Old Fashioned Hogwarts vs. The Wild 70's (WAS: Lily and the Marauders)

[pigwidgeonthirtyseven]

No: HPFGUIDX 33880


 

Mahoney wrote:

 

<<Do you really suppose that the wizarding world, and Lily, were 
*completely* out of sync with the muggle world?  The western world 
(including Britain) during the 60's and 70's saw a great wave of 
usurpation of all kinds of traditions ~ musical, sexual, gender- & 
race-related, to begin with.  Lily herself came from a muggle family. 
She spent her formative, pre-Hogwarts years probably fawning on the 
Beatles, or falling in love with The Doors, or at least being exposed 
to the peace-love-and-understanding nuttiness going on.>>

 

Not only do I suppose that Hogwarts (and I said only Hogwarts, not the whole wizarding world) is rather out of sync with the Muggle world, I’d say it’s pretty evident from the books. The first thing you immediately notice is the language factor: Albeit English is not my first language, I think I recognize that at Hogwarts, the teachers and, to a somewhat lesser extent, also the students, speak a language completely devoid of four letter-words and of recently coined expressions, abbreviations etc. While you might argue that the teachers do so to set an example, which is certainly true, the student’s way of communicating with each other is a point in case: Obviously, students like Fred and George would  have missed out completely on more recent developments of Muggle linguistics, given that they never enter into close contact with the Muggle world, but Seamus, Hermione, the Creeveys, Harry himself would be able to introduce their fair share of fresh wind into the Hogwarts student body. Nevertheless, I can’t think of one single phrase where they do so. And language certainly is a most important indicator of being in or out of sync. 

As far as the 60’s and 70’s are concerned: I don’t know your age, but I was born in 64 and therefore only a little younger than MWPP and for my generation, the revolution of the 60’s and 70’s (and here I’m speaking in a strictly European, not American context, of which I honestly don’t know much) was something we lived through while we were still rather little. Unless you had parents who were immediately enthusiastic about all those “new ideas”, little or nothing of it permeated into your cosy, middle-class home.

So, as far as I’m able to judge Lily’s (and Petunia’s) situation, they came from a middle-class and maybe not even urban environment and at age 11, Lily went to Hogwarts. Assuming that she was really born between 1958 and 1960 or even 1961, she got her admission letter between 1969 and 1972 which means that she had spent her formative years more probably in an environment hostile to “new ideas” and then went straight into a universe where people wear clothes cut after medieval or renaissance patterns, pore over ancient books and are completely cut off from any outside influence for the best part of the year.

So, yes, I think that Hogwarts and, to a certain extent, the wizarding world are totally out of sync with the Muggle world and only very few wizards, like e.g. Dumbledore who reads Muggle newspapers, bother to keep themselves informed about what’s going on.

 
still Mahoney:

<<Now, if Lily and her parents had been deeply imbued with the social 
norms which were uprooted in the 60's and 70's, among them 
traditional gender roles, I somehow doubt the witch gig would have 
gone over so enthusiastically, and I especially doubt that Petunia 
would have loathed Lily so much.>>

 

First, it’s only Petunia’s rant of PS/SS to provide us with this certainly very biased bit of information, namely that their parents were so proud of having a witch in the family, that Lily was everything to them and Petunia nothing. There might be a grain of truth, but it’s mostly jealousy, I’d say. And then, accepting that one of your daughters is a witch doesn’t strike me as open-minded in the sense of the 60’s and 70’s ideology. It means that Lily’s parents were able to love and accept a daughter who was different, but not necessarily rebellious and jeopardizing her parents’ life choices. On the contrary, having a daughter who occasionally made things explode or caused other strange phenomena, locked safely in a boarding school that promised to train these abilities and make them less dangerous but more useful, might have been a rather alluring thought for Lily’s parents.  


<<Lastly, is there any indication that Lily was *not* intelligent, 
outgoing, clever, good-humored?  Meaning, is there any indication 
that she was *not* the kind of person, regardless of her being a 
girl, that the Marauders would have considered to be their kinda 
person?>>

Nope, there isn’t. All I wanted to point out is that, at least on this list, I’ve mostly seen ideas about “Nice Lily” and there isn’t any canonical indication for that, either. And so I imagined teenage Lily at Hogwarts and what kind of person she could have or rather, must have been (IMHO) to form a relationship with James and, at the same time, get along with the rest of his friends, or keep them at bay, whichever way you want to look at it.  

 

m.bockermann wrote:

 

<<Looking at real life friendships, it is more likely than not,
that this losened the ties of their friendship. Not severe them, but losen.
And that is what, in the end, made it possible for Peter to create mistrust
and betray the Potters. Before James joined a steady relationship, the
friends seemed to trust each other so far that it is very unlikly that
Sirius would have believed that Remus betrayed the Potters and vice versa.
And before the friends drifted apart, they would have noticed a change in
Peter, or maybe it would not even have occured.>>

 

Hmm, I don’t know. But I suppose that Peter turned to Voldemort after they were all out of school and it is more than probable that, as it goes in real life, the nature of their friendship simply changed. It’s one thing to be friends when you’re confined within a boarding school, sharing dormitories, classes, taking your meals together, and another to be out there, having made different professional choices and following different paths in life. If Peter really was the tagalong we all seem to think he was, it seems only logical that after graduation, his contact with the former group became more and more loose.

 

Susanna/pigwidgeon37 (exhausted, and that at 8 am) 

 

 



"And how come those portraits seem to be alive?"

"What'ya mean? All paintings move."

"No, they don't. We have lots of paintings in our villa, among them a real Chagall, and none of them..."

"And d'ya expect that something painted by a jackal will move? Now really..."



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