Scans

Simon Walters, the Political Editor of The Mail on Sunday, has a Harry Potter-mad family. So when last week J.K. Rowling posted on her website a blast against the glorification of skinny young women, adding that fat wasn’t the worst thing a woman could be, he was prompted to write this controversial reply… Imagine a childrens book where the attractiveness of the heroine is established in the first chapter by comparing her with another female character who is revoltingly fat, stupid and violent. On top of that, the fat girl spends most of her energies to bullying and beating up the slimmer, brighter heroine—with the support of the fat girl’s parents. Judging from her remarks last week about our ‘skinny-obsessed world’, J.K. Rowling would be the first to condemn such a book for brainwashing young people into thinking thin means beauty and brains, while fat means ugly and brainless.

But change the sex of the characters in the novel mentioned above and you have Rowling’s own brilliant creation, Harry Potter. The fat boy is of course Dudley. The slim and attractive boy is Harry. The opening chapters of most of the Harry Potter series are devoted to Harry’s life of misery with Dudley and his parents, Vernon and Petunia Dursley, Harry’s uncle and aunt. They are the most derided of minorities: small-minded, lower-middle class, suburban snobs.

But that is not enough to make Dudley a truly repulsive figure of fun. Rowling—who wrote on her website that she didn’t want her daughters growing into ‘empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated-clones’—gives him one more handicap. He is fat. Dudley is not just fat. He is disgustingly fat. In her fist book, The Philosopher’s Stone, the reader is introduced to Dudley thus: ‘Dudley was very fat and hated exercise, unless of course it involved punching somebody. His favorite punch bag was Harry, but he didn’t often catch him. Harry didn’t look it, but he was very fast. Dudley was so large his bottom drooped over the side of the kitchen chair.’ Dudley, fat and slow. Harry, deceptively fast. Presumably because he is slim. Why else? The readers view is soon confirmed, albeit subtly: ‘Perhaps it had something to do with being in a dark cupboard, but Harry had always been small and skinny for his age.’ There it is in Rowling’s own words—our hero Harry is skinny.

Ah, I hear you say, but Rowling wasn’t talking about boys on her website. She was talking about her fears for her two daughters and the pressure on them to emulate models such as Kate Moss. But young boys are now as weight-consious as young girls, and almost as susceptible to peer pressure not to be fat. In Rowling’s defense, it is true that the main female character in Harry Potter, bossy Hermione Granger, is no Kate Moss lookalike. However, by any normal yardstick, she is pretty. Which is why the pretty, slim—and talented—Emma Watson was chosen to play her in the films.

Harry’s girlfriend, Ron Weasley’s sister Ginny—pale and with long, flowing, red hair—has an air of Hamlet’s Ophelia about her. Rowling frequently uses dancing metaphors to describe Ginny. In one section she waltzes across the floor ‘like a ballerina.’ There are few fat ballet dancers. Confirmation of Ginny’s beauty comes from Pansy Parkinson, the girlfriend of Harry’s enemy Draco Malfoy. She tells Malfoy: ‘A lot of boys like her. Even you think she is good-looking. And we all know how hard you are to please.’ Meanwhile, Rowling happily mocks another Hogwarts pupil, Marietta, whose ‘thick layer of make-up did not obscure the odd formation of pimples etched across her face.’ Is that her fault?

But Rowling is in awe of Fleur Delacour who is sweet on Harry. ‘A young woman [Fluer] was standing in the doorway, a woman of such breathtaking beauty that the room seemed to become strangely airless. She was tall and willowy with long blonde hair and appeared to emanate a faint silvery glow.’ Tall and willowy? Skinny-obsessed? Not Rowling. Poor old Dudley Dursley is not the only fat boy who is a figure of fun.

Goyle and Crabbe, Malfoy’s two young henchmen who try, and usually fail, to catch up with fleet footed Harry, are straight from Central Casting: ‘Grinning stupidly, they stuffed the cakes into their large mouths,’ Rowling writes with relish. ‘Both are thick set and extremely mean.’ She barely mentions them without a disparaging reference to their size. Sure, not everyone in Harry Potter who is overweight is bad. Mrs.Weasley, who is played by Julie Walters in the movies, is described as ‘plump.’ But here Rowling lapses in to another stereotype. Mrs.Weasley’s plumpness is the matronly kind, the maternal comfort that Harry has never had. And what of Harry’s own mother, Lilly, and his father, James? We meet them only through the magical Mirror of Erised, which brings their images back to life again.

Is his mother the ‘matronly’ kind and his father bull-necked like Dudley’s equally corpulent and odious dad? Not a chance. Harry’s mum, we learn, is a ‘very pretty woman.’ No plumpness or thick ankles, then. And his father is a ‘tall, thin, black-haired man.’ There’s that little word again: thin. Rowling deserves credit for using the book to extol the virtues of sticking up for the underdog. Or, at least some of them. Harry has no family; the Weasleys are poor and Hermione has few social skills. But they all stand together, defeat the forces of evil, and still find time to protect other victims such as stammering Neville Longbottom. Which is admirable.

Yet her latest book ends with another pile of derision heaped on fatso Dudley. In one of the early Potter novels, she writes: ‘Dudley had a large pink face, not much neck, small watery blue eyes and thick blonde hair that lay smoothly on his thick fat head. Harry often said Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.’ For every school boy with black hair and glasses who has been called Harry Potter in the playground, there is another fat boy who has been called Dudley—fat, stupid, nasty Dudley. Maybe its time for Rowling to create a new hero, male or—even better—female, who is fat. After all, as she said herself: ‘Is fat really the worst thing a human being can be?’

Thanks to Sorting Hat for typing up the article!

4/10/06