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Rebecca Allen wrote:
Welcome to the list!
Thanks! It's good to be here.
You've presented some interesting arguments, and seeing as some people support you in this, I feel I can get away with making some arguments in the opposite direction.
But of course. That's the name of the game, isn't it? Fire away.
[I asked: do we have difficulty imagining even a younger and less bitter Snape as a social creature?]
Well, yes. If he were really gregarious he'd probably have recovered a little by the end of several years and made new friends. I don't think it's irrational to assume that his moody, contemptuous personality hasn't been with him since he was really young.
Neither do I. But as it happens, I do think that Snape was probably moody and snappish and temperamental and prickly and unpleasant from a very early age. Less bitter, perhaps, but still hardly an easy personality. After all, what other sort of person arrives at school at the tender age of eleven with an unwholesome fascination for the Dark Arts and a wicked repertoire of curses under his belt?
But he can't have been all that much of a loner. Sirius says that Snape "was part of a gang of Slytherins who nearly all turned out to be Death Eaters." You don't get identified as "part of a gang" unless you hang out with the gang's other members on a fairly regular basis.
(BTW, that "nearly all" is interesting, isn't it? Not all of them, but "nearly" all of them. Who, one wonders, were the abstainers? And how do they feel about all of this?)
If he'd been having so much fun with his friends he might not have had such a (solitary) obsession with the Marauders.
True. And really, while being the guy in your circle who knows all of the really scary curses may be intensely gratifying, in a creepy Slytherinesque sort of way, it is unlikely to have been very much fun.
But then, I was never trying to argue that the other members of Snape's gang provided him with a warm and loving environment that fulfilled of all of his emotional needs. I think it quite clear that they did not do that. He'd be a very different person if they had, and I daresay he wouldn't have been so creepily obsessive about the Marauders either.
I just see no reason to believe that Snape hated or loathed or despised his classmates, or that he never enjoyed their company, or that there was never any bond of affection or loyalty or respect between them.
We're talking about people who hung out, attended classes, ate meals, and slept in the same room together for seven years, from the age of eleven to the age of seventeen, in a school environment which actively encourages students to think of their housemates as their "family." Even if their relationship was deeply ambivalent—and it probably was—there's still got to be a strong bond there.
[I asked why people seem to find it impossible to imagine the future Death Eaters ever having formed friendships]
Maybe because JKR has yet to portray a sympathetic Slytherin other than Snape....Let's face it—JKR's Slytherin is the House of Bad Guys. Snape is the only exception so far.
It's very hard for me to imagine a Wizarding Britain in which a full quarter of the population is composed of murderous sadists with little or no redeeming qualities. Let's face it—if the Slytherins really are all like that, then the entire society is doomed, no matter what Our Heroes might or might not accomplish.
Killing and torturing is hard to relate to.
I'll go you one further and say flat-out that I consider killing and torturing people to be evil. My, how morally daring of me!
But you know, in the real world, people who kill and torture others do generally have friends, and loved ones, and people they care very deeply about. Life is complicated that way.
We hear a great deal about Rowling's statement of intent to show how genuinely bad evil is in these books, and I laud that sentiment. But evil is also complicated, and there are times when I find myself wishing that Rowling would run a little further with that particular ball.
And they betray their friends too.
Well, some of them do. But by no means all of them. Avery and Malfoy both managed to evade justice by claiming to have been under the Imperius Curse, yet as far as we know, neither of them ever named names. Nott, Goyle, Crabbe and MacNair would all seem to have managed to make it through their trials all the way to acquittal ("You are merely repeating the names of those who were acquitted of being Death Eaters thirteen years ago!") without succumbing to the temptation to cut a deal with the prosecutors by squealing out their comrades. The Lestranges certainly didn't tell any tales, and neither did poor little Barty Crouch (although perhaps he just didn't know enough about the organization to do so).
From the way that Sirius talks about the other prisoners crying out in their sleep about Karkaroff's betrayal, and from Moody's particular contempt for Karkaroff in the Pensieve scene, I got the impression that Karkaroff's plea bargain was unusually dastardly, even by Death Eater standards.
And Harry's generation of Slytherin kids seem loyal enough to each other, don't they? Pansy exhibits genuine concern for Draco's well-being when he is attacked by the Hippogriff, and Crabbe rushes right over to pick up ferret-Draco during the Bouncing Ferret Incident, in spite of the fact that the entire situation must have been pretty terrifying—Moody is scary, and his use of transfiguration as a punishment marks him as a loose cannon. For that matter, when Draco makes his nasty "Mudblood" comment on the Quiddich pitch in CoS, Marcus Flint shields him with his own body—and continues to stand in the path of fire even after wands have been drawn. They're not nice kids, no. But they do seem to have a strong sense of in-group loyalty.
See, if we are to imagine Snape really liking these people, we have to have some reason to imagine them as likable.
Well, the issue here isn't really what we find likable. It's what Snape finds likable, which may not be at all the same thing.
But leaving that aside for the moment, I guess I just don't have a problem imagining this. People who do dreadful things usually do have friends and associates and colleagues who consider them perfectly likable, worthy of affection and respect. People are more than the sum of their rap sheets.
Also, as Marina pointed out today, they probably all joined when they were in their teens, so none of them might have known exactly what they were doing.
They were very young, yes. Depressingly so. And I strongly suspect that none of them really understood completely what they were getting themselves into. Not at first, at any rate.
I wrote:
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?
Rebecca replied:
As a big fan of Snape, I'd say this isn't true. We like him angsty.
Heh. Indeed. The more he suffers, the more we like him. It's sick, really.
Betraying old friends is ugly; no one should have to do it. I just don't see why we should imagine why they were such lovable types and that he misses them so much.
Good lord, no! Did I give the impression that I was imagining them as lovable types? That wasn't at all my intent. "Lovable" and "not altogether devoid of redeeming qualities, capable of forming normal human relationships" are not at all the same thing!
Nor did I mean to imply that I think that he misses them, per se. I hardly imagine that he has fond memories of his schooldays, or that he looks longingly back on those fine old nights spent practicing Cruciatus on the lab rabbits up in the Slytherin dormitories after lights-out (or whatever other unsavory nastiness he and his cronies used to get up to), or that he's just dying to take Avery out to lunch so that they can reminisce about old times, or anything like that.
I do think that he feels wretched about them getting themselves killed and imprisoned, and that he would have far rather they had all escaped unharmed, promptly abandoned their wicked ways, and then disappeared from his life altogether. (As, indeed, Avery would seem to have been quite obliging in doing. But that's not really at all the same thing.
[the "Severus Snape is Peter Pettigrew through the looking glass" comment rises ire from Rebecca]
Whether or not one likes Snape, I think this last statement is completely unsupported by the text.
I adore Snape, and I don't think that it is at all unsupported by the text. Just look at how Snape reacts to Sirius, when he thinks that Sirius, rather than Peter, is the traitor.
For that matter, look at how he reacts to Quirrel in PS, when he comes to suspect Quirrel of infidelity to Dumbledore. Or how he reacts when Crouch/Moody implies that Dumbledore doesn't really trust him. Issues of trust and betrayal are serious hot buttons for Snape. He's exceptionally sensitive there; they're sore spots.
In order for them to be reflections of each other you have to overlook some barn-door sized issues like, oh say, good vs. evil, cowardice vs. courage, etc.
Er...no. The mirror reverses that which it reflects. In order for Snape and Pettigrew to be reflections of each other, what they need to do is to be the same in certain respects, while "reversing the image" in others. Which I think that they do quite nicely, myself.
I don't really think that you're in disagreement with me here.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 22, 2002 4:12 AM
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