Content Synopsis

This book continues the adventures of young wizard Harry Potter as he spends his second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. While Harry continues his education, he and the readers meet a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Gilderoy Lockhart, and get to know more about Ginny Weasley, the sister of Harry's best friend. Both of these characters will play significant roles in the adventures of the book.

The story begins on Harry's twelfth birthday, as the staunchly anti-anything-magical Dursleys prepare for an important dinner party hosting one of Uncle Vernon's clients. Harry is supposed to stay hidden while the guests are in the house; however, during the party, he is surprised by his own visitor—a house-elf named Dobby, who tries to warn Harry of terrible consequences should he return to Hogwarts. While delivering the warning, the house-elf causes problems for Harry, upsetting the Dursleys’ home and getting Harry locked in his room as punishment. In addition, the house-elf's use of magic is pinned on Harry, who gets in trouble with the Ministry of Magic for allegedly using magic outside of the school.

Three days later, Harry's best friend from school, Ron Weasley, and Ron's brothers, the twins Fred and George, appear outside Harry's bedroom window in a flying turquoise Ford Anglia, to rescue Harry. They take him back to their home, “The Burrow,” where Harry has the opportunity to experience happy family life for the first time since his parents died when he was a baby. Ginny Weasley, who made brief appearances in “The Sorcerer's Stone” when Harry was trying to figure out how to get onto Platform 9 ¾ to board the train for Hogwarts, and again when he returns from his first year at school, is more fully introduced as a young girl who is flustered around Harry. About a week after Harry arrives at the Weasleys, the letters are delivered informing the students what books they will need for the coming year at school, which is when Harry learns Ginny will be a first-year student at Hogwarts.

The following Wednesday, using floo powder, Harry and the Weasleys travel to Diagon Alley to make their purchases for school. The key to success when traveling using floo powder is to speak the name of the destination very clearly; however, Harry misspeaks his destination and ends up instead in Knockturn Alley at Borgin and Burkes. Borgin and Burkes is a shop devoted to the Dark Arts, where Draco Malfoy is with his father Lucius, who is trying to sell some possessions that would get the Malfoy family into trouble if they were discovered. Harry eventually catches up with the Weasleys and reconnects with Hermione Granger, who has also come to do her shopping for school. At the bookshop Flourish and Blotts, they run into the Malfoys again, and meet Gilderoy Lockhart, who is there to autograph his autobiography, “Magical Me,” the latest book in a series about his adventures with various magical creatures. The students learn he will be the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Lockhart maneuvers to have his picture taken with Harry.

A few weeks later, Mr. Weasley drives Harry and the family to Kings Cross Station to catch the Hogwarts Express. They are running late, and everyone but Harry and Ron gets through the barrier before it seals itself. So Ron and Harry drive (or rather “fly”) themselves to Hogwarts relatively uneventfully (except for being seen by the Muggles, which is how wizards refer to people in the non-magical world) until they try to land at Hogwarts and end up stuck in the Whomping Willow. The car ejects them and their luggage, breaking Ron's wand, before rolling itself off into the Forbidden Forest. Professor Snape catches them trying to sneak their possessions into the school, and he tries to have them expelled for their misdeeds. However, Headmaster Dumbledore just gives them a severe warning—they will be expelled if there are any subsequent infractions. This becomes a threat hanging over Harry's head for the remainder of the year, a threat Draco Malfoy hopes to use to his advantage.

The next morning, Mrs. Weasley sends Ron a Howler—a kind of telegram using the sender's own voice—berating him for taking the car. The Howler also informs the boys that the Ministry of Magic is inquiring into Mr. Weasley's role in the incident (we later find out that he has been reprimanded, and Lucius Malfoy has tried to get him removed from office). To make matters worse, Lockhart assumes Harry flew the car to school because he wanted the publicity, which upsets Harry because publicity is the thing farthest from his mind. Harry's first class of his second year is with Professor Sprout. In this class, they learn to repot a Mandrake, which “is a powerful restorative” that “is used to return people who have been transfigured or cursed to their original state” (92). The Mandrake's powers will play a significant role before the story is over.

On the way to his Defense Against the Dark Arts class, Harry meets first year student Colin Creevey, who takes Harry's picture with his camera. During the Defense Against the Dark Arts class, Lockhart releases a cage of Cornish pixies that torment the class. He leaves Harry, Hermione, and Ron to gather them up and put them back into the cage. At this point in the story, Harry and Ron realize that Lockhart is not the person he claims to be, though Hermione still idolizes him.

That Saturday, the Quidditch team for Gryffindor (Harry's house) gathers for practice, with Colin ready to take pictures. Quidditch is a magical game similar to soccer that is played on broomsticks, with a seeker (Harry's position) trying to catch the Golden Snitch to win the game. However, the rival Slytherin house team beats them to the practice field to train their new seeker—Draco Malfoy, whose father has bought the team the newest broomstick, the Nimbus Two Thousand and One. When Malfoy insults Hermione by calling her a Mudblood, Ron tries to hex him, but Ron's patched-up wand backfires and he ends up affected with the “belching slug” curse. They head to Hagrid's hut for help, where they learn that the term “Mudblood” refers to “someone who is Muggle-born” (115), whose parents have no magical skills. Malfoy uses the term as an insult because his family is pureblooded and believe they are to the other families who are not. Later that evening, while Ron is serving his detention by polishing the school's silver for Mr. Filch, the school caretaker, Harry is helping Lockhart answer his fan mail when he hears a chilling voice whispering through the walls: “Come…come to me…. Let me rip you…. Let me tear you…. Let me kill you….” (120). However, no one else hears the voice.

In October, Nearly Headless Nick, one of the Hogwarts resident ghosts, invites them to his deathday party, which is Halloween night. One of the guests at the party is Moaning Myrtle, a ghost who “haunts one of the toilets in the girls’ bathroom on the first floor” (132). After the party, on their way upstairs to the great hall, Harry hears the eerie voice again, and they find a warning written on the wall: “THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE” (138). Filch's cat, Mrs. Norris, is found hanging stiffly by her tail underneath the warning and over a big pool of water. Dumbledore realizes the cat is petrified, not dead, though neither he nor anyone else has any idea how it might have happened.

During a History of Magic class, Professor Binns is finally talked into explaining about the Chamber of Secrets, which allegedly was built by Salazar Slytherin, one of the four founders of Hogwarts, who wanted to be more selective about who was admitted to the school. The legend states that he sealed the Chamber until his true heir arrived at the school to open the chamber and “unleash the horror within, and use it to purge the school of all who were unworthy to study magic” (151). After the class, Ron and Harry spy a line of spiders struggling to escape the castle through a small crack, allowing Ron to reveal that he is arachnophobic (scared of spiders). They then decide to check out the bathroom that Moaning Myrtle has been haunting as a possible source of the water that had pooled under the petrified cat. Their investigation leads them to conclude that Draco Malfoy must be involved in what has been happening, so they decide to concoct some Polyjuice Potion, which will allow them to turn themselves into students from Slytherin, so they can secretly pump Malfoy for information. Of course, they first have to track down the recipe, which is in a book in the restricted section of the library. They manipulate Lockhart into giving them access and discover the potion is complicated and involving bits of the people they are trying to change into.

Meanwhile, when Harry plays in a Quidditch game against Slytherin, he is hit by a rogue bludger that smashes his elbow, though he still manages to catch the Golden Snitch allowing Gryffindor to win the match. Lockhart comes to his aid, trying to mend the broken bone, but instead he turns it into jelly. Harry ends up in the hospital wing with Madame Pomfrey, who gives him a potion that painfully, helps him re-grow the arm bones. Dobby comes to visit Harry in the infirmary and reveals that he was responsible for Harry missing the train to Hogwarts. In addition, he hexed the bludger to force Harry to go home in order to save his life (though he is unable to disclose from what he is trying to save Harry). Dobby also reveals that a house-elf “can only be freed if his masters present him with clothes” (177). Before the night is over, however, another “victim” is found: a petrified Colin Creevey is brought into the infirmary, holding his camera in front of his face, and confirming that the Chamber of Secrets has indeed been opened, though Dumbledore is not sure how it happened.

In December, the school decides to start a Dueling Club, sponsored by Lockhart and assisted by Snape, in order to train the students to defend themselves by casting spells at their opponents. Harry is paired with Draco who, after casting a couple of childish spells, turns his wand into a big black snake that starts to attack Justin Finch-Fletchley until Harry yells at the snake to leave Justin alone. Afterwards, Ron reveals to Harry that Harry is a Parselmouth—he had actually spoken to the snake in its own language, though Harry had no idea that he had that ability. Of course, his having this ability is enough to convince most of the student body that Harry is the heir of Slytherin foretold in the earlier warning. Harry's avowals of innocence are not helped when he discovers Justin petrified in the corridor next to Nearly Headless Nick.

After this latest incident, Harry is hauled into Dumbledore's office; while he is waiting for the headmaster, “a decrepit-looking bird that resembled a half-plucked turkey” suddenly bursts into flames (206). Harry is certain that he will be blamed for this also; however, Dumbledore informs him that the bird, Fawkes, was a phoenix just doing what comes naturally to the species. When the headmaster offers Harry an opportunity to reveal anything that Harry would like to tell him, Harry foolishly rejects this chance to get answers to some of the questions that have been bothering him (for instance, why he can talk to snakes).

Finally, on Christmas morning, the Polyjuice Potion is ready, so after Christmas dinner, Harry and Ron slip Crabbe and Goyle a sleeping draught in some chocolate cake. The boys pluck out some hair from their victims’ heads for the potion, which works as planned, except for Hermione, who somehow has mixed some cat hair instead of hair from Millicent Bulstrode into her portion. Harry and Ron (disguised as Crabbe and Goyle) catch up with Malfoy and learn that Mr. Weasley is in trouble with the Ministry of Magic. Malfoy also reveals that he has no idea who has opened the Chamber. The boys finally learn that the “last time the Chamber of Secrets was opened, a Mudblood died” (223), a revelation that will soon become significant. Because of his dislike for her, Malfoy, of course, hopes that Hermione is the victim this time around.

A few weeks later, Moaning Myrtle's bathroom is again flooded because someone has thrown a small, shabby black book into the toilet. The book, a diary, had belonged to T. M. Riddle, who had received “an award for special services to the school fifty years ago” (231). Harry discovers that the diary is enchanted and he is able to communicate with its owner by writing in it. He learns that Riddle's “special services to the school” in some way involved the last time the Chamber of Secrets was opened, apparently by Hagrid. Soon after the Easter holidays, someone steals the diary from Harry's room.

While Harry is preparing to play a Quidditch match against Hufflepuff, the third of the four houses at Hogwarts, Hermione slips away to test a theory and is discovered petrified in the hallway with another girl from Ravenclaw, the fourth Hogwarts house. The Minister of Magic then announces that the school will be closed unless the culprit hurting these students is caught. Harry and Ron use Harry's Invisibility Cloak to sneak out to Hagrid's hut to find out what he knows about the Secret Chamber. While they are there, Dumbledore arrives with Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic, who has come to take Hagrid away to the notorious prison Azkaban, believing he is somehow responsible. Then Lucius Malfoy arrives with an order from the board of governors suspending Dumbledore as headmaster of Hogwarts. Dumbledore rather meekly accepts the order from the board; however, he predicts to Malfoy and Fudge that “you will find that I will only truly have left this school when none here are loyal to me” (263–4), while glancing at the corner in which Harry and Ron are hiding. As Hagrid is being led away, he advises anyone who wants “ter find out some stuff…ter follow the spiders” (264), which they are able to do about two weeks later. The spiders lead them deep inside the Forbidden Forest, where they meet Aragog, “a spider the size of a small elephant” that had been Hagrid's pet fifty years ago (276). The spider was accused of being the monster dwelling in the Chamber of Secrets, which resulted in Hagrid's expulsion from the school. Harry learns from Aragog that what “lives in the castle…is an ancient creature [the] spiders fear above all others” (278), before the spiders threaten them, and Harry and Ron are rescued by the Ford Anglia that has been hiding in the forest since their initial arrival at school back in September. After listening to Aragog, Harry suddenly realizes that Moaning Myrtle was the girl killed the last time the Chamber was opened.

Three days before June 1, when the students’ final exams are to begin, Professor McGonagall announces that the mandrakes are ready for harvesting, so the potion to help the petrified people will soon be ready. Ginny tries to tell Harry something, but her big brother Percy interrupts her. Harry and Ron manage to sneak in to see Hermione, allegedly to tell her the news about the mandrakes, just as people carry on conversations with people in comas. They discover she has been holding a piece of paper all of this time—a page out of a library book that tells about the Basilisk, a giant serpent, which Hermione has figured out has been hiding in the school's plumbing and is responsible for all the victims. Just as the boys are ready to tell Professor McGonagall what they have figured out, they learn that the monster has taken Ginny Weasley into its lair. The teachers decide to send Lockhart after the creature, because of all of his “expertise” in dealing with magical creatures. However, Harry and Ron learn that he is planning to skip town because he has stolen the exploits chronicled in his books from the people who actually accomplished them. The boys force Lockhart to accompany them to rescue Ginny.

The three of them start their quest in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom and finally learn how she died. This information leads them to the portal to the chamber of secrets. Inside of the tunnel, Lockhart manages to grab Ron's wand and casts a spell that backfires, bringing down part of the tunnel and making Lockhart lose his memory. Harry is forced to continue alone to the chamber, where he finds Ginny nearly dead and meets the memory of Tom Riddle, who has magically existed in the diary, appearing as the student he was the last time the chamber of secrets was opened. Tom has been manipulating events up to this point using Ginny, who had first found the diary and thrown it in the toilet. After Tom sets the Basilisk loose to attack Harry, Fawkes, the phoenix, arrives carrying the sorting hat with Godric Gryffindor's sword hidden inside. Harry uses the sword to slay the Basilisk, and is wounded in the process. The phoenix's magical tears heal the wound. He then uses one of the Basilisk's fangs to poison the diary, effectively destroying it, but not before he learns that Tom Marvolo Riddle had become Lord Voldemort. Finally, Fawkes carries Harry, Ginny, Lockhart, and Ron out of the chamber and back to the surface.

As the story ends, Dumbledore returns to Hogwarts and informs Harry that Voldemort had transferred some of his powers to Harry the night he tried to kill him, including the ability to speak Parseltongue. However, the choices Harry has made have made the difference, including the help he received from Fawkes during the battle. Lucius Malfoy finally arrives at Hogwarts with Dobby, and it is revealed that Mr. Malfoy had slipped the diary into Ginny's books back in Flourish and Botts. Because Harry has learned that house-elves are freed if they receive an article of clothing from their masters, when Harry returns the diary to Mr. Malfoy, he slips it into one of his socks. In disgust, Malfoy tosses the sock (and book) at Dobby, effectively freeing the house-elf and earning Harry Dobby's undying gratitude.

Historical Context

The Harry Potter series is set in England, and takes place in an unspecified time in the late twentieth century. The Muggle world has television and telephones, but evidently not yet cell phones or computers. Mr. Weasley has been studying (and creating an invisibility-cloaking device for) an old Ford Anglia, which, according to googleanswers.com, was produced in England between 1959 and 1967, so that positions the time of the series in the late 1970s to early 1990s. The fact that Nearly Headless Nick is celebrating his 500th deathday during this school year places the time of “Chamber of Secrets” squarely in 1992 (his invitation makes it clear that he died in 1492). The bulk of the story, however, takes place in the wizarding world, which is virtually timeless. Significantly, the students write with quills, which have been used since the fourteenth century; there are no ball-point pens to be found at Hogwarts.

In addition, the attitude of pureblooded wizards like Lucius Malfoy toward half bloods like Harry and Mudbloods like Hermione could be compared to Adolph Hitler's attitude regarding the Aryan race, which he perceived as being the purest. Hitler's point of view resulted in the pogroms that decimated the Jewish, homosexual and gypsy population, among others, in Eastern Europe during the middle of the twentieth century. If Harry can finally defeat Voldemort, the wizarding world should be able to remain safely multi-cultural.

Societal Context

For the first time in the series, readers are introduced to life in a wizard's household, which is markedly different from the Dursleys’ (which is probably similar to that of most readers). The narrator describes the Weasley's house as similar to “a large stone pigpen” to which “extra rooms had been added here and there until it was several stories high and so crooked it looked as though it were held up by magic” (32). Interestingly, the clock tells the location of the family members instead of the time, and the dishes clean themselves in the sink. This house is also the first place, other than school, where Harry has felt at home.

Just as the Muggle world is sports crazy for its baseball, football, rugby, soccer, basketball, and/or hockey teams, the wizarding world is crazy about Quidditch. Ron is a typical young boy who papers his room with posters depicting his favorite team—the Chudley Cannons, who, as Ron tells Harry, are “ninth in the league” (40), suggesting there are at least eight other professional Quidditch teams. Rowling's supplemental textbook, “Quidditch Through the Ages,” specifically lists thirteen teams for Ireland and Britain, and at least twenty-one teams found in the rest of the world.

The difference between Mudbloods, half bloods, and pureblooded wizards starts to become important in this book. Rowling had previously clearly separated Muggles (non-magical people) from wizards in “The Sorcerer's Stone”; but in “The Chamber of Secrets,” the racism associated with the differences within the wizarding world becomes evident—almost a theme of the book. During the story, for instance, Hermione hears Malfoy use the term “Mudblood” disparagingly against her, then she and Harry learn the significance of the term. However, these overt differences are deceptive: for example, as Ron points out, Neville Longbottom, one of their classmates who is a pureblood, is rather inept in most of their classes, especially when his skills are compared with Hermione, who has definite book-learning skills even if she has no wizarding blood in her. We also learn there is a third class of people in the wizarding world: people like Angus Filch, who are referred to as Squibs—people “born into a wizarding family [without] any magic powers” (145). In addition, we meet other sub-groups, like the house-elves, who have definite places in the wizarding world that are clearly not equal to the people in power.

Religious Context

Rowling's Harry Potter books are “Religious” in the broadest sense of the word; they emphasize the golden rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and a strong sense of morality pervades the actions of the key characters (the need to do what is right even when nobody is looking). In addition, love plays an important role in the books; Harry's mother's love protects him even after she has died. In fact, as Jerry Walls points out, “love is a greater and more powerful thing than evil and death” (75), whether we are talking about God's love or a mother's love.

Fundamental to the religious context, however, is the blatant battle between good and evil that is central to Rowling's stories. For example, with the exception of Harry, and usually Dumbledore, everyone in the wizarding world is reluctant or afraid to refer directly to “Voldemort,” the “Satan” character of the series, preferring to refer to him circuitously as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” However, the characters identified with “good” (those not associated with Slytherin and the Death Eaters) all clearly act against the evil associated with the other group.

Significantly, in “The Chamber of Secrets,” none of the people attacked by the Basilisk are from the Slytherin House. In addition, the people who are attacked wind up petrified—apparently dead—before they are revived courtesy of the Mandrake potion, thereby echoing the rebirth imagery associated with several of the world's major religions. Up to this point in the series, Rowling has avoided having her characters die, at least within the direct context of the story (the death of Harry's parents is merely reported, and the event actually occurred before the first book in the series began). The petrification and revival of the characters in “The Chamber of Secrets” appear to be her way of compromising, to introduce gently the perilous images that will worsen as the series and Harry's studies continue.

Scientific & Technological Context

The wizarding world offers an opportunity to examine the laws of physics and chemistry from a totally different perspective, one that is antithetical to the traditional way of perceiving these sciences. This perspective is interesting because people today have forgotten that magic was largely absorbed by science in the discoveries that were made by people like Sir Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler starting in the seventeenth century (Lipscomb and Stewart 78). Alternatively, as Roger Highfield observes in “The Science of Harry Potter,” many of today's innovations and discoveries have come about because someone was able to look at an issue from a different perspective that could be perceived as being magical. Rowling's stories expand upon the possibilities of shifting perspectives. Wizards spend their time learning to transmogrify—to reorganize the atoms of an object into a different object. When not within the walls of Hogwarts, wizards are able to apparate—to break apart the molecules of their bodies and reappear somewhere else. A variation of this process is the ability to travel via floo powder using a fireplace as a kind of “railway station.”

Biographical Context

Rowling was born on July 31, 1965, in Gloucestershire, England. She graduated from the University of Exeter in 1987 with a degree in French and the classics. In 1991, she was hired to teach English in Porto, Portugal, where she met, and married Jorge Arantes, a TV journalist, who fathered her daughter Jessica in July of 1993. By the end of that year, they separated, and she moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, where she applied for Public Assistance (the British version of Welfare); she and Arantes officially divorced in 1995. In 2001, Rowling married Dr. Neil Murray; two years later, they had a son, David, followed by a daughter, Mackenzie, in 2005.

According to Rowling, she dreamed about Harry while traveling on a train between Manchester and London in 1990. Out of that dream, she created the wizarding world and characters that populate her Harry Potter stories. In an interview packaged with the DVD of the film version of “The Chamber of Secrets,” Rowling reveals that of all the characters in the stories, Dumbledore most often speaks for her. In addition, she shares that the details that she writes into the books reflect what would scare her in the situations she depicts. She also observes that, since writing the story, she has realized that Tom Riddle's diary functions quite similarly to a conversation in an internet chat room.

The first draft of “The Philosopher's Stone” (the British title of “The Sorcerer's Stone”) was completed in 1995. Rowling was able to revise the book and start on the second volume thanks to a £8000 grant that she received from the Scottish Arts Council in February 1997. “The Chamber of Secrets” was published in the United Kingdom in July 1998, three months before Scholastic Press finally published “The Sorcerer's Stone” in the United States. “The Chamber of Secrets” made it to the U.S. in June 1999, the same year that Warner Brothers signed a deal to film the first book, which was released in November 2001. The film version of “The Chamber of Secrets” was released the following November.

Works Cited

Discussion Questions

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