PS Chapter Two

[hafl.livejournal.com]

- The manner in which Dursleys abuse Harry is so over the top, it is hard to take seriously.

- Harry can't understand why would Dudley want to get a bicycle, since he apparently hates sports and is fat. Clearly, Dudley is morally deficient.

- Harry's glasses are held together only by Scotch tape, because Dudley punches him into nose so often. In the previous paragraph, it was stated that Harry is so fast, Dudley can't often catch him. These two sentences don't mesh together well.

- Not only is Harry not afraid of spiders, but also likes his scar. A true Gryffindor.

- Dudley is so fat he is like a pig. Hahaha, fat people are pathetic. Unless they're matronly of course.

- Okay, Dudley has no trouble while counting his gifts one by one, but when he has to add two at once, he is suddenly having problems?

- Harry find it hard to feel sorry that Mrs. Figg has broken her leg. The power of love at work, ladies and gentlemen.

- Petunia "looking furiously at Harry as though he'd planned this" is actually pretty interesting. If I remember Deathly Hallows correctly, Snape had some measure of control over his magic even before he entered Hogwarts and Petunia knew about it. As far as she knows, Harry may have caused Mrs. Figg to break her leg.

- Dudley is so spoiled he knows he only needs to pretend to cry to get all he wants.

- Again, Vernon warns Harry about doing anything weird. This and all the accounts of Harry's mishaps really reinforces the idea that the Dursleys are scared of Harry and think he is in control of his magic.

- Now that's Harry's school is mentioned, how come nobody noticed him being abused by the Dursleys? I don't mean classmates, I mean the school administration. They should know that both Harry and Dudley have the same address and they should know that Dursleys are Harry's legal guardians. Why didn't anyone the teachers notice that Harry's probably malnourished, wears only old clothes and his glasses are constantly getting broken, while Dudley's fat and owns only new things? I don't know that much about British educational system, especially in the eighties, but it probably wasn't that bad.

- In the zoo, Harry feels compassionate towards the snake. At this point, he's still a sympathetic kid.

- Now, after the snake incident, Piers claims that Harry was talking to the snake. Okay, but Parseltongue is apparently just hissing. So is Piers saying that Harry was talking just a simplification to avoid the revelation that Parseltongue is hissing? Or, if Harry was using human speech, why did the snake understand him?

- The Dursleys reaction is actually completely understandable. From their point of view, Harry was using is magic and from all the incidents that were mentioned, this one is the only one, where Dursleys could reasonably think that Harry was trying to attack them.

- And at the end of the chapter, we are again reminded that Harry is lonely and abused and that there's something mysterious about him.

Comments

[cured4life.livejournal.com]

I think most parents who do abuse children are not thinking of the children at all. There is a big difference between discipline and abuse.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Depends on your era and definition of abuse, I'd think. True abuse, yes - beating the kid, for instance. But many more-modern definitions of abuse include spanking, which, a couple or three decades ago, would not have been considered abuse except by a few. When discussing the HP books in particular, since I don't usually discuss any other books on-line so have no reference to those particular discussions, the definition of abuse for each participant comes into play. Parents who spank believe they are doing the child a service. In much earlier times it was believed by society(though not necessarily by individual members of society) that a good beating did a bad kid good. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was an adage people believed because they thought it was good for the child though today we'd see it as abuse.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Or the parents tried many other things that failed and one day gave in to the people who kept telling them spanking would work. And then fell into the pattern.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

But many Potter discussions get that radical. I've read or been in eleventy-one too many, I think. Some people feel that Snape is an abuser because he had Neville test some youth potion on Trevor. It helps, I think, to find out exactly what a person means by "abuse" and what that person doesn't mean. I think I ended up rolling my question as to what is abuse to you into the discussion as a whole and it ended up splitting itself to shards here. Sorry!