Snape as teacher

[sashibuya at hotmail.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 12126

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "ender_w" <ender_w at m...> wrote:
<snip>
> 
"Call me a heretic (and I know the Snape lovers will), ...and before 
I say this, let me insist that Snape is one of my favorite 
characters...but I see Snape as a literary device more than a person 
to be psychoanalyzed.  Now, I firmly believe that there is more to 
Snape than we see and he will become instrumental in the coming war 
with Voldmort, but, as far as his personality in the classroom, I 
have trouble reading too much into it.  I think that he's nasty to 
Gryffindors simply because they're Gryffindors and he's a Slytherin.  
I also think that JKR has made him the stereotypical mean teacher for 
the sake of making Harry's life more interesting, and not  just 
because Snape has some deep, dark secrets in his psyche..."
<snip>

Nah, I see your point. Most of the "analysis" I'm doing is 
speculation. Part of the reason we talk so much about Snape is that 
he's got interesting contradictions, yet we've been mostly told about 
them secondhand (mostly through Dumbledore) rather than seeing them 
ourselves. We haven't been shown how they fit together. So we can 
make up plausible psychoanalytic scenarios, which are fun, but not 
taken to be taken too seriously.  We don't have much actual insight 
into Snape's character yet, unless he suddenly begins to have 
tortured monologues that Harry starts to overhear, or appoints Harry 
as his special confidant (hahahaha!). But the enimity between Snape 
and Harry and his nastiness in class does connect in some way to what 
else we know, and what we are told is more positive from what is on 
the surface of his everyday interactions with Harry, which makes it 
interesting as well. Harry and his associates (think conversation 
with Sirius in GoF) don't really get Snape either, and we won't until 
they do. 

Charmian, speculatively