is to have a character who battles the class system far too openly and ends up being wrong. S/he sees legitimate flaws in the social order, but in trying to rectify them, goes so overboard that we can feel comfortable retreating to the same inequitable system we had before. (For women, this usually involves making friends of an unsuitable class and being unable to properly civilize them. Men usually have to work with subordinates in the military and come to realize that officers really are inherently superior… or some other rot.) At the other end of the spectrum is the Indian Hater, a common figure in American Westerns. The Indian Hater is a bigot so intensely bad that in comparison, we/the reader can be prejudiced in a normal, everyday sort of way and feel ourselves to be paragons of reason and justice. I would venture to say that Lucius Malfoy fulfils this role. The other HP characters don't mistreat house elves as much as he does, so they must be nice, moral people, right?
via sistermagpie & franzeska's discussion of S.P.E.W., house-elves, and Kreacher, in this 2003 thread posted shortly after the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
