Snape: A Definitive Reading

by Lorrie Kim

Those looking to decode Rowling’s mysteries see that in her stories, ill temper, even bullying, do not necessarily signify evil.

What can Snape do? Tensions between opposing groups of students are so volatile that someone has created an actual explosion in his class, causing physical harm. He can’t know Harry was only trying to create a diversion. He probably thinks Harry wanted to hurt Goyle; any teacher would think that. Dumbledore is no closer to finding the culprit, but Snape must defend against the Dark Arts—he must teach the children to resist the suspicion and hostility that increase in atmospheres of heightened fear. Or, if they cannot resist, he must program defenses into them before the fighting escalates further.

Snape is reproducing the life-threatening tensions currently disrupting the school and tailoring the lesson to take that combative mindset into account. In sport, one hexes according to rules of etiquette; in fighting, such thinking will be a disadvantage. The skills learned under casual conditions may not transfer to true danger, but the reflexes and drilling learned from combat training can—if they are well managed—transfer successfully to any situation.

CoS, 151) This entire volume is about the danger of dormant resentments that can be awakened in an atmosphere of suspicion.

Rowling is training her young readers to understand that when they learn long-hidden truths about ugly characters, no matter how hook-nosed and greasy-haired, they may see these characters in a new light.

Harry learns that some types of spells require specific emotions or thoughts from the caster. As he learned from Snape, and will never forget, the emotions of dueling an enemy create different magical conditions than dueling a friend. Spikes of loyalty and courage conjure Fawkes and the Sword of Gryffindor for Harry. And to open the Chamber of Secrets, you don’t have to be the Heir of Slytherin. You just have to know how the Heir of Slytherin would feel—as Ginny does when she’s possessed and as Ron will, years later, after the Horcrux. This is one of Rowling’s most important themes: that empathy is the basis of powerful magic.

This is something teachers can do with young students who have not even entered their teens. They are not yet old enough to resist the training they absorb from their environments. If they are conditioned at this age to use slurs and explode one another’s cauldrons, they will default to those behaviors later, and someone will get hurt. But if they are conditioned to disarm and to block unfriendly spells, those will become their defaults.

Lupin asks the students to reveal the thing they fear the most. Neville’s reply is “Professor Snape.” Lupin then instigates collective mockery of Snape using a sexist, ageist image that the students would never have come up with on their own.

Just as Snape created a classroom atmosphere in which his Slytherins were “excited” at the prospect of a classmate’s failure, humiliation, and fear for his pet, Lupin has gotten a roomful of pubescent Gryffindors to engage in collective sexual ridicule behind a Slytherin teacher’s back, including the alarming word “forced.”

In the ensuing rush of adventure, there is little leisure for the reader to reflect upon how teen Snape would have felt glimpsing a werewolf at the end of a narrow tunnel, set up by his enemies. From the time Sirius and Lupin both headed back to his adult workplace, Snape has been battling memories of that episode. As far as Snape knows, the boy who once tried to get him killed and saw nothing wrong with turning his own werewolf friend into a killer could easily have become a mass murderer.

The kids stay with Hagrid until the executioner arrives and they slip out the back. They hear what they believe is Buckbeak’s death: “without warning, the unmistakable swish and thud of an axe.” (HP/PoA, 331) With that sound, their trust in authority is severed.

So Lupin finds Snape’s response understandable. The prank, with all its implications for Lupin, was thought up by Sirius alone. And Sirius, whose development has been arrested by imprisonment, dementors, and rage for the past 12 years, expresses no remorse.

But Snape hears that the life debt he owes James was actually a different kind, an action that says: I will risk my own life to save yours. It may have meant: Not even my enemy deserves to die this way.

Snape isn’t ready to re-evaluate the past; he’s still in it.

After all the precautions put in place for Lupin’s protection as a student, after all the special treatment, Lupin still led his friends into danger, out-of-bounds, at night, and visited Hogsmeade as a werewolf. Yet when Sirius nearly got him to kill another student, nobody was expelled; there is no evidence that anyone was even punished. The only consequence we know for sure is that Snape was “forbidden by Dumbledore to tell anybody” (HP/PoA, 357) that Lupin is a werewolf. He was forbidden to speak of his terrifying experience. His near murder, and his need to work through it by talking, were considered less important than Lupin’s privacy and, perhaps, Dumbledore’s chagrin.

Hermione, Harry, and Ron have learned that sometimes there is no way to save the innocent through proper channels.

When is it okay to take super-magical objects for one’s own use? According to the rules of J.K. Rowling’s universe, when you want them not for personal gain, but to protect others.

The fantasy of going back in time to change something regrettable is universal but impossible. We can only understand what happened and learn to tolerate it; we can’t change the past. But when we see history repeating itself and we must choose not to interfere, that’s a different story. As Snape has found, the urge to interfere can overpower reason. The ability to overcome this urge is essential for experienced time travelers: that is, adults, parents, teachers, or anyone who has had to learn that each generation will make its own mistakes.

Hermione is regularly the only Gryffindor to be as concerned for Professor Snape as she is for others, despite Snape’s usual refusal to listen to her or acknowledge her. Because of Hermione’s vigilance, Harry gets a glimpse of how his nemesis behaves when he thinks nobody’s looking. Snape is not acting here. He is careful even with the unconscious Sirius Black, in contrast to Sirius bumping Snape’s head intentionally when Snape was unconscious. (HP/PoA, 378) It may be that the private Snape is a better man than the public persona Harry usually sees.

This is a particularly effective instance of one of Rowling’s favorite devices, calling characters by their surnames when she wants to emphasize the conflation of their identities with their parents or children who share the same name.

In the past, after Lupin’s lycanthropy endangered Snape’s life, nothing changed. Dumbledore enforced silence around the

incident, compounding Snape’s trauma. Dumbledore would not hear Snape’s safety concerns when he appointed Lupin to a teaching position, but it turned out that Snape was right. It was not humanly possible to guarantee anyone’s safety against lycanthropy, despite Dumbledore’s precautions and Snape’s inexorable production of Wolfsbane. The first time, another human who was in on the secret showed faulty judgment and exposed a student to the werewolf. The second time, Lupin’s own human emotions prevented his self-care. Fortunately, nobody was hurt in either instance, but Snape was right: it would be impossible to guarantee that there wouldn’t be a next time.

Snape once accepted Dumbledore’s order of silence when his own life was endangered by the student Lupin in werewolf form. But when the adult Lupin reneges on his own contract with Dumbledore, forgetting to take Wolfsbane, he endangers the entire campus and grounds. Snape can no longer endure being silent.

As Dumbledore said, Snape suffered a severe disappointment when Sirius escaped: he had hoped for some closure. If Dumbledore was able to speak to Snape after his flashback, acknowledging what his gag order had cost Snape and admitting his errors, that conversation might have functioned like a Time-Turner for Snape. He and Dumbledore would have been able to think back to the moment of Snape’s student trauma and acknowledge Snape’s innocence and suffering in the matter. This would have enabled Dumbledore to see why Snape would go to any lengths to protect other students from undergoing the same ordeal and led to Dumbledore lifting the confidentiality ban.

From Snape’s point of view, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is not the story of a kind teacher with a stigmatized disability and a wrongly incarcerated man set free by his courageous godson. It is the story of bullies who once got away with nearly getting Snape killed, the headmaster who refused to expel Sirius but cracked down on Snape by forbidding him to talk about his ordeal, the werewolf who returned as a teacher and once again posed a fatal danger to Hogwarts students, and the same headmaster, older but apparently no wiser, refusing even to listen to Snape’s concerns for student safety.

The Time-Turner magic that we learn in this volume will also turn out to be the overarching story of Snape’s second chance in life, going back to his own past to become somebody who is stronger and more protective than he knew he could be.

Harry learns that the power and relief from rescuing one’s own loved ones make it easier to decide to risk oneself to rescue others. This will be a major lesson for Snape, as well.

extremists at either end of the spectrum may have more in common with each other than they do with most of their ideological allies.

After Dumbledore enters, Harry sees that “Snape followed him, looking into the Foe-Glass, where his own face was still visible, glaring into the room.” (HP/GoF, 679) Perhaps Snape is checking for magical confirmation of what he knows to be true: his renunciation of Voldemort is genuine. He is so young and new to double agency, at this point, that he still looks for reassurance, for external mirroring of his internal reality, especially since he has so often been disbelieved. As he gets further into his mission, as more lives depend upon him, he will have to learn to avoid or fool magical mirrors so they don’t give him away. There will come a point when he learns to hide his true self so deeply that he won’t show up in mirrors at all.

One of Rowling’s most sophisticated points is that naïve teen political choices can have major, even lifelong repercussions on one’s romantic and family future. Snape has no romance in his life and never will, for three reasons. On his first chance, he destroyed his own prospects and faith in himself when he repelled the love of his life with his hateful politics, which eventually brought about her death. On his second chance, he will atone for this with undercover work that makes romance too risky. Thirdly, he would have had a difficult time attracting romance in any case because life is painfully—agonizingly—unfair to the homely.

Snape’s response switches rapidly between anger, defensiveness, and intimidation like a pubescent boy’s voice breaking. He knows he has nothing to hide, but the insinuation that Dumbledore might not trust him hurts. We see here how much Dumbledore’s trust means to Snape’s life.

Bizarrely, in this upside-down conversation between a helpful man who wants to hurt Harry and a hateful man who wants to protect Harry, Snape’s stammered explanation is the true one. He forgets himself, sometimes, because Harry enrages him so, but he really does want Harry to stay safe during this year when someone is clearly trying to kill him.

Sirius’s recollections introduce new information about Snape the student. He arrived knowing adult-level curses—defensive, angry, possibly power hungry, and smart, if not wise. He was notorious. He had friends, or at least a “gang”—he was not entirely unpopular, at least within his own House.

Snape’s surreptitious plan is working. He has drilled a simple spell into Harry that Harry has practiced and can perform under stress. It does not lead to escalation but an emotional connection between attacker and attacked. It humanizes the victim who would disarm the attacker rather than attack in return.

After a year of hiding his body’s secret, shameful changes, Snape bares his vivid Dark Mark to the Minister of Magic. His puberty is over; he is a young man with nothing to hide. The lack of shame changes him. Unlike every other glimpse we have had of the skin

under his robes, this time, the sight does not seem shell-less or ugly. Fudge is repelled by the “ugly mark” on his arm, not by Snape. The ugliness is not in Snape anymore; it is on his surface, evident in the Mark that shows the growing terror he’s been enduring all year in private and the terror that is coming to all of them soon, whether they deny it or not. The self that has grappled with this truth and prepared to accept the consequences is not ugly; it is brave.

This is the answer to Sirius’s question about why Dumbledore would hire someone who once worked for Voldemort. People can change, even if their spots cannot. Appearances and inner reality are not always the same. There are sometimes good reasons to present the self untruthfully, even if that can be a grueling ordeal, as Sirius well knows. And people who have undergone such transformations know things, can do things, that those innocent of such ordeals cannot.

Snape may be alone, but there are others who are thinking about what he’s doing, and by including these silences from two of the series’ most insightful characters, the author signals that the reader should, too.

What Harry knows is that Voldemort was shocked and fearful when his rebirth went awry. He had expected to kill Harry and ascend triumphantly back to power, not to be overpowered, for the first time, by the memories of his own crimes.

In this volume, Snape is gone from the school narrative for chapters at a time, busy with his spy work. In his absence, the reader sees Harry experience many of the emotions that we have seen in Snape.

When it comes to actual harm, just as Harry instantly saves Dudley from dementors, Snape goes immediately into protective mode, unlike Umbridge, who pushes Harry “in front of her like a shield” when endangered.

As a teacher, Snape finds Umbridge irrelevant. As an outsider bearing down on the strategy that he and Dumbledore have developed to fight Voldemort, however, he finds her presence nearly intolerable.

Surely even Snape-hating Gryffindors enjoyed the moment Snape turned to face Umbridge. Rowling carefully unites the sentiments of Slytherins, Gryffindors, and the reader behind Snape for this scene: even Umbridge can find no fault with Snape’s academic standards. His classroom manner has indisputably caused damage, but his students have put in the labor. One way or another, together, he and the students have created something unassailable by this intruder.

Either Snape is indeed vulnerable to the lures of the Dark Arts, so unstable that Dumbledore refuses to count his application, or this is a paper trail that he and Dumbledore have laid as part of a strategy. Snape’s supposed vulnerability to the lure of the Dark Arts is part of their cover story, but Snape has never found that lie easy to swallow, and he certainly cannot bear to choke it out in front of Umbridge and his avidly listening students. It was Dumbledore’s idea for Snape to include this ignoble rumor in his cover persona. Let him be the one to perform it for Umbridge.

Anything this Ministry might deem a threat is something the Boy Who Lived needs to know. This is a textbook example of Rowling loading Snape’s actions with exactly equal motives of protectiveness, sound strategy, and hostility toward Harry.

We will find, though, that Snape’s true motives can be discerned in this volume through a close reading of the private lessons in Occlumency that Dumbledore orders him to provide for Harry.

This scene is cringe-worthy and heartbreaking. Twelve years of wrongful imprisonment, followed by two and a half years as a fugitive, have kept Sirius in a state of arrested development. Snape has had the freedom denied Sirius, but when threatened by his least favorite bully from his past, he regresses to taunting Sirius about something that Gryffindors find intolerable: forced inactivity during crisis. Yet there is beauty in both men in this scene, too. Harry sees someone who cares about nothing in the world more than Harry’s happiness and is willing to fight for it. Snape gives Sirius a genuine warning.

This is the first time anyone seems able to give answers. Snape must remain measured so he adheres, word by word, to the guidelines set by both masters. If he engages with Harry, if he forgets himself, he could accidentally reveal something that gets them in trouble. Harry must not interrupt. Snape must remain in control of the interaction and for once, it’s not because he wants to wield power over Harry. The danger is what makes Snape angry here, not his dislike of Harry.

Blanket permission for Harry to use his wand against Snape. Acknowledgment of one of Harry’s strengths, in a manner that is useful for the lesson. This is what it looks like when Snape actually teaches Harry magic. It’s a private lesson tailored to him because he needs the protection, delivered as sincerely as Lupin’s Patronus tutoring.

Harry has been feeling isolated and frightened all year, ignored by Dumbledore as the Dursleys used to ignore him; many of these memories contain those emotions, and Harry cannot stop them. The clue comes when the thought of Cho enables Harry to resist. Unlike the other memories, it’s a positive one: it involves warmth and connection with someone who likes him. This kind of emotion can give Harry the strength to Occlude.