All right, since it’s the end of March and I apparently have time to write insanely long responses to other people’s challenge entries, I might as well go ahead and attempt to put my thoughts on Sev and Voldie into some kind of order. Be warned that this is not a proper essay arguing a point, but merely a long (very long!) ramble about my thoughts on different aspects of Sev and Voldemort’s relationship. Tangents, long detours, etc. may be ahead.

Great Minds Think Alike – Or Do They? Sev as an Armchair

In her response to the March Challenge, mary_j_59 brings up the idea that one possible reason for Severus’ favor with Voldemort lies in the similarities between them that Voldemort could have picked up on – that is, he could have seen himself in Severus to some degree, perhaps even feeling some sort of sentimental connection to him. I do not find this entirely implausible, but nor do I wholeheartedly agree with it. As other commentators elsewhere on the web have already pointed out, there are indeed some striking similarities between Severus and Voldemort, two of the so-called “abandoned boys” of Hogwarts. Both men are literal (rather than technical) half-bloods, having a pureblood witch mother and a Muggle father; both start off in rather unpleasant and lonely circumstances due to the unhappy marriages of their parents; both suffer from neglect and a lack of loving attention. Voldemort seems to have received little or no affection whatsoever from the orphanage’s staff and had no friends; likewise it seems clear that Snape’s only real friend and source of affection during his childhood was Lily Evans (the true closeness of this relationship is another subject for another post). Both are also brilliant, powerful and talented wizards who apparently share some degree of interest in magic itself, as something worthy of study and mastery. Both are skilled in the mental arts (Legilimency, Occlumency), and in the Dark Arts (whatever they may be – we’re not given the details). And finally, Sev and Voldemort are the only two wizards we are ever told in canon who, as adults, have mastered the art of unsupported flight.

However, when it comes to Hogwarts Sev, even more than Voldemort, is an outsider. Voldemort (as Tom Riddle) was able to be charming and to impress his professors and peers; Sev is ridiculed and attacked for his intellectual prowess by his peers, and while he may have impressed Slughorn with his abilities in Potions, the other faculty don’t seem to have doted on him to any degree – quite the opposite. Voldemort may have had an unhappy home life, but his experiences at school were on the whole positive, and so I don’t read them as contributing in any significant way to his later fall into darkness and evil. His murderous rise after leaving school seems far more the agenda of a true, clinical psychopath than anything else. Sev’s descent into darkness, OTOH, seems to me to be far more emotional and human in origin, particularly in light of his experiences at Hogwarts – decisions made out of resentment, anger, hatred, pain, and desire for acceptance found only (if at all) among his Slytherin friends, rather than the cold logic of someone who truly doesn’t connect up with human emotion and cares only for expediency in achieving their personal aims. In short: Voldemort is a user, Sev is not (if anything, he is all too willing to be used).

Voldemort may indeed see similarities between himself and Sev. And the desire to understand Sev’s problematic position as a DE as being related to this degree of similarity is very tempting – particularly in combination with a desire to humanize Voldemort to some degree by attributing some shred of human feeling to him. And perhaps he does feel some superficial attachment to Sev in this regard – a sense that this servant in particular ‘fits’ him well, and is even perhaps a little amusing, because he is so like Voldemort except in key respects (power-hungry, utterly ruthless and lacking in empathy). Someone once commented that Sev was dear to Voldemort the way a favorite armchair is to its owner, and this makes sense to me; Voldemort would feel particularly attached to Snape because he’s a good ‘fit.’ But nothing more. I can’t quite attribute real sentimentality to Voldemort, other than in this superficial (and ultimately ‘user’-friendly) sense. He simply doesn’t have the capacity to empathize, something which Sev DOES possess.

For this reason, among others, I much prefer the view that Sev taught Voldemort to fly, rather than vice-versa. As I wrote in my response to Janus’ entry:

“He [Sev] is creative and we know he writes his own spells, but we have no such direct evidence of Voldemort’s creativity. He seems rather…uncreative to me, in fact [....] Sev could have gotten the idea from Lily, and shown Voldemort how to do it as a way of currying favor, or even as a sincere gift to his lord if he was still a young, completely loyal DE at the time. Voldemort, paranoid and control-hungry as he is, honestly does not strike me as the kind of person who would give away knowledge that 1) could so easily be used against him (as a strategic maneuver – Sev could teach others, and then any advantage it might have in a battle would be lost) and that 2) makes him special, set him yet further above the ordinary witch/wizard, unique. Voldemort is a narcissist – he would want to be the only one with this power, as yet further proof of his superiority. He might say all sorts of nice things to Sev, and let him sit at his right hand, but that’s all symbolic. Sharing real knowledge and power is something else entirely.”

I mean, how many people teach their favorite armchair anything but how to be a better armchair, a better servant to them? Voldemort teaching Sev to fly is IMHO far too much an expression of Voldemort seeing Sev as worthy of affection and time by virtue of his being human, too much concern for Severus as a separate being with his own desires, for me to buy it.

However, I can see Voldemort according Sev some small measure of respect (after a time) by virtue of his courage, his intelligence and ability to get stuff done (as opposed to Bella or Lucius), and his lack of servile Pettigrew-style groveling (which often gets rewarded with Cruciatus). Over at LJ melannen has an essay on this that I find interesting and in part rather compelling:

http://melannen.livejournal.com/55273.html (Four Virtues of the Dark Lord)

Severus and the Dark Lord: Thoughts on Love

I’ve also wondered about Sev and Voldemort’s relationship in connection with what SEEMED to be one of the series’ major themes, love. We’re told that Voldemort was never loved by anyone (apparently Bellatrix’s fanatical adoration doesn’t count as love), while Sev seems to be able to act out of love for people he finds personally distasteful. Not necessarily out of affection, mind you, but out of at the very least a fundamental regard for the worth of other human beings as such and a willingness to sacrifice for them – an attitude I can only characterize as a basic form of unconditional love, expressed through action rather than sentiment/feeling. Sev is also the only ‘white hat’ who spends enough time around Voldemort to have any idea of what the man in person is like. In my fic (I don’t do this on purpose, it just happens), again and again Sev ends up realizing that he’s found some shred of compassion for Voldemort, often to his own surprise. He also of course still hates the fact that Voldemort killed Lily, has turned his back on Voldemort’s ideology and so on, and he doesn’t feel ‘sorry’ for him as if he weren’t to some degree responsible for being a psychopathic mass-murderer. (He uses an analogy: pity is for teacups, which have no choice and so no responsibility for getting smashed. Compassion is for human beings, who do.) But he recognizes that there’s something tragic in the fact that Voldemort doesn’t understand love because he has NO experience of it, and – having had an only slightly better experience than Voldemort growing up – can empathize with him.

Considering the question of the relationship between Sev and Voldemort regarding love also brings into sharp relief the real lack of appreciation, of respect, of even simple human love, that Sev faces in canon. It’s always struck me as tragically ironic that the highest praise we ever witness Sev receiving in canon is Voldemort’s throwaway line in DH about him being a good and faithful servant – something that 1) is said to him by the man he despises, who murdered Lily and who has just murdered him, and 2) is not even factually true – and that almost the only person who openly expresses even a false sense of regret for what happens to Sev is, in fact, the unloving mass-murdering user who has just made him his latest victim. What a slap in the face for Sev. Perhaps Voldemort was in some ways (though not all, I don’t think) a “better” master than Dumbledore – at least with Voldemort Sev always knew where he stood. Voldemort was no hypocrite of Dumbledore’s ilk, and did indeed reward him for doing well. He also (in all probability) Cruciated him when he failed…but at least this was no different than what his other followers faced. In the DE’s Sev was one of the group, not universally loved but at least accepted and respected, and/or feared. In the Order Sev was always the odd man out, untrusted by almost everyone to some degree, blamed for not being good enough, but unrecognized for his real achievements and sacrifices while he was alive. Which was better, really? What kind of choice is that?

All right, enough rambling for now. I could go on and on, but this is already way too long. Another time!

Janus:

As I said in my short comment to your post, this is a very interesting essay, with a perspective I haven’t come across before. On a number of points I agree with you, particularly about using real emotions as a method of occluding, creating a ‘face’ for the legilimens to see. It accords pretty closely with my understanding of Sev’s Occlumency. And yes, he is a complex man full of contradictions – verbally brutal to his students, yet willing to charge into danger when he thinks they’re hurt, full of resentment and hate but also deeply loving, a DE and a member of the Order, etc.

However, I do have real questions/confusion on some points. Please don’t feel attacked – I agree with you on some things, and for the rest I honestly am interested in hearing your response. I guess I’m trying to get a better understanding of your Sev’s psychology. Please correct me where I misinterpret things!

This might be pretty long.

+++

This isn’t really a response to the [Snapedom] March challenge, since I’m not going to touch on Voldemort in any depth. Hopefully I’ll get my planned challenge response done in time (as usual I’m probably trying to cover too much in it). In the meantime, though, I thought I’d post some musings on a somewhat related topic – Severus, Hogwarts and the DE’s – which came to me the other day when I was reading the cover story of the latest issue of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. I’ll have to take a quick detour through the article and some related stuff before I get to Sev directly.

The article was about Tim Kretschmer, the 17-year-old perpetrator of a recent school shooting in southwestern Germany (see Winnenden School Shooting) – the usual attempt at answering the normal questions: “Why? What was wrong? Who was this person, that he did this?” etc. In themselves neither the article nor the incident struck me as particularly extraordinary in comparison with other such shootings and their aftermaths – tragic and senseless, of course (and my heart goes out to the victims’ families) – but sadly not unusual. The number of such incidents here in the US alone is frightening, but as this tragedy shows they are not restricted to America. Such incidents have occured in Finland, Germany, Denmark, Canada and Scotland, to name a few. Rather, what struck me was precisely the fact that such outbreaks of violence in schools on the part of students are not unusual, and (as a moment of research on the internet proved) are not a particularly recent phenomenon either. Such incidents have a history in the US alone stretching back to at least 1966 (the U of Texas at Austin massacre, 17 dead), and – if one includes the Bath School disaster as an incident of this type (questionable, as it was carried out by a member of the board rather than a student) – even back to 1927.

Oddly, despite the frequency of such incidents, the creation of a standard ‘profile’ of a proto-school-shooter seems not to be feasible. The perpetrators of such attacks historically came from varying backgrounds – some came from apparently normal, happy homes, others were children of divorce or were foster children. Nor were they all your standard ‘loner’ – some were, but others had circles of friends. One of the few constants, however, is the presence of bullying, and of a sense (on the part of the perpetrators) of victimization at the hands of and alienation from their peers and the wider school society. Katherine Newman at Princeton has pointed out that, often the perpetrators “are ‘joiners’ whose attempts at social integration fail … [and that the] shootings seem as though an attempt to adjust their social standing and image, from ‘loser’ to ‘master of violence.’” (1)

Sometimes a sense that the school’s faculty and staff are ignoring the problem of bullying is also present, as the Wiki article on Columbine points out: “Some commentators charged that school administrators and teachers at Columbine had long condoned a climate of bullying by the so-called jocks or athletes, allowing an atmosphere of outright intimidation and resentment to fester which, they claimed, could have helped trigger the perpetrators’ extreme violence.” (2) The article in Der Spiegel brought up the issue bullying in connection with the prevalence of feelings, not only of depression, but also in particular of helplessness and sometimes self-hate in the perpetrators, who have nearly always been young men.

And it was this sense of helplessness that sparked a mental connection to Severus for me. Think about it for a moment. Think about the infamous Pensieve memory, and what’s really going on in that scene. Why and how is this particular memory Severus’ “worst” memory, when (as has repeatedly been pointed out) he’s got years’ worth of memories as a DE involving things objectively worse than humiliation and de-pantsing to choose from? Partly, of course, is the fact that this is the moment where everything with Lily breaks down (ignore for the moment, if you please, the problematic nature of their supposed friendship). But I’m willing to bet that another aspect of this incident that makes it so very unpalatable is the absolute sense of helplessness that Sev must be feeling – he’s physically helpless (bound or hanging in the air), verbally helpless (soapsuds, then too emotional to be rationally articulate), magically helpless (no wand), and emotionally helpless (he knows he needs help but is too embarrassed by that and by the fact that it’s a girl – and not even a member of his own house! – who’s rescuing him in front of the entire school to be anything other than humiliated and angry; he’s probably quite aware that he’s a pawn in Lily and James’ little mating dance; and to top it off at the end he’s got the guilt of the Mudblood-slur weighing on him too.) He’s helpless, he knows it, and virtually nobody is doing anything other than laugh at him for it. And his helplessness leads him to destroy his connection to his one real ally and friend, the person who he values more than any other, permanently. Considering how much Severus seems to value self-sufficiency and his well-known abhorrence of open displays of emotion, which he considers “weak,” I wager that Severus probably hates being helpless more than anything, especially after the incident by the lake. And he therefore wants to avoid this feeling at all costs. After five solid years of four-on-one bullying (ignored and therefore tacitly condoned by the administration) and the constant threat of attack, with nobody to back him up, he probably feels that he’s always one short step away from being helpless again, and so likely wants to do something about it, preferably something to permanently remove the threat.

Rereading the Der Spiegel article with this in mind, I really started to wonder what might have happened had Severus not been so thoroughly roped in by the group of proto-DE’s occupying Slytherin – or, to put it another way, what might have happened had Harris and Klebold, or Cho, or Tim K., been surrounded since childhood with a specific ideology of bigotry and, at school, a group of friends who were all proto-members of the corresponding hate group. After all, at the time when Sev was probably making the decision to join the DE’s (his last year or two of school into his first year or two afterward) the key individuals responsible for making Sev’s school years a living hell were all closely connected to the DE’s opposite number (the Order) and were gleefully making targets of themselves (“thrice defied” and all that jazz). And in my understanding of Sev’s psychology, I see a definite pattern of extending emotions focused on very personal issues (e.g. Lily) into a broader setting (e.g. –> saving Harry –> the Order –> the war). If love works like this for him, why wouldn’t hate as well? Was joining the DE’s Severus’ own personal Columbine?

I’d like to go further into this, but I’ve gone on long enough for one post here, so for now I’ll leave it at that. It could be theoretically interesting to examine (through meta or fic) the possibility of a Columbine-style incident at Hogwarts, and how the WW might conceivably react. Does the wider WW actually GET such incidents? If not, why, and is this then bound up with the prevalence of Dark Lords? Dumbles certainly, IMHO, seems deeply implicated in creating the dreadful circumstances Sev found himself in and which quite probably had a lot to do with him joining the DE’s. But is he a reliable guide to viewing the typical Hogwarts Headmaster, or a spectacularly bad example of one? So many questions, so little time.

The links I originally had to the Wikipedia articles in question apparently didn’t work, so here they are: (1): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting (2): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Bath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster UT at Austin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman

+++

I was browsing through some old DH rants and reviews a while back and rediscovered Dan Hemmens’ excellent essay, “Harry Potter and the Doctrine of the Calvinists” posted over at Ferretbrain. Hemmens, IMHO, does a fantastic job in putting together a coherent, workable theory of just what on god’s green earth is going on in the Potterverse and how it can so blatantly propose a clear double standard on just about every major moral issue it touches. My question, after rereading the article, was: what about the characters’ own worldviews, within the books? Particularly Severus’, considering how he fought so hard, for so long, out of an apparent belief that he could in this way somehow make up for his earlier failing/s and thereby earn something – praise, respect, or even just a respite. A change in category, if you like. Redemption. But where does he get this idea, if the world is so clearly and definitively Sorted into the Elect and the Not? You’d think seven years of Hogwarts under the Marauders would have given him a clue, but apparently not. So what gives? What IS his world-view, in comparison with his contemporaries’? Well, I’ve got a theory. More behind the cut.

This is, I warn you, not an actual essay with a proper argument, just some ranting thoughts about how Severus fits into the Potterverse in light of Hemmens’ theory. I intend to come back later and post a proper essay on the subject sometime, with more coverage given to just why the notion of Severus as a Catholic (in the character of his world-view, not necessarily in formal practice) makes a lot of sense to me. In the meantime: I do hope no-one takes offense at anything I say here – I’m not attempting any kind of judgment of any religious tradition, merely examining how the implications of Hemmens’ theory work out on the level of the characters themselves and their world-outlooks. That is: how a Potterverse character’s view of the world can clash, or not, with the view of the world the books themselves lay out, and what this can mean for the characters, including – of course – our poor dear Sev.

Link to Hemmens’ article, a definite read if you haven’t already: http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-161.html

For those unfamiliar with the article, Hemmens’ thesis is essentially that the Potterverse operates according to the Calvinist doctrine of Election (either you’re simply among the Elect, saved, redeemed by grace, etc., or you’re not, and you can’t do a damn thing about it because your actions have no bearing upon your ultimate moral status) as understood by a Cultural Christian, rather than within the actual theological context that gave rise to it. As Hemmens puts it, Rowling’s world “really does work the way atheists perceive Calvinist Election as working.” We might say that in the Potterverse the Pseudo-Calvinists have gotten their way, and have decided that a hat (yes, a HAT) shall have final say over who is Teh Good and who Not.

In other words, the chosen ones [aka Gryffindors] can do whatever they please and it’s Teh Good, while those singled out as being, deep down, irredeemably Teh Evul [Slytherin] will get kicked down for doing anything, because they’re Teh Evul and that’s how it works. Regardless of whatever tripe about love, choice, and righteousness is on the menu today.

But what about the individual characters – how do they perceive the world as working, and what effect does their perception have on their actions? Who, in the basic character of their world outlook (leaving aside the issue of actual religious practice in the WW – that’s another matter), are the (Pseudo-)Calvinists, who the mainline Protestants, etc.? Note that getting how Teh Rules work, and actually being among the Elect, have nothing causal to do with one another. That is, you can ‘get  it’ and still be screwed, not get it and be saved, be saved/screwed and KNOW it, or somewhere in between.

Harry, of course, has learned the proper course of things at the knee of Ol’ White-Beard himself, the fount of all wisdom, and by the end of DH has so thoroughly taken this ‘wisdom’ to heart that he quite uncomplainingly marches off to his own death in the company of his suicide-cult-aka-family. He then gets to come BACK because he’s Teh Ultimate Good and it’s his fate, but I’m sure that knowing that all is going as it should helps his sanity along the way. Clearly the pinnacle of Pseudo-Calvinist thinking. Dumbles too, the master manipulator. They accept their fates with nary a complaint and all goes well.

Voldie, poor guy, either doesn’t get it at all or totally gets it and is enjoying every second of the ride. Bellatrix, like a number of other DE’s, probably has gotten it and has decided that if she’s among the ranks of Teh Evul, well, she might as well enjoy it. The two side wheels of Harry’s Tricycle of Teh Good Jr. seem to have imbibed enough Pseudo-Calvinist doctrine to make their way well enough in the WW (being among the Elect certainly helps in this regard). Ron the pureblood Gryffindor, like his family, seems to me to be a touch clearer in his grasp of Teh Rules, while Hermione (influenced by her Muggle upbringing?) wavers occasionally for a little while before she really gets it – possibly tempted by the general Protestant notion of salvation by faith alone. I suspect quite a few Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws fall somewhere along this section of the spectrum too.

And Severus?

Severus, poor guy, is a Catholic.

I mean, the silly sod actually thinks he can change his fate, by doing things! By trying to do Good (TM)! In the name of the mother and child! He actually thinks his devotion to the Queen of the Elect herself and her Glorious Son might earn him something! Like, a get-out-of-Hell-with-maybe-a-limb-intact-card. He doesn’t seem to get it: he’s Slytherin and therefore screwed – though if in his delusion he wants to help Dumbles and Co. out by providing a steady stream of information (going one way) and misinformation (going the other way) at risk of his life and freedom, well, he’s welcome to do so. Nobody’s complaining, least of all Dumbles himself. Nobody seems particularly keen to point out Teh Rules to poor, dumb Severus either. Sorry, the fount of wisdom is off today, Severus. Try again another time. But what was that about Mr. Scaly wanting the prophecy? From the DOM? Go on, go on, the Big White Beard is listening. And trying not to smirk at how pathetically dumb this idiot Slytherin is, to still  – after all he’s been through – think he’s got a chance in hell of anything other than a messy, painful and thoroughly unpleasant end to a life that Hobbes, unfortunately, characterized quite well in Leviathan:

“the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Where does he get this stubborn idea that he can change anyway, though? My theory – or the theory lying behind the Severus who appears in my current in-progress fic, at least – is that Severus’ family, on the Muggle side, was Catholic, and that whatever his current status vis-a-vis actual religious practice or belief in God, his general OUTLOOK is fundamentally shaped by the notion that redemption, forgiveness, CHANGE, is possible if one devotes oneself to working hard at it.

Sometimes we Sort too soon, my foot. Aaargh, JKR just pisses me off sometimes. Anyway, that’s all for now, folks. Like I say above, eventally I hope to get around to writing a proper essay on this subject. Until then: Toughts? Comments? Major silly typos or lapses in logic in the above post?

Well, alright, perhaps a few silly incantations from time to time. For the fun of it.

Anyway,  hello all out there and welcome to the dungeons of my mind (or at least the upper basement – the real dungeons are a few levels down). This is the space where I (intend to) come to rant about various subjects having to do with everyone’s favorite Potions Master in a slightly more coherent way than I generally do on forums, and to collect my already-scattered thoughts on this subject from the corners of the internet. I expect also to eventually post my fic here; in the meanwhile I shall provide fic recs from time to time. Please enjoy all offerings at your leisure.

So now we come to the question that – for some of you – probably doesn’t need answering: Why Snape?

Well…the short answer, and most coherent one, is: he’s Snape. Despite JKR’s repeated attempts to belittle her own creation and the industrial-strength psychic blinders she must be wearing if she honestly doesn’t see what a marvelous, complex and beautiful character she has created, there’s something about Severus Snape that simply refuses to be let itself be ignored. There’s a real depth of possibility (and character) there, something that shines through even DH’s clunky prose and even clunkier plotting. The man is, one has to admit, fascinating. And endlessly debatable. And I’m not simply talking about the Is he a White Hat or a Black Hat? discussion – DH pretty much answered that one, at least in the CanonVerse. Rather, it seems to me almost as if in Severus Snape JKR has (accidentally? purposefully? unknowingly?) given us a realistic character moving in a world that is decidedly non-realistic (beyond the simple issue of magic, I mean); it’s a folk-tale-ish, half-allegorical world in which realistic psychology and moral growth/decline sticks out like a sore thumb…or like Severus Snape. And yet, he (almost) fits. There’s some strange alchemy going on between the character and the world though which he moves, it seems, and it just cries out to be interpreted, analysed, sifted and gone through. Unlocked, if you like.

Alohomora.