[HPforGrownups] "Foreign" students at Hogwarts

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 58576

On Fri, 23 May 2003, Gail Pamphilon wrote:

> I have my own theory on the mix of social classes at Hogwarts. I imagined 
> Tom Riddle, who hated being half muggle, being raised as a snob by his 
> father and stepmother, then deciding to reject the British caste system as 
> a muggle weakness. 

There's a problem with this theory.  Tom Riddle was not raised by his
father, or by any family at all.  He was rejected by his father before he
was even born and was raised in a Muggle orphanage.  There's no canon
evidence that he ever met his father before he showed up at the Riddle
house to kill his father and grandparents.  (There's also no evidence that
Tom Riddle Sr. ever remarried.  Only one woman's body was found after that
night, that of Tom Jr.'s elderly grandmother, no mention was made of a
missing person, and apparently no surviving family was around to inherit
the old manor.)

Besides, Tom would have plenty of exposure to the class system while being
raised in an orphanage, without ever being taught to be a snob.  You don't
have to be at the top of the heap to realize the heap is there.  Being
pretty much the lowest of the low (a penniless, family-less minor) I
imagine the class system must have left Tom feeling quite bitter, and
determined to rise to the top.


> There doesn't appear to be any of that outdated nonsense 
> in the WW, and little to no sexism either. 

The WW has it's own outdated nonsense, the whole purity of blood thing.  I 
wouldn't say it's any better, just different.  And we really don't know 
about the sexism.  Our teenaged male protagonist hasn't had much occassion 
yet to consider the role of women.  But I do think it's telling that all 
the high-ranked ministry officials we have met so far are male.  That 
indicates to me that women, while not so down-trodden as house elves, are 
not yet true equals in the WW.


----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"