Slytherins in love Was: Wasted potential in Pettigrew

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 173686

Carol earlier:
> > I still don't see stalker Snape. He left her alone after she
refused to forgive him and begged both Voldemort and DD to save her.
I'm quite sure he would not have come near her, knowing that she would
despise him as a Death Eater. He only wanted her alive, not
understanding how terrible life would have been for her without her
husband and son. His love was selfish at first, but I don't think it
was ever sullied [by lust]. <snip>
> > 
> > As for the Bloody Baron, surely he's meant to contrast with Snape.
The Baron murdered the woman he loved; Snape tried and failed to save
Lily, whose death was in large part his fault, and spent the rest of
his life repenting that sin and the last seven years protecting her
son and secretly fighting her murderer, at terrible cost to himself.
Snape's love starts out selfish, but it's never as selfish as the
Bloody Baron's. Nor will Snape spend eternity groaning and clanking on
the Astronomy Tower. ;-)
 
> Clio:
> I agree with you Carol in almost everything you wrote about Snape
(which I had to cut from your post). <snip>
> Still, I am not so sure if you and I read and see Snape the way it
is intended by the author. I am all for 'sweetly in love' Snape, but I
have to admit his love for Lily has an obsessive quality. I'm not so
sure if he would have left Lily alone had the Dark Lord spared her. As
for the letter he takes in Sirius old bedroom, I wouldn't see that as
sick stalking either, but as the very human act of a desperate and
verly lonesome man. Has I been in his shoes, I would have done
exactely the same. I have to disagree with you on the role of the
Bloody Baron. He is not meant as a contrast to Snape. I think he and
Snape have a lot in common. Snape may not be 'groaning and clanking on
the Astronomy Tower' as you put it, but he is all through the HP
series sulking in the dungeons, flaying himself for Lily's death and
obviously hating everything happy and light around him, and especially
dead!James Potter and his offspring. And had Ddore not shown him a new
goal in life (help Harry survive), I am not sure if Snape had not
killed himself just like the Bloody Baron. I think both examples are
meant to show how love can turn from a good thing into something
dangerous and destructive. Just in Snape's case the destruction is
channeled by Ddore for a noble cause. <snip>
> The point remains, Snape's love isn't something pure and shining,
but obsessive, desperate and selfish. Just, I think this is realistic
and human to the extreme, and therefore to me Snape is the best
character JKR has written. Like it or not, Snape is not Saint Severus.
Actually he is one of the few people in the series who don't act 'For
the Greater Good' which we were told to fear in DH, but out of human
feelings.
> 
> Clio,
> who thinks in her next post she should aim for 'Saint Severus,
> protector of all wayward sons of desperate mothers'
>

Carol responds:
I think you're seeing my position as more extreme than it is. I'm not
arguing for St. Severus, only that Snape does not come across as a
stalker to me. Nor am I denying that his reason for wanting Lily to
live while not caring about her husband and son is in any way admirable.

But Lily was Snape's only real friend, the only one who liked him from
his childhood on despite his hooked nose and greasy hair and horrible
clothes. His life with his parents was terrible. His friends in
Slytherin accepted him despite his Half-Blood status, but would they
have done so if he hadn't been a prodigiously talented, highly
intelligent boy who came to school knowing more hexes than half the
seventh years?

Severus's love for Lily was (IMO) in part a longing for the days when
they had no one but each other to talk to about being a witch and a
wizard, when he could teach her about Dementors and Azkaban and
Hogwarts and even hope, naively, that she, a Muggleborn, will be
sorted into Slytherin, which he perceives as a House for brains, not
brawn.

Later, he has to choose between Lily and his Slytherin friends, who
are making no secret of their DE ambitions. (Severus, meanwhile, is
spending a lot of time stydying *Defense Against* the Dark Arts,
judging from his OWL exam.) After the "mudblood" incident, he makes
the wrong choice. He might have gotten over it, even her turning to
James Potter, and just become a Death Eater (far more formidable than
Yaxley or any others that we see) if Lily had not been targetted
thanks to his eavesdroping.

His first step toward repentance and redemption is small and in DD's
view, contemptible. He begs DD to save Lily's life. He tells DD that
he will do "anything" if DD will save her (which becomes "them" in
response to DD's contempt) and true to his word, he spies for DD at
great personal risk. *Unlike* the Bloody Baron, who kills the woman he
loves, he begs for her life. (Whatever he may have told Voldemort,
it's not because he desires her. He only wants her to live. Obviously,
she would have wanted nothing to do with him and would have hated the
sight of him. And surely he has no delusions that she could think
otherwise.)

When we see him next, he is, like the Bloody Baron, ready to commit
suicide or at least to die. "I wish. . . . I wish *I* were dead."
Dumbledore responds coldly, " And what good would that do anyone? If
you loved Lily Evans, if you truly loved her, then your way forward is
clear." Snape, peering "through a haze of pain," asks what he meand
and DD responds, "Help me to protect Lily's son." Snape protests that
the boy doesn't need protection and DD tells him that LV will return.
And snape agrees, making DD promise that he will never tell anyone,
especially Harry Potter, what snape has done. And DD interprets this
promise as never revealing "the best" in him. *If you truly loved
her.* And both his subsequent "immensely brave" actions as
Dumbledore's man and the doe Patronus, which brings tears to
Dumbledore's eyes, show that he truly did.

Yes, his love is obsessive, especially after her death, but it's his
unassuageable guilt that makes it so. There's all the difference in
the world between the Bloody Baron, who kills the woman he loves and
then kills himself, and Severus Snape, who wants to die to end the
agony of unendurable remorse for his part in Lily's death but chooses
instead to protect her son and never to receive credit or gratitude
from that son. (The point of a foil, which I think the Baron is with
regard to Snape, is to show two similar characters in a similar
situation and contrast their responses. Snape may have started out
like the Baron, but his choice took him in another direction, allowing
him the redemption that the Bloody Baron will never have. Nor do I
think that Snape will choose to spend eternity as a ghost, afraid to
face what lies beyond.)

On a side note, I can't think of any character besides Dumbledore who
acts for "the greater good" (and he's a rather scary figure in DH).
Hermione acts to some degree on principle, and perhaps Mad-Eye Moody
does, but the characters we know best are all motivated, it seems to
me, by some form of love. The Battle of Hogwarts is as personal to
Molly Weasley or Kreacher or Tonks as the long struggle to protect
Harry Potter and undermine Voldemort from within has been for Snape
(who can't even declare openly where his loyalties lie). And for Ron,
even though he's always hated the word "Mudblood" and the Weasleys
have always been "blood traitors," his love of Hermione makes it
personal. Love is the great motivator, far more than principle, in
JKR's world, as far as I can see.

Carol, who can think of no other reason to include the Baron's story
except to contrast *his* obsessive love, which leads to two cowardly
and contemptible acts and an eternity of pointless remorse, with
Snape's, which leads to acts of exceptional courage and, I am certain,
to his redemption in the afterlife