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People were astonished that I thought the twins behaved like bullies, and so I provided a list of the traits that researchers in the field have found over the years to typify people who bully in school.
Irene read it, blinked, and then said:
Is it just me, or did anyone else at this point felt compelled to say "Hello, Sirius Black!" ?
Oh, excellent. A new topic!
Well...er. Ish.
Yes. It does describe Sirius rather well, I think, and I do believe that this is one of the main reasons that so many readers do jump to that conclusion that Sirius must have been a "popular bully" back in his schooldays. I touched briefly on this in that same post, actually, when while talking about the twins' dismissive manner of speaking of those they have designated outsiders, I tossed off as a quick parenthetical aside:
(It is also, I might point out, very similar to the sneering tone with which Sirius Black always speaks of Severus Snape -- a character touch which has led more than one reader to deduce that Sirius himself might have been a bit of a bully back in his schooldays).
Indeed, I think that it is difficult for many people to read Sirius' sneers about "slimy, oily, greasy-haired" Snape in GoF, for example, and not see it as a quite recognizable depiction of the popular charismatic bully, all grown up and still utterly lacking in any particular sympathy for his adolescent victim. His derisive snort and sneering of "it served him right" in the Shrieking Shack also contributes to this impression, I think, as does his allowing Snape's head to bang on the ceiling as they make their way out of the shack. By then, of course, Sirius has perfectly valid reasons to be feeling more than a mite bit peevish about Snape—I'd feel pretty darned cranky too if someone had gloated to me about handing me over to the dementors to be Kissed and wouldn't even listen to the proof of my innocence—but all the same, I do think that these character touches combine to suggest a certain lack of maturity and perspective, as well as a weak balk instinct—a refusal to respect others' vulnerabilities—all of which are traits strongly associated with those inclined to bullying. It is revelatory behavior in much the same way that the twins' stepping on Malfoy et al at the end of GoF is revelatory behavior, IMO, and I do think that it serves to suggest certain things about Sirius' inclinations and tendencies, about his character.
Irene:
I read the whole huge thread on bullies in one go, and it helped me to answer a question that bothered me for a long time: why it seems widely accepted opinion among Snapefans that Sirius was a "popular bully" when canon gives us nothing to support that?
Hmmm. Well, I'm also one of those Snapefans who definitely received the impression that Snape was hassled by James' group of friends, and particularly by Sirius, back in the day (we few, we happy few...), and I think that the extent to which Sirius matches the classic bully profile very likely does have much to do with the popularity of that reading. I don't know if I'd say that there is nothing to support this reading in the canon, though.
::waits for groans and jeers to die down::
No, no, seriously. A while back, Dicentra accused those who came by this reading of suffering from "fanfic contamination," and I have to say that this did strike me as a rather odd accusation, maybe just because I've read all the wrong fanfic. Most of what I've read has not gone particularly far in portraying the Marauders as Snape's boyhood tormentors.
No, I'd say that those who felt, while reading the books, that Sirius was a charismatic bully in school and Snape a creepy outcast are suffering far less from "fanfic contamination" than they are from "real life contamination." And from "genre convention contamination." And from "comedic trope contamination." Not to mention from...well, from what I guess we might just call "canon contamination." *g*
Sirius does fit the personality profile of those who bully in school. Snape, on the other hand, struck me even from the very first book as a classic victim-bully. Most of the direct canonical support that one can cite to defend this reading comes from PoA and GoF, but I have to say that I found it an instinctive reading of the character long before PoA. I was reading Snape as the grown-up incarnation of the creepy unpopular kid from the start. PoA merely confirmed that reading for me.
Genre conventions came strongly into play there, as did comedic trope. The nasty vindictive sarcastic schoolteacher who everyone knows just had to have been unpopular as a child is one of the classic comic figures of the school story. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, usually quite sympathetic to the "unpopular," has made use of it in its depiction of the reverted-to-teenagerhood Principal Snyder. It's a classic.
(I'd also like to suggest here, BTW, the possibility that the use of this type as a "figure of fun"—ie, a target of aggressive humor—may well be slightly more common, as well as more socially acceptable, in the UK than in the US. Here in the US, having been "unpopular" as a child often carries with it a certain cache of moral virtue. "Popular" can be a bit of a bad word in some circles in the US, I think, because we tend to assume that all schoolboy targets are ipso facto innocent victims. I don't know, though, if this is necessarily as common an assumption in the UK. When I was living in Wales, for example, I frequently heard "you really weren't very popular in school, were you?" used as a snarky but light-hearted way of indicating to someone that their behavior had become obnoxious. So there may well be some cultural differences that come into play when it comes to our emotional responses to textual indications that Good Guys like James and Sirius used to pick on Snape quite a lot -- very much, in fact, as I suspect there may be some trans-Atlantic issues that come into play when we talk about the twins.)
Snape really does fit this comic type, I think, as well as matching up rather closely, IMO, to our real world understanding of unpopular students who grow up to take out all of their adolescent frustrations on the world at large. And you don't have to look all that deeply into the text to find evidence of who Snape himself likely perceived as his childhood tormentor, do you? Whom does he hate? Whose athletic prowess makes him absolutely snarl? Whose child does he go out of his way to victimize?
I do think that it's a fairly instinctive reading of PS/SS, and PoA merely confirms the reader's suspicions. It not only gives us the pr*nk, it also gives us Sirius Black and the Marauder's Map. And it also, as Irene points out, gives us a direct and authorially suggested parallelism between James and Sirius and the twins.
Irene wrote:
And after some soul-searching I think it's a projection of Fred and George pair to James and Sirius. As was established, it is possible to make a solid case of the twins being popular bullies based on the canon (solid case does not mean the prosecution is necessarily going to win it, mind). Is there some basis to establish similarity between the two pairs? Several characters comment on how the twins remind them about James and Sirius: McGonagall, Madame Rosmerta and Hagrid, if I'm not mistaken. So it is possible the canon works on some subconscious level and makes Sirius "guilty by association".
::nods::
Yes. The text does go out of its way to lead us to draw that generational parallel, I think, not only through the comments of McGonagall, Rosmerta and Hagrid, but also (and I think perhaps even more powerfully) through the Marauder's Map, which serves as a physical and tangible link between generations: both the literal generations of Father James and Son Harry, and also the "school generations" of soon-to-be-leaving-school twins and soon-to-be-upperclassman Harry. "Noble men," Fred says of MWPP, "working tirelessly to help a new generation of law-breakers."
The twins' bestowal of the map upon Harry is not merely a gift. It is a legacy. "We bequeath it to you," George says, and he is only half-joking. With the conferral of the map come certain rights and responsibilities above and beyond that of simple mischief-making. It is not only to be used for selfish purposes. Later on in the series, the twins will borrow it back from Harry briefly in order to provide the supplies for a party for Gryffindor House as a whole. This is the twins' social function, their self-perceived duty, and the Map is an essential tool in fulfilling that function. By "bequeathing" it to Harry, they have effectively declared him as their heir apparent. When they are gone, bucking up the morale of the House in this fashion will be Harry's job.
Tabouli has written of the twins' role "coaches," whose job is to lead the House, in part, through bolstering the Gryffindors' morale. Abigail also touched on this aspect of the twins' role, when she wrote about the scene at the end of GoF, in which Harry exhorts the twins to serve a similar function for the WW as a whole. In this respect, Harry's bestowal of his prize winnings onto the twins parallels the bequeathment of the Marauder's Map. Just as the twins are the defenders of Gryffindor House, so Harry is the defender of the Wizarding World; just as the twins inspire and moralize members of their House through their activities, so Harry inspires and moralizes the WW by simple virtue of his continued survival. Just as the twins have appointed Harry to step into their shoes as they leave school, so Harry then appoints the twins to serve his function in the adult world while he himself is prevented from doing so fully by virtue of still being a schoolboy.
So the Map is a legacy item. It is not merely a useful device, but also a symbol. It represents a specific social function. With its conferral come duties and obligations. It is passed down across the generations. It bridges the gap between the twins and Harry. It bridges the gap between Harry and his father. And in doing all of that, I think that it also links Sirius and James with Fred and George in a very powerful way.
The Map's explicit function is to serve as an aid to "Magical Mischief-Makers." Its implicit function is to serve as a tool to those who help to bolster the morale of the House. But what else does the Map do?
As though an invisible hand was writing upon it, words appeared on the smooth surface of the map.
'Mr Moony presents his compliments to Professor Snape, and begs him to keep his abnormally large nose out of other people's business'
Snape froze. Harry stared, dumbstruck, at the message. But the map didn't stop there. More writing was appearing beneath the first.
'Mr Prongs agrees with Mr Moony, and would like to add that Professor Snape is an ugly git'
It would have been very funny if the situation hadn't been so serious. And there was more...
'Mr Padfoot would like to register his astonishment that an idiot like that ever became a Professor.'
Harry closed his eyes in horror. When he'd opened them, the map had had its last word.
'Mr Wormtail bids Professor Snape good day, and advises him to wash his hair, the slimeball.'
An implicit part of the social function that the map represents is the targetting of the designated enemy for mockery and abuse.
Small wonder that Snape "freezes!" I think that it is safe to assume that this unpleasant little encounter with the map is serving as a most unwelcome revisitation of the past for him, just as his journey to the Shrieking Shack later on in the book will have nightmare overtones of a revisitation of the night of the infamous pr*ank.
The Map does not seem to be a Riddle's Diary. It does not chat with Harry. It does not, for example, allow him to have virtual conversations with a kind of ghost of his father as a teenager. It does not seem anywhere close to fully sentient. It does occasionally show signs of self-awareness—as when it reveals to Harry the secret of getting past the statue—but it would seem to do so only when this is a necessary adjunct to its actual function.
So the implication to my mind is that insulting Snape is in some sense a part of the Map's function. It is part and parcel of the social role which the Map represents, the same social role that the Twins have occupied within House Gryffindor: they defend and build up the morale of "us" in part by levelling their aggression against designated members of "them."
This is what the Map does. It is what the twins do. I find it very difficult to imagine that it was not something that James and Sirius used to do as well.
Certainly, I personally find it simply impossible to read this scene without coming to the conclusion that the map's little zingers are in fact precisely the sort of verbal abuse with which James and his friends used to taunt Snape back in their schooldays. The Map's insults are fundamentally childish. They are schoolboy insults: "abnormally large nose," "ugly git," "idiot," "slimeball," "advises him to wash his hair."
They are also precisely the sort of insults that get levelled against creepy unpopular kids by their socially superior adversaries. The focus on physical detail is particularly suggestive of this dynamic. We know that Snape is not, and has never been, an attractive fellow. Sirius, on the other hand, was "handsome," handsome enough that even a thirteen-year-old boy can identify him as such from a photograph. Sirius and James were popular not only with the student body, but also with their teachers and other adults. Hagrid, Rosmerta, Flitwick and McGonagall all speak of their schoolboy incarnations with undeniable fondness, and in Rosmerta and McGonagall's lines, I detect hints of attraction as well. James and Sirius would seem to have been attractive to women. We have never seen any sign of Snape exercising an equal romantic appeal, or for that matter, any romantic appeal. (Er, well, within the canon, that is.) Nor have we seen any signs that he was at all well-liked by his teachers or other adults. Indeed, Snape's indignation, even some twenty years after the fact, over the outcome of the prank strongly suggests that from his perspective, at any rate, there had been strong bias in play.
So yes. I do think that it is quite strongly suggested by the canon that Snape was often taunted by James and his friends back in their schooldays, as well as that they held the upper hand in terms of social popularity. Everything about the Map's insults speaks to me of just such a dynamic.
In fact, I see this dynamic as rather central to the endgame of PoA, and I believe that it is precisely to establish it firmly in the reader's mind that JKR included the encounter with the Map in the same chapter that also first hints at the prank -- the chapter that is entitled "Snape's Grudge."
The chapter title is significant, IMO. Grudge-holding is indeed Snape's great hamartia, but one does not generally refer to someone as "holding a grudge" if they did not have an at least somewhat legitimate cause for grievance in the first place. Snape has a sense of grievance that he is just not letting go; that he is not letting it go is a problem, but that he should ever have developed it in the first place is not; and I think that the encounter with the Map is written into this scene not merely to serve a comedic function, but also to lead the reader to this understanding. What is eating away at Snape is not mere envy, and it is not mere malice. It is a sense of thwarted justice, and one that derives from rather more than the fact that Sirius Black once tried to feed him to a werewolf, that nobody was ever expelled for this, and that Snape himself wound up with an utterly unwanted debt (whether "official" life-debt or debt of honor) to a hated rival as a result. The prank may have been the most blatant and egregious manifestation of what Snape is holding a grudge over, but it is hardly the entire story, and I think that the encounter with the Map—and what it implies about Snape's past relationship with attractive, popular, athletic, brilliant Sirius and James—is there to show us a bit more of the story. It serves to define somewhat more clearly the social context in which the prank took place. Like Sirius' sneering, it compells us to read the prank not as an isolated incident, but as a reflection of an entire social dynamic, one that is fundamentally a dynamic of injustice. Without that understanding, the parallelism between Snape and Sirius in the Shrieking Shack (and beyond!) loses a great deal of its raw power and impact, IMO, as does the entire endgame of PoA.
There are strong parallels between Snape's encounter with the Map and the prank itself, parallels which will later be extended to encompass the entire endgame of PoA -- and I again, I think that these are essential for establishing in the reader's mind the full nature and extent of Snape's sense of grievance. The language with which Snape tries to read the map is to my mind highly suggestive. "Reveal your secrets," he commands it. Sirius will describe him later as always "sneaking around" after James and his gang, trying to get them in trouble. Snape is trying to force the map to reveal its secrets in the first place in order to prove that Harry has been "out of bounds," in violation of the school rules. As a teenager, he tried to learn the secrets of MWPP in similar hopes of proving them out of bounds, and by doing so to get them in trouble with the authorities. And of course, in the endgame of PoA, Snape makes his way to the Shrieking Shack one last time, his use of the invisibility cloak once more placing his behavior firmly into the Slytherinesque category of "sneaking," hoping to apprehend Remus and Sirius, whom he believes to be dangerous criminals, and hand them over to the authorities for justice.
And he gets trounced, each and every time. He does not learn the secrets of the Marauder's Map. Instead, the Map insults him. He does learn Lupin's secret, but only at the terrible cost of being saddled with a debt to James. And at the end of PoA, he winds up first knocked unconscious, then foiled in his attempts to ensure that Black finally gets punished for his crimes, and finally dismissed as a raving lunatic by the Minister of Magic himself.
Who was it who made the comment that history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes?
Poor Severus just can't catch a break, can he, and JKR plays that fact for pathos as well as for laughs, I'd say. I do think that we are meant to read a certain degree of pathos into this portrayal of Snape as the constant voyeur: a hostile outsider, yes, but always an outsider trying to look in. I also think that the reader is meant to sympathize a great deal with Snape when he finally Just Plain Snaps at the end of PoA, even while also laughing at him. Certainly I've always found that sequence just plain heart-breaking, even while I also take enjoyment in its (deeply malicious!) humour.
(Wasn't it you, Irene, who once cited end of PoA as just plain killer in terms of Snape sympathy? I seem to remember wanting to slip a "me too" at the end of a sig sometime to you for that one, but then somehow never quite managed to get around to it.)
So in short [pause for everyone to laugh derisively], I certainly do think that there are a number of things in the text which support a reading of Sirius as a bully. I also think that this is partially a reflection of the series' thematic approach to questions of power, justice, vengeance and mercy.
Sirius may be depicted as a bullying type, but the text emphasizes quite strongly that James himself was not, in that he did respect vulnerability, he did know when things were going too far, and he had a very well-developed balk instinct. This aspect of his persona is absolutely pounded home to us in PoA, I'd say. James went after Snape and saved him from the potentially lethal effects of the Prank. Pettigrew claims that James would have shown him mercy. Harry (on the basis of no real evidence, mind) concurs; he cites James as his role model in prevailing upon Sirius and Remus to spare Peter's life. And when at the end of the novel, Harry's patronus takes the form of James' animagus form, when he is told that he truly is his father's son, we as readers are inclined to believe that indeed mercy, the balk instinct, the willingness to overlook even genuine grievance in the face of another's profound weakness, must have been one of James' primary characteristics.
By emphasizing these aspects of James' character, while also providing us with evidence that Sirius himself lacks those traits, I think that the text is drawing an important distinction between the traditional values of House Gryffindor and the WW's warrior culture, which while admittedly useful are also inherently ethically flawed, and the values which are being set forth as the truly heroic alternatives: those which are capable both of transcending the usual dynamics of conflict and strife, and of effecting the spiritual transformation of man. Sirius and the twins (who "take care" to step on Malfoy et al in the train at the end of GoF) represent the former. James and Harry (who takes care to step over them) stand in for the latter, as does Lily, whose self-sacrifice served to circumvent the normative zero-sum equation of conflict in the WW.
Here we touch on TBAY's Stoned!Harry: Harry as the living embodiment of the Philosopher's Stone, as an agent of spiritual renewal and transcendence. By intervening in the Shrieking Shack, Harry is not really saving Pettigrew at all. (If Pettigrew is to be saved, which I rather suspect that he is, then that will come later; right now, the poor devil is just about as lost as they come.) Harry may be setting the groundwork for Pettigrew's later development, but he is not saving him. He is saving Sirius (and also Remus), just as James once saved Sirius and Remus by intervening in the prank, and just as Harry and James will soon symbolically unite to save Sirius from the dementors. By intervening to insist upon the recognition of a higher moral code than "he deserves it," Harry is acting as an agent of transformative and redemptive moral change, one which can serve to heal both the wounds of injustice and the wounds of the past. There is no direct confrontation with Voldemort in PoA in part, I believe, because Harry's role as savior in PoA is absolutely not defined in terms of his ability to overcome his antagonists in any direct fashion. Rather, it is defined in terms of his ability to inspire spiritual transformation in others and in doing so, to begin to correct some of the problems of power with which the series is so intimately concerned.
—Elkins
who was unsurprised that there was a gleam in Dumbledore's eye
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on August 28, 2002 9:38 PM
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