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HPfGU Message #41683:
Official Philip Nel Question #10: Class



A few more thoughts on Nel Number 10.

But first, a couple of tangential asides.

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On the Designation of "Canon"

Pip wrote:

Could I just make my position clear here? JKR has invented the Potterverse. It is her world, and she's still creating it. If she says there are no other wizarding schools in Great Britain, then there-are-no-other-wizarding schools. Full stop.

These books are tremendously popular. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of the series' readers have not also read all of JKR's interviews. Nor do they have access to her shoeboxes full of notes. Nor can they read her mind. Nor do things like memoirs, oral statements, and authors themselves tend to live as long as works of fiction themselves do. When attempting to evaluate what a text is actually saying to its readers, therefore, I tend to prefer to look only at the text itself.

I see a great deal of ambiguity in the text on this point, particularly in the first book in the series. I find it difficult to parse either Neville's statement or Hermione's statement as reflecting the same reality that JKR's interview statement proposes. Both statements imply something quite different.

There are a number of reasons why this could be the case. JKR may have written her dialogue carelessly. She often does. My own reading might be idiosyncratic. It often is. Or JKR could have changed her mind on this point sometime between writing the first book and being asked the question in interview. Authors—yes, even those who claim that they have everything exquisitely planned—very often do change their minds in just such a fashion.

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On Wizarding Education

Pip wrote:

Of course, this does rather leave us with the problem of wondering what happens to magical children who aren't magical enough to get into Hogwarts [see below for my personal opinion], but whether we choose to imagine apprenticeship-at-age-11 (which happened as recently as the nineteenth century in the UK, so not impossible that the WW should still use it), or private home tuition (possibly where Professor Lupin made his living?)...

Correspondence courses, Pip! Correspondence courses! Kwikspell!

...other, less prestigious, wizarding schools in the UK are OUT. Like it or not, they don't exist.

In which case I do think that Neville and Hermione's dialogue in Book One was carelessly written. I have heard many arguments against the possibility of the existence of other, less prestigious wizarding schools on this thread, yet I notice that no one has yet tried to argue against the assertion that the dialogue I cited does indeed imply the reverse.

----------------

On the absolute cheek of my tackling this subject at all

Pip wrote:

You could try using 'upper', 'middle' and 'working', which would be the metaphor I would use - equally inaccurate, since of course all three classes have both working and non-working members.

Yes, all right. I will do so in the future. It hadn't occurred to me that "working class" would be understood to encompass certain segments of the urban poor.

I did not assume that you were trying to be offensive; I simply assure you that I have heard 'lower class' used far too many times in a way that suggested that the speaker really did think that they were inferior. I'm sure from reading your posts that you don't - but I found reading your post objectively quite difficult because you kept using 'lower class', and that is why I mentioned it.

I apologize. I would love to be able to offer in my defense the claim that I just didn't realize that class was such a sensitive issue, but of course, I knew perfectly well that it was. I can't really deny that I wasn't being deliberately provocative. I was not, however, trying to be insulting, and unfortunately, the line between the two is a very difficult one to walk. In this case, my sense of balance was clearly not quite up to the task. I am sorry, and thank you for being so very gracious about it.

-------------------

On the Subject At Hand

Pip wrote:

You seem to be determined [grin] to read 'real world' class systems into the WW, and I suspect that JKR does not want to import them for exactly the same reason she's made sure that 'race' is examined only by the fictional means of using the WW's attitudes to races that don't exist in RL. She's going to examine 'class prejudice' [if I'm right] by using a class system that only exists in the fictional world.

Oh, I absolutely agree that JKR prefers to explore issues of social prejudice through the use of metaphor. She does an excellent job, IMO, of managing to write the books in such a way that ethnic and racial conflicts devolve entirely on fictional divisions: muggle/wizard/squib, pureblood/muggle-born, human/elf, etc. I also agree with everything that Pip wrote (and implied) about the likelihood of there being muggle-borns holding decent positions in the Ministry, what this suggests about Hermione's prospects, and the extent to which Hermione's pronounced work ethic may be in part a result of her recognition of her own social standing. I always find it extremely difficult not to read Hermione as coded as "immigrant." Which is, of course, in a sense precisely what she is.

The reason, however, that I "seem to be determined" to read real world class systems into JKR's wizarding world is because I feel that while the author has indeed done a sterling job of writing the books so that the closely related issues of race, ethnicity and immigration all do devolve onto their imaginary analogues, the issue of class itself just...well, it doesn't quite. It doesn't quite manage it.

Naama echoed Pip's sentiments when she wrote:

I also think that JKR is not preoccupied with class struggles. I think she is occupied with the major political crisis line of our times - ethnic conflicts.

I agree that JKR is not preoccupied with class issues per se. Indeed, I suspect that it might well be her very lack of authorial focus on them that enables them to sneak their way into the wizarding world. She is obviously concerned with real world racial issues, and so they are rather strikingly absent from the books, allowing the wizarding blood metaphor to carry that weight. But class? Class doesn't seem to have been expurgated from the fictive world in at all the same way.

Pippin wrote:

By British standards, all modern wizards are middle class. Period.

Somebody might want to inform Richard Adams and Pico Iyer of that fact. They seem to have missed the memo. ;-)

Is Stan Shunpike middle class? Or are you arguing that he is not really a wizard at all, but a Squib?

Are the Malfoys middle class, do you think?

Well, maybe. Maybe they are. Certainly they're arrogant enough to have built themselves a "manor" only a generation or two ago and then to have named it after themselves. Maybe in fact Stan Shunpike is middle class, as are Algie Longbottom and Lucius Malfoy and Mr. Borgin and the Crouch family and Tom of the Leaky Cauldron. Maybe they're all middle class. But in that case, I have to say that the wizarding world's middle class is beginning to look an awful lot like the American "middle class" to me. ;-)

We can quibble over terminology all we like, but there really do seem to be class distinctions within the wizarding world even aside and apart from those which devolve on either magical talent of purity of blood. The pure-blooded Mister Malfoy speaks to the (presumably) pure-blooded Borgin as aristocrat to "trade," and while Borgin certainly doesn't like that one bit, he does seem to understand it. Malfoy is equally insulting to Arthur Weasley, but the tenor of the insult is completely different: it has very different class overtones. Stan Shunpike speaks disparagingly of Muggles, yet he does not speak as if he received a Hogwarts education. Severus Snape has a properly Latinate wizarding name, and yet he seems to feel the most comfortable in the company of Filch, and Pippin suggests that his own manner of speaking is somewhat suspiciously over-mannered. Ernie MacMillan can trace his wizarding descent back nine generations, but he also feels the need to proclaim this publicly when he knows that muggle-borns are being targetted -- a compulsion which we do not see shared by, say, Draco Malfoy.

All of these things suggest to me that there are indeed other class considerations interacting with those related to the question of "blood" within the wizarding world. There seems, in fact, to be quite a bit of overlay of real world class construct operating alongside the fictive constructs of magical talent and purity of blood.

Pip wrote:

[*even more exceptionally evil grin*] but you seem to be deciding that the trolley lady, the nice ice-cream lady, and all the other one-or-two line characters are automatically of a particular social class because they are in a service position. Think outside the box, please.

I think that as readers, we do tend to "think outside the box" when it comes to, say, race. But JKR makes it very difficult for us to do so when it comes to class, IMO, because there seem to be so many places in the text where real world class issues do seem to be informing how the wizard characters relate to one another. Malfoy and Borgin's interaction at the beginning of Book Two, for example, simply does not make very much sense when viewed from outside of that box.

-------------

Far more recently, Pippin wrote:

Wait a minute! Part of what Rowling accomplishes with characters like Stan is to show us exactly how convenient it is to rely on those old-fashioned cultural clues and how uneasy we are without them.

Except that people aren't really at all uneasy without them, are they? I mean, what causes the unease here is not, say, the lack of distinction of accent between the Hogwarts students and the lunch trolley witch. That doesn't bother people, does it? I don't think that it does. Nor do people seem troubled in at all the same way by Hogwarts' racial diversity (well...okay, I guess that some people really are bothered by that, but for unrelated reasons).

What causes the trouble here, I think, is first that real world class distinctions do seem to keep on making an incursion into the WW, and second, that this seems so out of keeping with the way that other real world social distinctions. like racial distinctions, are never expressed in any way other than through metaphor.

We all admit that it makes not the slightest difference as far as the outcome of PoA where the heck Stan Shunpike (not Steerpike, are you a Mervyn Peake fan, Elkins?) went to school.

Oh, Pippin's onto me. I am not only an enormous Mervyn Peake fan, but I'm also secretly hoping that the real plot of the HP series involves an ambitious Stan Shunpike rising through the social ranks, committing murder and mayhem wherever he goes, while Harry Potter himself turns apolitical subversive, eventually developing a romantic fixation on his long-lost feral unbound House Elf foster-sister. By the end of Book Seven, I want to see the entire rotten system crumble to pieces. The House Cup Competition -- abandoned! The Squibs -- ruling the Ministry of Magic! Hogwarts under new administration! And the Sorting Hat burned to ash! Hah! Hah, hah, hah!

<Elkins blinks, suddenly realizing that this actually is where she'd most like for the series to go. Or...well, something a bit like that, at any rate.>

Er, yes. I stand corrected. Shunpike. Indeed.

But we are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that we don't know. We don't know how to class Stan or Ern or the trolley witch, and it bugs the heck out of us, progressive ideals or no, just as much as it would bug Uncle Vernon.

But for slightly different reasons, I think. Uncle Vernon already knows where he sits within the Potterverse's social structure. We, on the other hand, have absolutely no idea what place we would occupy within the social hierarchy of the fictive universe. The people who hold very strong views on this subject seem to me to be doing so largely as a kind of by-product of the phenomenon of reader self-insertion: "Would I, as a member of the working class, have been free to attend Hogwarts had I been born with magical talent in this universe?"

It matters to many people on such a gut emotional level, I think, not because they really care in the slightest where non-characters like Stan and Ern and the nameless trolley witch belong, but rather, because they want to know where they would belong. In that respect, I view it as kissing kin to the "where are all of the gay/devout/leftist/whathaveyou characters?" lament.

—Elkins (who thinks that Nel #10 was 'waaaaay too big a subject, as she still has three more responses to the original question set left to tackle, and just doesn't know where she's going to find the time)


Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on July 24, 2002 5:01 PM


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