Chamber of Secrets: Page 139
Why Mrs. Norris is the Basilisk's first victim, Riddle-Ginny's plan that doesn't make much sense, a lot of problems with a short scene, and a glimpse into Malfoy's real character.
Welcome back! Today, we cover page 139 of Chamber of Secrets. CoS is a weird book — admit it, people — so a lot of this is dissecting that weirdness. The plot holes; the strange plans; the bits that don’t make much sense. Take it all in, and enjoy the trip!
Page 139 of Chamber of Secrets will be instantly recognizable even to casual fans (are there any casual fans that read this newsletter?). It starts with a quote that will basically encapsulate the entire contents of the page:
“What’s that thing — hanging underneath?” Ron asks, his voice quivering.
It’s Mrs. Norris. She’s been petrified. There’s a message on the wall. We all know this. It’s basic Potter knowledge. But there are still some things I’m wondering. Some of them are things I’ve mentioned before, in previous newsletters about the Chamber of Secrets: why would the Hogwarts pipes be large enough for a Basilisk to travel through? Where does the Basilisk find exits from the pipes, besides toilets? Things like that. But I also have some questions specific to this page.
For one, why Mrs. Norris? Surely, a more effective petrified accompaniment to the announcement that the Chamber has been reopened would be an actual Muggle-born, rather than a cat belonging to a Squib (who most people don’t even know is a Squib!). Mrs. Norris definitely could have been petrified by accident if she just happened to be walking by and looked into a puddle to see the reflection of the Basilisk’s eyes. But it’s not like Riddle-possessed Ginny and the Basilisk have signed a “waste not, want not” pledge: if their first petrify-ee turns out to be a waste, they can just discard that one and petrify someone else, someone better. Someone like, oh, I don’t know, Filch himself? Or any of the muggleborns who they attack later?
If you remember, following the first attack, no one, not even Dumbledore, is certain that the Chamber has indeed been opened. It’s not until the attack on Colin Creevey — an actual muggleborn person — that they’re convinced. So rather than being the dramatic unveiling that Riddle and possessed Ginny were presumably hoping for, the attack on Mrs. Norris actually ends up being more confusing than frightening.
I’ve heard it said that Chamber of Secrets is the book with the most plot holes, and discrepancies, and I can’t help but agree. To look at how this shows up here, maybe it helps to recreate what must have happened that night.
On previous pages, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are making their way back from the Deathday Party when Harry hears the voice of the Basilisk moving through the wall. He hears that it smells something blood and that it’s about to attack, so he sprints ahead and the trio follows him. From that, we know that the attack took place literally seconds before; it’s not like Mrs. Norris got petrified then was just sitting there for 45 minutes until someone happened to walk by.
And yet, by the time the trio shows up, Mrs. Norris is not only already petrified; she’s hanging from a torch bracket by her tail. The message is already written on the wall. Obviously, there’s no sign of the Basilisk or Ginny. So in the mere seconds it took for Harry to hear the Basilisk’s voice and sprint to where the attack was happening, the Basilisk came out of the wall (you know, through one of those pipe-holes that all the walls have in old castles; what, you’ve never heard of such a thing?), stared at Mrs. Norris in the puddle, then slithered back into the wall or into the bathroom back into the Chamber. Ginny, meanwhile, waited until the Basilisk had gone (or somehow grabbed Mrs. Norris without looking the Basilisk in the eye; you decide which is more likely), then hung Mrs. Norris from a torch bracket and ran the other way. The message must already have been written on the wall; there’s simply no chance that Ginny could have written the message after Mrs. Norris was petrified and still had time to escape before the trio showed up.
It’s interesting: the whole scene would be infinitely more plausible if Harry didn’t hear the Basilisk as it made its attack, thus establishing just how quick the time frame had to be. If the trio just happened to come across a petrified cat and a message on the wall as they made their way back to the common room after the Deathday party, there would be nothing to disbelieve: someone showed up, painted a message, petrified the cat, and left. But the way it happens in the book, the trio shows up mere seconds after an attack that would seem to require extensive set-up and construction, and there’s no sign of anyone, human or monster.
The way things happen also sort of implies that Mrs. Norris was an accident. If we accept that Ginny must have painted the message in advance, it means that she also planned the precise location of the attack in advance, since she had to pick up the victim and immediately hang them up by the message. So she had to attack a person (or cat) who was walking alone past the message, and Mrs. Norris was the only person who came along. Ginny couldn’t have waited for a different person to walk past, of course, because the entire school was about to show up and everyone would have seen that there was a Basilisk on the loose, or they all would have died, which wouldn’t have been good for anybody.
Apparently, Ginny and Riddle got very lucky. What would they have done if Mrs. Norris hadn’t walked past? It was the last few minutes of the Halloween feast: if they hadn’t attacked Mrs. Norris and the trio hadn’t been drawn to the scene by Harry overhearing the Basilisk’s attack, the entire school would have walked past a few minutes later and seen a message written on the wall, but no petrified cat. It would have been even less threatening and more confusing: the teachers probably would have gone on the lookout for a prankster with a bucket of paint. Ginny and Riddle really didn’t have the best plan in place — unless their plan was just the message on the wall, and Mrs. Norris was a last-second bonus. The extent of the plan seemed to be “hope someone, anyone, walks past this message on the wall alone.”
Believe it or not, there are other problems too. For one, why do we hear the Basilisk moving around the castle, and even going up from one floor to another, before the attack? As we’ve already established, the attack had to happen in a very precise location, next to where the message was already painted. So why didn’t Ginny just have the Basilisk waiting there? I’m thinking of some sort of silly explanations, like “it had to stretch its legs,” which actually isn’t so far-fetched: this is the first time it’s been out of the chamber in 50 years. But we’ve also previously seen the Basilisk wandering the castle when Harry hears it during his detention with Lockhart, so maybe the answer is that Ginny has no problem with the Basilisk just doing whatever it wants and wandering around to stay loose and limber, as long as it shows up and makes its attacks on time.
So, anyway, that’s the first line of the page: one quote, about six problems. Assessing the situation, we get an interesting and revealing moment.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ron says.
“Shouldn’t we try and help—” Harry says.
“Trust me,” Ron says. “We don’t want to be found here.”
People are always complaining about how “movie Ron” gets portrayed so much worse than “book Ron,” but in this moment, book Ron isn’t great either. He’s acting completely selfishly, urging the trio to move away as fast as possible so that they don’t get in trouble. They can’t do anything to help Mrs. Norris, but Ron certainly doesn’t know that: he’s twelve years old. Even worse, he’s adopting this annoying, misplaced air of authority, speaking as though he has secret inside information when really, he’s just scared. “Trust me” — why? Ron has no reason to tell Harry to trust him besides the fact that Ron wants Harry to trust him, because if Harry trusts him, they can leave sooner.
At this very moment, of course, the feast ends, and hundreds of Hogwarts students start climbing the stairs on either side of them, making their way towards the corridor. The next moment, they’re surrounded by people, but then students see the strange scene in front of them and are temporarily dumbstruck. Silence falls — and then a shout rings out.
“Enemies of the Heir, beware! You’ll be next, mudbloods!”
It’s Malfoy, of course, and he’s just provided the red herring that will last most of the book. Obviously, Malfoy turns out not to be the heir of Slytherin. But his shout here is still a bit strange. In broad strokes, he supports the heir’s goals, or at least has been raised by his parents to think he supports them (it’s debatable, I suppose). But so far, he has no way of knowing what any of this is about, so there’s no reason his mind should immediately jump to “mudbloods.” Later, when Harry and Ron infiltrate the Slytherin common room with the help of Polyjuice Potion, Malfoy tells them that his father has told him that last time the chamber was opened, someone died. But presumably, Lucius told Draco that after the chamber started popping up again and people started getting attacked, which hasn’t happened yet. Even for the Malfoy household, it’s a little dark to imagine that being an everyday, spontaneous topic of conversation: “Hey, Draco, what would you like for dinner? Speaking of which, have I told you that last time the Chamber of Secrets was opened — it’s this chamber with a monster, it hates mudbloods, don’t worry about the details — a girl died? Wait, Narcissa, what was I saying? I lost my train of thought. What were you saying about your friend Yvonne? She’s on vacation in Majorca?” (The crossover none of us knew we needed).
So, either Lucius has told Draco about the Chamber of Secrets before, for no apparent reason, or we’ve got another plot hole. I suspect that it’s a case of the drama and ideal scene not quite fitting the details that the author needed. Rowling, in this scene, needs Malfoy to come off as a villain, so she needs him to shout out something rude and possibly incriminating. But she also can’t reveal too much of what the chamber is all about, because that’s all information that’s going to come out gradually and influence the plot of the story. What’s left is Malfoy shouting something that he really has no way of knowing.
We also get a visual of Malfoy, which sheds even more light on his personality in this moment. He has pushed to the front of the crowd, “his cold eyes alive, his usually bloodless face flushed, as he grinned at the sight of the hanging, immobile cat.” Actually, the description here seems to make it more likely that Draco already knows about the chamber and what’s about to happen. The plot hole shifts from what he knows to why he knows it. But this section also sheds light on Draco as an absolutely awful person. Sure, he’s been raised wrong, but he’s getting actively excited about the thought of people less fortunate than he getting terrorized by “The Heir,” whatever he understands that to mean. People love to talk about how Draco is a victim and in the end, ultimately finds his sweet redemption. I mean...believe what you want. But he certainly doesn’t come off well here, or for a long, long time.
The page wraps up here, so we don’t get to see any of the aftermath: Lockhart’s office, Dumbledore’s examination, Snape’s comments, etc. There’s a lot that’s about to change in a short time; life at Hogwarts will be completely disrupted. For now, though, students have no idea what’s going on, and if they did, they’d have almost no reason to believe it. I mean, come on. A secret chamber in the school with a monster that’s lived for 1,000 years, now finally awakening and attacking enemies of some sort of heir? That’s nonsense. It’s even less plausible than a snake jumping out of a pipe to attack a wandering cat for no reason.