#elkins

Many of JKR's approaches to social class seem to me to reflect precisely the same mind-set that she so loudly and shrilly denounces in her depiction of the Dursleys. People like the Dursleys, JKR tells us, are wickedly regressive -- brutish, even. They and their ilk should be scorned, as should the things that they tend to believe in. Things like corporal punishment. Things like the death penalty. Things like disdain for the lower classes. Things like suspicion of the aristocracy. Things like jingoism, and law-and-orderism, and political paranoia, and the belief that foreigners are intrinsically dubious, not to be trusted. Things like "blood will tell." We are treated to this at the beginning of each novel, almost as if JKR wants to establish her progressive credentials from the very outset. Once we move on to the meat of the text, however, it can sometimes become a bit difficult to avoid the suspicion that in some indefinable way, the spirit of Aunt Marge is pushing the hand that holds the pen. Blood really does seem to tell in the Potterverse, and foreign names do often serve as a marker of dark allegiance. The lower classes are stupid and beneath notice; the aristocracy is sinister, and very likely sexually perverse as well. Corporal punishment is precisely what children like Draco Malfoy deserve, and although Hogwarts does not itself permit this, the narrative voice positively exults whenever the little brat gets physically smacked down. The political approach of Crouch Sr. was regrettable, of course -- but all the same, you know, his son really was guilty...and besides, Fudge is ever so much worse. And Sirius Black, whom Vernon Dursley so brutishly classifies as gallows-bait, was innocent all along. Pettigrew was the real culprit -- and the narrative voice rather gives us the impression that the author believes that he really does "deserve to die." It is troubling, this, and it casts the Dursley sequences which open each novel in a strange and somewhat disturbing light. The broad slapstick viciousness of these passages—often strikingly stylistically out of kilter with the more subtle shadings of the rest of the text—almost begin to read like expressions of authorial self-hatred, or perhaps even as failed authorial attempts at self-exorcism. JKR rings her little bell and lights her single candle: she sneers at Vernon; she blows up Aunt Marge. But the values that these characters represent cannot be so easily dismissed. Their personifications may receive all manner of public thrashing in the first chapter or two of each novel, but it would seem that their spirits are lodged somewhere deep within the author's very soul. When it comes to the Dursleys, the closet conservative doth protest too much. The result—much like the homophobic rantings of those trapped in a somewhat different closet—is strangely unconvincing. On some fundamental level, we simply do not believe in the Dursleys in at all the same way that we believe in the rest of the fictive world. The explicit condemnation of their values doesn't carry the same weight as the implicit approval that these same values are granted by the rest of the text -- in very much the same way that JKR's use of stereotypes as a form of humor so often fails to quite convince readers that she really doesn't, deep down in her heart of hearts, genuinely believe the things that she passes off as "nothing but a joke." JKR wants to be a progressive. But there's a rock-solid streak of conservatism in her writing, and even though she herself seems to dislike it, she nonetheless seems incapable of banishing it even from her very own text.