Snape: Childhood, Ambiguity, Love Life, and Afterlife (was: Sorting and Snape)

[Judy]

No: HPFGUIDX 175445

Well, as is usually the case when I discuss the books, I have a bunch 
of Snapethoughts.  So as to not exceed my five post limit, I will try 
to shoehorn a batch of them all into one post. 


First Topic: Childhood 

Concerning the oft-cited quote about Snape looking at 
Lily "greedily," I will confess that this creeped me out at first, 
especially since I am very sensitive to any suggestion of sexual 
violence.  However, on second reading, I no longer saw this as having 
anything to do with sexual stalking. Snape is only supposed to be 
about nine or ten years old here, which is awfully young for 
stalking, even if one is a precocious little Dark-Wizard-To-Be. I now 
agree with the posters who say that Snape was "greedy" for friendship 
with another magical child, since he was isolated in a Muggle 
community. To support this view, let me point out that both of times 
the term "greedy" is used, Snape is watching or discussing Lily do 
magic. The first time he looks at her "greedily," she is swinging 
very high, about to go leaping magically off.  (Which is something 
she has done before, according to Petunia.) The second time that he 
watches her greedily, "as he had done on the playground," is just 
after he tells her that she is highly magical.


About the branch hitting Petunia, 
Dana said:
> To me Snape did make the branch break on purpose because he wanted 
> to punish Petunia for intruding on Lily and him and insulting him. 
> It does show that Snape at an early age had a mean streak to him 
> but he did not use his ability to go around and bully other kids 
> into submission. Petunia made him angry and his responds was 
> violent...
>
>Pg 536 DH UKed.
>
> 'Did you make that happen?'
> 'No.' He (Snape) looked both defiant and scared.
> 'You did!' She was backing away from him. 'You did!' You hurt her!"
> 'No – no, I didn't!'
> But the lie did not convince Lily: after on last burning look she 
> ran from the little thicket, off after her sister, and 
> Snape looked miserable and confused


This tells us that, yes, Snape's magic caused the branch to break, 
but I don't think we can tell from this whether the branch breaking 
was deliberate or accidental. Lily asks whether Snape *caused* the 
branch to break, and the text states (or at least very clearly 
implies) that Snape is lying when he says that he didn't cause it.  
But, Lily never asks him if he broke the branch *intentionally.*  So, 
the "lie" was that he didn't cause the break at all, rather than that 
he didn't do it intentionally. 

I would definitely agree with that claim that Snape has a bad temper, 
and that watching his father quite likely made him think that getting 
angry was acceptable. However, here we just have no way to know if 
what happened was accidental, like some of Harry's wandless magic, or 
intentional, like what Tom Riddle did. Tom Riddle did very cruel 
magic intentionally even as a young, wandless child, but that doesn't 
mean that as child Snape ever did, or even was able to. I like Snape 
a lot, and I think canon states that he was an extremely powerful 
wizard, but he wasn't in Voldemort's class magically.

While we are talking about Snape, Lily, and Petunia, let me say that 
I don't read Snape as blaming himself for how much Petunia hated 
magic.  I think it would have been very hard on Petunia to see Lily 
coming and going from Hogwarts each year, even if she had known 
nothing at all about magic before Lily left. On the other hand, the 
fact that Petunia's first exposure to the magical world was with 
Snape gives me some more sympathy for her dislike of magic (although 
it doesn't excuse her being awful to Harry.) Snapefan though I am, he 
certainly does fit a very negative stereotype of magic users, 
bubbling cauldron full of "eye of newt, toe of frog" and all. 



Second Topic: Ambiguity

> Julie in Chicago said:
> I've been trying to wrap my mind, for days, around what 
> the heck JKR thinks we are 
> 'supposed' to believe about Snape after reading these 7 books...
>
> It's a tangle. I still honestly don't know what the author intends 
> me to think about him in the end. My brain hurts.

And houyhnhnm replied:
> Why does it matter what the author intends for you to
> think about a character? I mean outside of the text
> itself. Surely that's the reader's job, not the author's.

I see your point, houyhnhnm, but I think that the Harry Potter 
characters (especially Snape) are a special case.  Readers have spent 
10 years and 4000 pages being given all sorts of hints about Snape's 
true character and motivations, and this topic has inspired tens of 
thousands of posts on this list alone.  With that big of a build-up, 
people are going to look for resolution in the final book. 

It's surprising to me that JKR left Snape as ambiguous as she did.  I 
was expecting something much clearer as to his motivations.  Instead, 
we're left debating questions like:  "Was Snape friends with 
Dumbledore?" and "Did he care about saving the world from Voldemort, 
or was he just doing penance for Lily's sake?"  Amazingly, we don't 
even get a statement, either way, as to whether Snape cared about 
revenge on Voldemort. 

Did JKR intend to leave Snape so ambiguous?  You know, I'm not at all 
sure that she did.  She's given some conflicting quotes in the post-
DH interviews.  She says that she doesn't see Snape as a hero, and 
then a few days later, she says that she does see him as a hero.  I 
think maybe she's not sure what to make of him herself. 


Third Topic: Love Life

Ceridwen wrote that during the big climatic battle:
> > The whole world stopped to hear that Snape loved
> > Lily, and Voldemort apparently had a heart-to-heart
> > with him about other women afterwards.

And Allie responded:
> This is how I imagine it:
>
> Voldemort: And you understand, Severus, why the silly
> girl had to be eliminated.
> Snape: Yes, my Lord.
> Voldemort: Surely you must see now that there are
> women worthier of your attention, women of purer
> blood.
> Snape: Of course, my Lord.
>
> Very touching, isn't it. Probably Snape's biggest
> challenge at performing Occlumency.

Like some others here, I found this discussion in the middle of the 
battle to be a bit amusing, or at least odd.  "We interrupt this war 
to bring you a special bulletin: Snape Loved Lily!" 

I imagined the conversation between Snape and Voldemort exactly as 
Allie imagined it, complete with it being Snape's biggest challenge 
at Occlumency.  I figured it took place at the end of GoF. 

Oh, and the line where Voldemort said, "but when she had gone, he 
agreed that there were other women, and of purer blood, worthier of 
him"?  I read that and thought, "Hey!  Now we're going to get all 
these fanfics where Snape tries to convince Voldemort that he's over 
Lily by sleeping around."  (Not that I see canon as is necessarily 
implying this, just that the line will trigger fics.) 



Forth Topic: Afterlife

Ok, one more topic for this post.

Regarding what happened to Snape in the afterlife,
lizzyben04 said:
> it's to JKR's credit that she created a character so vivid that I
> actually worried about his immortal soul. I even read fan-fic to
> find a happy ending!

Me, too, except rather than looking for fanfic, I found it easier to 
just imagine my own happy ending. I was really broken up by Snape 
dying while looking into Harry's eyes, so I thought of Snape looking 
into Harry's green, almond-shaped eyes, everything going black for a 
moment, and then Snape finding himself in the afterlife, looking into 
Lily's eyes and finally being forgiven and accepted by her. (No, they 
can't get married since she has James, but then, I don't really 
expect that there's marriage, child-bearing or sex in the afterlife --
 not because sex is evil, but because sex and child-bearing seem to 
me to be very much part of the *physical* world.) 

Leaving fans' imaginations aside, what does the book itself imply?  
Well, Snape presumably never made a Horcrux (or else he would have 
become Vapor!Snape instead of dying), so therefore his soul wouldn't 
have the terrible fate that Voldemort's soul did. (By the way, I felt 
certain that the deformed child at King's Cross was supposed to be 
Voldemort, and it reminded me very much of the UglyBaby!Mort in GoF. 
But I'm not sure if it was supposed to be the main part of 
Voldemort's soul, or just the bit that was in Harry. Either way, I 
felt sorry for it.) However, since we don't see Snape in the 
afterlife, I would have liked to have seen Snape get his portrait in 
the Headmaster's Office.  Oh well, at least JKR said in an interview 
that she thought the portrait would appear there "in due time." 

-- JudySerenity, who is really enjoying the thread on readers' most 
emotional moments, but is spending WAY too much time posting, so 
doesn't have time to write up her own favorite moments, of which 
there were lots.