Vernon's character

Sat Feb 22 12:51:14 UTC 2003

No: HPFGUIDX 52699

Morgan (me) defined:

> Vernon Dursley - fat and mean and not particularly bright.

Ffred replied:

> Agree with the mean part but Vernon has got to be pretty good as a
> businessman. He owns (or holds a senior post in - I know that views 
> are divided on this one) a manufacturing company. He has 
successfully 
> negotiated Grunnings not only through the catastrophe for 
> manufacturing industry in the early 1980s but also the one in the 
> early 1990s and they are still in business.

And I rectify:

I wasn't thinking in terms of IQ or administrative competence. 
Besides, we don't know what kind of businessman he is, or how he 
conducts Grunnings. We see him coaching his family in funny 
rehearsals in order to impress a potential client and his wife in a 
dinner party (CoS, chapter 1). There are a few things about the 
situation I don't consider "particularly bright".

- he invites the Masons to dinner in their house, wants it to be 
perfect and abnormality-free, but he lets Harry stay in the house, 
demanding only a promise that the boy would be quiet. After his past 
dealing with Harry (the visit to the zoo, PS/SS ch 2, for example), 
he should know better. Why didn't he try to get Mrs Figg or someone 
else to take care of him? Why didn't he invite the Masons to a 
restaurant?

- he insists in keeping Hedwig in the cage, even knowing she makes a 
lot of noise during the night.

- apparently he approves Dudley's extremely-hard-to-believe 
allegation that he would have chosen Mr Mason as the subject in a 
school essay about heroes (at least we know he didn't reprehend 
Dudley for it). Have Dudley even met Mason before? If Mason wasn't 
Vernon's client yet, how would Dudley have met him? Wouldn't a bright 
man asked Dudley to come up with a better lie?

- I'm not sure about this, but I've been told that the punchline of 
the Japanese golfer joke (CoS ch 2) isn't by all means G-rated and 
not the kind of joke you would tell in an elegant dinner party 
with "ladies and children" present. (But *I* never heard the joke 
before, so I might have been misinformed about this.)

It's my humble opinion that if this is how Vernon conducts his deals, 
he's quite lucky to be still in business.

Of course, there are all the rumors about OotP showing the Dursleys 
with financial problems. I don't know if there's any truth in it 
though. (I confess I like the idea. I see lots of plot potential in 
it.)

Maria suggested:

> Well, yeees.... But having good business sense and being 'bright' 
> isn't exactly the same thing, is it?
> I don't really think there's enough canon to prove that he's smart, 
> or to disprove it. But he's got a trait that truly smart and 
> intelligent people don't normally have. He is extremely narrow-
> minded. His narrow-mindedness shows in everything he reacts to, 
> starting with Harry and finishing with his death-penalty comments 
and 
> the state of Sirius' hair. 

I agree. His bias interferes with his judgment. He seems like the 
kind of guy who might fire a competent employee because of the state 
of his clothes. (No canon proof of that, I'm just extrapolating, 
transferring his attitudes at home into a work environment.) I can 
see him collecting friendships based solely on their influence, 
wealth and proper looks, not on affinity. (Again, no canon proof.) 

Furthermore, his whole relationship with Harry strikes me as a not 
particularly bright decision. Maybe at first he had hoped Harry would 
never become a wizard, but after the boy's first year at Hogwarts I 
don't see why he would think bullying Harry would be a clever idea. 
He locks the kid in his room, keeps him from contacting his friends, 
starves him, makes his life in Privet Drive 4 the most unpleasant as 
possible. Didn't he ever stop to think that this kid would eventually 
be totally out of his control? Didn't he ever consider the 
possibility that Harry might someday want revenge for this kind of 
treatment? In PoA (ch 2) Vernon sees Harry blowing up his sister 
Marge, but in GoF he's still not convinced that a brighter idea would 
be not to give the kid more reason to hate him and his family. 

In GoF he starts losing his authority over Harry. He is afraid. 
Because of Harry? No, because of Harry's supposedly murderous 
godfather. Who probably wouldn't be happy about Harry being starved 
or called abnormal. But he has to be *reminded* of said murderous 
godfather to become more reasonable. If I lived under the threat of a 
mass murderer coming to my house to turn me into a bat, I wouldn't 
forget him that easily.

(Actually I have lots of doubts about this situation. Is it true that 
Vernon didn't know Harry had a godfather? (PoA ch22) Then why does 
Vernon believe the story so easily? It sounds so fantastic, precisely 
like the kind of thing a kid would invent to get the upper hand, and 
he know Harry has hidden the truth from him before -- like the 
prohibition over underage sorcery. And if he asked to read one of 
Sirius' letters to be sure there was a godfather, well, does Sirius 
sound like a mass murder in his letters?) 

Maria added:

> I'd hesitate to call Vernon Dursley smart. The portrayal of whole 
> family is so grotesque that it doesn't really allow for anything 
> positive. If any of Harry's relatives turned out to have a positive 
> trait it would be very inconsistent with the rest of their 
> characterization.

I, on the other hand, am looking forward to see a better development 
of the Dursleys. They're so caricaturedly grotesque, I keep expecting 
Harry to find something new about them that will give their 
characters a new dimension.  

Morgan D. (who pronounces Lupin as "lü-PEN", in French)
Hogwarts Letters - http://www.hpgwartletters.hpg.com.br