Some Assorted Questions and Comments on the Dursleys

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

1. Is Smeltings a boarding school or a day school? My first instinct is that it's a local private day school, mainly because Piers Polkiss, Dudley's neighborhood friend, also attends the school. But I've read a lot of fics in which it's a boarding school, so I'm not sure.

2. I have trouble pegging the Dursleys' social class. One the one hand, several factors lead me to believe that they are upper-middle class--Vernon has a white collar job and drives a company car; they have a four-bedroom house, and Dudley attends a private school. On the other hand, I feel like the Dursleys'behavior better fits the stereotype of a working class family. Vernon reminds me of Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin from Family Guy, and both of those characters are meant to be caricatures of working class men. It's possible that Vernon grew up in a working class family, but that doesn't quite make sense to me, either, because he also attended Smeltings. So, I know that the Dursleys are supposed to be caricatures, but I'm not sure whom they're supposed to be caricatures of. The problem might be simply that I'm American and not that familiar with British culture.

3. If the Dursleys were a real-life family in the UK, would they have been able to get away with forcing Harry to sleep in the cupboard under the stairs? I want to believe that, if anybody knew about the cupboard, they would have reported the family to social services, and I don't think it's very realistic that the Dursleys would have managed to keep Harry's sleeping arrangements a secret for eleven years. For instance, I imagine it would have been difficult for them to prevent Dudley's friends from finding out about the cupboard and saying something to their parents. But maybe I'm being too optimistic.

4. Rowling makes it sound like it's the worst thing in the world that Harry has to wear Dudley's old clothes. But it's actually perfectly normal for the younger/smaller children in a family to be given the hand-me-down clothes of their older/larger relatives. New clothes, especially school uniforms, are expensive, and children often outgrow their clothes long before wearing them out. Harry's clothes may have been baggy on him, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the Dursleys dressed him in rags.

Comments

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

It would make more sense, and be much more interesting, if they treated him like a normal son but freaked out if he did anything different and tried anything to distract him away from anything "irrational."

I agree, but this would introduce a certain amount of moral ambiguity into Harry's actions when he abandons the only family he has ever known for his shiny new friends. We can't have Harry looking ungrateful, right? At least not on purpose...

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure that JKR was consciously thinking that though. The idea of 'moral ambiguity' when it comes to Harry seems beyond her reach. She seems fine having Harry do worse things, and even being punished for them, without ever having the narrative voice suggest that he is morally ambiguous. More and more I find these books to be just *bewildering.*

Consider the incident in HBP where he nearly kills Draco. He's punished, and at one point it seems like it's being suggested that he's not so perfect - Minerva tells him he got off lightly. But then the narrative switches to telling us how unfair and horrible the detentions were, and Harry *never, ever* reflects back on what he did or why it was wrong. Nor does the narrative voice or any other character in the series (at least, any Authorially Approved character) tell him that he needs to reflect and maybe feel remorse. Instead, in the same book he's praised for hexing someone who can't fight back (Flich) without provocation, and in the next book he's praised - by Minerva! - for torturing someone for spitting. Yet at the same time we are expected to unquestioningly believe that he is an extraordinarily loving junior Jesus?

Does. Not. Compute.

It's kind of like the thing with his supposed horror over James' behavior in SWM. He gets all the brownie points for the right reaction, without it ever having to actually make an impact on his consciousness. Instead he starts behaving just like James, and the narrative voice thinks it's just fine and dandy! I guess we are supposed to take away from that that Harry was somehow So Amazingly Teh Love that he felt sympathy even for the ugly Slytherin who Totally Deserved What He Got, without this affecting his Cool Jock Heroicness as demonstrated by his unprovoked tormentingrighteous punishment of the cranky old squib? Or something.

*goes to bang head into nearest wall, as it hurts less than trying to make sense of these books*