Prisoner of Azkaban: Page 283
The weirdness of velvet hangings, why Sirius might have gone completely insane, when the house elves come to clean, and who said a strange line about Professor McGonagall.
I’m sorry. Really, I am. This post is a week late, and to make up for it, I went extra deep into a certain throwaway line from an unnamed person. Seriously. Read it. But really, I’m sorry for the delay, and I’m working to get all subsequent issues of the newsletter out on time. For now, let me brighten your Saturday nights with some Sirius Black, common room musings, Hogwarts controversies, and much more.
I got excited when I got to page 283 of Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s the kind of page where there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on, a lot of logistical action that’s fun to critically dissect. Also, this is just a first impression, but it feels like we’re going to see more than a fair amount of various characters saying and/or doing things that are just dumb.
The page starts in an incredibly unsatisfying way: a sentence fragment immediately before an em-dash. Here’s what it looks like:
“hangings — he could hear movements around him, and Seamus Finnigan’s voice from the other side of the room.”
Already, we have a sense of what’s going on. The hangings on the beds at Hogwarts aren’t discussed all that much, as far as plot elements are concerned, but one moment they do have is when Sirius absolutely massacres them in his search for Scabbers. So it’s safe to assume that that’s where we are.
What’s the deal with hangings, anyway? I do suppose it might be nice to have thick velvet curtains around all four sides of my bed; it would be like living in a luxury tent. But all the same, they seem a little excessive. They basically turn each bed into a cave — again, it’s nice, but at the same time, a little much.
Hogwarts students live in this weird dynamic where they spend some of their lives like royalty, but they still have to do ordinary student things. They live in these glorious dormitories, with thick bedding and velvet curtains and hangings and roaring fires in the towers of a castle. Their meals just appear on plates in front of them, and by all accounts, every meal is fantastic. And yet, walking around amidst the rich portraits and ornate decorations and antique suits of armor, they still have to go to class. They still have homework. They have to look after flobberworms and crush sopophorous beans. If I slept in one of those fantastic, velvet-surrounded beds, I’m not sure I could bring myself to wake up for History of Magic.
I wonder if the semi-opulence of Hogwarts sometimes causes controversy? It’s not hard to imagine a group of parents getting annoyed: “You pay for velvet hangings on every single bed, but you can’t hire someone who’s still alive to teach History of Magic?” Of course, the real question is how much the opulent parts cost to maintain. I have a sneaking sensation that they might be the original velvet that the founders installed, protected from aging and wrinkling by some advanced velvet magic. That, of course, could cause a whole new kind of controversy: one group wants to redecorate the school to bring it up to speed with modern times, and the other group shouting “how dare you even think about taking down the founding velvet?!”
Seamus interrupts Harry’s thoughts — and my rambling — by shouting “what’s going on?” Harry hears the dormitory door slam; he finally finds the gap in his curtains and rips them open; Dean Thomas lights his lamp.
We all know what happens next: Ron, sitting with a wild expression on his bed, the curtains ripped back from one side, shouts “Black! Sirius Black! With a knife!”
The main problem with this scene comes from the fact that Sirius doesn’t have a wand. If he did, his whole plan would be obvious: he walks in, maybe casting “Muffliato” for good measure, silently stuns Ron, grabs Pettigrew, and does what he will with him. Because he has no wand, though — later on, in the Shrieking Shack, he uses Ron’s wand — he has to do the whole thing with a knife. Still, though, Sirius isn’t exactly acting rationally. For one, if he kills Pettigrew, he has no way (as far as we know) to clear his name. Intuitively, it seems like it wouldn’t be possible to change a transformed animagus back into their original form after they’re dead. If Sirius slashes Pettigrew’s throat, justice will have been served, but Sirius will still be on the run. Come to think of it, the dormitory is sound asleep — couldn’t Sirius just grab Neville’s wand from his bedside table and use it to execute exactly the plan I just described?
And another thing: what is Sirius doing ripping the curtains open like a madman? Especially knowing retroactively that his target is an elusive rat, Sirius is acting absolutely nonsensically by not trying for as much stealth as possible. Even if Sirius has somehow observed that Pettigrew is hiding in Ron’s pocket, so he knows he can just trap Ron and thus also trap Pettigrew, he still shouldn’t want to wake Ron up. Sirius is basically pulling a Hagrid: he storms in, doing the “velvet hangings” version of breaking the door down, and wakes up the entire room.
I mean, what did he expect? As we see later on the page, the second Ron wakes up and shouts, Sirius runs away. So if he was going to run away as soon as anyone shouted, why on earth wouldn’t he try to avoid waking Ron? Why would he tear down the hangings, seemingly making as much noise as possible? According to Ron’s shout in the next line, Sirius didn’t even pull the curtains violently open and just happen to tear them; he actually slashed them. Unless these are some sort of hitherto-undiscovered hangings that lock from the inside, there’s no need to viciously slash them open. It’s literally like deciding that rather than slide a shower curtain open along the rail, you’re going to slash it open with a knife.
The conclusion I can’t help but avoid is that Sirius, at this point, has basically gone insane. Why else would he be confronting the one person who can prove his innocence — who he needs alive — with a knife? Why would he slash the bed open and wake up the entire room, when he can just grab a wand from a desk and do the entire thing silently and more efficiently? He’s been on the run for a long time, and in Azkaban before that. Maybe he’s just tired of it.
Except — he’s not, because he runs away as soon as everyone wakes up. He clearly still has some instinct for self-preservation; he’d prefer to flee the dorm and let Pettigrew live another day than stay behind, grab Pettigrew, and try to cut his throat before some adult wizards show up. So maybe the answer is that he’s not thinking rationally at all. He has this vague plan to sneak into the dormitory and grab the rat, but as soon as reality intercedes, he realizes that he’s gotten himself into some major trouble, and flees the scene immediately.
The five of them scramble out of bed and sprint down the stairs to the common room — a strange choice, given that for all they know, a mass-murderer just went down those very same stairs to that very same common room, but justifiable, I suppose — and quickly, the rest of the house wakes up and joins them. The common room is lit by the glow of the dying fire, and remnants of the party they’d been having to celebrate winning a quidditch match are still lying everywhere. All this tells us is that the House Elves haven’t come in to clean yet. Come to think of it, I wonder what time they do come in to clean? We’ve seen Harry stay up pretty late in past books, but we’ve never witnessed the cleaning crew coming through.
In fact, maybe they don’t come at night at all; maybe they clean during lunch, or something like that. As good as my memory is, I’m thinking back and I can’t remember ever getting a concrete answer to this one way or another. There have been lots of big Gryffindor Common Room parties — the “Eat Dung, Umbridge” one is my personal favorite — but unless I’m wrong, we’ve never gotten a firm textual description of what the common room looks like the next morning. Either “the common room was spotless the next morning” or “confetti and crinkled plates littered the common room floor the next morning” would answer the question easily, but that’s just one of those things that we’re never quite told. We’re left to guess for ourselves, so my guess, I suppose, is that the House Elves come and clean during one of the meals. I wonder which meal it is, though; probably dinner, seeing as they’re done cooking for the day. I also wonder why Hermione never went through with her plan to have a “sponsored scrub of Gryffindor Common Room,” but that has very little to do with this page; it’s just a thing I wonder about on my own time.
All of Gryffindor is confused:
“Who shouted?”
“What’re you doing?”
“What’s all the noise?”
“Professor McGonagall told us to go to bed!”
Percy comes in and tries to restore order, but here’s my question. Who do you think said “Professor McGonagall told us to go to bed”? It’s probably some nameless Gryffindor fifth-year, Kenneth Towler or someone like that, but if we limit the list to characters we know, there actually aren’t that many suspects. We can rule out all the boys in Harry’s year; they’ve seen what’s going on, so they’re going to be more worried about Sirius Black than Professor McGonagall. We can also rule out Fred, George, and Percy, Fred and George because they don’t really care about the rules and Percy because he’s too pompous to include himself in the group. “Professor McGonagall told you to go to bed” is how Percy would phrase the line, even if he could somehow get through it without adding a “certainly” or “rubbish.”
The only suspects among characters that we already know, thus, are Lee Jordan (no), Hermione (no), Parvati and Lavender (maybe), Ginny (honestly, she’s still pretty young and scared, so maybe?), Colin Creevey (no), and the characters we know from Quidditch. Oliver Wood, Angelina Johnson, Katie Bell, Alicia Spinnett, Andrew Kirke and Jack Sloper (were they even there yet? I don’t remember how old they are), Demelza Robbins, Ritchie Coote, and Jimmy Peakes (Jimmy is too young, and I think the rest of them are as well), and Cormac McLaggen. Let me know if I missed anyone.
So who said it? I think it’s either someone young, because they’re more scared of Professor McGonagall and more likely to follow the rules, or one of the girls, because they’ve always seemed responsible and sensible while the boys generally act like idiots. So I’d say we can narrow the list down to Parvati, Lavender, Ginny, Angelina, Katie, Alicia, Kirke, Sloper, Demelza, Coote, and Peakes. If we restrict the list further, down to characters we already know at this point in the books, it gets a lot smaller: Parvati, Lavender, Ginny, Angelina, Katie, Alicia. I don’t think it could possibly be Colin Creevey, just because he’d be far too busy trying to document the whole thing with his camera. “Colin Creevey: Intrepid Journalist” is an angle that the series unfortunately never explored.
All the suspects on the list are interesting for their own reasons. The three veteran quidditch players are all members of what amounts to an old boys club, and if any of them said it, it would be admirable pushback against the prevailing male culture surrounding quidditch, which is basically that you can do whatever you want, and besides quidditch nothing is that important. If it was Ginny, it would be a striking moment of simultaneous defiance and conformity: she’s speaking out against what everyone else is doing, but only because someone else with more power told her to. Ginny, of course, is only twelve, so her character is far from fully developed. And if it was Parvati or Lavender, finally...well, meh. All they really do is sit there acting vaguely superior to everyone else, so it wouldn’t be a surprise at all. With that, I think I’ve officially rambled on about this throwaway line long enough.
Fred asks, “excellent, are we carrying on?” To which Percy responds, bustling into the room and pinning his head boy badge to his pajamas (although we don’t see that until the next page), “everyone back upstairs!” We don’t, unfortunately, get to see the fantastic moment when it turns out that Sir Cadogan let Sirius into the common room because he’d stolen the list of upcoming passwords from Neville (talk about a breakdown of security...): that comes over the next few pages.
It’s an action-packed page, to be sure. There are slashed curtains, slammed doors, and knife-wielding murderers. Certainly not something you expected to see when everyone went to sleep a page earlier. But then again, in this series and at this school, things are rarely what you expect to see. Who would expect to see velvet hangings on all the beds in a boarding school?