Harry Potter Melodrama

“’So I made Ginny write her own farewell on the wall and come down here to wait. She struggled and cried and became very boring. But there isn't much life left in her….I have many questions for you, Harry Potter….how is it that you—a skinny boy with no extraordinary magical talent—managed to defeat the greatest wizard of all time?’” (Rowling, 313).

These several lines, taken from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling, paint a rather perfect picture of the very traditional melodramatic components. Most obviously, Tom Riddle (the character speaking) is the embodiment of pure evil. He appears as something of a black hat and has taken a poor, innocent girl as a captive. Ginny plays the role of the damsel in distress: she is helpless and needs saving from her perilous doom. Harry is cast as the victim hero, the “boy who lived” when his parents were murdered by Tom Riddle himself (AKA Voldemort). He functions as the hero with a pure heart and pure intentions, a commoner who stands up and overcomes the evil that he is confronted with. To change this set up, one may make Tom Riddle appear to be less of the mustachioed villain, Ginny appear less helpless, and Harry appear to have qualities that are unfitting of a melodramatic hero in the traditional sense. Humorously, one could translate the passage as follows:

"So I asked Ginny to write her own farewell on the wall and come down here to wait. Her incessant complaints about the condition of her accommodations began to wear on my nerves. But she became disinterested and is now napping....I have many questions for you, Harry Potter....what scheme did you devise to defeat the greatest wizard of all time?"