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David wrote:
I think possibly there is a difference between the Dursleys' Toryism and JKR's values. Adams describes her as an old fashioned 'one-nation' Tory, while (I think) the Dursleys are more in the mould of the modern Thatcherite.
Well, I wouldn't really presume to pass judgement on JKR's personal politics, but I think that you are quite correct that the Dursleys are a satire of a far more contemporary political type than the type whose values are personified by Aunt Marge—and whose values I also perceive as subtly reinforced by the rest of the text.
One of the really interesting things about the nature of the HP books' nostalgia, IMO, is that it is not only "archaic" in the sense of being nostalgia, but also rather archaic in its very expression. The books "look backwards" on more than one level. On the one hand, the wizarding world is quite consciously and deliberately set forth as anachronistic: it is itself to some extent portrayed as an escape from the mundanity of modern life. Yet this anachronistic quality seems at times almost to "leak," to rub off on the fictive world as a whole. It is not just the wizarding world that seems to exist in a somewhat romanticized version of the past. The text as a whole seems to live there as well, as many on this list have noted when they have written about the series' "innocence," particularly when it comes to sexual matters. Darrin has identified the books as "1950sish." Adams alludes to its "between the wars" quality. Even the genres which comprise the series' "genre soup"—the Golden Age detective story, the Boarding School tale—are rather archaic types of fiction.
This aspect of the series often leaves me with an overall impression of a kind of "double nostalgia." The wizarding world is deliberately anachronistic, yet even its anachronism is set within the context of a series that itself in many ways "looks backwards." (This may in fact be part of why I am so often and so forcibly reminded of Christie while reading Rowling: Christie's writings also partook of a kind of "double nostalgia." Many of her books give the impression that their author is a Victorian, or at least an Edwardian, when in fact, she was born too late to lay any legitimate claim to either of these designations.)
Aunt Marge, for example, is really a very dated stereotype. Like the Dursleys, she's a broad caricature of a representative of a very specific social class, but unlike the Dursleys, she's not really a caricature of contemporary type at all. She seems to me in many ways to belong far more to the cosily antiquated England that the Weasleys inhabit than she does to the world of Thatcherites and playstations. Indeed, the interactions between the Dursleys and Aunt Marge strike me as quite humorous for just that reason: Aunt Marge just seems so terribly incongruous when plunked down in the middle of the Dursleys' modern suburban home. She is as out of place there as the Weasleys are; she is herself a bit of an anachronism.
In some ways, though, I think that this is a necessary part of her narrative function. By depicting an alliance (albeit a somewhat strained one) between the Dursleys and Aunt Marge, the text seems to me to be implying a certain political parallelism between these two broadly caricatured social "types." This is necessary in part because of the discrepancy that Richard alludes to here:
In today's Britain, I suspect that those views are far more those of the aspiring classes rather than the true middle class.
Hence the significance of that textual alliance between the post-Thatcher caricature of the Dursleys and the pre-WWII caricature of Aunt Marge, no?
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on July 19, 2002 7:53 AM
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