Highlights
- The Dursleys pass down their biases towards wizardkind to their son, Dudley, through their mistreatment of Harry, reinforcing negative attitudes.
- Dudley, initially a bully to Harry, eventually makes amends and rebuilds a relationship with him, showing signs of personal growth.
- The Dementor attack on Dudley serves as a reality check, prompting him to become more self-aware and shed the biases he grew up with.
The first chapter of the first Harry Potter book - The Sorcerer's Stone paints an idyllic picture of the Dursleys' life at Number Four, Privet Drive. Their patriarch, Vernon serves as the director of a drill-making firm called Grunnings. His wife, Petunia is a stay-at-home mother of a boy named Dudley. Chapter 1 "The Boy Who Lived" begins shortly before Albus Dumbledore is about to condemn the orphaned infant, Harry Potter to Aunt Petunia's. The Dursleys are ashamed of the boys' mother, Lily who is a muggle-born witch, and his father, James, who is a pure-blood wizard. In their opinion, the Potters are nothing but freaks.
The Dursleys are the archetypal English middle-class family, while James and Lily fought in the First Wizarding War as members of the Order of the Phoenix. The Dursleys through their treatment of Harry make sure that their biases towards the Wizardkind are passed down to their child. As such, Dudley at a young age inherits his parents' hate without so much as knowing what Harry's parents fought for. Chapter two of the first Harry Potter book - "The Vanishing Glass" talks about Harry's growing years at the Dursleys. He's been living at his aunt's for ten years and yet there exist no pictures of him on the living room mantelpiece. While Aunt Petunia had begrudgingly taken him in, little did she know that her son, Dudley would eventually be the one to make amends and rebuild a relationship with Harry.
Harry And Dudley Through The Years
Chapter two of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone centers around Dudley's eleventh birthday. His favorite exercise is punching people and his favorite punching bag is his smaller and skinnier cousin, Harry. Because of the differences in the boys' physiques, Dudley cannot often catch Harry. The skinner Harry wears his cousin's hand-me-downs and his round glasses are beyond repair due to countless punches on the nose from Dudley. In "The Vanishing Glass," Dudley tries his best to talk his mum out of taking Harry to the zoo. He wails and pretends to sob but since Mrs. Figg who watches over Harry every year, bails out, there is little that Petunia can do.
Dudley (and his gang) often chase Harry around the school campus and punch and push him. When Dudley punches Harry at the reptile house on his birthday outing, it costs him and his friend, Piers Polkiss as they leap back into the boa constrictor's tank while the snake slides past. The glass vanishes, and Uncle Vernon blames Harry. Chapter 3 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone "The Letters From No One" says that Dudley's friends, Piers, Dennis, Malcolm, and Gordon join him in his favorite sport - "Harry Hunting" during the holidays and because of it, the young wizard spends most of his time avoiding them. Dudley is accepted to Smeltings, and Harry is going to a local school named Stonewall High. Harry however starts Hogwarts in September 1991 and the Dursleys in vain try to prevent it, and Dudley even gets a pig's tail in the process.
The Dursleys are unhappy to have Harry back for the summer and in The Chamber of Secrets, Dudley teases him about not receiving any birthday cards from friends at Hogwarts. He calls his school a "freak place" and gives him a hard time throughout the holidays. The third Harry Potter book - The Prisoner of Azkaban says Dudley, like his parents, has "a very medieval attitude" towards magic. That year, Aunt Marge visits the Dursleys at Privet Drive, and Harry is terrified to see her again. Her dog, Ripper had once chased him up a tree and Dudley had made fun of him. Dudley relishes how his father bullies Harry, and Harry Potter describes it as his "favorite form of entertainment." In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Vernon, and Petunia make excuses for Dudley's bad marks and ignored accusations of bullying in his end-of-year report.
The Dementors' Attack And Dudley's Amends
In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Vernon almost chucks Harry out of the house after the Dementors' attack on Dudley in the alleyway between Magnolia Crescent and Wisteria Walk. Harry produces a fully-fledged Patronus to ward the Dementors off, lifts Dudley off the floor, and carries him home. All hell breaks loose at Number Four, and both Vernon and Petunia are livid at Dudley's condition. Vernon accuses Harry of casting a spell on Dudley, forcing him to reveal that they were attacked by Dementors. He is overwhelmed and decides fostering Harry isn't worth the trouble anymore. Vernon orders his nephew to leave, but when Dumbledore's Howler arrives, Aunt Petunia asks him to stay.
In the sixth Harry Potter book - The Half-Blood Prince Dumbledore visits the Dursleys and informs them that the magical protection he invoked years ago will cease to operate as soon as Harry turns seventeen. In that light, he asks them to allow Harry to return one last time before his seventeenth birthday. The Dursleys reluctantly depart from Number Four, Privet Drive in chapter 3 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Harry, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and Arthur Weasley explain to them that they can be held hostages by Voldemort and that they have to go into hiding. Dudley is the first one to accept the Order's help, and he is the only one worried to leave Harry behind. "Why isn’t he coming too?" he asks his parents. In this back and forth, Harry calls himself "a waste of space," and Dudley replies he doesn't think of his cousin as a waste of space. He admits that Harry saved his life, while the latter jokes that the Dementors had blown a different personality into him. They bid goodbye and Dudley nearly smiles.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling revealed during a 2007 Q&A session (per MTV) that Harry and Dudley would see each other enough to be on Christmas-card terms. Rowling added that they would visit more out of a sense of duty and sit in silence, so their children could get to know each other. Furthermore, Rowling added the Dementor attack that took place in the fifth Harry Potter book was a good thing for Dudley. It gave him a reality check and made him more self-aware. Simply put, Dudley's gesture in The Deathly Hallows was a small step in the right direction, and even though the harm could never be undone, Dudley shed the bias he grew up with.