The Cave, the Bible, the Passing of the Baton...

[wickywackywoo2001]

No: HPFGUIDX 134367

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "vmonte" <vmonte at y...> wrote:

> With Tom Riddle you get the impression that he was never loved, so if 
> he becomes evil you can sort of see where it's coming from.  But with 
> Draco and Snape I get the impression that they did have at least one 
> person in their lives that loved them.  I may be wrong but I think 
> that Draco's mother loves him. And I get the feeling that Dumbledore 
> loved Snape. And it was Dumbledore's love of Snape that really made 
> him blind to him.  
> 
At this point, I can't judge just where the "culpability" that Rowling
is talking about lies in Snape.  We just don't know enough.  We don't
know who was the person who loved him - it was probably his mother,
that's the most obvious choice.  But mothers aren't all good - look at
Sirius's mother.  She loved her children, but only in so far as they
followed her into evil.  It could be Snape's father who loved him - in
the only glimpse we see of him, he's shouting and his wife is crying.
 But it isn't only cruel, evil fathers who shout - remember how angry
Arthur Weasley got when he caught his sons fooling around with a Dark
Magic spell.  Snape's father could have just as easily been shouting
at his wife because she was doing something similar; little Severus
would just be crying because of the fighting, not because he knew what
was really going on.  Or it could be a completely different person who
loved him - a grandmother, perhaps.

I don't tie Snape's guilt to a particular incident - killing or
betraying this or that person.  Rowling may have been talking in more
general terms.  Perhaps she meant that, unlike Riddle, Snape was or
had been loved, and so he should have known better than to turn to
evil.  He was half-Muggle; he knew that Voldemort's anti-Muggle
obsession was a lie, he knew it from his own life, and maybe from his
own family.  He even called himself "Half-Blood Prince"; unlike
Riddle, he didn't try to obliterate all trace of his Muggle heritage.
 So he knew that he was trafficking in lies when he became a Voldemort
supporter, but he did it anyway.  That I think was his greatest guilt.

Wanda