Thanks for taking this up! I've posted this anonymously (if it works) because I've just discovered I'm excluded from posting here. Please accept my apologies for my misunderstanding of the community and for any offence I've caused. woman ironing.
Does she intend to evoke negative stereotypes by having Stan speak a lower-class accent? I can't answer for sure, but it does seem likely.
I would never dream of describing anyone’s accent as ‘lower-class’(!) and I dispute that speaking with an accent necessarily creates ‘negative’ associations. I know that accents do have associations and that there is research to show this, but the associations are complex and often positive, and while a Glasgow accent, say, may be associated with heavy drinking and a tendency to fight outside the pub of a Saturday night, it doesn’t mean that anyone applies those characteristics routinely to every Glaswegian they come across.
Stan has a regional accent and works as a bus conductor. This community has deduced that Stan works as a bus conductor because he has a regional accent. And to bring us round in a circle, the community concludes that the job of a bus conductor is demeaning because it is done by someone with a regional accent. Stan’s accent, and by implication Stan himself, is held to be “thick” and “low class”. There follows a number of flights of fancy about Stan’s backstory, wizarding world education policy, class prejudice at Hogwarts, Snape’s origins and ambitions, and Harry’s understanding of the world he lives in. It’s fun, but it can’t be serious. The Society for the Promotion of Working-class Welfare is but a step away!
The wizarding world is in many respects an evocation of a mythical pre-WWII Britain, and the HP books are steeped in the children’s literature of actual pre-WWII Britain but the reader is hardly expected to share the attitudes and views of that time, when society – or a powerful section of it - did still tend to categorise individuals by occupation and accent. The book was written in the 1990s when, as now, it was neither adequate nor acceptable to define an individual by his/her accent or occupation. I don’t for a moment suppose that the members of this community would apply the approach they’re using with Stan to someone with a regional accent or to a bus conductor they met in RL, or that they imagine it is the attitude the author would apply in her daily life. The question is, is it worthwhile to apply it to this character in this novel? For the purpose of having fun, certainly. For the purpose of evaluating and understanding the novel, well it’s a place to start.
I know I don’t really have to say this, but it is worth remembering that the HP books are novels, and as such they don’t operate on only one level with only one tone. Novelists can – and need and must - get away with a lot more than academics, or the compilers of train timetables, for example, and when it comes to comedy they can get away with just about anything. Yes, we’re meant – and allowed - to find Stan, what he says, and the way he says it amusing. Yes, like Hagrid, Stan is associated in part through his accent with simplicity and a certain innocence. In both cases this serves to reinforce that their mistreatment at the hands of the wizarding powers-that-be is poignant and unjustified and obviously wrong. It really does not imply that Harry is some sort of marxist manque, or that there is a conspiracy against the working-class at Hogwarts. Regional accents do not figure among the students at Hogwarts. One chapter in which a character based on a London bus conductor speaks with a London accent is one thing, but an entire novel – series of novels! - littered with ‘By ‘eck’, ‘Cor blimey’, ‘Innit?’, and ‘Oo arr’ would be quite another. (How many readers would be able to identify a particular regional accent, I wonder? How many could bear to read the thing at all?) We are given little information about the backgrounds of the students, and whether or not 'we' imagine them all as middle-class peas in a pod is up to us.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-01-17 02:19 pm (UTC)Does she intend to evoke negative stereotypes by having Stan speak a lower-class accent? I can't answer for sure, but it does seem likely.
I would never dream of describing anyone’s accent as ‘lower-class’(!) and I dispute that speaking with an accent necessarily creates ‘negative’ associations. I know that accents do have associations and that there is research to show this, but the associations are complex and often positive, and while a Glasgow accent, say, may be associated with heavy drinking and a tendency to fight outside the pub of a Saturday night, it doesn’t mean that anyone applies those characteristics routinely to every Glaswegian they come across.
Stan has a regional accent and works as a bus conductor. This community has deduced that Stan works as a bus conductor because he has a regional accent. And to bring us round in a circle, the community concludes that the job of a bus conductor is demeaning because it is done by someone with a regional accent. Stan’s accent, and by implication Stan himself, is held to be “thick” and “low class”. There follows a number of flights of fancy about Stan’s backstory, wizarding world education policy, class prejudice at Hogwarts, Snape’s origins and ambitions, and Harry’s understanding of the world he lives in. It’s fun, but it can’t be serious. The Society for the Promotion of Working-class Welfare is but a step away!
The wizarding world is in many respects an evocation of a mythical pre-WWII Britain, and the HP books are steeped in the children’s literature of actual pre-WWII Britain but the reader is hardly expected to share the attitudes and views of that time, when society – or a powerful section of it - did still tend to categorise individuals by occupation and accent. The book was written in the 1990s when, as now, it was neither adequate nor acceptable to define an individual by his/her accent or occupation. I don’t for a moment suppose that the members of this community would apply the approach they’re using with Stan to someone with a regional accent or to a bus conductor they met in RL, or that they imagine it is the attitude the author would apply in her daily life. The question is, is it worthwhile to apply it to this character in this novel? For the purpose of having fun, certainly. For the purpose of evaluating and understanding the novel, well it’s a place to start.
I know I don’t really have to say this, but it is worth remembering that the HP books are novels, and as such they don’t operate on only one level with only one tone. Novelists can – and need and must - get away with a lot more than academics, or the compilers of train timetables, for example, and when it comes to comedy they can get away with just about anything. Yes, we’re meant – and allowed - to find Stan, what he says, and the way he says it amusing. Yes, like Hagrid, Stan is associated in part through his accent with simplicity and a certain innocence. In both cases this serves to reinforce that their mistreatment at the hands of the wizarding powers-that-be is poignant and unjustified and obviously wrong. It really does not imply that Harry is some sort of marxist manque, or that there is a conspiracy against the working-class at Hogwarts. Regional accents do not figure among the students at Hogwarts. One chapter in which a character based on a London bus conductor speaks with a London accent is one thing, but an entire novel – series of novels! - littered with ‘By ‘eck’, ‘Cor blimey’, ‘Innit?’, and ‘Oo arr’ would be quite another. (How many readers would be able to identify a particular regional accent, I wonder? How many could bear to read the thing at all?) We are given little information about the backgrounds of the students, and whether or not 'we' imagine them all as middle-class peas in a pod is up to us.