Why Suspect Lupin? (WAS: Snape, Lupin's Mistakes Again)

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 35040

Mahoney wrote:

> On another subject, has anyone speculated that as for Black having 
> suspected Lupin as being the spy, there might have been some reason 
> related to, I dunno, Lupin's personality that suggested it? I.e., 
> something other than, say, general distrust of werewolves? 

<raises hand>

I have.  

"'They call it the Dementor's Kiss,' said Lupin, with a slightly 
twisted smile."

Ooooh, yes.  There's *definitely* a dark streak to Lupin's 
character.  He's got Edge, which is one of the reasons that I like 
him so much.  (Without his Edge, he'd be a bit sappy, if you ask me.  
Far too *nice.*  Too...well, too ewww to be trewww, shall we say.)  I 
don't think that Lupin's werewolf status was the only reason that he 
was suspected at all.  Not by a long shot.

But then, I think that it may be hard to separate Lupin's dark side 
from his lycanthropy when we talk about the reasons his friends may 
have had for coming to suspect him -- or for that matter, even when 
we talk about our *own* feelings about him. That notion of "the wolf 
is always there, even when you can't see it" is far too central to 
even our own werewolf mythos, let alone that of the Potterverse.  

Mahoney:

> I Was thinking...the 'Jekyll & Hyde' type is one way of looking at 
> Lupin; but what if he's less split down the middle? What if he's 
> actually a bit...wolfy? He acts mild-mannered and nice, because he 
> *is* generally mild-mannered and nice; but even the mild-mannered 
> nice people can have dark emotions and urges. 

Yes.  I think that if we didn't know that Lupin were a werewolf that 
Edge of his would still be an evident aspect of his character, but 
the fact that we *do* know -- as did the Marauders -- makes it all 
that much harder to ignore.  

Still Mahoney:

> And if he had a bit of a wicked streak, which he only let his close 
> friends see, it would make more sense for Black to think that Lupin 
> was the type to maybe be amenable to Voldemort's ways and thus 
> become a spy. 

Well, I think that we get to see quite a few signs of Lupin's "wicked
streak" in PoA, and that they do make it easier to imagine how Black
could have come to suspect nice, mild-mannered, intellectual Remus as 
the spy in their midst.  After all, *we* suspected him, didn't we?
;-)

Leaving aside the question of his capabilities (Lupin is certainly 
both clever enough and sufficiently emotionally-controlled to have 
been an effective spy), and of his social vulnerability (aside from 
the lycanthropy itself, the fact that Lupin's condition renders him 
effectively chronically-ill and terminally-nemployed would have made 
him far more vulnerable than any of the others to temptation by 
offers of financial security or enhanced social standing), and
focusing instead purely on questions of character, I see a number of 
things which might have made him seem suspect.

For starters, he's apparently chosen to specialize in the Dark Arts 
(er...*Defense* Against Dark Arts, that is).  It's not clear 
whether he was drawn to this field because of being a werewolf or in 
spite of it, but either way it's a little suspicious, and would surely
have seemed far more so during the days of Voldemort's reign.  

Then there's his sense of humor.  It's dry, but it can also be a 
little bit black:

"Professor Lupin had come back.  He paused as he entered, looked 
around, and said, with a small smile, 'I haven't poisoned that 
chocolate, you know...'"

Of course he's joking, and the humor there is primarily self-
deprecating: Lupin knows full well that to the students he must 
appear somewhat disreputable. It's a joke designed to release tension 
and put the kids more at ease with him, and it works beautifully.  
But it is a little dark.

His demeanor when practicing magic is casual in a way that could be 
read as indicative of darkness as well.  On more than one occasion in 
PoA, JKR uses the word "lazy" or "lazily" to refer to aspects of 
Lupin's wand work.  This speaks to his competence, of course, but 
it's also a trifle unsettling, because "lazily" is a loaded word in 
the Potter books.  It's how Snape speaks when he is being 
deliberately cruel; it's the adverb consistently applied to the 
Malfoy drawl.  And in GoF, voldemort gets an awful lot of "lazily" as 
well.  "Lazily" is how the Potterverse's sadistic characters behave.  
In JKR's idiom, it's really a neutral word at all. 

Then there's also Lupin's tendency to speak of dark matters in a 
cool, light, or even breezy fashion.  The angrier or more upset he 
is -- or the more potentially emotionally upsetting the subject under 
discussion -- the lighter and milder his tone becomes.  We see that 
whenever he has to deal with Snape's unpleasantness, we see it in 
Shrieking Shack when he responds to Hermione's outing him as a 
werewolf, and we see a lot of it whenever he talks to Harry about the 
dementors.

When Harry asks him why the dementors came to the Quiddich match, for 
example:

"'They're getting hungry,' said Lupin coolly, shutting his briefcase 
with a snap."

That "coolly" sort of chills the blood, doesn't it?  And he gets even 
worse when he tells Harry about the Dementor's Kiss.  There's 
the "slightly twisted smile," of course, but even beyond that, 
Lupin's entire tone as he describes the Kiss is light, casual, 
breezy; it's very nearly bemused.

There is, of course, nothing in the least bit "wicked" about using 
this technique to disconnect from upsetting matters; it's a form of 
emotional self-protection.  But it's a habit that is horribly prone 
to being misinterpreted by others.  It can all too easily be misread 
as callousness or inhumanity, or even as cruelty.  

(I've had a lot of personal experience with this one, as I share 
Lupin's tendency to take on a facetious tone when angry or upset, or 
when discussing distressing subjects.  There have been many times 
when I've discovered -- much to my dismay -- that somebody I'd 
*thought* I was getting along with quite well had actually come 
away from a conversation absolutely convinced that I must be a truly 
horrible and cruel and uncaring person.  It's always a bit of a 
shocker, when that happens.)

Of course, you'd think that Sirius and the Potters would have known 
Lupin well enough not to be dismayed by that sort of thing, but...you 
never know.  Horrible things were happening.  I can easily imagine 
how Lupin's breezy and off-hand manner when discussing, say, somebody 
that the group actually *knew* having been tortured or murdered might 
have given even his friends pause, particularly if they were already 
becoming suspicious of him for other reasons.

Even Lupin's compassion could, viewed in a certain light, make him 
seem a little suspicious, because it's a compassion born of 
sensitivity and insight, of the ability to "read" others, to deduce 
other people's personal vulnerabilities and motives.  Lupin's very 
good at that; it's what makes him a good teacher.  But that form of 
sensitivity can also be a rather unnerving trait, particularly in a 
paranoid situation, one in which there are *secrets* that must be 
kept hidden.  On a certain level, an emotionally astute individual 
*is* a spy -- he knows your secrets...or at least he makes you feel 
as if he does -- and I don't think that it did much for the others' 
sense of security around Lupin.  I think that his very sensitivity 
probably made him seem suspect.

When we're talking about Darkness, also, I think that Lupin's 
sensitivity to others is one of his most suspect character traits 
because while wisely used that sort of sensitivity can lead to 
compassion, used with ill-intent it turns to sadism.  If you can tell 
where somebody's vulnerabilities lie, then you may know how to help 
them, but you also really know how to *hurt* them.  And while Lupin 
rarely uses his sensitivity cruelly, he certainly does know *how* to 
do it.  His rebuke to Harry at the end of Chapter 14 -- "Your parents 
gave their lives to keep you alive..." -- is devestatingly 
effective.  It's also slightly...

Well, intent is everything here.  Lupin truly believes that murderous 
Black is trying to hunt Harry down, and the kid really *isn't* taking 
the threat as seriously as he ought to be.  But if Lupin's comment 
hadn't been delivered with such undeniably good intent, if the 
context had been different, then one might even be tempted to call 
it "vicious."  Lupin really does know how to target the jugular, and 
there are times when I get the definite sense that he's got a bit of 
a taste for it as well.  He's not a sadist...but he could be, and 
if he ever did go bad, I think that's exactly how he'd do it.  It 
does come across as a "dark streak" to his personality, IMO, and I 
can easily imagine how that aspect of his character could have made 
him seem highly suspect.

Of course, where I think that Lupin's capacity for sadism comes 
across the most clearly is in Shrieking Shack.  Others, I know, have 
disagreed with my reading of Lupin's lines there -- we had a thread 
on this a little while back, and it reached an impasse pretty 
quickly -- but I still maintain that in Shrieking Shack, Lupin's 
anger has pushed him to the brink of sadism.  

Everyone gets bestial at the end of PoA, of course -- that's the 
entire point -- but Lupin's particular *mode* of beast-ness does, 
IMO, come across as considerably more "Dark" than either Sirius or 
Pettigrew's respective forms of beastliness.  

So...um, yeah.  I do think that there are a lot of things about 
Lupin's character other than his lycanthropy that might have tempted 
Black and the Potters to suspect him as the spy.  There's a streak of 
Darkness there, to be sure.

Good thing, too, 'cause otherwise he wouldn't be nearly so 
interesting.  Or nearly so sexy.


-- Elkins, to whom never even *occurred* that others might find 
anyone but Lupin the sexpot character of the older generation, and 
who was shocked -- just shocked! -- to learn otherwise.  ("'Sirius Is 
Dead Sexy?'" she read to herself, and then blinked in confusion.  
"Sirius?" she repeated blankly.  '*Sirius?*  Is that...that's a joke, 
right?"  Then she remembered the flying motorcycle, and nodded to 
herself.  'Ah,' she thought.  'Okay.  I guess some people do like 
that sort of thing.')  

(We won't even get into her response when she discovered the Snape-Is-
Sexy people.)