Muggles v wizards redux

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 183273

 
> Magpie:
> Almost every single interaction between Hermione and her parents
> shows them not being respected as parents the way Wizards are.

Pippin:
But it's not just wizards vs muggles. Seldom in canon do the haves of
any description treat the have nots with complete respect, even when
they believe with all their hearts that they should. And seldom in
canon do the have nots, justly angry at this sort of thing, direct
their anger (which is to say their energy for change) in a completely
constructive way, even when they think they should. 

Canon shows that treating people as equals when they differ vastly in
power and competence is not easy. In fact it's practically impossible.
People who want a more tolerant world  will have to tolerate mistakes
on both sides. We do see some of that in the epilogue.  If Harry
failed to return his nod, Draco didn't make an issue of it, and Ron
didn't make an issue of Scorpius's name.

James and Sirius made some progress too. Of course they displayed
their arrogance, which we know is going to kill them in the end. But
while the slapstick description cues us to laugh at the fat policeman,
James and Sirius don't make fun of his appearance or his difficulty
with the buttons -- definitely a change from the days when they teased
Snape about his looks. The arrogance remains, but the gratuitous
cruelty is gone.

I don't want to be a Muggle in the Potterverse, but then by the time
the story was over I didn't want to be a wizard either. If I lived in
the Potterverse, I would want to have love, and to be left in
peace. IMO, my odds of that wouldn't be much affected by whether I was
magical or not. 

I sympathize with Frank Bryce and the Muggle prime minister, who were
just trying to do their jobs, and with Petunia and Dudley -- I don't
approve of their actions but I can see why they did what they did. I
doubt that Hermione, Harry and Ron would have done much better if
they'd been saddled with Grawp. Certainly they wouldn't have loved
him. And if they had thought there was a way to squash the Giant out
of him, I bet they would have tried. 

 The way that Muggles are depicted doesn't bother me, because I know
that I'm  reading a highly *selective* account of Muggle doings.
Wizards didn't invent Playstations, airplanes, Ford Anglias or the
London Underground. There's no shortage of brilliant creative Muggles
in the Potterverse, they just don't come into the story much. 

JKR, of course, is under no obligation to give us a representative
sample of Muggles.  What we get, IMO is a full account of one person's
experiences along with a few glimpses of the bigger picture that
completely (and intentionally, IMO) misrepresents an entire group.
That this has implications for Slytherin House as well has already
been noted. True, this is not stated explicitly anywhere.  But as
we're told, books can be misleading.

*Of course* the set up is a mind game, one of many in canon.  We're
cued to read the Muggles as a metaphor for dull and stupid people just
as we're cued to read Snape as a villain and Dumbledore as the
personification of wisdom and benevolence.  But we find, we have our
consciousness raised,  that we have to ignore evidence and dehumanize
the characters to do it. 

 The larger  point is that using people as metaphors is
dehumanizing, period. A metaphor is like a patronus -- it's a
projection with no feelings of its own. It may carry a message, it may
be used to frighten or inspire, but it's just a tool.

I can't sympathize with a metaphor or  make allowances for its
failures. What I see JKR asking me to do is leave the metaphors where
they belong, in fiction, and respect real people as if their thoughts
and feelings mattered as much as my own.

That JKR's good guys often fail to do this does not matter to me as
much as that they take this as their standard of success. They  fail
too often to make good metaphors for goodness -- but so what?

Pippin