Snape: A Definitive Reading

by Lorrie Kim

It is no wonder that Snape is feeling the strain of being the only one who can help Draco, the only one who can fight some forms of Dark Magic, the only one who can retain Voldemort’s trust while taking his place at Dumbledore’s right hand. In some ways, it’s a bit similar to being the Chosen One, although Harry gets credit for his sacrifices and the blessing of a clean conscience. Snape’s job depends upon his guilty past and upon the secrecy that ensures his sacrifices will never be seen.

The words to Snape’s phoenix song might have gone something like this: I am sorry I did this, so long ago. I am sorry I brought it into the world for others to use without knowing how it would hurt you. I am sorry you were so hurt by this. You didn't deserve this. I stopped doing this a long time ago, but as long as I live, I will track down all the damage I caused. If I could suffer this in your place, I would. Take my remorse. Let it re-integrate your wounds. I will sing to you until it stops. I was supposed to protect you. I will always protect you. Thank goodness it is not too late. Few moments in the series are as starkly beautiful as the tableau of Snape singing shut Draco’s Sectumsempra wounds, performing magic that nobody else in the world could cast, suffusing the song with all his grief and regret that his long-ago evil is still doing harm in the world, still hurting this child who has spent all year trying to kill people and yet doesn’t deserve this because nobody deserves this. Draco has been pushing Snape away all year, descending deeper into horror, yet when he is in danger, Snape’s protective response is absolute: I came as soon as I could. You’ll be all right. I’ve got you. I’m here.

Draco cast Expelliarmus. He could have, should have, attacked, but he disarmed, instead, and then attacked no further. The effort Snape has poured into this boy for the past six years has been worth it. He will not split his soul by killing. Covertly, against the efforts of Lucius, Bellatrix, and Voldemort, Snape has taught Draco non-aggression. He has fulfilled two of his three vows to Narcissa: he has watched over Draco and protected him from harm.

The moment has arrived. Snape’s Time-Turner journey is complete. This is his second chance. He has been a double agent for years, working to protect Harry Potter. But if he kills Dumbledore—if he can kill his friend and mentor, the one living person who knows the full truth about the good self he’s been hiding under his spy façades—if he can bring himself to break his last remaining mirror, committing to live the rest of his dangerous life being thought a murderer and traitor—then he will be upholding his vow to protect Draco in addition to Harry Potter. He will be able to save more than one innocent life.

This is how Snape has always talked to Harry, teaching him non-aggression accompanied by insults and loathing. Snape has just cast an Unforgivable Curse and knows how bitterly it cost him. Harry wouldn’t be able to do it based on vengeance alone; it took Snape greater emotions than that to pull it off, and it ripped his soul apart. Everyone deserves, if at all possible, to remain too innocent to cast an Unforgivable.

Snape refuses to attack Harry. All he does is block, expending almost no effort. At this moment, Snape is fueled by grief for the friend he just killed and protectiveness toward Draco.

Many people read this line from Snape as rage at being called a coward: perhaps he was taunted as a coward by bullies too many times. Perhaps after making the brave choice to kill his dying friend and accept a life of being vilified, it’s unbearable to be taunted so wrongly. Perhaps this sentence is primarily about the mortal panic of feeling trapped in a world that’s going up in flames, as unable to articulate his pain as a beast (Justice). Certainly, Snape must be

feeling all of these torturous things. But the long pause within the sentence suggests another reading as well.

Harry did not say “James.” He said “Kill me like you killed him.” They were speaking of James, but “him” could also mean killing Dumbledore, the act that is tearing apart Snape’s soul, the act that turned him from being the traitor responsible for James and Lily’s deaths into an actual killer. Snape’s guilt over the deaths of Lily and James has distorted his perceptions of Harry every day for the past six years, and now, minutes after killing Dumbledore, Harry’s words slam him with a renewed realization of the enormity of that guilt. “DON’T—”

The self-trust in Snape’s former allies is one of the saddest casualties of Snape’s Killing Curse. After this, they question themselves. They had been so sure. They had built up affection and a history of successful collaboration. Of course they trusted Snape. He was meticulous about retaining their trust until the last possible moment

Researching only the patronymic line misses half the story. It’s not always about the name of the father. Unlike Muggle Britain, what we see of wizarding Britain in these seven books indicates that all wives take their husbands’ surnames (and all the marriages we see are between a woman and a man). The mother’s name can be obscured within a generation, as we see with Merope Gaunt, who named her son after her father and her husband, eliding her own identity as completely as she could. Yet the key to understanding Voldemort in this volume has been his mother’s story. The mother’s name and story are key to understanding Snape. The author is using loud silence to tell the reader that the missing story of Harry’s mother will turn out to be key, as well.

Snape’s “Flight of the Prince” is about the ascendancy of the protective magic he got from his mother. Starting from this chapter, that’s the aspect of Snape that will remain dominant for the rest of his life.

Rowling’s combination of the name “Severus,” with its implications of severity and severing, with “Snape,” which sounds like snipe or snip, creates a brilliantly unpleasant picture of a character who will be ferocious and shrewd about snipping the thread of another prince’s lifespan.

No longer does the story show Snape as an ugly man. The usual gratuitous descriptors of his ugliness—the mentions of the hooked nose and the greasy hair during standard exposition—are now gone from the narrative. Rowling writes him with stark realism when he is being brave: when he pulls up his sleeve to show his Dark Mark, when he sings shut Draco’s wounds, when his eyes sweep the scene and he kills his mentor. He is heroic then, harshly beautiful as he does magic that no one else can do.

Unbeknownst to Harry, Dumbledore also bequeaths him a final message that he entrusts to Snape with instructions to deliver the message only when Harry is close to defeating Voldemort. Snape must stay alive long enough to deliver the message then and no sooner. He must remain tightly Occluded until he meets with Harry. Then he, too, can open at the close. There are other mysteries in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but the revelation of Snape’s motives is the key to them all. After a buildup of a million words, Rowling finally shows us Snape as he truly is, the full story of how he became the right-hand man of two opposing generals and what was in his heart the entire time.

At the heart of the book is the silver doe. Rowling uses imagery from the Arthurian tradition, the white hind that signals adventure in the forest, to lead Harry to the sword in the lake that goes only

to the worthy. We have been wondering what Snape’s Patronus is. When it appears, at the book’s midpoint, it is the light that Harry has needed. Voldemort cannot touch this. It provides the guidance that Dumbledore doesn’t. There is comfort in this light, which takes the image of Lily Potter, the mate to James Potter’s silver stag. Snape and Harry have been strengthened by love from the same person. The silver doe tells us: follow the mother’s story.

Now that Snape is separated from Harry, he is no longer ugly. His face is described as “thin” in this book, rather than hook-nosed and sneering. (HP/DH, 597) It is partly that we are not seeing him through Harry’s eyes and partly that he no longer has the irritation of Harry’s presence in his classroom to provoke him to ugly behavior. But mostly, Snape is no longer ugly because he is doing the kind of life-or-death work that transforms his appearance from ugly to stark. No one but the Dark Lord has power over him. Everyone else sees the authority and forbidding intelligence that emanates from him throughout this sleepless year.

The Carrows punish protesters with torture. The best Snape can do about it is divert detentions Hagrid rather than the Carrows, at least until Hagrid gets caught throwing a “Support Harry Potter” party. Hagrid manages to flee Hogwarts, suggesting that Snape may have obstructed attempts to take him into custody. (HP/DH, 442) For Snape, with his hypersensitive protective reactions, standing by while adults torture children requires the utmost in self-control. But he can’t betray his true sentiments or he will be killed and replaced by someone worse.

If Snape ever feels tempted to protest to these good people that their old faith in him was not misplaced, he can remember what happened when Dumbledore succumbed to the flaw in the plan, the affection that makes it difficult to be ruthless. Dumbledore flinched at telling Harry the truth and Sirius died for it. Snape cannot permit such a lapse when so much is at stake.

Harry and Ron are too convinced of Snape’s evil to figure out whose Patronus helped them in the forest. The reader, however, knows that Snape can cast a Patronus, which we have never seen, and that Rowling has repeatedly underscored the importance of the mother’s story while revealing almost nothing about Lily’s friendships. Snape must have been careful to avoid letting Hermione see the silver doe. She was the last to lose faith in him, and he has never been able to evade her understanding for long.

ring. Like other powerful objects, such as the Sorcerer’s Stone, the Deathly Hallows are subject to one of Rowling’s cardinal rules: they belong to those who seek them not for gain, but to protect others. At different points in his life, Snape is each of the brothers in the tale. In youth, he was combative. After Lily died, he wanted to join her in death. But for his second chance in life, he has been keeping his true self hidden, not for personal gain but in order to protect others. According to Dumbledore, that is the essence of the Cloak of Invisibility, “the true magic of which, of course, is that it can be used to protect and shield others as well as its owner.” (HP/DH, 716)

scene, Rowling shows only how Snape appears to Voldemort. But by pointing us toward Machiavelli once again with the name “Charity,” she tells us that Snape, a “new prince,” is acting against his own beliefs.

The same thing is happening to Draco under Voldemort’s tyranny. He is being forced to cast the Cruciatus Curse against fellow Death Eaters under threat of punishment if he disobeys. Harry sees Draco’s “gaunt, petrified face” and feels “sickened by what he had seen, by the use to which Draco was now being put by Voldemort,” understanding that Draco is obeying against his will in order to protect himself and the rest of his family.

Recognizing Stan made the difference for Harry: I know you. I know the real you. I refuse to attack you. You do not deserve to die like this. Sparing the life of your attacker because you know them is a powerful magic with potent, unpredictable results. Lupin is completely opposed, but Snape’s teachings, plus years of his own battle experience, leave Harry in no doubt that this is his magic of choice.

The recognition of human worth in an opponent creates magic

Killing Curse, lingering and unpredictable. Dumbledore and Draco raised this magic together in their face-off at the tower. Draco disarmed Dumbledore rather than attacking, and once Dumbledore was wandless, cast no further spells against him. Dumbledore neither counterattacked nor defended himself, taking that time, unbeknownst to Draco, to freeze Harry in place. Draco learned that Dumbledore thought him and his family worth protecting—worth dying for. That magic joined with Snape’s grief and healing magic after Draco’s Sectumsempra wounds to create a young Death Eater who felt too much connection to others to be a killer. Draco had overpowered the greatest wizard of the age using Expelliarmus, the defensive spell that Snape taught Draco and Harry to use against each other so they could hate without harm. The Elder Wand recognized this magic in Draco as akin to Dumbledore’s in strength and willingly changed allegiance.

Draco’s wand turns out to work well for Harry, “at least as well as Hermione’s had done.” (HP/DH, 520) The wand recognizes Harry’s and Draco’s magic as equivalent. This wand has cast Expelliarmus at a wizard of great power and then been taken in a disarming move by a wizard whose signature magic is Expelliarmus. It is an easy transfer of wand allegiance from Draco to Harry, prompted in large part by a recognition of interchangeability.

Dumbledore wanted the Elder Wand to recognize the mercy and regret in Snape’s Killing Curse and transfer allegiance to Snape, quietly. He knew he could trust Snape to be a good custodian of the Elder Wand, since Snape’s signature magic is purely defensive: when he has to force himself to attack or use Dark Magic, it’s only in order to protect others, then immediately dropped.

Dumbledore expected Voldemort might violate his tomb and take the wand. He had hoped that any spell Voldemort cast against Snape with it would fail because the Elder Wand would not kill its master, especially if its master counteracted with purely defensive magic, as Harry did and Snape surely would have.

Dumbledore also knew he could trust Snape to be the rightful owner of the Elder Wand because with all powerful magical objects, Snape handles them without greed, not for personal gain but to protect others. In his third year, Harry saw that his Invisibility Cloak, one of the Deathly Hallows, worked perfectly for Snape because Snape was using it in the belief that he would protect children from murderers. Dumbledore, in contrast, says he once borrowed the Cloak from Harry’s father “out of vain curiosity, and so it could never have worked for me as it works for you, its true owner.” (...

“perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it.”

Dumbledore had never been able to turn either Tom Riddle or Snape away from Dark Magic when they were students, but he lived long enough to see that Snape’s teaching reached Draco.

Voldemort cannot kill Harry with any wand because in order for the Killing Curse to work, the caster has to mean it, and Voldemort doesn’t realize that he identifies with Harry too much, sees too much of Harry’s humanity, to kill him the same way he has killed others. But just in case, Harry—and the author—derive some support from the connection that the hawthorn wand and the Elder Wand now have. The Elder Wand has submitted to disarmament from the hawthorn wand once before. Harry is conscious of drawing on that parallel history as he casts his signature magic using Draco’s wand (emphasis mine).

Using nothing but a teenager’s wand and Expelliarmus, Draco and Harry brought down the most powerful wizards of their age and survived. Both of them had cast the Cruciatus and Imperius curses, sometimes of their own volition and sometimes to protect others. But as he vowed to Narcissa and, posthumously, Lily, Snape’s efforts ensured that both Draco and Harry turned away from killing and kept their souls intact.

Dealing with Phineas Nigellus Black is rather like having Snape around. He is snide, waspish, and quick to take offense. But as the portrait of Armando Dippet says, portraits of former headmasters are “honor-bound to give service to the present headmaster of Hogwarts.” (HP/OotP, 473) After the first time Hermione blindfolds him, he declares he will never return, but that decision is not his to make. Through this connection, Snape learns that Harry, Ron, and Hermione are alive. In return, they learn that Dumbledore used the sword of Gryffindor to kill a Horcrux, that Dumbledore’s Army is still active, that Snape sends them to Hagrid for detentions, and that Ginny has been banned from Hogsmeade visits. Anytime Phineas Nigellus asks for hints about their location, Hermione puts the painting away, but Snape manages to get them some information and assurance that Ginny is safe.

When it’s finally safe for him to give in to the visions of Voldemort’s surroundings, he sees the same light that he saw at the beginning of his sixth year, coming late to school after being attacked on the Hogwarts Express: “Voldemort was at the gates of Hogwarts; Harry could see him standing there, and see too the lamp bobbing in the pre-dawn, coming closer and closer.” (HP/DH, 499) Snape is coming to let Voldemort in. After nearly 500 pages of absence, he reenters the story. Now that Harry has learned Occlumency, now that Voldemort fears contact with Harry’s mind and isn’t aware that Harry can see his thoughts, it is safe for Snape and Harry to connect again. Snape cannot be certain that Harry has mastered Occlumency, but he knows that Voldemort will never again read Harry’s thoughts, and he knows what it looks like in Harry’s mind when Harry reads Voldemort’s thoughts. He must suspect that when Voldemort looks at him, Harry might see him, too. The light coming closer and closer is to welcome in Harry as well as Voldemort. Harry and Snape have closed in on Voldemort from either side. From this moment, Voldemort is doomed.

By the time of the Final Battle, Harry discovers two more ways to handle dementors, and we see evidence that Snape probably used these tactics to seal his own mind against them. The Resurrection Stone gives Harry one way. The almost solid forms of Lily, James, Sirius, and Lupin keep him company on his walk toward death. These are the parents and family friends whose care instilled love in him so that he could have the kind of joy in life that can produce a Patronus. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have such riches. Not everyone is unfortunate enough to lose many of their loved ones so early. These intense memories of beloved caretakers are the sort of emotion that Patronuses are made of. Just thinking about them is protection enough.

The final book shows us that Snape was once ready to die to ease his own pain, but he accepted the offer of a second chance in order to protect someone else, difficult as that was guaranteed to be. When he does accept death, again, it is not for personal gain but to protect others. These convictions mean that Snape always knows why he is alive and what is important to him. The emotional connections necessary for a Patronus are not only available to those who remember receiving love. Those who choose to live to protect others create in themselves the same defensive strength.

No matter what strife there has been between Harry and Snape, they have loved and been loved by the same person. They both contain traces of Lily’s magic.

the image of the silver doe points us toward a variant of the trope of courtly love.

Snape’s Patronus shows that he holds in his heart an image of a woman whose friendship and love helped form the best part of his nature. During this year when nobody knows Snape’s true self, Snape cannot depend upon external recognition of his nearly superhuman efforts. He can turn to his memories of Lily’s friendship as a guide: he can atone for his betrayal that resulted in her death by becoming, in the second part of his life, someone who would be able to meet the gaze of a person like Lily without shame.

Snape would have known, through Phineas Nigellus Black’s reports, that Ron was no longer with Harry and Hermione. He would also have seen Ron searching for Harry and Hermione in the forest earlier that day. The silver doe led Ron to Harry as well as leading Harry to the sword.

The story that Harry and McGonagall believe to be Snape’s cannot contain Snape anymore. There is no exit possible for Snape that would allow him to take peaceable leave of his former colleagues and survive to deliver the message to Harry. Over seven volumes

and a million words, Rowling has carefully balanced a portrait of an almost unknowable man whose every action could be interpreted as protective or wicked. He has played both sides expertly for so long. Does he even have an authentic self anymore? Or is the person known as Severus Snape just an absence, an outline into which others project their assumptions of who he is?

Why does Harry approach him? To Snape’s dying breath, Harry hates him. But he approaches because in Snape’s final moments, alone with a genocidal madman, the only thing he asked for, three times, was permission to look for Harry. He didn’t ask for his life, only Harry. Dumbledore once told Harry that “help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.” (HP/CoS, 264) Harry heard Snape’s dying wish and granted it.

Readers often wonder: What would have happened if Harry hadn’t appeared just before Snape died? Was it only coincidence that Snape was able to deliver the final message? Or did Snape make the choice to grasp the front of Harry’s robes rather than save himself (Justice, 232-8)? Snape was “trying to staunch the bloody wound at his neck” until Harry appeared; he was trying to live long enough to find Harry.

Hermione has always been ready to be the vessel that receives Snape’s thoughts. She knows precisely what Snape needs; the flask she conjures is even the perfect size.

Look at me. With those words, Rowling completes the incantation for the stupendous magic she has cast over seven books with her creation of Severus Snape. Everything about Snape is contained in those three words. The spy who longed for nothing more than to be seen. The double agent who killed the mentor who was the last person to see his true self. The ugly boy who grew up into a man so ugly that students couldn’t look upon him without revulsion. The master of Occlumency who was sealed shut so tightly, his eyes looked dead. The Master of Death who didn’t need a cloak to be invisible, completing his second chance at life, removing his disguise and meeting Death as a friend.

Through the shared gaze, Snape transmits to Harry his memories of Lily’s love, Harry’s birthright. Like the Snitch that contains the Resurrection Stone, Snape opens at the close, memories pouring out of him.