The Dursleys

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 167423

aceworker wrote:
> >I always thought that JKR was always just trying to portray the
Dursley's as fearful and materialisitic people. JKR finds this
contemptable as 'courage' she has said is her highest value.  
 
Bart replied:
> Because the way they are portrayed, especially in the earlier books,
they actually seem to believe that keeping Harry away from magic is
good for HIM. Combine this with their obvious greed, and you get a
situation that does not make sense. They clearly don't want "normal";
they want to be better than everybody else, their neighbors in
particular. Look at what Dursley puts his family through to impress a
potential client (and note that none of the efforts shown are an
attempt to show the good points of his drills). Can you picture such a
man to be unwilling to use magic if it will make him an extra quid or two?

Carol responds:

"Normal" for the Dursleys is more than just middle-class materialism
--having a well-paying job (with power over your subordinates), a
green lawn, a shiny new car, a clean kitchen with all the latest
appliances, more birthday presents than last year, etc. On one level,
the Dursleys are a caricature of those values: an unimaginative,
bullying father (that is, he bullies his subordinates and his nephew,
but usually not his wife and son); a nosy, soap-opera watching,
cleanliness-obsessed wife; an overindulged, video-game-playing, obese
son who seems destined to follow in his father's footsteps (unless his
inadequate education and naive view of his own importance catch up
with him). 

But "normal" for them also means nonmagical. They are Muggles; they
can't do magic. If it weren't for Petunia's relationship to the
Potters, they, like their equally materialistic, equally
appearance-obsessed neighbors (who water their lawn in the middle of
the night despite the ban on hose pipes just as Vernon does), would
not know or believe that magic exists. Muggles can't see Hogwarts; it
looks like a ruin to their eyes. They walk right past the Leaky
Cauldron and St. Mungo's. They're unaware of the Knight Bus ("they
don't see nuffink, do they?") or the expansion of 12 GP actually
moving their own houses to make room for itself. The Dursleys would be
in exactly the same position as most other Muggles who don't have
Muggleborn witches or wizards as children if it weren't for Petunia's
murdered sister and brother-in-law and their orphaned son, who most
inconveniently was placed on their doorstep, and whom Petunia
grudgingly and reluctantly took in, her humanity apparently overcoming
her selfishness in this particular instance.

No doubt Vernon's attitude toward magic would be entirely different
had he been born magical, especially if he had at least one magical
parent. I can see him becoming a male Umbridge, or one of her
underlings, or even a Death Eater given his enjoymment of bullying and
his view of his own superiority, which ironically mirrors the more
aristocratic Lucius Malfoy's (though I think that Vernon would be more
inclined to Muggle-baiting than murder). As it is, he's on the other
side, the arch-Muggle, as I called him in an earlier post:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/90322

Since he can't do magic and what he's seen of magic is dangerous, he's
determined either to pretend it doesn't exist or to stamp it out of
anyone connected with him. He can't admit that his wife's nephew is
magical--the neighbors or his colleagues would think that he was
insane--so he pretends that Harry's "abnormality" is juvenile
delinquency and that, instead of going away to Hogwarts School of
Witchcraft and Wizardry for ten months each year, he attends St.
Brutus's Secure Center for Incurably Criminal Boys. (Did Vernon invent
St. Brutus's? If so, he has more imagination than we thought!)

Dudley, of course, shares his father's attitude, with even more cause
to fear magic, having been given a pig's tail at age eleven and a "ton
tongue" at age fourteen and faced an invisible Dementor that tried to
suck out not only his happiness but his soul. Such experiences are
humiliating and terrifying and very much outside the range of "normal"
experience as poor unimaginative, over-indulged, bullying Dudley knows it.

Petunia is, IMO, a more complex character than either Vernon or
Dudley. On the one hand, she, too, is a Muggle, and since she can't do
magic, she considers herself "normal" and Lily a "freak." On the other
hand, she knows considerably more about the WW than Vernon does,
having grown up in the same house with Lily (though after Lily went
away to Hogwarts, she would have seen her mainly during the summer
holidays). Unlike Vernon, she can't really deny that magic exists
though she furiously *pretends* that it doesn't. But Petunia knows
about Voldemort and Dementors (and frog spawn and Transfiguration).
Even before she finds out that the Potters' house has been blown up,
she seems to be keeping secrets from Vernon. (Her angrily suspicious
behavior in SS/PS chapter 1 when he asks if she's heard anything about
the Potters reminds me of Lupin's when Harry asks him whether he knew
Sirius Black.) In PoA, she peeks out the curtains after she hears
about Sirius Black on the news, suggesting that she's familiar with
the name and possibly expects him to come after Harry. She "has
corresponded" with Dumbledore. Twice (SS/PS and OoP), some of the
secrets she's been suppressing about the WW come bursting out of her.

Something is up with Petunia. Yes, she's a Muggle, not a Witch or a
Squib. She's no more likely to perform magic than Dudley or Vernon or
you or me. But she knows something that she's concealing not only from
Harry but from her own husband and son, and, IMO, Harry (and the
reader) will find out what she knows in DH. Dudley is just Dudley;
Vernon is just Vernon; but there's more to Petunia than meets the eye.

Carol, who is also a Muggle and therefore "normal, thank you very
much," even though her values are rather different from the Dursleys'