Starting with a Normal we Hate

Professor Mitchell-Buck brought up an interesting point in class this week.

Quote: “How many of you even remembered that the first chapter of Harry Potter is all about Vernon Dursley?”

Frankly, the first passage of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is boring. A hateful kind of boring. The sort of boring that audiences have been trained to hate.

Rowling is specific enough to note that this story begins on a Tuesday. Tuesday is arguably the worst day of the week (for anyone not involved in this particular Pop Culture class). The work week has already begun, so there’s no point in channeling a cartoon cat to complain about that, and yet the weekend is still incredibly far away. To top it all off, Vernon Dursley celebrates this boring, uneventful Tuesday by picking out “his most boring tie” to wear. This man cannot possibly be anything good. If the book made any mention of Vernon Dursley in its title, page two would be the point where decisions would need to be made about whether or not to continue reading. If the reader could not make it past Dudley screaming in his high chair, the book would be doomed.

Even when things begin to get interesting, they are only interesting in relationship to the mundane drudgery of everything else that is happening. And yet, in some ways, Vernon Dursley almost becomes a character that we can like through the way that he reacts to the things around him. He’s aware enough of his surroundings and the truth of his sister-in-law that even if he doesn’t want to admit to himself that the cat reading street signs may be more than a trick of the light, he’s able to put the clues together to correctly conclude that Lily Potter’s “kind” are involved in the oddness of the day.

And yet, before we can really get to like this man, who is presented as the worst kind of boring reacting with curiosity to the peculiarities and truth of the world around him, we shift focus to the “Wizarding” world.

While Harry Potter, as a franchise, deals (almost necessarily) with Harry above all others, this is largely a product of the fact that the target audience is children. Certainly this was the case when the book was first released, but now that a number of years have past, the readers who grew up with the books are, well, grown up.

The time between the first chapter and the second is nearly ten years. Ten years of time that is not at all important to the story of Harry Potter; but time that is very significant to Vernon and Petunia Dursley.

All of this is a long way of saying that I would actually really enjoy reading something like Vernon Dursley and The Unwanted Magical Adoption. I want to hate the Dursleys because they’re boring. I do wind up hating them because I’m intolerant of intolerant people. But there are ten years of raising a child that isn’t theirs, that represents any number of harsh Universal truths for the Dursleys, that only add fuel to a fire of their own anger. As it is, the Dursleys have no character arc. They start boring, hateful, and intolerant, and they end that way, with no real explanation why. Perhaps, for a children’s story, this is an important lesson; some people just are the way they are, and there’s no changing that, even if we don’t like them for it. But from narrative, dramatic development, I want to see the Dursleys fail at growth. I want to see them try to understand and raise their magical nephew, and I want to see the things that keep stopping that from being an achievable reality.

The scene we get from Dudley’s birthday touches on this, but even before that, there’s hints of the years of struggle here. One of Harry’s potential babysitters, Marge, is specifically counted out because “she hates the boy”, and when Harry suggests that he stay home by himself, Petunia denies him by snarling and questioning that if they did they would “come back and find the house in ruins” to which Harry specifically says “I won’t blow up the house,” This suggests to me that at one point in time, Harry very nearly blew up the house when he was left alone. “He always sp-spoils everything!” We do get examples of the weird things that happen around Harry, but since the story is told largely from Harry’s perspective, we only see them as examples of the wickedness of the Dursleys.

Did Petunia Dursley cry herself to sleep the night after she cut off nearly all of Harry’s hair? Her and her husband both know the whole truth. This sort of thing shouldn’t have been a surprise to her. Maybe she was always jealous of Harry’s mother, her sister, being able to do crazy things with her hair because she could use magic. Did something happen to Petunia’s hair when Lily was off at school, leaving Petunia effectively bald? Why was this a big deal to her? What was Vernon doing during all of this? Sighing quietly, trying to distract Dudley, and thinking of ways to keep his marriage together?  

And this is what Fan Fiction is really all about, I suppose. I want these characters to have development, or at the very least an explanation. They’re really only a plot device in the source material - easily hated, hateful, intolerable, intolerant people who represent everything that is the sort of normal and boring that audiences have been trained to hate.

But they’re people. (At the very least, they’re characters.) And I want to know why they failed.