Chamber of Secrets: Page 159

Percy's hidden ambitions, why the Common Room is actually inconvenient, another reason the trio should know Malfoy isn't the Heir of Slytherin, and the problems with inside-the-box thinking.

Welcome! Today, we look at a page from the middle of Chamber of Secrets. The trio doesn’t quite know how to think, Percy is annoying and unintentionally ethical, and Malfoy is clearly not the heir — that, plus more. If you like what you’re reading, subscribe and get Potter Pages in your inbox every Friday morning!

Page 159 of Chamber of Secrets starts with an intriguing word: “reddening.” Just based on memory and context, we quickly see that it’s Ron who’s reddening, which is an interesting choice: you’d think he was already red enough. Seriously, though, Ron is getting angry at Percy. Specifically, Percy is trying to punish Ron; Ron, in turn, yells that Percy is just worried about becoming Head Boy, and won’t even support his family if it might damage those ambitions. Percy, on hearing that, gets extremely angry.

“Five points from Gryffindor!” he says, fingering his prefect badge to reinforce his authority. “And I hope it teaches you a lesson! No more detective work, or I’ll write to mum!”

On the surface, this looks like a pretty typical Percy interaction. But I think there’s more going on. Percy gets especially annoyed when Ron mentions that he (Percy) might be particularly worried about his Head Boy chances. Why?

From what we know of Percy, he believes that obeying authority is a virtue, and thus, that all the things that come from obeying authority — in this case, being a prefect, and maybe Head Boy — are virtues. He’s open about his belief that because he is a prefect and follows the rules, he’s a good person, better than others. You’ve seen how he talks about Fred and George, even when they can hear him: “Don’t worry, Ginny has other brothers who can set a good example.” Presumably, Head Boy would be the same. In Percy’s mind, to be named Head Boy would basically validate that he’s morally superior to the rest of his year and his family. He’s open about that: he talks to family and friends all the time about being a prefect, the importance of the rules, obeying authority, etc. 

He goes on and on about being a prefect ­— why should he be upset when Ron accuses him of wanting to be Head Boy? If anything, you’d think he’d embrace the accusation. “You’re damn right I want to be Head Boy,” you can imagine him saying. “I want to be Head Boy because I think I would do the job well and I think I deserve it, and that’s a good thing. Hard work and respect for rules are good, and I want to see more of them from you.”

He doesn’t say that, of course; instead he just gets annoyed, yells at Ron, and takes points from Gryffindor. This does sort of disprove Ron’s point: there’s no political upside to Percy taking points from Ron. It’s not like there’s an evaluator watching him. If anything, maybe there’s a downside, because you’d think that house points at the end of the year might factor into the Head Boy decision. Presumably, a house winning the House Cup reflects favorably on that House’s prefects, so Percy is really demonstrating a lot of integrity here, albeit maybe accidentally. He’s doing the right thing, despite the fact that it might damage his chances of personal advancement. The only question is whether he’s doing it because it’s the right thing, or just because of a completely unrelated, also-unethical reason.

This is a lot like when politicians run for office, but they can’t seem power-hungry, so they have to come up with weird reasons that they’re running that don’t involve them just thinking they’ll be good at the job. Everyone knows that at least part of the reason someone runs for president is that they just want to be president, and we accept that. After all, it’s hard to find someone to do the job who doesn’t want to do the job, and they probably wouldn’t do the job all that well. Just like we should take the shame out of running for an office in part because you want to hold that office, it shouldn’t be a bad thing that Percy wants to be Head Boy. It would be a bad thing, of course, if Percy’s Head Boy ambitions clouded his judgement so much that he started doing unethical things in order to get closer to the Head Boy’s spot, but that’s not what’s happening here. In fact, it’s the opposite. Percy is doing something that’s absolutely fine; the only reason Ron doesn’t like it is that he’s the one who got caught doing something bad. If we know one thing for sure, it’s that the reason Ron is angry is not that he has some sort of principled belief system about competing theories of electoral integrity. 

Really, what we’re looking at here is Percy’s insecurity quickly leading him to anger. Percy just isn’t completely confident in himself yet. He’s caught students in an out-of-bounds area, but rather than simply disciplining them and moving on, staying above the fray, he gets himself involved in the conflict. He’s like an umpire who yells back at an angry coach instead of turning his back. And of course, instead of taking the disciplinary action strictly through official school channels, the only convincing threat he can muster is that he’ll write to mum. He’s willing to discipline members of his own family — but not because they’re doing things wrong; only when they happen to make him angry. Again: it’s an integrity move, but for all the wrong reasons. 

From there, we hit a section break and skip ahead to that night, when the trio is in the common room doing their homework. They choose seats as far away from Percy as possible, of course; Ron is still in such a bad mood that he keeps blotting his charms homework. It doesn’t help that when he tries to use his wand to remove the smudges, he sets his paper on fire. I can’t help but think that Ron with a broken wand might be more powerful, albeit less predictable and controlled, than Ron with a fully functional wand. I can’t imagine Ron with a regular, working wand just casually setting things on fire as a second-year. With a broken wand, he’s sort of like Captain Marvel when she pulls that thing off her neck and smashes Jude Law (now there’s a crossover nobody saw coming) into a mountain.

This section does bring up questions about the common room. In the movies, it’s a small room with a fire and a few chairs; in the books, it seems bigger. It’s a gathering spot for the entire house, after all, and it needs to be big enough that a few different things can go on at once. Some people are playing games; some people are talking; some people are doing homework; some are playing jokes or trying out new wizarding gadgets; some people aren’t really doing anything. It’s strange, when you think about it, that the only gathering spot for this fairly large group of people is this one small room. You’d think they’d have a house study room, a house game room, a house room just for hanging out, maybe a special sixth- and seventh-year lounge...but no, it’s everyone in one room, with little freedom to go anywhere else.

There’s a great comedic line in here too, that I’ve overlooked before this reading. After Ron accidentally sets his homework on fire, he slams his book shut in anger: Rowling notes that he is “fuming almost as much as his homework.” After he slams his book shut, to Harry’s surprise, Hermione does too. Then she starts talking.

“Who can it be, though?” she asks, as if she’s continuing a conversation that they’d all been having. “Who’d want to frighten all the Squibs and Muggle-borns out of Hogwarts?”

I’ve written before about all the things the trio should spot that instantly disqualify Malfoy from consideration for being the heir, and here’s another one of them. Did Malfoy know that Filch was a squib? We’ve never seen any evidence that he did, and as Harry knows, Filch is very secretive about it. Even Hermione and Ron couldn’t tell until Filch blurted it out and Harry relayed the information, so they should know intuitively that Malfoy probably doesn’t know either. But they don’t: they get completely fixated based on some fairly vague parts of Malfoy’s personality. Imagine if a kid who got bullied in elementary school one day announced that their bully was also behind a chain of recent serial murders; they didn’t have any evidence, but it just really seemed like something a bully would do. That’s basically the trio at this moment. 

Ron, of course, doesn’t see this logical impossibility. Instead he launches into a speech about why it absolutely has to be Malfoy. I’m not saying that Ron is obtuse, but maybe the others should know better than to follow his lead after he says the line “You’ve only got to look at his foul rat face to know it’s him.” Ron, at this point, is a lot like one of those Twitter users who’s a huge fan of a sports team, but who doesn’t understand the concepts of random variation and luck over small sample sizes. You can easily imagine Ron following the Chudley Cannons season, watching a nine-match winning streak and not saying a thing, then watching a single loss and being so angry about it that he tweets a six-part thread about how losing is inexcusable and if the team ever wants to succeed they have to fire everyone and rebuild from the ground up. 

I mean, really — he insists that Malfoy must be the Heir of Slytherin because of his foul rat face. Obviously Malfoy is a turd, but surely Ron should be less dense and shallow than this. Also, does Malfoy look particularly like a rat? I don’t think we’ve seen evidence from books or movies that he does (correct me if I’m wrong, of course).

It’s also excusable, because — let’s not forget — Ron is twelve years old at this point. The problem is that with his immature thinking doesn’t come a commensurate respect for the rules, or at the very least, an aversion to not getting into trouble. Usually, twelve-year-olds say crazy things, but because they’re twelve, they don’t actually act on them. The trio is different: they gossip, then immediately act on it. They decide that Draco must be the heir of Slytherin, then immediately turn to coming up with a ridiculous plan to expose him. Ron could just say “Draco is the heir...maybe we should keep an eye out, see if Draco is summoning snakes, and try not to hang around with him too much!” But instead, as we’ll see on future pages, the trio takes entirely too much responsibility into their hands and ends up taking a huge risk that was never going to pay off. Even Hermione gets involved. 

At least she’s skeptical at first, rather than Ron, who literally looks at Draco’s face and decides he must be the Heir of Slytherin. Hermione pushes back on Ron — not that hard, but she pushes back. But then Harry joins in.

“Look at his family,” Harry says. “The whole lot of them have been in Slytherin; he’s always boasting about it. They could easily be Slytherin’s descendants. His father’s definitely evil enough.”

So, to recap: the evidence the trio has for Malfoy being the Heir of Slytherin is A) he says his entire family has been in Slytherin, and he’s apparently trustworthy on that point; he would never lie about his entire family being in Slytherin to create an image of a pure-blood Slytherin lineage, we’ll just have to take Malfoy’s word on this one B) he has a mean-looking face C) his father was rude to Mr. Weasley in a bookstore D) he’s said some mean things. 

Actually, I’m conflicted here, because the trio isn’t being that crazy. On the one hand, it’s probably true that Malfoy is the best candidate among current students to be the heir. He is undeniably into dark stuff, and he definitely doesn’t like Muggle-borns and seems very attached to Slytherin in a way that we haven’t seen even from other members of the same house. On the other hand, though, if Malfoy is the top candidate among current students, there are still so many flaws in the theory that if anything, it should be a sign that the heir isn’t a current student. The trio, basically, isn’t doing a terrible job at conventional deduction, but they seem not to consider the possibility that because they’re at a magic school, they should look outside the conventional, and try to really think outside the box. It’s hard to fault them too much...but at the same time, come on. It’s the Wizarding World. Before you jump to conclusions, consider how magic might expand the universe of what’s possible.

And “he’s definitely evil enough” is a big thing to say. Sure, Malfoy is mean and rude and bigoted for a twelve-year-old, but does Harry really think that Malfoy is evil enough to go around attacking students with dark magic? Or has he not really thought it through at all? This, I suppose, is what happens when the people in charge don’t publicly indicate that they’re focused on solving the school’s problems: you get renegading groups of twelve-year-olds who decide it’s completely crucial that they take the law into their own hands while still thinking and acting like twelve-year-olds. The people in charge could really be doing a better job keeping students calm and controlled, but no...students are trying to hunt down the Heir of Slytherin by brewing an illegal potion, and they’re so busy monitoring Percy’s fake-integrity house point deductions that nobody seems to notice.