Why do the Dursleys try so hard to keep Harry from going to Hogwarts? Is their hatred of magic greater than their desire to get what they perceive as the Potter brat out of their house? If I were Mr. Dursley I’d have shoved Harry out the door as soon as the first owl letter arrived.
As I recall, Petunia was really bitter that her family treated Lily so well because she was a witch. She was also likely jealous about Lily going to this special magical, wondrous school her muggle self wasn’t allowed to go to. To her, Hogwarts was a privilege and a symbol of the fact that she was neglected, and damn if she’s going to let that brat get those same unfair privileges, especially since Dudley can’t have them!
because Mrs Dursley was jealous of her sister. Lily had magic, went to Hogwarts,lead an exciting life, I have the impression she was prettier etc. Petunia may have had a small amount of magic but not eough to get her noticed and in with the “cool kids” so she reacted by dismissing and belittleing the thing that made her sister special.
I don’t know that there’s an answer more specific than they, and Petunia in particular, felt it was their duty to raise Harry, but he need not enjoy it. Also, and this is fanwanky but Petunia had some idea of both Harry’s role in defeating Voldemort the first time and Voldemort’s cruelty toward and hatred of muggles. Should things in England go south, the Dursleys may have had some chance of hiding or fleeing. But if they were also the family of The Boy Who Lived, there’s a lot more attention directed their way.
What puzzled me was after Harry started attending Hogwarts the Dursleys continued their mistreatment of Harry during his summer holidays. Mr Dursley was a business man. I think he should have thought it through and figured out that someday Harry was going to graduate from Hogwarts and be a full fledged wizard. Frankly, I wouldn’t want a ffw harboring really bad feelings towards me. I mean, machines in factories can break down, you know? Brakes in cars can wear out and wiring in houses can develop shorts that can cause fires. And for that matter, tumors can grow, if Harry was feeling REALLY resentful.
It struck me as irrational hatred, fear, jealousy, and resentment expressed as a LOT of bullying. But it was fiction originally intended for children. Don’t you want clear cut good people and bad people in that? How many gradations of grey does an author want to toss at their 9 or 10 year old reader?
I think that children – even that young – are more sophisticated than you think. Also, the world is full of gradations of grey: it’s never too early to start helping kids understand that hardly anyone is all good or all bad.
Wasn’t there also a hint later on in the series that she was a little mad at the wizarding world for killing her sister?
i find this sentiment pretty baffling, actually. are you really suggesting that the books should be full of cartoon-like good guys vs bad guys, rather than having more realistic, fleshed out characters? i can’t imagine how much less enjoyable the series would be. harry’s a great character because, while unquestionably a good guy, he has a lot of flaws- he’s kind of arrogant, he has a hero complex, and he never, ever listens to the adult characters, and these flaws have consequences. the latter two indirectly lead to the death of his godfather. on the other hand, voldemort is unquestionably a bad guy, but book 6 reveals some of his backstory, which is like reading about the origins and early life of a serial killer. it’s fascinating. the dursleys are neither hero nor villain. they treat harry badly, for a multitude of reasons, but they’re not bad people. they’re complex, like real people are. as Misnomer said, give kids more credit. their brains won’t explode if the book challenges them a little bit.
Not a nice person, not his kid, forced upon him by scary people who had power he couldn’t do anything about. He said repeatedly that if it was up to him, Harry would be gone.
I think he fought so hard to not let Harry go in the first place because he knew Harry would get that power too and wouldn’t be happy with him. Over the following years, he lorded it over Harry that Harry couldn’t do magic outside of school, so was powerless to do anything about him, and thus, HE had the power in that situation despite what all of these scary powerful people wanted.
And he was twisted and selfish enough to think, at every turn, that Harry should be grateful that they gave him a damned thing.
Kinda like the conversation with my dad last night where he told me my boss is my boss and if he wants to come in, completely change everyone’s schedules and work rules without consulting us, then we all need to shut up and do what we’re told. And if people leave because they don’t like the new rules, then the boss can just get new people to do our (technical) jobs. :rolleyes:
None of it made much sense to me either.
In my own fan version of the history, I’ve imagined that Petunia was sexually abused by a relative (father, perhaps) who did not abuse her sister because the sister was a witch and/or was away at Hogwarts. This isn’t the kind of thing you tell very many people, so I explain its absence from the story that way.
To me, this explains both the irrational hatred/jealousy of her sister and the inexcusable abuse and neglect of Harry.
I always got the impression that the abusive treatment of Harry was driven more by Vernon than by Petunia, and that it was driven mainly by his fear of the whole notion of magic and wizardry. Through being married to Petunia, and through her obligation to take care of Harry, he inevitably knows that wizardry and magic exist, but he desperately wants not to think about it, and not to know any more, so he rejects and pushes away all evidence. He doesn’t want Harry to go to Hogwarts because he does not want to be reminded that there is a Hogwarts for Harry to go to. He does not allow himself to think about adult Harry taking revenge, because he does not want to admit to himself that Harry’s powers are real.
But anyway, it seems to me that the Dursleys are, by some distance, the least well-realized in the books. It is also remarkable that (except, in a very perfunctory way, for Dudley) they are allowed no sort of redemption. Vernon and Petunia never seem to show any remorse or to repent the error of their ways, and remain horrible and petty to the end. From the author, they get worse treatment than the Malfoys, or even Voldemort, whose evil at least has a motivation and a satanic grandeur to it.
I’ve only watched the movies, but I always thought that it was driven largely by vindictiveness - they didn’t want him to be happy.
Speaking only of the movies - but couldn’t a part of it also be pure macguffin? It did after all spur some of the fun scenes in the movies (like the Anglia rescue, the cake being dropped on the head, Dudley getting his comeuppance in the tunnel, and wasn’t there a scene in the first movie of them being freaked out by letters flying out of the fireplace?)
Why would their nastiness necessarily need to “mean” more than to set up some form of sympathy for Harry, and to underscore the difference between how he was treated by them, and what people thought of him in the wizarding world? (don’t a large number of kids like to believe at times that their parents are as mean as the Dursleys and how fun it would be to escape by being a wizard?)
With the first book, I got a Roald Dahl vibe from the family interactions, but only really in the first book. But I think that’s why the way the Dursleys acted never struck me as odd, it was their job to frustrate Harry - like bengangmo said, a kind of macguffin.
I agree with your sentiment that the treatment was quite irrational. The book, however, were not for 10 year old, the later books especially. Perhaps the Dursleys attitude was a vestige of the first book, the only one that truly was a children’s book. It was also the one with the greatest role for the dursley’s.
I think there was also a huge component of “what will the neighbors think” There understanding of the magical world was not good, but they didn’t want anything “strange” happening in their house.
Their nephew, who was mistreated, that was fine for the neighbors’ consumption. Their nephew, that REALLY weird kid in a CAPE with an OWL who looked like he stepped out of some hippie reenactment of Lord of the Rings - THAT would have been shameful.
They were treating him like a slave so I would think the idea of sending him off to learn to control powerful supernatural forces would be almost as frightening as social services showing up at their door.
It looked like they liked keeping him under their thumb. It makes them bigger then all this nasty magic they fear.
It would be a good Funny or Die sketch to see what the Dursleys are like when Harry is gone. Without him to pick on they may start turning on each other. By the time summer comes around they would be all black and blue from beating each other and eager to pick him up at the train station.
Actually I think they’re probably a very idyllic lovey-dovey family without Harry around to spoil it for them.
This. At least early on, they are in the story to make Harry more sympathetic and to make the reader experience Harry’s escape along with him. I think this is why their trying to keep Harry out of Hogwarts seemed a bit irrational at the start. They were there as an obstacle between Harry and the main plot. Rowling does attempt to add a bit more character to them later in the series (Petunia talking about Azkaban, Dudley shaking Harry’s hand), but I think it was a token effort.
However, Vernon does tell Hagrid that he’s not going to pay for Harry to learn “magic tricks,” so that may inform the Dursley’s position a bit more. As Chimera mentioned, Vernon did give the impression that Harry was an ingrate and that Vernon didn’t owe him anything. I can totally see the Dursleys going to crazy lengths to prevent Harry from going to Hogwarts if they thought it was going to cost them more money.
I still think it’s amazing that someone with Harry’s upbringing could be as good a human being as he is.
Actually, the Dursleys struck me as a fairly accurate depiction of child abusers where one specific child, or children, are the subject of the abuse. In my work experience, I’ve seen some… unpleasantness, to say the least.
It is not uncommon for abusive and neglectful parents to pick a, “bad” child. They will rationalize with investigators that this particular child just won’t behave, will steal food, needs to be locked in the bedroom, etc… I have seen it more often in households with a combo of adopted and natural children, but that is anecdotal.
It seemed to me that Harry was the bad child foisted on them, unwillingly. He had a “strangeness” to him that needed to be beaten out of him. They were trying to train him up, so to speak, to break him of his badness… his magicalness.
Of course, as everyone knows, the entire story is just the delusions of a poor, emotionally abused boy who is still locked in that cupboard under the stairs…forever.
I kid!