Official Philip Nel Question #10: Class

[dicentra63]

No: HPFGUIDX 41448

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "ssk7882" <skelkins at a...> wrote:
> 
> Furthermore, we have never once heard even a first-year student at 
> Hogwarts speak with the "wrong" sort of accent.  The only Hogwarts-
> educated character we have ever heard speak "improperly" is Hagrid, 
> who also, er, can't spell.  I tend to agree with Eileen that this 
> does not seem particularly believable, and that it can probably be 
> read as comedic trope.  If the children of the lower classes of the 
> wizarding world are indeed assimilating, then either they're doing so 
> awfully *quickly,* or JKR has simply never bothered to show us any 
> evidence that they attend Hogwarts at all.

Or she's not bothering to spell out all their accents at all.  If
these kids are coming from all over the British Isles, they're going
to have different accents, even the ones from the middle and upper
classes: the Irish and Scottish accents aren't necessarily lower-class
identifiers (unless I miss my guess), but they don't sound like
Londoners, either.    So we might have run into children of the lower
class who speak with the "wrong" sort of accent, but JKR didn't think
it was necessary to point it out.  She might make Hagrid an exception
because it is an important part of his character, but with the other
people, it isn't.
 
> What makes this interesting, to my mind, is that the particular 
> *kinds* of stocks which are being used are emblematic of a literary 
> approach to social class that is strongly aligned with a certain set 
> of values and mores and judgements, a certain way of viewing the 
> world, and that it is a way of viewing the world that elsewhere in 
> the text, JKR seems to be going very far out of her way to critique 
> and even to deride.  

What choice does she have, though?  She wants to critique social bias
and unenlightened social values, but all she has to work with is a
world that isn't ideal, even though the world is of her own creating.
 She has chosen not to pull a Roddenberry and create a world that is
already how she thinks things should be, then set it up as a foil to
the muggle world.  The fact that she adds the stock characters where
she does instead of making them against type may be indicative of the
constraints her world imposes rather than a blindness on her part.

As has been said, Harry has limited exposure to the people outside the
world of Hogwarts, but he does bump into them occassionally.  JKR
could have decided to make Stan Shunpike an earnest poet something
equally against type, but that's too much granularity for the role he
plays.   So she has to fall back on a particular type of stock
character because there are none other available.  To make Stan et al.
too different from the literary tradition she's plugged into would
"feel wrong" in the wrong places.  She's going to preach her sermon
from Dumbledore's pulpit, even though the setting appears to be
comfortable with the very things she explicity critiques.

I don't know if you're assuming that the contradiction between the
stated and implied messages is an unconsious act on JKR's part.  Maybe
it is.  But I don't know how else she's supposed to pull this off. 
She can't stop every two seconds to climb on the soap box.

--Dicentra, who learned tons of stuff from Elkins' post, as usual