Chamber of Secrets: Chapters 7 & 8

Wizard rock of the week: "The Lonely Life of Sir Nick" by Catchlove

Why hello again! Hope you've had a lovely week and are as excited as I am for Thanksgiving (if you're American, that is. I suppose this is a normal week if you live elsewhere, but I'm thankful I get two and half days off this week. And there's going to be pie!)

So, here we are, decently into Chamber of Secrets, and this pair of chapters is where things really start to get cookin' for Our Heroes. Puking! Narcissism! Prejudice! Dead People! Clues! It's going to be a wild ride, so hold onto your Nimbus Two Thousand (and One) and off we go.

Chapter Seven: Mudbloods and Murmurs

What Happens:

Harry’s weekend starts off earlier than expected when Oliver Wood insists on break-of-dawn Quidditch practice. Colin Creevey tags along, eager to photograph the training session. Harry, slightly exasperated, explains all the rules to him on the way to the pitch. Wood spends hours detailing his new strategy, and when they finally make it outside, the Slytherins descend on them. Snape has given permission to use the field, as they need to “train their new Seeker:” Draco Malfoy. Malfoy’s father donated brand-new Nimbus Two Thousand and Ones to the entire team. Ron and Hermione join the group on the field as the Slytherins and Gryffindors trade insults. Hermione accuses Malfoy of buying his way onto the team, and he retaliates, calling her a “filthy little Mudblood.” The entire Gryffindor group is outraged, but none so much as Ron, who tries to curse Malfoy. Unfortunately for Ron, his broken wand backfires and he starts throwing up slugs. Harry and Hermione bring him to Hagrid's, narrowly avoiding another run-in with Lockhart.

Hagrid is rather disgruntled with Lockhart, who keeps trying to give him advice. He explains that Lockhart was the only applicant for the Defense Against the Dark Arts job, since rumors are flying that the position is cursed. Hagrid and Ron explain toHarry and Hermione that “Mudblood” is an incredibly insensitive, insulting term for someone of Muggle parentage. Ron adds bitterly that some wizards, including the Malfoys, think that their “pure” blood makes them better than others.

At lunch, Professor McGonagall reminds Harry and Ron that their detentions will be that evening. Ron has been given cleaning duty with Filch and Harry will be helping Lockhart with fan mail. Both of them are horrified at their assignments. As Harry predicted, answering fan mail with Lockhart is a nightmare. At the very end of the evening, he hears a disembodied voice over Lockhart’s inane prattling. The voice is cold, evil, and venomous, and says eerily, “let me rip…tear…kill…” Harry asks Lockhart about it, but the dim-witted teacher didn’t hear anything. He lets Harry leave. Back in the common room, he tells Ron about the voice, but neither of them knows what it could mean

Commentary:

An occupational hazard of being the second book of a series is that there's a lot of exposition and catch-up to be done. Here, Jo uses Colin to accomplish this. Colin, after all, is a Muggle-born first year who has no idea how Quidditch is played. It's not quite as annoying to be info-dumped-upon if the info-dumping is directed at a cute eleven-year-old with a camera.

Putting Malfoy on the Quidditch team also makes a lot of sense. Being a Quidditch player is like the Hogwarts equivalent of being on the starting lineup for that school in Friday Night Lights. If Harry and Malfoy are really foils, they need equal footing and social status. It's perfect, too, that Malfoy will play the same position as Harry. Of course, Hermione's right though; Malfoy's spot on the team was probably influenced just a teeny bit by his father's "generosity." This confrontation reveals, in explicit terms, the lines of class and prejudice in the Wizarding world. We learned back in Sorcerer's Stone (during Harry's trip to Diagon Alley) that Malfoy thinks certain families are better than others, but here that prejudice is given a name and specific criteria. Obviously, the purebloods vs. every one else distinction will be brought to its zenith in Deathly Hallows, but the groundwork is already being laid. Even without Voldemort's direct influence, the vestiges of prejudice and bigotry exist. Wizarding society isn't all that different from Muggle society. Human nature is consistent, I suppose.

Hagrid drops a little bit of important information too: applicants for the Defense Against the Dark Arts job are few and far between. People are "whispering" that the job is cursed, and in this book's bookend parallel (HBP) we'll learn that it is indeed. Curious, though, that Lockhart would want the job at all. He's a bestselling author, after all, and even though that doesn't mean he's a rich as our Jo, he's probably a bit better off than your average author. So why does he teach? He's clearly terrible at it. Is he just looking for a venue to talk more about himself and increase his book sales via textbook requirements?

I agree with Harry's assesment of the detention assignments; I'd much rather clean trophies than put up with Lockhart's prattle for four hours. Ugh. But then, I'm not burping up slugs like Ron. And ooh ooh! Notice that Ron has to re-polish a certain yet-unnamed someone's Special Award for Services to the School because of his slug affliction. Very nice, very subtle. Meanwhile, Harry is stuck in Lockhart's office where he hears the basilisk for the second time. Neither he nor Ron has any idea where the voice is coming from, which makes sense, since "clearly, it must be in the pipes!" isn't something I'd think of either, were I in their shoes.

Chapter Eight: The Deathday Party

What Happens:

As Halloween approaches, the weather turns cold and several students are getting sick. Ginny Weasley is looking pale, too. One morning after a cold, rainy Quidditch practice, Harry runs into a very glum Nearly Headless Nick. The ghost is upset; once again his request to join the Headless Hunt was denied. Just as Harry begins complaining about his Quidditch woes, Mrs. Norris lurks by. Harry is dripping mud all over the place, and when Filch appears moments later he’s livid and hauls Harry to his office for punishment.

Once there, however, a huge crash resounds above the office. Certain Peeves is to blame, Filch storms out, leaving Harry alone. On Filch’s desk is a curious envelope full of information about a Kwikspell course. Harry looks through it, but Filch comes back more quickly than he expected, ranting about Peeves damaging a valuable vanishing cabinet. Harry shoves the folder aside, but Filch can tell he’s been reading it. Embarrassed, Filch sends Harry away without punishment. Back upstairs, Harry sees Nick again. Nick convinced Peeves to create the diversion. To thank him, Harry agrees to attend Nick’s five hundredth deathday party.

Despite his promise to Nick, Harry is less than thrilled to attend the party when it arrives. Hermione won’t let him bail, however, and the there of them venture to the dungeons to join Nick and hundreds of other ghosts. Hermione tries to avoid Moaning Myrtle, who haunts a girls’ bathroom, but Myrtle sees them and comes over to chat. After a few awkward moments she drifts away. The Headless Hunting party arrives to crash the party, much to Nick’s dismay. The kids, starving and cold, decide to slip out. On their way back up to the feast, Harry hears the creepy voice in the hallway again. He yelps and tries to follow it as it climbs through the castle. They come to a deserted hallway with a message dabbed on the wall:

“The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir, beware.”

Mrs. Norris’ unconscious body is hanging from a hook on the wall. The kids try to leave without notice, but it’s too late; the feast is over and people are pouring into the hallway. Draco Malfoy is at the front of the group, happily grinning at Mrs. Norris’s frozen form.


Commentary:

Hokay, so, there are a quite a few important and semi-important revelations in this chapter, and a handful of other observations:

• Ginny looks pale. This is only a "clue" one could detect on a second/third/fourth re-read, because at this point we have no reason at all to suspect that Something Is Up with the tiniest Weasley. Given, too, that this is a throwaway mention during a paragraph about other sick students, it's incredibly faint as clues go.
  
• Poor Sir Nicholas. Really. One could make a case (and I will) that the sub- theme of these two chapters, and a big theme of this whole book, is the lengths to which people to in order to segregate themselves and try to create arbitrary distinctions to make some people inferior to others. With Malfoy it's people's heritage. With the ghosts it's the Headless Hunt. And on and on.
• Harry finds out about Filch, but not really. Harry, not raised by wizards, doesn't know about Squibs. He only discovers that Filch is trying a different way to do magic with Kwikspell, not what that implies. However, Filch is obviously embarrassed about it. Even though he's a horrible person I can't help but feel a little bit sorry for Filch; after all, he's employed in a place teaching students the very things he'll never be able to do. But then, Mrs. Figg is a Squib too, and she manages to be sweet and helpful rather than bitter. As Dumbledore will say soon, "it is our choices, far more than our abilities..."
  
• EEK IT'S THE VANISHING CABINET OMG! (Sorry, I'm a little excited about this.) So, obviously, this makes a heck of a lot more sense in light of Half-Blood Prince. Back on Knockturn Alley, Harry hid himself in the Borgin and Burkes cabinet. I postulated that if he'd closed the door, he would have been transported into the broken cabinet and gotten stuck like Montague will years later. However... maybe not so much. If Peeves is the one who dropped the cabinet and initially broke it (here, in this chapter) then before the cabinet was broken Harry would have just been transported to Hogwarts if he'd shut himself in the Borgin and Burkes cabinet. Eh? But anyway. So Peeves breaks the Cabinet, which will lead to Montague getting stuck in there when Fred and George shove him in there in OoTP. This inspires Malfoy to use the Cabinet as a way to sneak Death Eaters into Hogwarts and attack the school and kill Dumbledore! Whew!
• Hi Moaning Myrtle! We'll be seeing a lot more of her soon, so that's all I've got for now.
  
• 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue... and Nick was brutally beheaded. This humble, moldy little deathday cake's decoration will become the focal point around which the entire timeline is based (there's other evidence, but this is the clearest one). If 1492 was his death, and this year is the five hundredth anniversary of that death, then Chamber of Secrets takes place in 1992, or, more properly, the 1992-93 academic year.
• After the kids discover Mrs. Norris, Ron's instincts are correct: they really don't want to be found at the scene! As we'll say, Harry will be the subject of a lot of whispers in the coming months. However, even as hundreds of other students swarm the hallway after the feast, the only one Harry really sees or takes note of is Draco Malfoy. At this point Harry has no earthly reason to think Draco had anything to do with Mrs. Norris's condition, but he'll immediately suspect him because Draco is such a prat.
  

Alright, kiddos, that's all I've got for this week. I hope you have a glorious Thanksgiving! Mine is guaranteed to be superb, since Thursday night after eating a lot of delicious things my family is watching Wizard People, Dear Reader. Yeah, it's gonna be totally awesome. :-)