Chapter 1 of CoS is full of slapstick (“the magic word”), farcicle similes (“like a winded rhinoceros”), a parody of business-meeting itineraries (“We should all be in position at eight o’clock”), and even multiple “magic” attacks on poor Dudley Dursley (“Jiggery pokery!”, “Hocus pocus”, “squiggly wiggly”).
This, I think, is one of the funniest opening chapters in the HP series. So I’m wondering what you think are some of its funniest moments.
Please let us know in the Comments thread.
Dursley-centric chapters are often great fun, and the first chapter of CoS (filled as it is with absurdity and slapstic) is no exception.
When Harry uses a common cliche (“You’ve forgotten the magic word”),
Dudley gasped and fell off his chair with a crash that shook the whole kitchen; Mrs. Dursley gave a small scream and clapped her hands to her mouth; Mr. Dursley jumped to his feet, veins throbbing in his temples.
For all this reaction, Harry may as well have arrived in black gloves wearing a mask and wielding a butcher’s knife!
But the absurdity doesn’t stop there!
“I meant ‘please’!” said Harry quickly. “I didn’t mean – ”
“WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU, thundered his uncle, spraying spit over the table, “ABOUT SAYING THE ‘M’ WORD IN OUR HOUSE?”
The “M” word? Siriusly?
Do the Dursleys have no sense of proportion? (well, the answer to that question should be obvious, shouldn’t it?).
“HOW DARE YOU THREATEN DUDLEY!” roared Uncle Vernon, pounding the table with his fist.”
OUCH! In the HP world, magic is not inherently threatening, but after the “pig’s tail” incident from Harry’s last birthday, any suggestion of magic may certainly seem like a threat.
Finally, Uncle Vernon screams:
“I WARNED YOU! I WILL NOT TOLERATE MENTION OF YOUR ABNORMALITY UNDER THIS ROOF!”
And this is the real issue, isn’t it? The Dursleys, as we saw in our previous re-read post, pride themselves on their normality – so much so that shortly after Petunia accepted Vernon’s proposal of marriage, she realized that she needed to confront the issue of her sister’s “abnormality”:
She confessed the truth during a tear-stained date, in Vernon’s dark car as they sat overlooking the chip shop where Vernon had just bought them a post-cinema snack. Vernon, as Petunia had expected, was deeply shocked; however, he told Petunia solemnly that he would never hold it against her that she had a freak for a sister, and Petunia threw herself upon him in such violent gratitude that he dropped his battered sausage.
Absurd as the Dursley reaction to the “M” word is, it is quintessentially Dursley-esque!
When Vernon sits down, he is “breathing like a winded rhinocerous” – one of several amusing similes found in this chapter. What’s a simile, you might ask? In a simile, the author compares one thing to another by using “as” or “like.”
JKR seems to prefer “like”:
Not only does Vernon breathe “like a winded rhinocerous,” but the Dursleys treat Harry “like a bomb that might go off at any moment” and “like a dog that had rolled in something smelly.”
And it’s all because, for Harry, “magic” is more than just a word. It is part of who he is.
In the first chapter of CoS, JKR repeats for the audience the requisite background information – reminding us of Harry’s experience during the previous year at Hogwarts and the fact that Uncle Vernon has padlocked his school books and supplies in the cupboard under the stairs. In fact, Vernon has even padlocked Hedwig’s cage – leading to the chapter’s initial confrontation (in which Uncle Vernon asks if he looks stupid – all while “a bit of fried egg dangl[es] from his bushy mustache!).
But probably the most significant point that JKR emphasizes is Harry’s scar. Harry, she reminds us,
…wore rounded glasses, and on his forehead was a thin, lightning-shaped scar.
It was this scar that made Harry so particularly unusual, even for a wizard.
At one year of age, as we all know, Harry survived an attack by Voldemort. He had
…escaped with his lightning scar, and somehow – nobody understood why – Voldemort’s powers had been destroyed the instant he had failed to kill Harry.
And then, when Harry goes to Hogwarts, he learns that
he and his scar were famous
… because he is the only person who ever survived a killing curse – and he survived the Avada Kedavra from its most proficient practitioner.
When I first read the the early chapters of PS/SS, Harry’s scar seemed somewhat cosmetic – a distinguishing mark that really looked cool – though it was clearly foreshadowing something of significance.
What I like here in the first chapter of CoS is that JKR reminds us of Harry’s scar several times, just to remind us that it distinguishes him from other Wizards. And later – as the books continue – she builds on what Harry experiences via the scar (first, pain in proximity to Voldermort, then later an ability to see into Voldemort’s mind). She puts all the clues she needs in even these early books so that when the big reveal about the scar comes in “The Prince’s Tale,” we should not be surprised.
But of course, I was – given that (unlike the pre-DH fandom), I had only about three days between discovering in HBP that Voldemort sought to split his soul and reading the endgame in Deathly Hallows. I had to do a double-take, a triple-take, a quadruple-take when I came across that passage in TPT.
No matter what I experienced though. Nobody can say that JKR did not give the reader fair warning! She told us – again and again and again – the significance of the scar, just as she does here.
So… what are some things that have jumped out at you in reading through the first part of the first chapter of CoS?
I actually did start something of a CoS re-read a couple of years ago. In fact, I wrote preliminary posts on the first couple of chapters of the book, but I never got in to the in-depth over-analysis that typically characterizes this blog. ;)
If you’d like to take a look at those original re-read posts, here you go:
Like the first CoS scene on Pottermore, my old post on chapter 1 put some emphasis on “the magic word.” So let’s take a look at Pottermore’s view of that scene.
Number 4, Privet Drive
At Zoom 1 (original zoom level), we see the exterior to Number 4, Privet Drive. According to JKR, she chose the name of the Dursley street after
that most suburban plant, the privet bush, which makes neat hedges around many English gardens.
She chose the name of their town because it
sounds appropriately parochial and sniffy, ‘whinging’ being a colloquial term for ‘complaining or whining’ in British English.
She chose the number 4 because she has
never been fond of the number four, which has always struck [her] as a rather hard and unforgiving number.
These little bits of information show the degree to which JKR thought about what she was doing. I may not share her take on the number 4 (I rather like the number myself) – and I’m not quite clear on why she created 4 Houses if she has such a dislike of the number – but I do think it’s obvious that even in the details of the Dursley address, JKR was attempting to create a composite of the Dursley family. And that’s just a little bit of wonderful!
When we look at the scene on Pottermore (Zoom 1), we see the pastel hues of the Dursley home, hints of the flowery wallpaper on the home’s interior, and the trim surburban plants set against the house. And through the window, there’s a picture on the wall that appears to portray somebody in a Smelting’s uniform. Young Vernon? Dudley? It’s certainly not Harry!
Oddly, though, on the Dursley’s front porch, there appear to be some wear-and-tear flaws in the plaster near the lamp. Is that nothing more than an artist’s rendering? Or is it part of JKR’s own conception? Is the exterior of their house not quite the exemplar of suburban perfection that Petunia would have it be?
At Zoom 2, we go through the door… to find a Smelting’s straw hat on the staircase (this must be Dudley’s!) and the door to the cupboard under the stairs padlocked. The padlock will be explained when we get to the argument in the kitchen.
And at Zoom 3, we reach the kitchen… just in time to see Dudley about to fall out of his chair when Harry tells him he forgot to say “the magic word.”
Just as we have three levels of zoom, the first part of the chapter is broken up into three parts (which do not actually correspond to Pottermore’s three levels of zoom):
We’ll take a look at these in the next re-read post. But for now, I’d like to go back to some Pottermore material that sets the stage. I’m speaking, of course, of that lovely exclusive JKR content on the Dursleys.
Vernon and Petunia Dursley
We know from the first chapter of PS/SS that Vernon values normalcy and that Petunia thinks her sister is a freak. The Pottermore info fills in the gaps.
One of the most sought-after pieces of information, actually, is the name of the town that the Evans girls – and, by extension, Severus Snape – grew up in. Based on Snape’s speech patterns, fans have speculated that he grew up in the north of England, perhaps even in a large industrial city like Birmingham. Actually, though, he and Lily and Petunia grew up in the fictional town of Cokeworth. This is the town that Petunia left in order to make her way in London.
And actually, we’ve been in Cokeworth before! In fact, I described the Cokeworth incident in an ancient Expecto Patronum! post concerning the Flight of the Dursleys:
On this 7th day of letters from no one, the Dursleys find that none of their previous attempts to outrun the letters have succeeded. 100 or so letters await Harry at the hotel desk.
The next morning, at breakfast, they discover Hogwarts letters addressed to:
Mr. H. Potter
Room 17
Railview Hotel
Cokeworth
The text tells us that Cokeworth is a big city, and we know that it’s within a day’s drive of Little Whinging, Surrey – even if the driver is continuously changing course. I don’t know enough about driving in the UK to know how far a driver can get under these conditions. I’ll leave it to my UK friends to tell me whether or not it is plausible that Cokeworth is in the north.
But whatever the case, the “gloomy-looking hotel” where the Hogwarts letters hunt them down is on the outskirts of the same town in which Petunia, Lily, and Severus all grew up. Curiously, Petunia says nothing.
The Pottermore info also contains tidbits of information that have been alluded to before in the text:
The truly new information focuses on Vernon and Petunia’s courtship and interactions with James and Lily. And this courtship info is often written in the same mocking tone that we find in the Dursley passages in the books. (Remember that wonderful Dursley intro in PS/SS: “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much”?).
In the Dursley courtship, the “deliciously normal” junior executive “seemed a model of manliness to young Petunia.” {{{GAG! RETCH!!!}}}
He had a perfectly correct car, and wanted to do completely ordinary things, and by the time he had taken her on a series of dull dates, during which he talked mainly about himself and his predictable ideas on the world, Petunia was dreaming of the moment when he would place a ring on her finger.
When, in due course, Vernon Dursley proposed marriage, very correctly, on one knee in his mother’s sitting room, Petunia accepted at once.
It’s almost like something out of a romance made in hell! For those of you who have read A Game of Thrones, here’s an analogy: Rather than dream of true knights to rescue her from her peril, Sansa Stark instead dreams of a big beefy dullard to give her a “completely ordinary” and utterly predictable life. Petunia’s “true knight,” in other words, rescues her from anything faintly resembling romance.
And with that, I’d say we’ve had enough for our first post back on the re-read. Next time, we’ll focus more on the book itself and less on the Pottermore experience of it. :)
Something fluid and silvery gray went slithering to the floor where it lay in gleaming folds. Ron gasped.
“I’ve heard of those,” he said in a hushed voice, dropping the box of Every Flavor Beans he’d gotten from Hermione. “If that’s what I think it is – They’re really rare, and really valuable.”
“What is it?”
Harry picked the shining, silvery cloth off the floor. It was strange to the touch, like water woven into material.
“It’s an invisibility cloak,” said Ron, a look of awe on his face. “I’m sure it is – try it on.”
The great thing with the Harry Potter series is that the title formula makes it very easy to write bizarro-scenario titles like the one I just wrote. (And if anybody wants to use “Harry Potter and the Invisible Man” for a fanfic, be my guest!)
Even though the Dursleys often treat Harry as if he’s invisible (and even though Severus Snape pretends he’s invisible after Harry witnesses a memory of his father humiliating Snape), Harry Potter never actually does not meet up with a literal Invisible Man in the course of JKR’s series. However, he does acquire an object that gives him invisibility at will. And there are “invisible” men willing to stay in the background as Harry moves to the foreground in the war against Voldemort.
Remember way back in January? We talked in one of the first re-read posts about the comparison between Harry and Cinderella. As a Cinderella figure, Harry has never really experienced a proper Christmas since his parents were killed. And his first Christmas at Hogwarts begins to set things right.
But a little backtracking is in order. When the Trio concludes that Snape tried to kill Harry during the Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch match, Hagrid accidentally lets it slip that what Fluffy is guarding is a matter “between Professor Dumbledore an’ Nicolas Flamel.” Naturally, the Trio becomes obsessed with finding out more about Flamel – setting up Harry’s first adventure with the Invisibility Cloak.
In fact, it should be noted that before that adventure, the Trio spends considerable time in the Hogwarts Library looking for Flamel… in all the wrong places. Harry even goes into the Restricted Section, and gets shooed out of the Library entirely by Madam Pince, the Hogwarts Librarian. Whatever possesses them to assume that Flamel is famous, I don’t know. But he is, and they do.
Before we get to Harry’s first Cloak adventure, however, let’s talk more about his first real experience of Christmas and his acquisition of the Cloak.
On Christmas Eve (six years to the day before his nearly fatal visit to his birthplace of Godric’s Hollow), Harry goes “to bed looking forward to the next day for the food and the fun, but not expecting any presents at all.” Instead, when he wakes up in the morning, he is stunned to find that he has a small stack of presents at the foot of his bed.
“Will you look at this?” [Harry exclaims] “I’ve got some presents!”
“What did you expect, turnips?” said Ron.
As it turns out, Harry gets a hand-carved flute from Hagrid, a 50-pence piece from the Dursleys (from which we learn that Muggle money fascinates Ron), a Weasley sweater from Molly Weasley (signaling the beginning of his unofficial adoption into the Weasley family), a box of Chocolate Frogs from Hermione, and the Invisibility Cloak. The Cloak comes with a mysterious note, written in a “narrow, loopy” hand:
Your father left this in my possession before he died. It is time it was returned to you. Use it well.
A Very Merry Christmas to you.
Since this is a re-read, I am going to assume that we all know that the note is from Albus Dumbledore and that it is his first direct outreach to Harry since Harry arrived at Hogwarts.
The Cloak not only belonged to Harry’s father, but his father inherited it from one of his parents… going all the way back to his ancestor Ignotus Peverell, with whom the Cloak originates, and who is buried not far from Harry’s parents in the graveyard at Godric’s Hollow.
Through Ignotus Peverell, Harry is distantly related to Voldemort (a direct descendent of Ignotus’ older brother Cadmus Peverell, who possessed the Resurrection Stone). The oldest brother, Antioch Peverell, possessed the Elder Wand – which is currently in the possession of Albus Dumbledore.
The reason I have mentioned the Cloak’s background is that I’d like to draw attention to something rather remarkable – the fact that Albus Dumbledore actually returns the Cloak to Harry, even though legend claims that the person who unites the three Hallows will become the Master of Death.
For 10 years, Dumbledore has held two of the Hallows in his possession. But rather than seek out the final Hallow, he instead relinquishes the Hallow that rightfully belongs to another. He could have kept it, and Harry would have been none the wiser. But Dumbledore allows himself to be merely the custodian of the Cloak until he can safely pass it on to Harry, its rightful owner.
Such an action would be remarkable for any Wizard who made a study of the Hallows. It is even more remarkable for Dumbledore, whose youthful fantasies specifically involved uniting the Hallows to create a world ruled by Wizards… or more specifically, by himself and Gellert Grindelwald. Returning the Cloak to Harry shows the extent to which Dumbledore has turned his back on his past failings.
Though Dumbledore is later fatally tempted by the Resurrection Stone, it’s not through an attempt to unite the Hallows. It’s just a moment of weakness in which he succumbs to the temptation to bring back his dead sister (a point that is indirectly related to the second part of this chapter).
Regardless of Dumledore’s failings, returning the Cloak to Harry shows significant character growth since his sister’s death. In a very real sense, Dumbledore is one “invisible man” in this post’s title – a man willing to remain anonymous, willing to guide Harry from the background, willing to let the boy ultimately move into the spotlight.
The new chapter starts with a BOOM. Any doubts on what that is all about?
In chapter 1, Hagrid was entrusted with retrieving baby Harry from the ruined house and bringing him to Privet Drive. After 7 days and hundreds of letters, Hogwarts has finally sent the same emissary to deliver a single admissions letter.
For the past 10 years, Harry has been abused, neglected, under-nourished. And now this seeming-stranger comes in to the hut and focuses almost exclusively on him. Hagrid brings Harry a birthday cake, heats him up some sausages, even takes care of the Dursleys for him! Hagrid treats Harry like a hidden Prince.
In the letter left with Harry on the Dursley’s doorstep, Dumbledore had entrusted the boy’s aunt and uncle with the job of telling Harry who he was and what he was. The Dursley’s opted, instead, to hide and even run from the truth. Now, for the first time, Harry meets somebody who knows his story… and isn’t lying about it. Harry is, he learns, a Wizard – a famous boy in the Wizarding World. And his parents didn’t die in a car crash. They were murdered:
“CAR CRASH!” roared Hagrid, jumping up so angrily that the Dursleys scuttled back to their corner. “How could a car crash kill Lily an’ James Potter? It’s an outrage! A scandal! Harry Potter not knowin’ his own story when every kid in our world knows his name!”
You’ve just got to love Hagrid. He’s just so infuriated with the Dursleys for telling Harry nothing of the truth and fabricating falsehoods and depriving Harry of his birthright.
And so it’s left to Hagrid to tell Harry the story that every Wizarding kid knows – or at least the snippets of it that are not confined only to Dumbledore’s personal knowledge. But much of it is speculation. Hagrid speculates that when he killed the Potters, maybe Voldemort was trying to recruit them and it all went wrong, or maybe he wanted them out of the way because they were too close to Dumbeldore. Hagrid doesn’t really know:
“All anyone [other than Dumbledore] knows is, he turned up in the village where you was all living, on Halloween ten years ago. You was just a year old. He came ter yer house an’ – an’ – “….
“You-Know-Who killed ’em. An’ then – an’ this is the real myst’ry of the thing – he tried to kill you, too. Wanted ter make a clean job of it, I suppose, or maybe he just liked killin’ by then. But he couldn’t do it. Never wonder how you got that mark on yer forehead? That was no ordinary cut. That’s what yeh get when a powerful, evil curse touches yeh – took care of yer mum an’ dad an’ yer house even – but it didn’t work on you, an’ that’s why yer famous, Harry. No one ever lived after he decided ter kill ’em, no one except you…. an’ you was only a baby, an’ you lived.”
This is really the first explanation we have of why this little boy will be legend. But Hagrid’s got large parts of the story wrong:
(SPOILERS AHEAD!)
Elsewhere, Hagrid tells Harry taht Voldemort never tried taking Hogwarts because he was afraid of Dumbledore. Of course, in the Second Wizarding War, he at least thinks he’s taken Hogwarts.
And now for the final crucial piece of information. After failing to kill the boy, Voldemort disappeared:
“Most of us reckon he’s still out there somewhere but lost his powers. Too weak to carry on. ‘Cause somethin’ about you finished him, Harry. There was somethin’ goin’ on that night he hadn’t counted on – I dunno what it was, no one does – but somethin’ about you stumped him, all right.”
This is one bit that Hagrid gets very nearly right. Something did stump Voldemort. Hagrid just doesn’t know what. Despite Hagrid’s enlightenment, much of Harry’s story is still obscure. But for the first time, Harry finally connects the flash of green light to the “high, cold, cruel laugh” that he heard on the night his parents were murdered.
We last left off with the Dursleys about to make a run for it, after the great letter-down-the-chimney assault. Let’s join them…
On the Lam
Sunday, Day 6: On Day 6 (the day “one less than perfection”), the Dursleys make a run for it, attempting to escape the letters…
Dudley was sniffling in the back seat; his father had hit him round the head for holding them up while he tried to pack his television, VCR, and computer in his sports bag.
They drove. And they drove. Even Petunia didn’t dare ask where they were going. Every now and then Uncle Vernon would take a sharp turn and drive in the opposite direction for a while.
“Shake ’em off… shake ’em off,” he would mutter whenever he did this.
Best moments: Dudley’s packing sense, Uncle Vernon’s muttering. And it just keeps getting better!
Monday, Day 7: Harry is a bit disoriented by the week’s events, so he doesn’t really realize it yet, but this 7th day of letters is also the day before the last day of the 7th month – the day of his 11th birthday. Keep in mind the dying days of the 7th month. It will become important later in the series.
And there are many other 7s in this series: 7 years, 7 Weasley children, 7 players in Quidditch, 7 Potters, 7 intended parts to Voldemort’s soul. And of course, 7 is said to be the most magically powerful number. But of course, all of that is yet to come. Right now, Harry has not even been introduced to the Wizarding World… though the Wizarding World is doing its best to introduce itself to him!
On this 7th day of letters from no one, the Dursleys find that none of their previous attempts to outrun the letters have succeeded. 100 or so letters await Harry at the hotel desk. After hours of driving aimlessly, Petunia sensibly asks Vernon if it might not be a good idea to go home. Instead, Uncle Vernon…
… drove them into the middle of a forest, got out, looked around, shook his head, got back in his car, and off they went again. The same thing happened in the middle of a plowed field, halfway across a suspension bridge, and at the top of a multilevel parking garage.
“Daddy’s gone mad, hasn’t he?” Dudley asked Aunt Petunia dully late that afternoon.
Finally, he finds a wave-crashed island offshore with a damp and battered shack. Certainly, no post can arrive there. Yet in what Daggerstone has called “Decidedly THE funniest Deus ex machina,” with less than one second to go to Harry’s birthday, Harry hears a…
BOOM.
The whole shack shivered and Harry sat bolt upright, staring at the door. Someone was outside, knocking to come in.
The Wizarding World will not be dissuaded.
Best moment: Dudley inquiring after his father’s sanity.
Next time: “Harry – Yer a Wizard”
Well, I did it! I didn’t finish The Flight of the Dursleys (had to go to sleep), but at least I got it started. All things considered, I call that a WIN!
So, let’s keep going, shall we? Before falling asleep last night, I had just started with the letters…
We were last on Day 2 – after Ickle Dudley Wuddykins’ snit, but before the morning post.
The Letters: A Brief Chronology (cont’d)
Wednesday, Day 2: Another single letter arrives. But significantly, it is addressed to Harry’s new location: “The Smallest Bedroom.” Someone knows he has moved.
Best moment? The three-way battle for the letter in which “everyone got hit a lot by the Smelting Stick.”
Thursday, Day 3: Harry is so determined to read the post that he tries sneaking outside before anyone else awakes. Uncle Vernon is so determined to keep him away from the post that he camps out by the mail slot in a sleeping bag. The unknown sender is so determined to get Harry his letter that three letters arrive!
Best moment? Uncle Vernon staying home from work to nail up the mail slot:
“Oh, these people’s minds work in strange ways, Petunia, they’re not like you and me,” said Uncle Vernon, trying to knock in a nail with the piece of fruitcake Aunt Petunia had just brought him.
Note to self: What a novel use for fruitcake!
Friday, Day 4: Twelve letters arrive, pushed through every crevice available. Uncle Vernon stays home to board up the cracks.
Best moment? Uncle Vernon humming “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” while nailing stuff up… and jumping at small noises.
Saturday, Day 5: Well, things just escalate and escalate and escalate:
On Saturday, things began to get out of hand. Twenty-four letters to Harry found their way into the house, rolled up and hidden inside each of the two dozen eggs that their very confused milkman had handed Aunt Petunia through the living room window. While Uncle Vernon made furious phone calls to the post office and the dairy trying to find someone to complain to, Aunt Petunia shredded the letters in her food processor.
“Who on earth wants to talk to you this badly?” Dudley asked Harry in amazement.
A few things here. The milkman seems to have been confunded. So this means that Wizards are taking a very direct and active role, interacting with Muggles, in order to get a single letter to Harry. Not to mention that the number of letters has doubled since the day before. We are now up to two dozen letters, along with the two dozen eggs.
Best moment? Aunt Petunia shredding letters in the food processor.
Who knew those things had so many uses?
Sunday, Day 6: No post today! Well not through Muggle Mail at least. But Muggle Mail has never stopped the owl post. 30-40 letters come zipping down the chimney like bullets, and Uncle Vernon decides to make a run for it.
Best moment? Uncle Vernon “trying to speak calmly but pulling great tufts out of his mustache at the same time” and looking “so dangerous with half his mustache missing that no one dared argue” when he ordered them to pack.
I’m going to leave off the Dursleys on the lam for our next entry. Hope to see you then!
(to be continued)
Okay, I did it. After a couple of weeks of personal trauma (including the loss of a beloved pet and two rounds of blizzard), I finally forced myself to re-read “The Letters from Nowhere” – the chapter in which Harry’s acceptance letters arrive from Hogwarts. Please bear with me while I make my re-entry into writing up the re-read. :)
I’m going to approach this first post a bit differently. In order to get writing again, I’m just going to do scattershot impressions rather than create crafted writerly paragraphs. Are you good with that? Here we go…
I really love this chapter. For starters, it’s our second close-encounter with this place they call Hogwarts. We know that those wizardly types in the first chapter had to come from somewhere, and two of them were called “Professor,” but we didn’t know Professor of what, or Professor from where. And really, at the end of this chapter, we still don’t know… because Harry’s uncle won’t let him touch those letters!
The whole letters incident is really hilarious, and it shows the incredible tenacity of the Wizarding World, and the incredible tenacity of the Dursleys in trying to avoid it!
Poor Dudley
Before looking at the letters, it might be nice to take a moment to think about poor Dudley. This is a really miserable chapter for Harry’s cousin, maybe moreso even than it is for Harry, who is accustomed to irrational behavior and abuse. But Dudley is used to being the center of attention and having all his whims met.
At the beginning of the chapter, Dudley is strutting around the house in his new school uniform with his new “Smelting Stick.” But once the letters arrive, Dudley gets shuffled to the side. In the attempt to keep the letters away from Harry, Uncle Vernon tosses Dudley (along with Harry) out into the hall by the scruff of his neck, gives Dudley’s overflow toy room to Harry (out of blind terror that the first letter came addressed to Harry at “The Cupboard Under the Stairs”), even wrestles his son to the ground when a new letter arrives. Later, when Vernon decides to flee the house, he hits Dudley on the head for taking too long to pack, and Dudley misses all his favorite TV shows on an empty stomach and even has to sleep in a horrible wet shack on a rock offshore! You almost feel some sympathy for the poor brute of a boy.
The Letters: A Brief Chronology
So now, on to the letters…
Tuesday, Day 1: Blind panic sets in at the Dursleys from the moment Uncle Vernon grabs Harry’s letter out of his hand and reads it. From the Dursleys’ point of view, a letter from these still-mysterious senders is nothing short of a catastrophe. Petunia’s voice is “quivering.” Vernon talks about “dangerous nonsense.” Dudley is forced to listen in at the keyhole (Shades of Death Eater Snape listening in on Trelawney’s prophecy). And Harry gets moved upstairs, out of the cupboard and into a bedroom.
Wednesday, Day 2:
Next morning at breakfast, Dudley was in shock. He’d screamed, whacked his father with his Smelting Stick, been sick on purpose, kicked his mother, and thrown his tortoise through the greenhouse roof, and he still didn’t have his room back.
And that’s all before the next letter arrives!
On Dudley Dursley’s birthday, the unthinkable happens. Arabella Figg – the crazy old cat lady Harry gets dumped on every time Dudley has a birthday – breaks her leg, and the Dursleys have to figure out what to do with Harry. When the boy suggests just letting him stay home, Uncle Vernon protests that he does not want to come back to find the house in “ruins.”
“I won’t blow up the house,” replies Harry.
The Ruined House
Sounds like the typical parent/guardian exchange with t(w)eens, doesn’t it? But this is actually that rare, almost non-existent, occasion when there appears to be some factual basis for Dursley fears. Dumbledore apparently told the Dursleys in his letter dated 10 years earlier about the condition of the Potters’ home after Voldemort came calling.
As Hagrid told Dumbledore at that time, the “house was almost destroyed,” and (as he later tells Harry) he took the boy from the “ruined house” himself. Aunt Petunia certainly knows that her sister “went and got herself blown up.” So it is with some bit of authentic, fact-based fear, perhaps, that Uncle Vernon mentions “ruins” when he thinks of Harry being left alone in the house while the family celebrates Dudley’s birthday at the zoo.
All Harry remembers of the You-Know-Who incident, though, is contained in a recurring dream about a flying motorcycle and the memory of a flash of green light from the “car crash”:
Sometimes, when he strained his memory during long hours in his cupboard, he came up with a strange vision: a blinding flash of green light and a burning pain on his forehead. This, he supposed, was the car crash, though he couldn’t imagine where all the green light came from.
(Well, Harry, that would actually be an Avada Kedavra curse, Voldemort’s signature spell. But you aren’t going to learn anything about the Unforgivables for four more years!)
Wandless Magic
Though the Dursleys may well have images of real ruins in mind when they talk about not wanting to leave Harry alone in the house, they seem more afraid of the random “strange things” that happen around the boy. Wizarding children have magical abilities, with or without a wand. The wand helps them learn to control and channel their magic, but being gifted with magic is not dependent on the wand.
Under various forms of stress, Harry has already caused his hair to grow back overnight from a bad haircut, caused a hated sweater to shrink while Aunt Petunia tried to force it on him, and even found himself on the roof of the school kitchens while attempting to escape from Dudley’s gang.
(Wandless magic plays a role throughout the series, but nowhere more strongly than in DH, where we learn of the wandless magic performed by young Lily Evans (Harry’s mother), her childhood friend Severus Snape, and Dumbledore’s own sister, Ariana. Ariana Dumbledore provides the tragic example of a Wizarding child who pays the price for being unable to control her magic.)
The Parselmouth
Then, there’s the event in the reptile house, from which this chapter takes its title. The Dursleys do end up taking Harry to the zoo (better than having him blow up the house, I suppose!), and after Dudley unsuccessfully tries to force his Muggle father to get a sleeping Boa Constrictor to “do something,” the snake initiates an interaction with Harry. First it winks, then it nods, then it gestures with its tail. In the course of this interaction, Harry starts talking to the snake. And the snake understands him.
On first reading, this seems like just another example of Harry’s wandless magic. And this possibility is underscored by the fact that when Dudley punches Harry, something more typically magical happens – the glass to the cage disappears, and the snake escapes. But as the snake leaves, it speaks to Harry in a “low, hissing voice” – and just as the snake understood Harry, Harry understands the snake.
Harry is a Parselmouth – a natural speaker of Parseltongue, the language of snakes. This is no ordinary magical power, and it is not typical of children’s wandless magic. In HBP, when Dumbledore teaches Voldemort’s history to Harry, he shows one memory in which an 11-year-old Tom Riddle (later Voldemort) reveals to the adult Dumbledore:
I can speak to snakes…. they find me, they whisper to me.
Dumbledore does not let on, but he is clearly taken aback by this revelation. Parseltongue is a language associated with Salazar Slytherin, founder of Slytherin House at Hogwarts, the House that values pure Wizard blood. Additionally, when Harry reveals his Parseltongue capabilities during the Duelling Club segment of CoS, his friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger tell Harry that this is a bad thing – that Parseltongue is generally associated with Dark Magic, and that You-Know-Who himself is a Parselmouth.
And speaking of You-Know-Who… notice that just as the Boa in the reptile house initiates contact with Harry, so young Riddle tells Dumbledore that the snakes “find” him. Apparently, snakes can innately tell if a Wizard is a Parselmouth… and seek such Wizards out.
The Parselmouth motif becomes increasingly important throughout the series, as Dumbledore pieces together the connections between Harry and the wicked Wizard who tried to kill him. But at this point in the story, the snake incident looks like just a throw-away magic event, another neat magical thing Harry can do. Which makes “The Vanishing Glass” a wonderful early instance of Rowling’s talent for misdirection.
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Next time, from Chapter 3:
‘The Flight of the Dursleys’ … in which we discuss the strange letter(s) addressed to Harry… and the Dursleys’ even stranger behavior surrounding them.
10 years on from Harry’s arrival, Privet Drive has “hardly changed at all,” and neither has the Dursleys’ living room. Besides cousin Dudley’s growing-up pictures, the place stays stuck in time, held in stasis – with no evidence, either, of Harry’s presence.
An 11th Birthday
Chapter 2, “The Vanishing Glass,” opens on Prince Dudley’s 11th birthday. In the British Wizarding World, 11 is one of the most special birthdays. It’s wand age – the age when a child can begin training at Hogwarts.
For the spoiled Muggle bully, though, 11 is just another birthday, a day when he can boss around his parents, receive an obscene stream of expensive gifts (a racing bike? a video camera? 16 video games? – for an 11-year-old?!?!!), and engage in his favorite sport: Punching-Bag Cousin.
A Grim Fairy Tale?
And how about the cousin? Harry lives in a cupboard under the stairs, amid spiders, wearing Dudley’s baggy hand-me-downs, even being awakened ahead of the rest of the house to slave away in the kitchen.
Is it just me, or does Harry’s plight sound like something out of the Brothers Grimm? …..
[Cinderella’s step sisters] took her pretty clothes away from her, put an old grey bedgown on her, and gave her wooden shoes. “Just look at the proud princess, how decked out she is!” they cried, and laughed, and led her into the kitchen. There she had to do hard work from morning till night, get up before daybreak, carry water, light fires, cook and wash. Besides this, the sisters did her every imaginable injury – they mocked her and emptied her peas and lentils into the ashes, so that she was forced to sit and pick them out again. In the evening when she had worked till she was weary she had no bed to go to, but had to sleep by the hearth in the cinders. And on that account she always looked dusty and dirty, they called her Cinderella.
– From Cinderella, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Pantheon Books, p. 121 –
Unlike Cinderella, Harry’s abuse comes at the hands of relatives by blood. He’s not literally a step-child. But like Cinderella, he is deprived of decent clothes, mocked, compelled to do the dirty work, forced to live in a place not fit for humans, and talked about as if he’s not there. And this is a child who, in the Wizarding World, is considered something of a Prince – a child famous for surviving Voldemort’s Killing Curse!
In the Introduction to the Muggle edition of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Rowling writes:
In Muggle fairy tales, magic tends to lie at the root of the hero’s or heroine’s troubles…. In The Tales of Beedle the Bard, on the other hand, we meet heroes and heroines who can perform magic themselves, and yet find it just as hard to solve their problems as we do.
Cinderella is an exception among Muggle fairy tales. She is saved by magic… or perhaps by grace. The magic comes from praying everyday under the hazel tree planted on her mother’s grave.
Harry, too, will eventually be saved from the Dursleys by magic – only to be thrown into a mounting War among Wizards. He was left on the Dursleys’ doorstep with a letter and a “Good luck, Harry.” But at this point, it looks like his luck ran out the night his parents (according to the Dursleys’ lie) died in a car crash.
Parallels and Foreshadowings (Smaller Font for the Spoiler-Sensitive!)
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Next time, from Chapter 2:
‘I Won’t Blow Up the House!‘ … in which we discuss Harry’s wandless magic, his Parseltongue capabilities, and his dreams.
Expecto Patronum! 