Much Ado About Money (concerning the Weasleys)

[jdr0918]

No: HPFGUIDX 59533

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "serenadust" <jmmears at c...> 
wrote:
<<<...Ron seems to be using a well known tactic of putting his own 
things down, before someone else can do it, so it will look as if it 
doesn't hurt his feelings...>>>

The Sergeant Majorette says:
I'm with serenadust on this one. Ron is a middle child in the throes 
of adolescence, and he's English. Molly is the mother of way too many 
kids, and she's English.

It might be interesting to sort out the "sides" on this issue by 
nationality. We Americans are notorious for inventing the concept of 
the "teenager": a creature miraculously endowed with the rights of an 
adult and the privileges of an adorable little child. I'm American 
myself, but from New York, so I don't have a lot of patience with the 
political correctness of the heartland. My own mother is of hard-
headed Jamaican stock. She put food on the table and you could eat it 
or starve. (That's a quote). I'm sure she also told me more than a 
few times that I was welcome to go naked if I wasn't willing to wear 
what she provided. Also heard: "we're not made of money", "when you 
get out of here and get a job, you can waste your own 
money", "children in Europe are starving" (this was the fifties).

Finally, to illustrate the culture gap, here are two views of 
Hogwarts:
On the Scholastic 'Parent Guide' page: "The characters and their 
lives are quite similar to real-life...but at the same time, are one 
degree removed -- by the fantasized world of magic...Hogwarts - a 
school for wizards - is certainly unique..." --Adele Brodkin, Ph.D.

>From The New York Times, Oct. 10, 1999: "...readers on this side of 
the Atlantic may not appreciate how much there is of realism, as well 
as magic, in the exotic tales of young sorcerers being trained at the 
Hogwarts School...What J.K. Rowlings has done...is to take the 
traditional rituals of English public schools and show them in a 
light in which they seem as curious to outsiders as the rites of 
passage of tribal Africa. She makes it easy to overlook the fact that 
the most visible character going through Harry Potter's training is 
Harry Windsor." -- 'The Playing Fields of Hogwarts', by Pico Iyer

--JDR