Snape: A Definitive Reading

by Lorrie Kim

The Occlumency lessons are the only times in the entire series that Snape praises Harry. He must be really impressed.

That’s more thought than Snape has ever given to the real Harry Potter. He asks about the dog, perhaps because he identifies with that feeling of being tortured, perhaps because he’s thinking about Harry’s relatives. Harry is real to him here. He can acknowledge that Harry’s first attempt was not bad, even if Harry did let him in too far.

Snape’s fears are confirmed. Harry’s scar is visibly hurting him; Voldemort is definitely aware of Harry in the present moment. Harry saying Voldemort’s name makes Voldemort’s Legilimency stronger: Harry’s mental image of Voldemort grows more focused when he says the name rather than a euphemism, opening his mind

more to Voldemort’s intrusions. Through Harry’s eyes, it’s possible that Voldemort can see and hear everything Snape does. Snape must shut down the emotional urgency he was feeling earlier and say the cold things that Voldemort would expect to hear him say to Harry Potter, whom he has claimed to despise.

Snape is—all of them are—stretched thin past the breaking point this year and if Harry is starved to talk to someone about what he’s enduring, it makes sense that Snape must be, too.

Snape’s defenses are down. It felt too good to be seen. Like Harry being too curious to shut out Voldemort’s thoughts, Snape is not trying hard enough to hide his true self from someone with whom he feels kinship. Snape’s memories feel different from Harry’s. The first scene suggests spousal abuse or domestic violence; the third has a distinctly sexual quality to the humiliation. But the second could have come straight from Harry’s most recent summer

As ever, when Snape feels fear for a student, it manifests as anger.

The Inquisitorial Squad is one of Snape’s worst nightmares come true. His students are being ordered to emphasize the most destructive elements of their natures and suppress their more humane traits. This harms them and also singles them out for their peers to target.

danger. The Inquisitorial Squad may be hand-picked by Umbridge, but as individuals, they are just as expendable to her as the other students. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix provides young readers with extraordinarily precise insight into the thinking of tyrants.

But in addition, in Dumbledore’s absence, Snape has assumed unofficial duties as deputy headmaster, supporting McGonagall in doing what they can to protect everyone covertly from Umbridge’s rule. Running toward Trelawney’s screams, tending to Montague, training Harry to shut out Voldemort: these all come from the same urge within Snape to defend against the Dark Arts. He goes where he is needed.

Lily blinked: she was surprised to hear Snape call her a “filthy little Mudblood.” She hadn’t been expecting it. Snape could not endure being told that he owed his relief to Lily’s willingness to put herself on the line for him. We don’t see in this memory how well they know each other, but her surprise shows that it’s something that hasn’t happened before. The betrayal causes enough of a change in her attitude that she calls him by the same name that the bullies do and makes her own sexually humiliating observation.

Rowling gives us a clue in the chapter title: “Snape’s Worst Memory.” We don’t see the whole memory, but for her to give it that title, we can assume that we have seen most or all of what we need to know. Snape is not the one who labels the memory this way; the chapter title is a message from author to reader. The bullying is bad, but Snape has been through worse: these same people almost killed him. The sexual humiliation is bad, but that’s not it, either, or the scene would not have cut off before the attempt to remove Snape’s pants. Rowling is showing that it was Snape’s own response to Lily that makes this his worst memory.

Snape certainly hates the memory of James Potter and dislikes seeing Harry’s face, but for him to be able to say right away, “Amusing man, your father, wasn’t he?” shows that he expects Harry to see his point about James. He knows he is right in this assumption; Harry and Snape have seen repeatedly that they can empathize with each other’s experiences of being bullied. It

Snape knows Harry saw the scene through his mother’s eyes, feeling empathy for the bullied Snape and then shock at the racial slur. If Snape faces Harry, it is like looking into Lily’s eyes while feeling the full force of his shame and regret—yet not having Lily there to receive his abject apology, only the face of his enemy, James Potter. Shame can be unbearable. Snape did what he could to bear it and teach Harry anyway, and Harry’s intrusion destroyed that protection.

We don’t know yet that Lily knew and loved Snape before his eyes turned dark and cold and Occluded. Lily saw his true self; she knew how to read the person who became this inscrutable man.

Snape can Occlude Voldemort as perhaps no other person can. This enables him to spy on Voldemort for the Order. When Voldemort scans Snape’s thoughts, he cannot see that Snape is working against him because Snape is able to defend certain thoughts from Voldemort’s view. But if Voldemort looks at Snape through Harry’s eyes, he will be able to see those things. Snape let Harry see past his defenses. By viewing one of Snape’s off-limits memories, Harry has just endangered them all and exposed Snape to mortal risk.

Harry knows too much now about how Snape feels, and how ashamed Lupin has felt for being inactive in the face of harm, to ignore the implications of these thoughts. He’s learning that he cannot justify keeping quiet about harm, even when the victims themselves have hurt others.

“Snape, meanwhile, seemed to have decided to act as though Harry were invisible.” (HP/OotP, 660) He avoids eye contact with Harry, in case Voldemort is watching Snape through the scar connection, and behaves spitefully so Voldemort will feel the mutual antipathy between Snape and Harry. This is the easiest thing in the world for Snape to pull off and affords him some nasty enjoyment, but Snape is behaving this way to protect them all. He may enjoy aggravating Harry, but it cannot be argued that these moments of “gloating pleasure” (HP/OotP, 661) interfere with the strategy in any way.

This is a change from the argument about Occlumency lessons when Sirius refused to believe that Snape had reformed. We don’t know whether Sirius has understood Snape better or whether being a parent figure for Harry has matured his thinking, but we see that Lupin notices the change.

Harry gets a painful reminder of his mother’s defense of Snape’s innocence when he witnesses Ministry officials coming stealthily at nighttime, on Umbridge’s order, to remove Hagrid from Hogwarts. Professor McGonagall runs out to intervene, using the same argument and nearly the same words that Lily used.

Umbridge catches Harry using her Floo to check for Sirius at

Grimmauld Place. It is not until she calls for Professor Snape to help her that Harry remembers there is one member of the Order of the Phoenix still at Hogwarts, one whom Umbridge has not thought to remove because, after investigating his background, she believes him to be a Death Eater.

Now that it’s an emergency, Snape and Harry snap immediately into Legilimency. They know how to do this. For good measure, Snape protects their communication against detection by either Umbridge or Voldemort by presenting an outward show of dislike for Harry while, incidentally, warning everyone else that Umbridge is capable of poisoning students.

So that’s what it takes to get Snape on probation. Not bullying Neville, not favoritism, but refusing to fight Harry Potter. Umbridge expected him to comply; unsurprisingly, Lucius Malfoy seems to have been bribing Umbridge, encouraging her to purge Harry’s allies from the staff, expecting fellow Death Eater Snape to cooperate from the inside.

Regardless of personal feelings, a protector like Snape will go into immediate intervention mode when a vulnerable person is endangered.

the protectiveness supersedes any personal conflict.

As painful as it is to be seen falsely, such concerns recede compared to the emotion of wishing to protect someone—or grieving the failure to protect them.

That’s how Snape stands being thought evil when he is actually risking more than almost anyone as a double agent against Voldemort. The longer he can remain hidden, the more he can protect not only Harry but his own Slytherins, boys as needy as he was at their age. The Inquisitorial Squad showed him how easy it would be for others to turn them toward evil. He will do what he must to stay close and protect them.

Above all, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is about the missing story of the mother. Tom Marvolo Riddle was named after his father and maternal grandfather, but we learn his mother Merope’s story to understand why Voldemort chose Harry to mark as his equal. Severus Snape bears the surname of his Muggle father, but in his magical textbook, he names himself after his witch mother, Eileen Prince. Harry hears about his father’s friends and about his mother herself, but on the topic of Harry’s mother’s friends, everyone is conspicuously silent.

If Harry is overwhelmed by hostility toward Dean Thomas merely for dating Ginny, it is no wonder that Voldemort nearly died of jealousy at the sight of a baby with a loving mother.

Snape and Dumbledore know Draco’s new standing with the Death Eaters. Dumbledore remembers that he failed to connect with student Tom Riddle and prioritized others over connecting with Snape. Slughorn failed to see the danger in Tom and didn’t find Snape worth cultivating. Snape, Dumbledore, and McGonagall work together to do better for Draco. They have to isolate him: Voldemort finds it too painful to share Harry’s thoughts anymore, but he performs Legilimency regularly on Draco, so they cannot jeopardize Draco by letting him know the Order wants to protect him.

Even though Snape knows his exoneration will last less than a year, he cannot help but show defiant pleasure at finally being acknowledged Dumbledore’s right-hand man. Moving him into this position is a clever move on the characters’ parts and also on the author’s. It telegraphs that Dumbledore and Snape expect something major to change for Snape by the end of the year, putting the reader in increasing suspense. It reimburses Snape for years of accepting an unflattering reputation that is the opposite of his true self. It removes the need for Snape to be covert about teaching Defense during this frightening year. It broadcasts to Death Eaters that Dumbledore foolishly trusts the man they believe to be on their side. It suggests that Snape is less than impressive, just a petty man of limited vision whose “heart’s desire” is nothing grander than a lateral move at his place of employment.

Lupin, too, is a spy for Dumbledore, and knows firsthand how Dumbledore uses rumors to provide cover. He speaks from an informed position when he suggests to Harry, “It might have been on Dumbledore’s orders that Severus questioned Draco.”

With close calls, as long as nobody dies, the attacker can walk away, free to resolve that they will not repeat the mistake. But sometimes attacks don’t end well and there is no walking away from the aftermath. Harry was immediately aghast at the effects of Sectumsempra, showing that guilt from causing damage or death can be enormous, even if the attacker didn’t know what they were doing.

Snape and Dumbledore both know that some forms of damage cause suffering that never ends. They would give their lives to protect their students from this pain.

The loathing tells us the narrative purpose of Wormtail’s inclusion in this scene. It is a replay of a pivotal moment in Snape’s past, something he must and can change on his second chance. Snape and Wormtail were the two people who betrayed the Potters to Voldemort. Now they are faced with a similar situation. A woman is frantic to protect her son from Voldemort. Her older sister has her own twisted ideas about what should become of this son. Snape can choose to protect the child this time. Wormtail feels no regret and neither wants nor gets a second chance. He is banished from the room.

Narcissa’s appeals to his bonds of sentiment have struck home. As a teacher and a family friend, he can protect this child. He can do better than he did for Lily Potter’s child.

Snape must buy time by convincing Narcissa to let him wait before killing Dumbledore for Draco. He must negotiate the most time possible for Dumbledore to stay alive and finish planning while putting Narcissa’s mind at ease and protecting Draco from harm.

Slithering out of action. Bellatrix has noticed that Snape has never done anything irrevocably evil to demonstrate his commitment to Voldemort’s cause. This hints strongly that Snape has never cast an Unforgivable: an Imperius, a Cruciatus, a Killing Curse.

Snape can look directly into the eyes of an anguished mother and show her his sympathy. He need Occlude nothing. It jeopardizes none of his plans if he adds protection of her near-grown child to the general protectiveness that he already provides to his Slytherin students and even to Potter. He has already dedicated himself to defending them against the Dark Arts.

He accepts personal responsibility for an endangered young one. That is more than what a teacher would do. This is a vow that will change him.

He commits to taking action to protect Draco whenever Draco needs it. This will rewire his consciousness so that he is always aware of Draco, always primed to rush to his aid. This means he will never be truly at rest as long as both Draco and Dumbledore are alive. This will change him, day and night. This round-the-clock commitment to action makes him Draco's family.

The twitch of the hand could mean anything. It could mean that Snape doesn't want to kill Dumbledore. That he flinches at the depth of commitment. That the thought of watching Draco attack Dumbledore and stepping in at the precise moment of failure overwhelms him with tension. But he chooses to leave his hand in Narcissa's. He will never again be the uncertain man who flinched under the gaze of Aurors or Death Eaters. He agrees to kill for Draco, or give his life, or take Draco's place, the way Lily did for Harry.

What Narcissa has done for him with the Unbreakable Vow is beyond measure. Until this vow, Snape has never been the most important person to anyone in his adult life. But now someone's entire happiness depends upon his survival and success. In the moments when his courage fails him at the thought of killing Dumbledore, it will help to remember that he must stay strong for Narcissa. It strengthens him. He is no longer alone.

Now, he can protect a child he likes for the sake of a father who respects him and a mother who knows the enormity of what she's asking him. The gratification he generates from protecting Draco will give him more momentum to extend the same protection to Harry. Thanks

Undo. That is a clue to Snape’s approach to the Dark Arts. Those who know how damage was done, plus have the extra push that comes of wanting to combat evil instead of being tempted by it, can reverse Dark Magic.

In the few months before he makes most of them hate him, Snape is trying to teach the students how to stay powerful when they are voiceless or silenced.

Readers are divided on whether Snape arranged to have his old Potions book fall into Harry’s hands or whether it was coincidence. Snape’s use of Legilimency here suggests coincidence: that he did not know Harry had the book, but now he suspects.

Perhaps it will eventually sink in for Draco that a teacher thinks he matters enough to be worth dying for. It’s the highest form of life debt: I would die for you and your loved ones.

This is what makes him the staff expert on Dark Magic. He knows how it feels to cast it, to mean it, to want to cause harm, and then to wish with all his being that he could undo the damage, to wish he could give his life if it would turn back time so he could change the past. Only someone who has felt both what it takes to cast Dark Magic