Official Philip Nel Question #10: Class

Thu Jul 25 00:01:41 UTC 2002

No: HPFGUIDX 41683

A few more thoughts on Nel Number 10.

But first, a couple of tangential asides.

On the Designation of "Canon"

Pip wrote:

> Could I just make my position clear here? JKR has invented the 
> Potterverse. It is her world, and she's still creating it. If she 
> says there are no other wizarding schools in Great Britain, then 
> there-are-no-other-wizarding schools. Full stop. 

These books are tremendously popular.  I strongly suspect that the 
vast majority of the series' readers have not also read all of JKR's 
interviews.  Nor do they have access to her shoeboxes full of notes.  
Nor can they read her mind.  Nor do things like memoirs, oral 
statements, and authors themselves tend to live as long as works 
of fiction themselves do.  When attempting to evaluate what a text is 
actually saying to its readers, therefore, I tend to prefer to look 
only at the text itself.  

I see a great deal of ambiguity in the text on this point, 
*particularly* in the first book in the series.  I find it difficult 
to parse either Neville's statement or Hermione's statement as 
reflecting the same reality that JKR's interview statement 
proposes.  Both statements imply something quite different.  

There are a number of reasons why this could be the case.  JKR may 
have written her dialogue carelessly.  She often does.  My own 
reading might be idiosyncratic.  It often is.  Or JKR could have 
changed her mind on this point sometime between writing the first 
book and being asked the question in interview.  Authors -- yes, even 
those who claim that they have everything exquisitely planned -- very 
often do change their minds in just such a fashion.

On Wizarding Education

Pip wrote:

> Of course, this does rather leave us with the problem of wondering 
> what happens to magical children who *aren't* magical enough to get 
> into Hogwarts [see below for my personal opinion], but whether we 
> choose to imagine apprenticeship-at-age-11 (which happened as 
> recently as the nineteenth century in the UK, so not impossible 
> that the WW should still use it), or private home tuition (possibly 
> where Professor Lupin made his living?)...

Correspondence courses, Pip!  Correspondence courses!  Kwikspell!

> ...other, less prestigious, wizarding schools in the UK are OUT. 
> Like it or not, they don't exist. 

In which case I do think that Neville and Hermione's dialogue in Book 
One was carelessly written.  I have heard many arguments against the 
possibility of the existence of other, less prestigious wizarding 
schools on this thread, yet I notice that no one has yet tried to 
argue against the assertion that the dialogue I cited does indeed 
imply the reverse.

On the absolute *cheek* of my tackling this subject at all

Pip wrote:

> You could try using 'upper', 'middle' and 'working', which would be 
> the metaphor I would use - equally inaccurate, since of course all 
> three classes have both working and non-working members. 

Yes, all right.  I will do so in the future.  It hadn't occurred to 
me that "working class" would be understood to encompass certain 
segments of the urban poor.

> I did not assume that you were trying to be offensive; I simply 
> assure you that I have heard 'lower class' used far too many times 
> in a way that suggested that the speaker really did think that they 
> were inferior. I'm sure from reading your posts that you *don't* - 
> but I found reading your post objectively quite difficult 
> *because* you kept using 'lower class', and that is why I mentioned 
> it.

I apologize.  I would love to be able to offer in my defense the 
claim that I just didn't realize that class was such a sensitive 
issue, but of course, I knew perfectly well that it was.  I can't 
really deny that I wasn't being deliberately provocative.  I was not, 
however, trying to be *insulting,* and unfortunately, the line 
between the two is a very difficult one to walk.  In this case, my 
sense of balance was clearly not quite up to the task.  I am sorry, 
and thank you for being so very gracious about it.

On the Subject At Hand

Pip wrote:

> You seem to be determined [grin] to read 'real world' class systems 
> into the WW, and I suspect that JKR does not want to import them 
> for exactly the same reason she's made sure that 'race' is examined 
> *only* by the fictional means of using the WW's attitudes to races 
> that don't exist in RL. She's going to examine 'class prejudice' 
> [if I'm right] by using a class system that only exists in the 
> fictional world.

Oh, I absolutely agree that JKR prefers to explore issues of social 
prejudice through the use of metaphor.  She does an excellent job, 
IMO, of managing to write the books in such a way that ethnic and 
racial conflicts devolve entirely on fictional divisions: 
muggle/wizard/squib, pureblood/muggle-born, human/elf, etc.  I also 
agree with everything that Pip wrote (and implied) about the 
likelihood of there being muggle-borns holding decent positions in 
the Ministry, what this suggests about Hermione's prospects, and the 
extent to which Hermione's pronounced work ethic may be in part a 
result of her recognition of her own social standing.  I always find 
it extremely difficult not to read Hermione as coded as "immigrant."  
Which is, of course, in a sense precisely what she is. 

The reason, however, that I "seem to be determined" to read real 
world class systems into JKR's wizarding world is because I feel that 
while the author has indeed done a sterling job of writing the books 
so that the closely related issues of race, ethnicity and immigration 
all *do* devolve onto their imaginary analogues, the issue of class 
itself just...well, it doesn't quite.  It doesn't quite manage it.

Naama echoed Pip's sentiments when she wrote:

> I also think that JKR is not preoccupied with class struggles. I 
> think she is occupied with the major political crisis line of our 
> times - ethnic conflicts. 

I agree that JKR is not preoccupied with class issues per se.  
Indeed, I suspect that it might well be her very *lack* of authorial 
focus on them that enables them to sneak their way into the wizarding 
world.  She is obviously concerned with real world racial issues, and 
so they are rather strikingly absent from the books, allowing the 
wizarding blood metaphor to carry that weight.  But class?  Class 
doesn't seem to have been expurgated from the fictive world in at all 
the same way. 

Pippin wrote:

> By British standards, all modern wizards are middle class. Period. 

Somebody might want to inform Richard Adams and Pico Iyer of that 
fact.  They seem to have missed the memo.  ;-)

Is Stan Shunpike middle class?  Or are you arguing that he is not 
really a wizard at all, but a Squib?  

Are the Malfoys middle class, do you think?

Well, maybe.  Maybe they are.  Certainly they're arrogant enough to 
have built themselves a "manor" only a generation or two ago and then 
to have named it after themselves.  Maybe in fact Stan Shunpike *is* 
middle class, as are Algie Longbottom and Lucius Malfoy and Mr. 
Borgin and the Crouch family and Tom of the Leaky Cauldron.  Maybe 
they're *all* middle class.  But in that case, I have to say that the 
wizarding world's middle class is beginning to look an awful lot like 
the American "middle class" to me.  ;-)

We can quibble over terminology all we like, but there really *do* 
seem to be class distinctions within the wizarding world even aside 
and apart from those which devolve on either magical talent of purity 
of blood.  The pure-blooded *Mister* Malfoy speaks to the presumably) 
pure-blooded Borgin as aristocrat to "trade," and while Borgin 
certainly doesn't like that one bit, he does seem to *understand* 
it.  Malfoy is equally insulting to Arthur Weasley, but the tenor of 
the insult is completely different: it has very different class 
overtones.  Stan Shunpike speaks disparagingly of Muggles, yet he 
does not speak as if he received a Hogwarts education.  Severus Snape 
has a properly Latinate wizarding name, and yet he seems to feel the 
most comfortable in the company of Filch, and Pippin suggests that 
his own manner of speaking is somewhat suspiciously over-mannered.  
Ernie MacMillan can trace his wizarding descent back nine 
generations, but he also feels the need to proclaim this publicly 
when he knows that muggle-borns are being targetted -- a compulsion 
which we do not see shared by, say, Draco Malfoy.

All of these things suggest to me that there are indeed other class 
considerations interacting with those related to the question 
of "blood" within the wizarding world.  There seems, in fact, to be 
quite a bit of overlay of real world class construct operating 
alongside the fictive constructs of magical talent and purity of 
blood.

Pip wrote:

> [*even more exceptionally evil grin*] but you seem to be deciding 
> that the trolley lady, the nice ice-cream lady, and all the other 
> one-or-two line characters are automatically of a particular social 
> class *because* they are in a service position. Think outside the 
> box, please. 

I think that as readers, we do tend to "think outside the box" when 
it comes to, say, race. But JKR makes it very difficult for us to do 
so when it comes to class, IMO, because there seem to be so many 
places in the text where real world class issues *do* seem to be 
informing how the wizard characters relate to one another.  Malfoy 
and Borgin's interaction at the beginning of Book Two, for example, 
simply does not make very much sense when viewed from outside of that 
box.

-----

Far more recently, Pippin wrote:

> Wait a minute! Part of what Rowling accomplishes with characters 
> like Stan is to show us exactly how convenient it is to rely on 
> those old-fashioned cultural clues and how uneasy we are without 
> them. 

Except that people aren't really at all uneasy without them, are 
they?  I mean, what causes the unease here is not, say, the *lack* of 
distinction of accent between the Hogwarts students and the lunch 
trolley witch.  That doesn't bother people, does it?  I don't think 
that it does.  Nor do people seem troubled in at all the same way by 
Hogwarts' racial diversity (well...okay, I guess that some people 
really *are* bothered by that, but for unrelated reasons).  

What causes the trouble here, I think, is first that real world class 
distinctions *do* seem to keep on making an incursion into the WW, 
and second, that this seems so out of keeping with the way that other 
real world social distinctions. like racial distinctions, are never 
expressed in any way other than through metaphor.

> We all admit that it makes not the slightest difference as far as 
> the outcome of PoA where the heck Stan Shunpike (not Steerpike, are 
> you a Mervyn Peake fan, Elkins?) went to school. 

Oh, Pippin's onto me.  I am not only an enormous Mervyn Peake fan, 
but I'm also secretly hoping that the *real* plot of the HP series 
involves an ambitious Stan Shunpike rising through the social ranks, 
committing murder and mayhem wherever he goes, while Harry Potter 
himself turns apolitical subversive, eventually developing a romantic 
fixation on his long-lost feral unbound House Elf foster-sister.  By 
the end of Book Seven, I want to see the entire rotten system 
crumble to pieces.  The House Cup Competition -- abandoned!  The 
Squibs -- ruling the Ministry of Magic!  Hogwarts under new 
administration!  And the Sorting Hat burned to ash!  Hah!  Hah, 
hah, hah!

Er, yes.  I stand corrected.  Shunpike.  Indeed.

> But we are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that we don't 
> know.  We *don't* know how to class Stan or Ern or the trolley 
> witch, and it bugs the heck out of us, progressive ideals or no, 
> just as much as it would bug Uncle Vernon.

But for slightly different reasons, I think.  Uncle Vernon already 
knows where he sits within the Potterverse's social structure.  We, 
on the other hand, have absolutely no idea what place we would occupy 
within the social hierarchy of the fictive universe.  The people who 
hold very strong views on this subject seem to me to be doing so 
largely as a kind of by-product of the phenomenon of reader self-
insertion: "Would I, as a member of the working class, have been free 
to attend Hogwarts had I been born with magical talent in this 
universe?"

It matters to many people on such a gut emotional level, I think, not 
because they really care in the slightest where non-characters like 
Stan and Ern and the nameless trolley witch belong, but rather, 
because they want to know where *they* would belong.  In that
respect, I view it as kissing kin to the "where are all of the 
gay/devout/leftist/whathaveyou characters?" lament.

-- Elkins (who thinks that Nel #10 was 'waaaaay too big a subject, as 
she still has three more responses to the original question set left 
to tackle, and just doesn't know where she's going to find the time)