I Found Where Aunt Marge Landed Funny
I don't think the Dursleys would have thought the aftermaths of Dudley's first Hallowe'en could have been worse.
I mean, getting landed with a wizard, son of shunned relatives, with a letter from a fully grown Warlock as a morning greeting is probably not what Petunia would have dreamt of in her wildest mind ramblings. Rather the contrary.
Fiona Shaw, who played Petunia Dursley, said, about the Dursleys: '[They] live on a knife edge of snobbery, aspiration, and a desperate disappointment that their son Dudley is not Harry.' and 'I soon realised that the Dursleys' world, in their ordinariness, is the more exotic and more frightening. […] Our failure with our son is all the more apparent with the presence of this beautiful stepchild. […] The Dursleys are desperately keen to appear normal, but Harry, through his eyes, shows us that these people are monstrous in their normality.'
Richard Griffiths, who played Vernon Dursley, added that 'The Dursleys wanted to be ordinary, average, and normal, and Harry Potter prevents the possibility of all this, which is terrifying to them.'
What is clearly to be understood is that while they are 'normal Muggles', yet smug and snobbish, and for them, wizards are the other, in the context of the books and films of the HP series, it's the other way round. It's the Muggles who are the other.
Short IDs
Name: VERNON DURSLEY
Blood Status: Worst Muggle Ever
Occupation: Shouting at customers and employees of his drill-making factory, Grunnings.
Born: 1954 or before (according to wikia who did a research based on the fact that Vernon gets an award for 27 years work at Grunnings in 1995, in OoP film - I don't agree much with holding the films as canon, so this info I take with a pinch of salt, to be honest.).
School: Smeltings
Marital Status: Widowed by 2020 (Cursed Child, I/7 - yet I hate that this crap is held as canon)
Child: Dudley
Other Known of Family: one sister, Marjorie Eileen Dursley (Aunt Marge)
Name: PETUNIA DURSLEY, née Evans
Blood Status: Most Bitter Muggle Ever
Occupation: Cleaning her kitchen and spying on neighbours.
Born: before 1960 according to wikia again (see comment above) -confirmed by book canon. Petunia is older than Lily.
Died: before 2020 (but way after 1997, because it's Dudley who's reported to send the ludicrous blanket to Harry, and I've trouble imagining Dudley do that at around 20.)
School: no information
Child: Dudley
Other Known of Family: one sister, Lily Potter, née Evans, died 31st October 1981.
Name: DUDLEY DURSLEY
Blood Status: Redeemable Muggle
Occupation: unknown apart from bullying people and Harry in particular while being a boy. Oh. And eating and watching the telly.
Born: 23rd June 1980 (according to wikia; Petunia also mentions he's one month older than Harry in HBP, chapter Three)
School: Smeltings
Marital Status: married, according to Rowling on the internet archives
Children: two, same source
Other Known Family: son of Vernon and Petunia Dursley, Harry Potter's cousin
Name: MARJORIE EILEEN DURSLEY (Aunt Marge)
Blood Status: Ignorant Muggle
Occupation: Bulldog breeder
Born: no idea
School: no clue
Child: none
Marital Status: Frustrated old spinster (according to PM, she wanted to marry Colonel Fubster, but he never proposed - I wonder why.)
Other Known Family: one brother, Vernon Dursley
First Impressions
At first sight, the Dursleys are mean, boring, stingy (with Harry), normal, smug, middle-class. Remember the incipit of Philosopher's Stone:
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
It was very clever, by the way, for Rowling to open the first book with them. It shows us the Muggle world first. The worst of the Muggle world. Not only because the Dursleys mistreat Harry throughout the whole series, but also because 'you couldn't find two people less like us' (McGonagall in PS, chapter One) and they are 'a family o' the biggest Muggles I ever laid eyes on' (Hagrid in PS, chapter Four). Moreover, they are educating their son Dudley to be a spoilt child, as McGonagall says in PS, chapter One: 'And they've got this son - I saw him kicking his mother all the way up the street, screaming for sweets'. This will provide some rather funny reactions in chapter Two, when Dudley has his birthday.
The Dursleys live in Privet Drive. The name is a reference to the most common hedge bush in England, and again a link to their being smug and normal, perfect middle-class representatives. Rather caricatural ones, I must say. The name brings to the mind the idea of them being safely protected by their enclosure, but still perfectly able to spy on the neighbours and be afraid of them noticing anything abnormal going on.
The Dursleys live in a place called Little Whinging. 'Whinging' is another word for 'whining' or 'complaining' in British English. That gives an idea of what Vernon and Petunia might spend their time doing, and the books tell us that gossiping is indeed one of the main activities in the neighbourhood.
I won't go into more details, but if we sum up, the first ideas we have of the Dursleys aren't very shining, are they.
Second Impressions
They aren't much different from the first ones, to be honest. Once you read the books, you still keep on thinking those are really mean and horrid people, and they are treating Harry like some sort of smelly thing, not even worth mentioning by name.
Of course, according to the Dursleys, Harry has started ruining their lives the moment he arrived. Pottermore listed fifteen moments that made the Dursleys' life a nightmare, starting from the moment he arrived on their doorstep in the night between Hallowe'en and 1st November 1981, to the moment they finally parted on that same doorstep, 16 years later. There's no arguing, from a perfectly normal Dursleyish point of view, they were totally right to hold a grudge against Harry.
However, if you think a bit further, it's not against Harry they hold a grudge. There are three completely different ways of seeing Harry in that family. Well, four, if you count Aunt Marge, and since she's such a strong character, I reckon we will count with her. Those ways are actually strongly linked to the characters' past histories. Let's have a look into them:
Aunt Marge
Aunt Marge is Vernon's elder sister. We all know how she bullies Harry as much as she can. The fact that Harry must call her 'aunt' is very painful to him.
She breeds bulldogs and is in love with them and Colonel Fubster, her neighbour, who - wonder why - never returned the feeling. That, of course, is one of the reasons why she's bitter.
She loves and dotes on her only nephew, Dudley. She showers him with presents and money while giving dog biscuits or nothing to Harry, because she believes Harry is the son of two unemployed people who couldn't take care of their offspring. The fact that the Dursleys have made up the story that Harry attends St Brutus's School for Incurably Criminal Boys doesn't help her being nicer towards him, because she thinks it's totally normal that Harry would be a criminal, given his parents' record. Hence her dislike of him and her constant insulting of his parents.
Marge has no remembrance of her being blown up thanks to the intervention of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad wizards who modified her memory, so we can't use that as a trigger for her to understand anything about another world. And honestly, I think she's beyond redemption.
Vernon
Vernon is a Muggle, with no connection with magic whatsoever. When he met Petunia, he was, as Rowling describes him, 'extremely unmagical, opinionated and materialistic'. Well, that hasn't changed a lot over time, has it? He was large and neckless already, a junior executive in every way up to all standards of normality. He despised even people who wore brown shoes with black suits; what he would think of cloaks was a total mystery to Petunia… let alone casting spells. As Rowling writes in PS, Chapter One, [Vernon] 'didn't approve of imagination'. What makes him totally caricatural too is the fact he puts his hopes in the establishment, as we see even when he's threatened by Voldemort in DH. 'I thought there was a Ministry of Magic? Why can't they protect us?' (DH, Chapter Three)
Rowling pictures him proposing to Petunia, 'very correctly, on one knee in his mother's sitting room'. That is very Victorian. So not only is Vernon boring, but he's really his mum's boy apparently. That is rather a funny antithesis with the bullying type we know.
At that moment, Vernon didn't know his wife was sister to a witch. When he learnt about that, he was upset, of course, but forgave his wife (yet not his step-sister). Petunia was so relieved she flung herself onto her husband, who lost his balance so much that he dropped the sausage he was holding. At that moment, neither of them had decided to cut all bonds with Lily.
Petunia
Petunia is a Muggle, but she gets an early connection to magic through Severus Snape, first, because both families lived in Cokeworth, a grim and industrial city, and Severus had spotted the magic in Lily very early, being himself a Half-Blood. She sees him lurking, and then talking with Lily, telling her what she is, building a friendship. And she's jealous. Jealous because Lily has a friend, because she's different, but different in a rather exciting way, one that gave her opportunities, that opened a door on a new world, and that would make her sort of superior (in Petunia's mind).
When Lily got her Letter, Petunia accompanied her to Platform Nine And Three-Quarters. She wanted to go to Hogwarts too, probably far from the boring town they lived in. Petunia had written to Dumbledore, but Petunia was a Muggle, and she couldn't attend. That made her even more jealous, but also bitter. On getting on the train, Lily suggested once more that she go to Dumbledore and maybe he'd change his mind. At that moment something snapped in Petunia. It's the first time she called her sister a freak and a weirdo. No help came from her parents who sort of worshipped Lily and, even unitentionally, shunned Petunia.
When she met Vernon, she had left Cokeworth out of spite, and left her past behind her, it seemed. She had taken up a typing course in London, got a job in an office and met Vernon. He was so much exactly what her sister was not that she fell in love.
I'll be going on with this analysis in a further post (next week). We'll be looking into the Dursleys as a family and the impact of life on Dudley.
Source: https://under-the-lake.tumblr.com/post/152818716316/the-dursleys-part-12
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