OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Mahoney wrote:

On another subject, has anyone speculated that as for Black having suspected Lupin as being the spy, there might have been some reason related to, I dunno, Lupin's personality that suggested it? I.e., something other than, say, general distrust of werewolves?

::raises hand::

I have.

'They call it the Dementor's Kiss,' said Lupin, with a slightly twisted smile.

Ooooh, yes. There's definitely a dark streak to Lupin's character. He's got Edge, which is one of the reasons that I like him so much. (Without his Edge, he'd be a bit sappy, if you ask me. Far too nice. Too...well, too ewww to be trewww, shall we say.) I don't think that Lupin's werewolf status was the only reason that he was suspected at all. Not by a long shot.

But then, I think that it may be hard to separate Lupin's dark side from his lycanthropy when we talk about the reasons his friends may have had for coming to suspect him—or for that matter, even when we talk about our own feelings about him. That notion of "the wolf is always there, even when you can't see it" is far too central to even our own werewolf mythos, let alone that of the Potterverse.

Mahoney:

I Was thinking...the 'Jekyll & Hyde' type is one way of looking at Lupin; but what if he's less split down the middle? What if he's actually a bit...wolfy? He acts mild-mannered and nice, because he is generally mild-mannered and nice; but even the mild-mannered nice people can have dark emotions and urges.

Yes. I think that if we didn't know that Lupin were a werewolf that Edge of his would still be an evident aspect of his character, but the fact that we do know—as did the Marauders—makes it all that much harder to ignore.

Still Mahoney:

And if he had a bit of a wicked streak, which he only let his close friends see, it would make more sense for Black to think that Lupin was the type to maybe be amenable to Voldemort's ways and thus become a spy.

Well, I think that we get to see quite a few signs of Lupin's "wicked streak" in PoA, and that they do make it easier to imagine how Black could have come to suspect nice, mild-mannered, intellectual Remus as the spy in their midst. After all, we suspected him, didn't we? ;-)

Leaving aside the question of his capabilities (Lupin is certainly both clever enough and sufficiently emotionally-controlled to have been an effective spy), and of his social vulnerability (aside from the lycanthropy itself, the fact that Lupin's condition renders him effectively chronically-ill and terminally-nemployed would have made him far more vulnerable than any of the others to temptation by offers of financial security or enhanced social standing), and focusing instead purely on questions of character, I see a number of things which might have made him seem suspect.

For starters, he's apparently chosen to specialize in the Dark Arts... errrr...Defense Against Dark Arts, that is). It's not clear whether he was drawn to this field because of being a werewolf or in spite of it, but either way it's a little suspicious, and would surely have seemed far more so during the days of Voldemort's reign.

Then there's his sense of humor. It's dry, but it can also be a little bit black:

Professor Lupin had come back. He paused as he entered, looked around, and said, with a small smile, 'I haven't poisoned that chocolate, you know...'

Of course he's joking, and the humor there is primarily self-deprecating: Lupin knows full well that to the students he must appear somewhat disreputable. It's a joke designed to release tension and put the kids more at ease with him, and it works beautifully. But it is a little dark.

His demeanor when practicing magic is casual in a way that could be read as indicative of darkness as well. On more than one occasion in PoA, JKR uses the word "lazy" or "lazily" to refer to aspects of Lupin's wand work. This speaks to his competence, of course, but it's also a trifle unsettling, because "lazily" is a loaded word in the Potter books. It's how Snape speaks when he is being deliberately cruel; it's the adverb consistently applied to the Malfoy drawl. And in GoF, Voldemort gets an awful lot of "lazily" as well. "Lazily" is how the Potterverse's sadistic characters behave. In JKR's idiom, it's really not a neutral word at all.

Then there's also Lupin's tendency to speak of dark matters in a cool, light, or even breezy fashion. The angrier or more upset he is—or the more potentially emotionally upsetting the subject under discussion—the lighter and milder his tone becomes. We see that whenever he has to deal with Snape's unpleasantness, we see it in Shrieking Shack when he responds to Hermione's outing him as a werewolf, and we see a lot of it whenever he talks to Harry about the dementors.

When Harry asks him why the dementors came to the Quiddich match, for example:

'They're getting hungry,' said Lupin coolly, shutting his briefcase with a snap.

That "coolly" sort of chills the blood, doesn't it? And he gets even worse when he tells Harry about the Dementor's Kiss. There's the "slightly twisted smile," of course, but even beyond that, Lupin's entire tone as he describes the Kiss is light, casual, breezy; it's very nearly bemused.

There is, of course, nothing in the least bit "wicked" about using this technique to disconnect from upsetting matters; it's a form of emotional self-protection. But it's a habit that is horribly prone to being misinterpreted by others. It can all too easily be misread as callousness or inhumanity, or even as cruelty.

(I've had a lot of personal experience with this one, as I share Lupin's tendency to take on a facetious tone when angry or upset, or when discussing distressing subjects. There have been many times when I've discovered—much to my dismay—that somebody I'd thought I was getting along with quite well had actually come away from a conversation absolutely convinced that I must be a truly horrible and cruel and uncaring person. It's always a bit of a shocker, when that happens.)

Of course, you'd think that Sirius and the Potters would have known Lupin well enough not to be dismayed by that sort of thing, but...you never know. Horrible things were happening. I can easily imagine how Lupin's breezy and off-hand manner when discussing, say, somebody that the group actually knew having been tortured or murdered might have given even his friends pause, particularly if they were already becoming suspicious of him for other reasons.

Even Lupin's compassion could, viewed in a certain light, make him seem a little suspicious, because it's a compassion born of sensitivity and insight, of the ability to "read" others, to deduce other people's personal vulnerabilities and motives. Lupin's very good at that; it's what makes him a good teacher. But that form of sensitivity can also be a rather unnerving trait, particularly in a paranoid situation, one in which there are secrets that must be kept hidden. On a certain level, an emotionally astute individual is a spy—he knows your secrets...or at least he makes you feel as if he does—and I don't think that it did much for the others' sense of security around Lupin. I think that his very sensitivity probably made him seem suspect.

When we're talking about Darkness, also, I think that Lupin's sensitivity to others is one of his most suspect character traits because while wisely used that sort of sensitivity can lead to compassion, used with ill-intent it turns to sadism. If you can tell where somebody's vulnerabilities lie, then you may know how to help them, but you also really know how to hurt them. And while Lupin rarely uses his sensitivity cruelly, he certainly does know how to do it. His rebuke to Harry at the end of Chapter 14—"Your parents gave their lives to keep you alive..."—is devestatingly effective. It's also slightly...

Well, intent is everything here. Lupin truly believes that murderous Black is trying to hunt Harry down, and the kid really isn't taking the threat as seriously as he ought to be. But if Lupin's comment hadn't been delivered with such undeniably good intent, if the context had been different, then one might even be tempted to call it "vicious." Lupin really does know how to target the jugular, and there are times when I get the definite sense that he's got a bit of a taste for it as well. He's not a sadist...but he could be, and if he ever did go bad, I think that's exactly how he'd do it. It does come across as a "dark streak" to his personality, IMO, and I can easily imagine how that aspect of his character could have made him seem highly suspect.

Of course, where I think that Lupin's capacity for sadism comes across the most clearly is in Shrieking Shack. Others, I know, have disagreed with my reading of Lupin's lines there—we had a thread on this a little while back, and it reached an impasse pretty quickly—but I still maintain that in Shrieking Shack, Lupin's anger has pushed him to the brink of sadism.

Everyone gets bestial at the end of PoA, of course—that's the entire point—but Lupin's particular mode of beast-ness does, IMO, come across as considerably more "Dark" than either Sirius or Pettigrew's respective forms of beastliness.

So...um, yeah. I do think that there are a lot of things about Lupin's character other than his lycanthropy that might have tempted Black and the Potters to suspect him as the spy. There's a streak of Darkness there, to be sure.

Good thing, too, 'cause otherwise he wouldn't be nearly so interesting. Or nearly so sexy.

—Elkins, to whom never even occurred that others might find anyone but Lupin the sexpot character of the older generation, and who was shocked—just shocked!—to learn otherwise. ("'Sirius Is Dead Sexy?'" she read to herself, and then blinked in confusion. "Sirius?" she repeated blankly. 'Sirius? Is that...that's a joke, right?" Then she remembered the flying motorcycle, and nodded to herself. 'Ah,' she thought. 'Okay. I guess some people do like that sort of thing.')

(We won't even get into her response when she discovered the Snape-Is-Sexy people.)