Official Philip Nel Question #10: Class

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 41415

David wrote:

> I think possibly there is a difference between the Dursleys' 
> Toryism and JKR's values. Adams describes her as an old 
> fashioned 'one-nation' Tory, while (I think) the Dursleys are more 
> in the mould of the modern Thatcherite. 

Well, I wouldn't really presume to pass judgement on JKR's personal 
politics, but I think that you are quite correct that the Dursleys 
are a satire of a far more contemporary political type than the type 
whose values are personified by Aunt Marge -- and whose values I also 
perceive as subtly reinforced by the rest of the text.

One of the really interesting things about the nature of the HP 
books' nostalgia, IMO, is that it is not only "archaic" in the sense 
of *being* nostalgia, but also rather archaic in its very 
expression.  The books "look backwards" on more than one level.  On 
the one hand, the wizarding world is quite consciously and
deliberately set forth as anachronistic: it is itself to some extent 
portrayed as an escape from the mundanity of modern life.  Yet this 
anachronistic quality seems at times almost to "leak," to rub off on 
the fictive world as a whole.  It is not just the wizarding world 
that seems to exist in a somewhat romanticized version of the past.  
The text as a whole seems to live there as well, as many on this list 
have noted when they have written about the series' "innocence," 
particularly when it comes to sexual matters.  Darrin has identified 
the books as "1950sish."  Adams alludes to its "between the wars" 
quality.  Even the genres which comprise the series' "genre soup" -- 
the Golden Age detective story, the Boarding School tale -- are 
rather archaic types of fiction.

This aspect of the series often leaves me with an overall impression 
of a kind of "double nostalgia."  The wizarding world is deliberately 
anachronistic, yet even its anachronism is set within the context of 
a series that itself in many ways "looks backwards."  (This may in 
fact be part of why I am so often and so forcibly reminded of 
Christie while reading Rowling: Christie's writings also partook of a 
kind of "double nostalgia."  Many of her books give the impression
that their author is a Victorian, or at least an Edwardian, when in 
fact, she was born too late to lay any legitimate claim to either of 
these designations.)

Aunt Marge, for example, is really a very *dated* stereotype.  Like 
the Dursleys, she's a broad caricature of a representative of a very 
specific social class, but unlike the Dursleys, she's not really a 
caricature of contemporary type at all. She seems to me in many ways 
to belong far more to the cosily antiquated England that the Weasleys 
inhabit than she does to the world of Thatcherites and playstations.
Indeed, the interactions between the Dursleys and Aunt Marge strike 
me as quite humorous for just that reason: Aunt Marge just seems so 
terribly *incongruous* when plunked down in the middle of the 
Dursleys' modern suburban home.  She is as out of place there as the 
Weasleys are; she is herself a bit of an anachronism.

In some ways, though, I think that this is a necessary part of her 
narrative function.  By depicting an alliance (albeit a somewhat 
strained one) between the Dursleys and Aunt Marge, the text seems to 
me to be implying a certain political parallelism between these two 
broadly caricatured social "types."  This is necessary in part 
because of the discrepancy that Richard alludes to here:

> In today's Britain, I suspect that those views are far more those 
> of the aspiring classes rather than the true middle class. 

Hence the significance of that textual alliance between the post-
Thatcher caricature of the Dursleys and the pre-WWII caricature of 
Aunt Marge, no?



-- Elkins