What triggered ancient magic? WAS: Re: James and Intent

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 187122

> > Alla:
>  
> > If you think that this is too much to ask of twenty one year old to make an assumption that the woman is **happy** in her marriage and would not want to be alive at the expense of her husband and baby, well all I can say is that I strongly disagree.
> <snip>
> > He knows that Lily is married and had a baby for quite some time now, and I think he should have made an assumption (absent any knowledge he has to the contrary) that she is happy rather than not.
> > 
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> In the traditions of courtly love (and arranged marriages), the general  assumption is that the wife is *not* happily married. In fact the courtly lover could never be his lady's husband. That romantic love could lead to happy marriage is a thoroughly modern idea which many people in the past would have thought insane. 

Magpie:
Snape was a teenager in the 1970s. Why would he be getting his ideas about love from courtly romances in the middle ages?

Pippin:
So even if he'd heard that James and Lily had married for love, Snape wouldn't necessarily assume they were happy, especially if he feared Lily's love was the product of a potion or an Imperius curse. 

Magpie:
He wouldn't necessarily assume it but I didn't get the impression his problem was that he really didn't think Lily was happy. I doubt he wanted to think too much think about how happy they were or not. I don't remember him ever seeming to think that Lily was under any potion or Imperius curse. He saw her drifting towards James right in front of him at Hogwarts. I think he'd be more likely to just think that she'd get over him than to really see himself as saving her from a loveless marriage.

Pippin: 
> Bellatrix doesn't seem to care much about her husband, and if Snape got his ideas of what marriage was like from her and from his own mother, it would confirm whatever he knew from tales of courtly love. Lucius and Narcissa seem to be close as of DH, but they didn't in earlier books, and it could be that adversity drew them together. 

Magpie:
Do we have some reason to think Snape is learning anything from tales of courtly love? He's a boy at school where people are dating in the 70s. I'm sure he didn't want to think of Lily and James being happy, but I suspect his reasoning sounded more like any modern (even if a bit old-fashioned) person wanting to believe the person they liked would eventually dump or get dumped by the inferior person than the misperception that marriage=unhappily yoked together through arrangement. Surely he'd assume that if he was married to Lily they'd be happy. If he imagined Lily as trapped in the arrangement it seems like it would be aggressively delusional.

Pippin:
He doesn't seem to have been close to Arthur and Molly and I don't think he'd have been watching "Ozzie and Harriet" do you? :)

Magpie:
He might have. We know Snape had a good example of marriage not being about being happy from his own home and that would have kept him from assuming married people had to be happy, but I would think nevertheless that his ideas about couples were fairly close to reality when wishful thinking didn't get involved. If he imagined Lily was unhappy in her marriage I think it would probably be more about projection--he knows James is a horrible person and so must have started bullying Lily the way he bullied Snape or that she'd finally seen his true colors. 

-m