Merope Gaunt and Mayella Ewell

[oiboyz]

No: HPFGUIDX 136916

Eric:
> When reading HBP, I was struck by how much the Gaunt household 
> reminded me of a book I know very well---_To Kill a Mockingbird,_ 
and 
> specifically the way the Ewells are described.

Me:
Now that you mention it, the Gaunts and the Ewells are strikingly 
similar.  I'll add one more detail.  The Gaunts are slovenly, dirty, 
uneducated hovel-dwellers, but they still manage to find a group to 
look down on: Muggles and half-bloods.  Likewise, the Ewells are at 
the bottom of the food chain yet have a group of their own to look 
down on: blacks.  The more degraded these families are, the more 
desperately they cling to the fiction that they're superior to 
others because of some inborn trait that poverty can't erase: pure 
blood and Parseltongue, or white skin.

I remember a history teacher of mine once pointing out that the 
millions of slaves in the South were owned by a very small 
percentage of the whites-- something like fewer than ten percent 
were slaveholders.  Most of the whites could never afford slaves and 
weren't benefitting at all from the practice, and yet many of them 
still supported it.  My history teacher speculated that some poor 
whites were in favor of slavery because it gave them something to 
look down on-- some group even worse off than they were.

  -oiboyz