CoS 18

[pauraque_bk]

Chapter 17 generated an unusual amount of discussion! Y'all are smart kids. :*


CoS 18: Dobby's Reward

[...]just as Harry found himself and Ron being swept up into Mrs Weasley's tight embrace.
'You saved her! You saved her! How did you do it?' (241)

I think it's weird that we're not shown Molly hugging *Ginny*, just the boys. The way Ginny is treated in this chapter is weird generally. More on this in a few pages.

[Dumbledore:] 'Very few people know that Lord Voldemort was once called Tom Riddle. I taught him myself, fifty years ago, at Hogwarts. He disappeared after leaving the school ... travelled far and wide ... sank so deeply into the Dark Arts, consorted with the very worst of our kind, underwent so many dangerous, magical transformations, that when he resurfaced as Lord Voldemort, he was barely recognisable. Hardly anyone connected Lord Voldemort with the clever, handsome boy who was once Head Boy here.' (242)

Except the "intimate friends" with whom Tom was already using the name at school! One wonders who they were... or if they even existed. We know Tom was a favorite of the staff, but was he popular? A half-blood in Slytherin today would meet with bigotry, but was that the case in the 1930s and 40s? Was he admired for his accomplishments, or seen as a geek, a weird uber-smart teacher's pet? Early on, I think it's Harry who compares Tom to Percy (though it might have been Ron, I can't recall).

Dumbledore offers no indication of *why* Tom disappeared, nor whether he set off to explore the Dark Arts or merely fell into them. My sense is that he was already interested in immortality, which could be confirmed by his urge to "back up" his memories in diary form, as caesia390 commented in Chapter 13. I can't find it now, but someone also said in a comment that it makes sense for him to have a great interest in permanence and personal security, given his childhood circumstances.

[Dumbledore:] 'This has been a terrible ordeal for her. There will be no punishment. Older and wiser wizards than she have been hoodwinked by Lord Voldemort. [...] Bed rest and perhaps a large, steaming mug of hot chocolate. I always find that cheers me up [...] You will find that Madam Pomfrey is still awake. She's just giving out Mandrake juice -- I dare say the Basilisk's victims will be waking up any moment.' (243)

We talked about this passage a bit in the last post. How can it be considered sufficient to "not punish" an 11-year-old kid who's been mentally violated, forced to do terrible things, and very nearly killed? To dismiss her suffering with a prescription of bed rest and chocolate (even considering its known magical properties) seems like madness. But it's not inconsistent with the wizarding world's general attitude toward suffering and psychological damage -- these things just aren't taken seriously.

One can debate the rightness of that in the characters and their culture, but that's a separate question from whether JKR herself is taking Ginny's trauma seriously, and there's precious little evidence that she is. The last time we see her in this book, she's giggling over Percy and his girlfriend (250), and we hear nothing more from her about the events of CoS until OotP, where she seems offended that the incident slipped Harry's mind. But who can blame him? All the other characters seem to want nothing more than to gloss the whole thing over.

On another note, in the last chapter gmth quite reasonably asked how Nick was able to take the potion. _hannelore suggested that splashing it on him could work, but aside from that, I haven't the foggiest. Nick is mentioned once in passing in PoA, but what happened the previous year is not remarked upon.

'Am I a Professor?' said Lockhart in mild surprise. 'Goodness. I expect I was hopeless, was I?' (244)

Again, we don't know the exact nature of Lockhart's mental state here, but if we can take this as something he truly believes about himself -- or believed about himself at one time -- it's very interesting indeed.

'He tried to do a Memory Charm and the wand backfired,' Ron explained quietly to Dumbledore.
'Dear me,' said Dumbledore, shaking his head, his long silver moustache quivering. 'Impaled upon your own sword, Gilderoy!' (244)

Hm, so Dumbledore knows about Lockhart's memory-modifying ways. And appears to be amused by his fate! I think this supports the notion that Dumbledore hired Lockhart in the first place to teach him a lesson of some kind.

'You can speak Parseltongue, Harry,' said Dumbledore calmly, 'because Lord Voldemort -- who is the last remaining descendant of Salazar Slytherin -- can speak Parseltongue. Unless I'm very much mistaken, he transferred some of his own powers to you the night he gave you that scar. Not something he intended to do, I'm sure...' (245)

And yet, after intentionally pouring his soul into Ginny, she's left unscathed. Right-o.

'It only put me in Gryffindor,' said Harry in a defeated voice, 'because I asked not to go in Slytherin...'
'Exactly,' said Dumbledore, beaming once more. 'Which makes you very different from Tom Riddle. It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.' (245)

Man, where to start with this?

1) When Harry asked for anything but Slytherin, he wasn't making an informed decision. He'd heard some exaggerated claims about what Slytherins are like, and, more immediately, wanted to avoid getting stuck in a dorm with a kid he already disliked.

2) It's hard to read this and come up with anything but "Slytherin is bad", which is just... sigh. Possibly "personal ambition is bad", which goes along with Lockhart's severe punishment, but ambition is Slytherin's symbolic trait, so there you are again. Is Harry virtuous not because he fought to save Ginny, but because he chose to wear red and gold?

3) It may not be the best of ideas to incorporate a major "free choice" theme into a story where you've also got real prophecies, not to mention a time travel event that's depicted in a way that suggests pre-destination. If for no other reason than that it makes my little head hurt.

[Dumbledore to Lucius:] '[...] Several of them seemed to think that you had threatened to curse their families if they didn't agree to suspend me in the first place.' (246)

Mm. The implication being that Lucius is more powerful than your average wizard, I guess. Special Dark Powers?

'And imagine,' Dumbledore went on, 'what might have happened then ... The Weasleys are one of our most prominent pure-blood families. Imagine the effect on Arthur Weasley and his Muggle Protection Act, if his own daughter was discovered attacking and killing Muggle-borns[...]' (247)

This seems to be conjecture on Dumbledore's part. It makes sense, but only Lucius knows for certain.

[...]and Lucius Malfoy had been sacked as a school governor. (250)

Who appoints and dismisses the school governors, I wonder?

And together they walked back through the gateway to the Muggle world. (251)

And that's that.


After allowing time for discussion of this chapter, I'll do a wrap-up post. The rest of the re-read posts are here.

Comments

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

You know, I tend to be a defender of JKR, perhaps less on the merits and more as a methodological principle -- that you get more out of a text, are more inclined to approach it attentively, if you assume the writer has total control of his/her effects, at least until the contrary is proven decisively. But I have to admit that paurauque has really shaken my sense of JKR's coherence here.

There are so many things that just don't add up and don't seem well thought-out. I guess if the book had started to grow out of control (with the HBP material) and she sort of chopped and sawed it back into proportion, it might explain some of the odd stuff, like the fact that she neglected to make Harry actually tempted by the dark side, or by disloyalty to Dumbledore, or vengeful about other people's false suspicions, or really anything at all like Tom Riddle. :)

I wonder what this material might have been? Maybe it does have to do with Harry testing his strength, feeling unchained from basic decency, and she just thought he was too young to get into that quite yet. I confess I don't have any specific thoughts, because I haven't thought much about HBP. Do you have any juicy speculations?

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Do you have any juicy speculations?

None at all.:-)

I admit I lean much more towards your kind of thinking when it comes to the text--I kind of surprised myself by thinking about her writing process this way and I don't read interviews with her, just know the things that get repeated on my flist. But I think just your using the phrase, "What book has she been reading?" made me think about how I'd read that she'd had these particular things connecting this book and the later one, and I think there was also something about this book being a "key" of some sort. And after OotP the idea of Harry being tempted by the dark side and not being loyal to Dumbledore makes a lot more sense--in fact, one of the things I've really been noticing in re-reading OotP is the way it's suddenly stressed how much Harry wants Dumbledore to pay attention to him, while Dumbledore makes a point of snubbing him. I've just never been comfortable with Dumbledore's explanation about wanting to pretend he's "just a headaster" in case Voldemort is "listening in" through Harry's head, because "just a headmaster" would be friendlier to Harry than Dumbledore is at the hearing. And besides, Harry's connection to Dumbledore is somewhat well-known. Sure Voldemort might not really know that they've had these personal chats, but I can't imagine Voldemort wouldn't suspect a personal connection as he himself seems to have.

Anyway, so suddenly I thought maybe this was a case of seeing the ghost of an earlier draft. I'm just not sure what to really do with it if it is. I mean, it's a bit like in NA when players would lose computer access or something--even if there was a mundane, RL reason for something, you still have to make it work within the text as it stands.