Hello. Newbie here, bleary and dry-eyed and trembling from weeks of staring at the computer screen reading old posts, and now finally ready to de-lurk with a few comments on Snape, the DEs, and the Longbottoms.
Proposing that Snape's shoddy treatment of Neville might be partially motivated by some old grudge against the Longbottoms, Dicentra spectabilis wrote:
The Longbottoms were powerful enemies of the Death Eaters, undoubtedly when Snape was one of them. Why would Snape hold a grudge against someone who was fighting for a cause he eventually embraced?
Well, why on earth wouldn't he? Embracing a cause is one thing. Embracing the individuals responsible for hunting down and killing your old friends, colleagues, and classmates is quite another. Just because Snape chose to betray the Death Eaters doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't retain a good deal of personal affection for them, and as Judyserenity pointed out, Snape's old classmates do seem to have had a poor track record with the Aurors.
In the Pensieve chapter of GoF it is strongly implied that Evan Rosier met his death at Moody's hands--and according to Sirius, Moody was exceptional for the extent to which he tried to avoid killing. So God only knows how many of Snape's old colleagues Frank Longbottom might have offed. For all we know, he could have been the one who killed Wilkes.
While we're on the subject of Snape's old Slytherin gang, I've noticed a curious tendency of fans, both here and elsewhere, to resist strongly the notion that Snape could possibly have retained any affection or regard for his old DE colleagues after his defection to Dumbledore's camp. In fact, many people seem to prefer to believe that he never really liked them all that much to begin with. (This is particularly evident in fanfiction, where Snape's relations with his old classmates, when depicted, run a very small emotional gamut indeed, ranging all the way from contemptuous disdain to virulent hatred.) The general attitude seems to be: "Oh, well, Sevvie never really could stand any of those guys in the first place, you know. And even if maybe he did once, he sure loathes them now."
Why do we believe this? Snape did join the DEs of his own free will, after all. He went to school with these people; he worked with them; we can probably safely assume that he risked his life alongside them. He did eventually choose to betray them, yes. But that doesn't mean that he never really liked them. Why is it so important to us to believe otherwise?
Is it perhaps because the Snape we see in canon strikes us as so profoundly anti-social that we simply find it impossible to imagine him ever having had any friends? Or is it, perhaps, because we as readers find the DEs so utterly and completely loathsome—they are the Baddies, after all—that we are unwilling to humanize them even to the extent of conceding that they might ever do anything so sympathetic as form friendships? Do we think them incapable of it? And if so, then why? Because they're Dark Wizards? Because they're Slytherins? Because they're bigots?
Because they're the sort of people who dehumanize their enemies?
Or is it, perhaps, that when push comes to shove, we just don't really believe it possible to continue to care for people personally once one has broken with them politically, ethically, and spiritually? Do we reject out of hand the possibility that one might hate the sin while loving the sinner?
Or, alternatively, might the unwillingness to concede the possibility that Snape might have truly cared for his old friends and colleagues be really nothing more than a ploy we as readers have devised to ensure our own psychological comfort with the character? Perhaps in order to redeem Snape to ourselves we must first place him in an emotional context from which he was not, in fact, betraying his friends when he defected to Dumbledore's camp?
Because, really, there's just no getting around it, is there? It's an ugly thing to do, to betray ones friends. No matter what the justification, no matter how sound the principles or the motivations underlying the betrayal, no matter how much we may approve of it as a political act, it remains undeniably ugly.
So is that it, perhaps? Do we tell ourselves that Snape never really liked the DEs in the first place because we are unwilling to acknowledge the extent to which Severus Snape is just Peter Pettigrew, seen through the looking glass?
Heh. Well. Whatever the reasoning behind the assertion, I'm afraid that I just can't buy it. I see nothing in canon to suggest that Snape never cared for his DE colleagues, and plenty to suggest that he did and does. His favoritism of the DE's children, his advocacy of House Slytherin, his reactions to Crouch/Moody, the very depths of his bitterness...there are other ways to explain all of these things, certainly. Many, many people have.
But I prefer not to. Until Rowling proves me wrong, I will continue to operate under the assumption that even while conspiring to betray them, Snape retained a strong personal affection for many of the DEs, and that when they got themselves slaughtered by Aurors or shipped off to Azkaban, it really hurt—even (or, rather, especially) when it happened due to the information he was secretly passing along to Dumbledore. It is terribly common for real-world spies to engage in just this brand of cognitive dissonance. One might argue, in fact, that the ability to maintain such a schismed perspective is the hallmark of a successful agent.
But returning to the Longbottoms...
Judyserenity wrote:
I have to admit, anger at the Longbottoms in particular would not be especially fair, since two of Snape's friends were jailed specifically for torturing the Longbottoms, but since when are emotions rational?
Indeed. Emotions are not rational, and anger is very rarely "fair," and blaming the victim, while it may be horrendously unjust, is also an all-too-human tendency. I can easily imagine Snape feeling particularly resentful towards the Longbottoms. They are, after all, the reason that the Lestranges (who should have been safe, dammit—the war was over, the arrests had come to an end, they would have been home free if only they hadn't had to go messing with the Longbottoms like that) are now serving life in Azkaban.
(Note to nitpickers: for purposes of this discussion, yes, I am assuming that the Pensieve couple and the Lestranges are the same people. And yes, I know that this Remains To Be Proved. But I think it strongly enough implied by the text to operate under the assumption for the nonce.)
But even if we assume that Snape bears no particular animosity toward the Longbottoms themselves, the fact still remains that Neville must serve as a highly unpleasant reminder to him that two of his oldest friends are to this very day gibbering their sanity away in wizard prison hell—something that I feel certain he'd much rather avoid thinking about.
And there are likely guilt issues as well. From what Sirius tells Harry et al in GoF about Severus Snape's School Days (famous for his fascination with the Dark Arts, entered school knowing more curses than half the 7th years, and so forth), it seems more than likely to me that Snape was the one who led the rest of his old Slytherin gang down the road to damnation in the first place. If such is the case, then he's doubly culpable, bearing responsibility not only for what eventually happened to Rosier and Wilkes and the Lestranges, but also for the fates of all of their victims—the Longbottoms included.
That can't be a nice feeling, and once you factor in Neville's propensity for melting cauldrons and generally making a mess of things in Potions class, I think it gives us more than sufficient explanation for Snape's treatment of the poor lad. Really, while it is a great deal of fun to contemplate the possibility that Snape might harbor some old grudge against Frank Longbottom, I hardly consider it necessary. His behavior seems perfectly comprehensible to me without adding a personal grudge on top of all of it.
Pigwidgeon37 asked:
... does anybody have an idea as to why the Lestranges got it into their fanatical heads that the Longbottoms might eventually know his [Voldemort's] whereabouts?
To which Judy replied:
I assume the Lestranges and their accomplices (Crouch Jr. and the other guy) started with the Longbottoms because the Longbottoms were the easiest to catch, and then got caught themselves before they could torture anyone else.
Well, of course that's always possible. But I tend to assume that the Lestranges started with Longbottom because they had reason to believe that if anyone knew anything about Voldemort's current whereabouts, he would. I doubt he was targetted simply because he looked like easy pickings. On the contrary, I suspect that Longbottom was quite a high-ranked Auror, privy to the details of the MoM's search for Voldemort: a Person In the Know, and no easy prey. Had he been such a lightweight, then surely his protestations of ignorance would have been believed long before both he and his wife were tortured to the point of irrevocable insanity?
(Of course, I suppose Crouch, Lestranges, et al could have just been entertaining themselves. But I've got a feeling that they were in a rather goal-oriented frame of mind at the time: had they not believed that Longbottom was holding out on them, I suspect that they would have moved on to the next victim, rather than hanging around increasing their chances of getting caught just for the sake of getting a few sadistic kicks.)
We do tend, I think, to envision the Longbottoms as hapless innocents—at least, I know that I do. It's hard to avoid the temptation to read them as young and inexperienced, as profoundly vulnerable, as defenseless. And of course, there are a number of reasons we read them this way. There's the identification with Neville, for starters. There's also an identification with James and Lily Potter, who if they were not hapless, were at least very young at the time of their deaths. Then there's Dumbledore's evident outrage over what was done to them. And, of course, there's also the fact that suffering of the magnitude that we can imagine the Longbottoms must have experienced grants the status of "innocent" as a matter of humanitarian default: in the face of such suffering, all men are innocent.
But all that said, I think that we might want to bear in mind that Frank Longbottom was not precisely an innocent in the full meaning of that term. His wife may have been, but he himself was not. He was not a hapless bystander, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He wasn't even a civilian. He was an Auror, invested with the authority to investigate, interrogate, arrest, and—in the last year before Voldemort's defeat—also to torture, to magically coerce, or even to kill those he suspected of malfeasance. Not to say that he abused his power, of course—Dumbledore seems to have liked him, so we may perhaps safely assume that he did not—but the fact nonetheless remains that we are not talking about a defenseless bystander here. What happened to the man was horrible beyond imagining, yes. But he wasn't exactly a lamb.
Nor was he even necessarily all that young. We are told that the Longbottoms were "very popular," which does rather encourage us to think of them as popular in the same way that the Potters were popular—which is to say, as young and handsome and overflowing with potential—but given the mood of wizarding society at the time, "very popular" could equally well refer to a hardened, tough-as-nails war-hero, well out of his twenties. Not everyone chooses to have their first child at the tender age of twenty-one. Certainly the impression I get of Neville's grandmother is one of old age, rather than late middle-age, which to my mind rather implies that the Longbottoms weren't all that young when Neville was born.
My own feeling on the question of "why the Longbottoms?" is that Longbottom was probably an experienced Auror of high rank and no small repute, deeply involved in the MoM's search for Voldemort, and that while the Lestranges and their accomplices may very well have been sadistic, fanatical, and more than half-mad, they were nonetheless not being entirely unreasonable in their choice of target.
Then, of course, I could be wrong.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 20, 2002 6:24 PM
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