Chamber of Secrets: Page 58
Wizarding ice cream, Diagon Alley retail architecture, Percy's boring dictatorial ambitions, and Gilderoy Lockhart's strange career choice.
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Page 58 of Chamber of Secrets starts on what must be one of the most joyful notes of the series: it’s a warm summer day and Harry is walking around with money in his pocket, so he buys a round of strawberry and peanut butter ice cream for everyone. It’s interesting, when you think about it, that wizarding ice cream seems to follow the same basic flavor structure as muggle ice cream. Wizards and muggles have a lot of foods in common, but there are also some food areas — most notably, processed desserts — that they don’t really share, and it’s sort of surprising that ice cream seems to fall into the former group rather than the latter.
We see this emphasized in Harry’s first ride on the Hogwarts Express, when he jumps up to buy as many Mars Bars as he can carry, but finds that wizards have completely different candy than muggles do. So it’s strange to see wizarding ice creams that seem completely non-magical. There’s always the possibility, of course, that the ice cream is magically augmented somehow. Maybe the strawberry essence is magically extracted, or the ice cream is fluffed up with a charm, or there’s some sort of structural change that’s made to the ice cream that muggles could never imagine.
Forgive me, but I’m now completely entranced by the possibilities that magical ice cream could offer. In terms of ice cream, it seems like there are basically two kinds of people: those who like good, simple flavors and those who like their ice cream crammed with a bunch of different stuff. I fall squarely into the latter group. I’m a big fan, for instance, of those Ben & Jerry’s ice creams with the secret filled cores, somehow jammed with sixteen different things: peanut butter cups and pretzels and peanuts and wafers and chocolate chips and cookie bits and marshmallows and everything. Just think of the possibilities when magic enters the equation.
Imagine an ice cream that somehow had self-contained pellets of melty hot fudge magically interspersed. A strawberry ice cream that contained pieces of strawberry shortcake that weren’t tough and frozen, but were magically maintained at the perfect temperature and texture. Peanut butter ice cream with honey-roasted peanuts, enchanted to maintain their crisp rather than go soggy.
We’ve seen some of this kind of magical food innovation in the candy available: Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans are a perfect example, and lots of things at Honeydukes are similar. So I wonder if there’s a similar arms race, if you will, going on in the wizarding ice cream world. Maybe one company becomes the first to make ice cream that magically warms you rather than cooling you, and then all the other companies come in a few months later with temperature-changing ice cream, so then another company invents ice cream that can have multiple flavors at the same time, and everyone else eventually follows suit. Come to think of it, it's not all that difficult to imagine a similar kind of divide emerging in the wizarding world, where some people love the overly magical, complicated ice creams, while others just want regular, simple, cold, one-flavored ice cream. If that’s the case, obviously, we know where Harry stands.
There’s also the age-old question: does Florean Fortescue manufacture the ice cream himself, or does he buy it from a distributor? We’ve covered wizarding manufacturing before, so I won’t get into too much detail here, but it’s an interesting question. Fortescue might be an artisan, devoting his heart and soul to ice cream, or he might just be a guy who lugs ice cream from a distributor back to his store. Come to think of it, he might — worst of all — just be a franchise owner, operating one lone branch of a multinational wizarding ice cream conglomerate.
Anyway, the trio wanders around Diagon Alley eating their ice cream and looking in shop windows. Ron is particularly interested in a full set of Chudley Cannons robes in the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies. This is relatable enough — who among us hasn’t stopped at the window of a sporting goods store to look inside at a new jersey that we really want? — but it’s still an interesting scene. It really challenges the image we’ve constructed of Diagon Alley, if you look closely enough.
When you think about Diagon Alley storefronts, what do you imagine? The way I think most people think of it is old-fashioned, sort of Victorian. Mostly wood, brick, and stone construction, not much lighting, low ceilings, quiet, cramped interiors, crown moulding and wooden trim and all that. But there’s a Chudley Cannons robe in the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies. Think about that: the Chudley Cannons are always the worst team in the league, and Ron is the only Cannons fan we ever meet. So why would there be a Cannons robe, unless there were also robes from a bunch of other teams? And if there were a bunch of different authentic quidditch robes on mannequins in the window, the window must be pretty big and well-lit. And if the window is big and well-lit...
Basically, what I’m saying is that rather than looking like a 19th-century living room with some broomsticks, it’s entirely possible that Quality Quidditch Supplies looks a lot more like Dick’s Sporting Goods. Most of us probably think of Flourish and Blotts like a classical, wood-paneled library — but maybe it’s more like a Barnes and Noble. Obviously, the presence of magic will allow retailers to make some choices that muggle shopkeepers never could. But still, a store, whether it’s a magical store or a muggle store, exists to sell products, so retailers are going to make some similar choices, whether they’re wizards or muggles.
Just for a start, there’s such a thing as an undetectable expansion charm, as we see later in the Weasleys’ tent and Hermione’s handbag. So it’s not like these retailers are constrained to the small space they have: they can make their buildings as big as they want on the inside. Quality Quidditch supplies, through expansion charms, can make enough space for good lighting and wide aisles and nice shelves; they can organize their gear by category and size and team.
The exception, of course, is Ollivander’s. We’ve seen the interior, and it’s dark and dusty and cramped just like it should be. But that doesn’t disprove this whole thing at all. Ollivander’s is a specialty store: a few people come in per day, they only sell one product, each customer is individually attended by the store’s one worker. The facility fits the sales environment perfectly. Quality Quidditch Supplies, on the other hand, is nothing like that. Neither is Flourish and Blotts, nor the apothecary, nor Gambol and Jape’s joke shop. They’re mass-market retailers, presumably catering to lots of different customers at a time who want lots of different things. One person shopping at Quality Quidditch Supplies needs a broom compass; another needs a new broom; a third needs Chudley Cannons socks; a fourth needs an English National Quidditch team headband for his son. And it’s not like you know exactly what your customers want before they come in, the way Mr. Ollivander does, so you have to have all kinds of different things in stock, and they need to be well-organized and accessible. All of this points toward the conclusion that the shops in Diagon Alley might be drastically different on the inside than we imagine: they might be a lot less like old-fashioned country stores, and a lot more like modern retailers. Which is sort of jarring to think about, but life goes on.
In any case, Ron doesn’t buy the robes; Hermione drags them next door to buy ink and parchment. I do have to say: it’s strange that wizards are still sticking with parchment rolls. This just seems like another one of those things that muggles have clearly won. A notebook full of paper is way more writing space then a roll of parchment, but takes up vastly less space in a bag, and is far more convenient. Come to think of it, we’ve seen that wizards are aware of notebooks: Tom Riddle himself uses one as a horcrux. But they stick with the parchment (and the quills, of course). It feels like it’s just an aesthetic choice, and I can’t tell whether it’s admirable or just nonsense.
The trio meets Fred, George, and Lee Jordan buying Filibuster Fireworks, and at a junk shop, they find Percy looking at a book called “Prefects Who Gained Power,” which, according to information that Ron reads out loud, is “a study of Hogwarts prefects and their later careers.” I know it’s a book that’s intentionally boring and ridiculous, but really, can you imagine the contents of that book? If the publishers every ordered a new edition, there would be chapters on Ernie MacMillan and Anthony Goldstein and Pansy Parkinson...surely, Percy should be aiming higher. He’s already a prefect, and he probably knows he has a decent shot to be Head Boy; he should be reading political autobiographies and studies of great wizards of our time. Obviously, this is all a joke, and it’s just Percy being Percy...which just goes to show you that wow, Percy is ridiculous.
The serious take on the episode is something like this: seeing Percy reading a book that’s literally called “Prefects Who Gained Power” should be a serious warning sign that Percy is a really weird, messed-up character. He’ll come around eventually, of course, but seeing him reading this book should foreshadow a lot of what’s to come in books four through six. Sure enough, as they leave the joke shop, Ron whispers to Harry and Hermione that “Course, he’s very ambitious, Percy, he’s got it all planned out...he wants to be Minister of Magic...”
From there, the page skips ahead an hour, and the trio is heading to Flourish and Blott’s to buy their school books. When they arrive, though, they see a large crowd jostling to get in. The cause quickly becomes evident. There’s a large banner stretched across the upper windows. “GILDEROY LOCKHART,” it says, “will be signing copies of his autobiography MAGICAL ME today 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.”
This goes back to the discussion of what Diagon Alley stores really look like. When you think about it, Flourish and Blotts is probably the pre-eminent bookstore in the British wizarding world. It’s basically a Wizarding Waterstones Picadilly (and if you get that reference, you’re my kind of person). Wizards need books just as much as muggles do — so this pretty much has to be a big bookstore. There’s even a reference to “upper windows,” which I suppose could just be the windows of apartments above the store or something, but seem far more likely to mean that the shop has at least two stories. It’s not like you’ll be wandering around a dusty, cramped library grabbing leather-bound books off an old wooden shelf: this is a bustling bookstore. It hosts celebrities. There might be a coffeeshop inside.
I also wonder about the timing of Lockhart’s book. Presumably, if he’s on a signing tour, Lockhart’s autobiography has just come out. For one, that makes it a really strange time for him to take a job as a Hogwarts professor: working full-time at a remote castle in Scotland will make it much harder for him to promote his book, give interviews or put on signings, or anything like that. He’s also being hired at the height of what will likely be an onslaught of media coverage: it’s amazing that no media showed up at Hogwarts for morning-show-type features on Gilderoy Lockhart as a teacher. And then there’s the issue of why Lockhart chose to publish an autobiography rather than another one of his typical plagiarized books. The easy answer is that it’s easy money and publicity, which is probably true. But it’s strange for Lockhart to depart from his formula, when it’s served him so well so far. Come to think of it, maybe Lockhart planned to retire from writing books: it’s not uncommon for a memoir to be the capstone of a writing career. He could write “Magical Me,” then ride off into the sunset on a raft of book royalties and teaching salary. Why did he choose to become a teacher, when he knows that he’s never actually done the things he says? Who knows? He probably enjoyed being bathed in the admiration of students, but of course, that dissipated quickly.
Unfortunately, the page ends there: right when Lockhart is mentioned, but before we see the shop, or the man himself. So we turn the page as we wait to meet Gilderoy Lockhart, a man who, thus far, already seems sort of off, even if Hermione and Mrs. Weasley seem to love him. Maybe Harry will look back wistfully, years later, to earlier that afternoon, before Gilderoy Lockhart entered the picture and turned everything upside down: when he, Ron, and Hermione were wandering around Diagon Alley without a care in the world, perusing shop windows and slurping on mercifully simple-flavored ice creams.