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

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

This is pretty much my perspective on what must have happened. All the same, I don't think this was *just* the result of Harry being naturally unsociable and sullen. He might have felt he was justified in, and had good reason for spurning his classmates. I left a comment about in the Bellatrix Rant thread, but the conversation was pretty much dead by that point so I don't think many people saw it. The relevant portion is quoted below.

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Y'know, this has me thinking about another conversation I was following about Harry's (lack of) ability to empathize or even manage basic socializing with his peers. It was brought up by some of the commenters there that in their experience, even at their most isolated and bullied, there were always a couple of other kids at the bottom of pecking order who would be willing to play and commiserate with them, even if they weren't willing to stand up to the bullies on their behalf. But for someone as naturally inclined to black-and-white thinking as Harry, would he be able to recognize that nuance as a small child without someone pointing it out to him?

Normally, this duty to explain that just because someone wasn't strong enough or brave enough to stand up for you in a tough spot doesn't mean they're a terrible person would fall to a child's parents or guardians. Petunia and Vernon, however, would never have bothered themselves that closely with Harry's social situation, and if they did, they might even have thought this the preferred outcome since it helped 'beat the magic out of him.' Without any older siblings/relatives he could rely on for help, the only other people in a position to straighten out his thinking was his teachers. Except from the background we're given, his teachers never saw Dudley and his gang behaving badly enough that they had to be reigned in (and you know Harry would have reveled in such a memory), and they don't seem to have seen any reason to intervene on Harry's end either.

End result? Harry never had anyone to knock him out of the (reasonable for a child) thinking of 'You didn't stand up to the big bad bully for me when he was beating me senseless?! FINE! I guess you were never a REAL friend ANYWAY!!!' This sense of hurt rejection would only have been exacerbated if *Harry* had tried standing up for his 'friends' against Dudley the way he expected them to do for him. And it is canon that Harry will put himself in a fight against bad odds for someone he considers a friend: witness the initial confrontation between him and Ron versus Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle, which he seriously thought might turn into a fist fight against at least two boys who handily out-massed him, among other incidents.

So Harry turned his back on the kids who had 'betrayed' him and refused to interact with the fakers even when he wasn't being actively targeted by Dudley (which, given Harry was a preferred target and Dudley et al. seemed to have a knack for avoiding the teachers, probably wasn't as often as Harry wished). If the teachers then saw Harry rejecting company without knowing Harry's perspective, or even how bad Dudley's bullying was, they probably, and reasonably, would have assumed the issue was Harry's alone. Harry, in the meantime, forced to choose (he thought) between deciding everyone else in his year was a complete jackass, and just blaming Dudley for the situation, went with the (only slightly) more reasonable course of just blaming one person instead of everyone.

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not sure if we can take Harry at his word that he had absolutely no friends, ever, before he went to Hogwarts, or at least never for very long before Dudley chased them away. For one, kids can exaggerate the state of their unpopularity in their minds, especially when they're feeling insecure or depressed. My mother used to sing the worm song (Nobody likes me, Everybody hates me, I'm gonna eat some worms) when I had such moments. For two, kids' friendships come and go as their interests and hobbies change, as they reach new stages in their psychological development, as families move in and out of the area, or as the students with whom they share classes changes from year to year. Harry might have had good friend in the past who had moved away or something.

Another thing to consider is that Harry consistently blames others for his problems, so he would therefore believe that his lack of friends was somebody else's fault regardless of whether or not that were actually true.

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

I thought that was what I said, though I guess I was unclear. It really is normal for kids to act like that and overreact when their feeling slighted. But unlike your mom, who gently pointed out when you were being ridiculous, Harry really didn't have anyone in a position to set him straight.

So yes, it was his own behavior that alienated the other kids. But he was also young enough and isolated enough that with no one to *explain* that to him, what he thought was a reasonable reaction was never corrected. I also wouldn't say that Harry "never" had a friend, but I do think it's possible that he wouldn't have *recognized* that he did, especially without someone in his life mature enough to point out when someone had genuinely betrayed him (Srs Bizniz for a kid) and when someone had only failed Harry's utterly unreasonable expectations.

tl;dr Harry had a number of troublesome personality traits that would have made it difficult to make friends, including black-and-white moralizing and a tendency to blame others for his own problems. These traits are easily corrected (and expected) in young children. Harry didn't have anyone interested enough to correct him, so his faults became more engrained and in fact worsened.