DD, the Dursleys, and Identifying with Muggles in Potterverse

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 158034


> Pippin:
> I think this is one place where the change in Rowling's fortunes worked
> against her. It's cheeky to poke fun at the middle class when you
are poor 
> and desperate and the only thing between you and the wolf
> at the door is the dole. Doing it when the Dursleys' lifetime income
wouldn't
> be a drop in your personal bucket is something else. 

Sydney:

You know, I hadn't though of that angle at all!  Perhaps there is a
bit of, 'what philistines those petit-bourgeois are'.  JKR skipped
over middle-class-- she went straight from 'broke' to 'insanely rich'.
 So as a middle-class muggle maybe I feel the authorial voice is
taking a few too many swipes at the middle class and muggles in
general in the Dursley scenes, independent of how nasty they are
specifically.


Pippin:

> But we can see from the reactions on our own list that Dumbledore can't
> chastise Muggles, even Muggles who deserve it, without undermining his
> position as the WW's foremost champion of Muggle rights. 


Sydney:

I think he's totally free to chastise the Dursleys.  In fact, I wish
he'd done it ages ago.  But if he uses magic to push them around and
humiliate them, then, yeah, it does sort of make him look like a
hypocrite.

Is Dumbledore a big 'muggle-rights' champion? He's certainly
supporting the rights of diverse magically-powered people, but I can't
remember where he's specifically supporting non-magic rights.


Pippin:

>The only methods available to him are the ones he would
> prescribe to any other wizard who thought his family was being treated
> badly by Muggles, and those methods would doubtless have resulted
> in Harry being taken away from the Dursleys and the protection they
> could provide. 
<SNIP>
> What power does Dumbledore have? It amazes me that people who are
> worried that Harry will sustain more psychological damage than
> Dumbledore could straighten out with one of his little talks
> do not see that the Dursleys have *already* sustained such damage, and
> Dumbledore's little talks would be as effective as shouting instructions
> at a hurricane. Vernon, in particular, seems to be holding on to the
> crumbling edge of sanity by his fingernails. 


Sydney:

By 'other methods', do you mean calling child services or something? 
That might be a bad idea (although given the Dursley's middle-class
dread of scandal, maybe it would have worked) but on the other hand
just dropping by every once in a while to show that someone out there
gives a crap about what happens to Harry when he was, say, five, might
have slowed down the abuse a little.  And by 'show someone cares' I
don't mean whack them with a curse, I mean, just call them like a
civilized human being, have a G&T , say, 'Look, none of us thinks this
situation is optimal, but how can we make it work better for everyone?
and by the way you should know this kid DOES have friends out there'.

If there's a huge concern about letting Harry know he's magic so he
won't grow into a 'pampered prince' (Dumbledore's explanation for why
he didn't say anything), then put on a suit and be 'an old friend of
your parents come to see how you are'.   

Every time Wizards appear in the Dursley's lives they seem to wind up
using magic to punish them or mess up their lives, and then vanish. 
He and Petunia were ready to have the Weasleys over when they came to
pick up Harry in GoF, and they wrecked their house, were an hour late,
and tried to kill their child. Maybe if Wizards could have restrained
themselves for long enough to come to the front door and have a
strained-but-polite dinner Vernon wouldn't have to hang on to his
sanity, he could acclimatize.  I'm not saying this would make the
Dursleys lovely people.  Obviously they're the sort of people it's
torture to have to deal with.  But in life sometimes-- in fact, all
the time-- you have to suck it up and deal with unpleasant people and
negotiate.  

There's a lot of options between 'threaten with magic' and 'do
nothing'.  We muggles have to figure out stuff like that every day.
And if Dumbledore is this genius epitome of goodness, you'd think he'd
have a few more 'Dealing With Difficult People' skills up his sleeve.
 He IS the CEO here-- he put Harry there, this is his project, he
wants Harry not to be a pampered prince, he wants to train the kid to
kill Voldemort.  If these pipsqueak managers are the guys he's stuck
with for Phase One, then he's in charge of using whatever management
methods he can come up with to make sure sweatshop methods are not
being used to complete Phase One.  If you can follow my strained
analogy...


> Phoenixgod:
> 
> I refuse to believe that leaving Harry with the Dursleys was the 
> best of all possible worlds for a wizard of Dumbledore's power, 
> skill, and age.  It might have been the best for the Cinderfella 
> story JKR wants to say, but I don't buy it in a world of magic on 
> the level we've seen in the story.
> 
> Pippin:
> Then you refuse to believe  canon.


Sydney:

Heh.  See, above I got lured into the logic of the whole situation,
which I think is a fatal mistake in HP... it's like trying to make the
Pensive magic have something to do with how memory really works.  I'm
with Phoenixgod-- the whole thing is a setup for a magical lost orphan
story and if you have to amp up your suspension of disbelief, you just
have to do it. 

So actually, ignore everything I said above!  I really just mark time
reading the Dursleys' scenes, because I just can't bring myself to
care about these cartoon people and their cartoon situation, except to
get irritated by what I think winds up being the 'message' of the
scenes, which is that with great power comes the ability to push
around your annoying inferiors.  I mean it does of course, but I just
don't find it interesting.  Perhaps I don't have enough Real Life
simmering resentment of being powerless?  I'm fortunate not to have
had a lot of bad 'being powerless under mean people' stuff in my life,
so the Dursleys (and Snape!) don't push my buttons.  On the other
hand, micro-managing beaurocrats and stab-you-in-the-back smiling
posers are my bete-noirs, so I got a big kick out of both Lockhart's
and Umbrige's exits.


> > Tonks:
> > 
> > > I think of Muggles as those humans who don't see or don't want to 
> > > see that there is a world outside of the world of matter as 
> > > experienced by their 5 senses.  I see the WW as similar to the
world 
> > > of the mystic or the spiritual world.
 
> > Sydney:
> > 
> > See, I think to a large extent this is how Rowling sees it, and it's
> > fine on a symbolic level. 
> 
> Pippin:
> I don't think she does,  because we have beings like Binns, who is 
> absurdly in denial about any sort of unseen reality. Wizards are 
> capable of experiencing as concrete things which we can only imagine,
>  but it doesn't actually make them more spiritually aware. 
> JKR has explained I think that magic is a metaphor for the
> talents that some people have. 

Sydney:

Didn't she say magic was 'imagination' somewhere?  I can't remember.

-- Sydney