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The January Challenge: Lily revisited

sylvanawood

1/3/11 04:02 pm

The Challenge for January 2011:

Lily revisited

Years ago (we've been around for a while, oh yes!)we had 'Severus and Lily' as a monthly challenge.

alicekinsno1 suggested to take a closer look at Lily's character:

Maybe something that discusses the character of Lily more deeply? I'd love to see what some of your ideas are for just how Lily went from treating Snape so harshly and talking back to James, to being the stereotypical "saintly mother" at the end of her life. There's something about her personality that doesn't add up.

That is to say, how her apparently selfless decision to die for her baby makes sense in light of the way she treated Severus or even James. With possibly a side comment about how despite being so powerful and gifted she didn't really show any of that by dying pleading for her baby's life without even trying to take on Voldemort.

Please post your entries here or in a separate post. I'm looking forward to your entries.
If you have ideas for new challenges, please post them here. (This is a new list, your earlier suggestions are still in the old post).

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• Re: If Severus is nuanced, so is Lily

  (Anonymous)

  1/12/11 12:45 pm (UTC)

  I think Pearl has highlighted a crucial point. Lily is introduced in a myth-like form, on a pedestal, and pretty infalliable in her image of perfection. What Harry, and by extension the reader, sees in The Prince's Tale and the scene at Godric's Hollow, is the real human - complex, sometimes contradictory, good virtues and flaws, struggling to walk the best path in life. I sincerely believe, it was good for Harry's emotional growth to see and understand this person as attainable, with a realistic personality, and no longer that distant idol. Of course, he can still find inspiration from her, and James, but he recognises they were of flesh and blood as surely as he is.
  
  As surely as Severus Snape's image, in turn, takes a journey as Harry's maturity evolves. :)
  
  "As for the way Lily treated Severus and James, what are her crimes, exactly? She ended her friendship with Severus for hurling a racial insult at her and she called James an 'arrogant toe rag'. I fail to see how these supposed failings cancel out her courage in taking the hit for her own child. As I said: we're all a mixture of saint and sinner. Human beings are complex and nuanced."
  
  Exactly.
  
  custos_noctis from Livejournal

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  • Re: If Severus is nuanced, so is Lily

    00sevvie

    1/13/11 10:14 pm (UTC)

    

    Except I don't see that Harry indeed does mature emotionally and sees Lily as realistic and flawed; I don't see that Harry reflected much on it at all while we're with him. And I mean see literally here: where on the page does he think about it once? His only interaction with Lily after the Pensieve is the 'good to see you, I'm going to die' moment in the forest, where Snape isn't brought up at all, and he doesn't think about her character on the page. Even in OotP his only thought about her was that Snape couldn't have really known her well, nothing about whether her actions in SWM were questionable or not. James's character is the focus of his attention, not Lily's.
    
    What to some fans come across as flaws in direct presentation of her character are read by others as evidence of her good-natured feistiness and moral solidity, not flaws, so the events themselves don't speak for Harry's interpreting them one way or another. We never get Harry's own reflection on these things - he goes from viewing the memories to "Snape was Dumbledore's!" to naming his kid Lily, but never do we get a word as to what he thought of Lily herself - whether he thought her realistic and flawed, or still a saint, or anything else. (A lack of reflection that to me comes across as unbelievable, in fact; he seems to have no emotional issues regarding what he sees in the Pensieve in DH at all, other than 'Snape was Dumbledore's man! Ha, Voldie!'.) We don't see onscreen much of Harry's emotional growth in that vein at all; what we are supposed to believe happened (e.g. the naming of Albus Severus) takes place offscreen, so we can't really tell exactly what he thought. So it's all personal speculation, one way or the other.

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