Moral Messages and Hagrid

[cat_kind]

No: HPFGUIDX 128769

catkind: Hi Marilyn, and welcome, if I'm allowed to say that as a
relative newcomer myself.

Marilyn Peake:
> What I absolutely love about the Harry 
> Potter books is that J.K. Rowling writes them as though the wizard 
> and muggle worlds are real, as though Harry Potter is a real boy and 
> a real wizard.  

catkind: I too love the realistic touches. (Harry getting to know Ron
over chocolate frogs; Harry's disastrous date with Cho.) On the other
hand there are other times when Rowling throws realism for her
characters out of the window.  A realistic Vernon Dursley would never
have ended up in the Hut on the Rock in the first place, and wouldn't
have a clue what to do with a gun. It would be far too exotic and
dangerous for him. A realistic Hermione couldn't possibly be so stupid
as to think SPEW a good acronym.  I think it can be fun and dramatic
when characters act like caricatures of themselves too.

This combination of realism and caricature seems to me to be unique to
HP. 

Marilyn:
> I think that the genius of the Harry Potter books is 
> that they do more than simply present good vs. evil in simplistic 
> terms to children.  I think that the Harry Potter series presents 
> layers of good vs. evil to children, in the way that good and evil 
> truly exist in the real world.  Talk about shades of gray!  It isn't 
> always the hardworking man in the suburban house (Mr. Dursley, 
> described by J.K. Rowling as "... the director of a firm called 
> Grunnings") who is good.  It isn't always his dutiful wife who is 
> good, either.  On the other hand, evil doesn't always come dressed in 
> black cloaks.  Good and evil are more complicated than that.  As 
> children read Harry Potter for the adventure and for the fantastical 
> elements such as "Platform Nine and Three-Quarters", "Bertie Bott's 
> Every Flavor Beans", "Chocolate Frogs", and unicorns, they're 
> absorbing the intricacies of real world good and real world evil.

catkind: I'm not sure. There *is* a large degree of evil coming
dressed up in black cloaks, so far at least.  The dark side comes
neatly labelled: Death Eaters, the Dark Lord, Dark Arts, the High
Inquisitor. In real life, it's not half so easy. 

JKR does play with mislabelling to some extent: Sirius Black
mislabelled as DE, for example. Snape is supposedly mislabelled as
evil, but he also behaves in "evil" ways, but he is on the side of
good (so far at least). I'm lost as to what if any moral message there
is there, the best I can do is to say JKR's getting us to think about
the questions. If we weren't doing so before, we certainly are after
the pensieve scene. 

I don't see the Dursleys as shade-of-grey at all.  They're absolutely
and stereotypically all that is wrong with dull suburbia, combined
with being nasty bullies. 

Maybe all will become clearer when we see how the saga ends.

catkind