Snapedom

I ended my last with:

We are totally misjudging Lily based on the “The Prince’s Tale.” Because these were never meant to be Severus’s memories of Lily.

They’re his memories of what went wrong between them.


I want to clarify this last point. And then I’ll be done, really, for quite a while.



Most of us who dislike Lily do so on the basis of Snape’s memories of her. (Well, we certainly don’t do it on the basis of Harry’s!) We assess her as a bad friend to him; we complain that we never see any encounter between them that doesn’t begin or end with her being angry or critical of him. We say we never see them just being friends, and so we question her commitment to the friendship.

When I first read SWM I took Lily to be a popular girl standing up for a loser outsider that she barely knew, and I liked her for it. Re-reading that scene as someone defending her supposed “best friend” infuriated me past measure. What kind of friend was that?

And so it was possible to view Lily as a user. I saw her sometimes as someone who tolerated Severus pre-Hogwarts because he was her only source of info on the WW, who then started drawing back from HIM before he’d done anything deserving of her disapproval, merely because Sev was a socially-awkward geek whom her other friends teased her about.

What we forgot to consider was that those memories were not necessarily a representative sample. Snape wasn’t giving those memories to Harry to give Harry a fair and balanced picture of who his mother was. *

Severus was trying to tell Harry who HE was, and how he got there. Partly because Harry had to trust him to accept Dumbledore’s message from him; otherwise Harry would have assumed Snape faked a memory to entrap him. But had that been all, the memories would have ended there, with the message.

Instead, Severus goes on to show Harry his outrage over how Albus used both of them. He shows Harry that he continues, nonetheless, to obey Dumbledore’s orders. He shows him that cutting off George’s ear was an accident, that he had never intentionally injured a Harry-clone. He shows himself crying over Lily’s letter and photo. And in the final memory he shows Harry that Snape now rejected absolutely the use of the word “Mudblood” [he interrupted Phineas with urgent news to object to it], that Severus was the one who armed Harry (and BTW that Severus was worthy to carry Gryffindor’s Sword), and that, though still loyal to Dumbledore, he wasn’t (or was no longer) blindly dependent on his mentor. His final words transmitted to Harry were: “Don’t worry, Dumbledore, I have a plan…[emphasis mine.]”

Severus wanted to be known. “Look at me!” His dying request.

The point Severus was trying to make to Harry was never about Lily at all. It was about himself. He needed Harry to know that Severus had loved Lily, had unintentionally driven her away, had forsaken all other loyalties and ambitions for her sake when he discovered that he’d endangered her, and had never swerved from that commitment.

So these memories were not selected by Snape to give a comprehensive portrait of Lily or of their friendship. They are not about what Lily’s like, or what it’s like to be her closest friend. They are about what it’s like to drive her away.

The miscommunications on both sides, and his missteps.

One recurrent theme is Lily’s lack of understanding of magic. We see three separate times when Lily responds negatively because she doesn’t understand Sev’s usage: when he first tells her she’s a witch, when he drops the branch on Tuney and she thinks he did it deliberately, and her strictures on Mulciber using Dark Magic. Similarly, we twice see Severus’s early disdain for Muggles (Petunia) and insensitivity to Lily’s closeness to people he doesn’t value. Then there’s the prejudice between their houses (though I think the train scene was also thrown in to show Harry that no, James really always WAS a total jerk). Later, he shows Lily’s disapproval of his friends and his own inability to see why she disapproved, the misunderstanding over the Marauder versus the Mulciber prank, and finally “the word” and Severus’s inarticulateness when he apologized, his inability to persuade Lily that the “way” he would choose was hers, if she would let him. But with that option completely lost to him, he makes other choices….

Reading smallpotato’s post on Lily as abusive, where she goes down the checklist: it’s a fairly compelling condemnation of Lily IF we take the memories Snape gave Harry to be representative of Severus and Lily’s usual interactions. However, if we re-read the Lily section of the Prince’s Tale NOT as a record of their normal relationship but as his record of how that relationship went sour, then what he’s pulling out for examination are exceptional incidents.

And we do in fact get three quite clear signs that their early friendship was a real one, and valued by both parties. Reread the scene that ends that ends with Lily accusing Severus of deliberately hurting Petunia. Before Petunia’s interruption, they are talking like friends, sharing confidences and hopes, and he uses his superior knowledge of the WW to impress her. But she doesn’t ONLY ask him about magic (as I have sometimes misremembered when casting her as a user).

“How are things at your house,” Lily asked.

“Fine,” he said.

“They’re not arguing anymore?”

“Oh yes, they’re arguing.” [tears leaves apart] “But it won’t be that long and I’ll be gone.”

“Doesn’t your dad like magic?”

“He doesn’t like anything much.”

Note: he gives her neutral/partially forthcoming responses, not a “F*** you for asking” snarl. And Lily perseveres until his third “Keep away” answer, then switches her questions back to magic, which he’s obviously happier talking about. And she hangs on his every word, until Petunia interrupts.

Which is exactly what a well-socialized (and mature for ten!) child would do with a friend she cares about who’s in a tough situation she can’t directly help with—ask enough to indicate she cares and is willing to listen, but respect the friend’s indication he’s not ready to talk. (And presumably Severus is sometimes able to talk about such matters with her, since Lily knows enough to ask in the first place.) Smallpotato asked: “Do we see Miss Lily ever, but I mean *ever*, understanding, valuing, supportive or respectful of Sev's feelings, friends, opinions or activities?”

Well, there we did. In fact, it was mostly that being missing in the Mulciber/Potter conversation that had so strongly persuaded me that Lily had already emotionally ditched Severus. Shouldn’t Lily, if still a friend, have responded even more strongly to her friend’s near-death than to his unhappy home life? But Sailorum reminded me that Lily didn’t know Sev had almost been murdered and that Lily probably assumed that he had snuck down that tunnel because he wanted a thrill. So, to her eyes, Sev got a bit more of a thrill than he had wanted, and was just sulking now over the ignominy of having been rescued by Potter. And with that bad attitude, no, Lily wouldn’t sympathize.

Two other scenes show that Lily at first valued her friendship with Sev.

On the Hogwarts Express, Lily blames Sev for her quarrel with Petunia—humanly, but most unjustly, since she violated Petunia’s privacy as much as Snape did, and it’s Evans, not Severus, who chose to rub her sister’s nose in it. Bad Lily! But it’s Snape who’s being insensitive—his “So what?” really takes the cake. Bad Sev! Nonetheless, Lily DOES allow Sev to talk with her and “brightens” in response to his excitement. Then when James takes issue with Severus’s favored house and the matter goes downhill, Lily doesn’t participate until the two strange boys descend to open insult of Severus, when she “sat up, rather flushed, and looked from Sirius to James in dislike. ‘Come on, Severus, let’s find another compartment.’ [she said in a] lofty voice.”

She gives up her anger AT Sev to get angry on Sev’s behalf. Moreover, she has no wish whatever to interact with the jerks; she wants only to remove herself and Severus from their attack. This contrasts painfully and pointedly with her behavior in SWM, of course, and I’m sure Severus was well aware of it.

Finally, there’s the reaction to her sorting. As soon as the hat cried, “Gryffindor,” Snape let out a tiny groan—and Lily looked back at him with a sad little smile. They both know that Lily’s sorting will separate them, and they both mourn it. (And for anyone who thinks either of them should have talked the Hat into mis-sorting, the Hat didn’t seem to hesitate in either case—as it had with Harry, Hermione, and Neville. So it doesn’t seem that either Sev or Lily had the opportunity to make a request to be sorted to hir friend’s house.)

SWM, I think, Sailorum’s best efforts notwithstanding, still only makes sense if Lily, by then, had already distanced herself from Severus. Though she hadn’t yet admitted it to him, and perhaps not to herself.


But this re-interpretation is really a good thing for Snapefen. Being misled by the fact that all the Lily-memories were bad ones, we thought that the relationship—and she—were bad. But if she really had been worthy of his love, and if they were once truly friends, and if he might have had a chance for more—had his insecurities, misunderstandings on both sides, and their respective houses not gotten in the way—then Severus lost, or rather destroyed, something of real value. And then he’s not a sad little dweeb clinging to the memory of a friendship-that-never-was as his one light in this cruel world, but a figure in a tragedy.

And what’s especially poignant is, Severus first gained Lily’s attention and interest by knowing more than she; he was “oddly impressive” telling her about mysteries. Rowling said Snape joined the DE’s partly in hopes of impressing Lily. We interpreted this as Jo meaning that Snape thought Lily liked powerful bullies like James, and tried to make himself one. But if Severus also thought he was going to learn mysteries of life and death such as few knew, that finally makes a different kind of sense.



(*Wouldn’t it be nice to think that Snape left Harry a vial of memories left behind Dumbledore’s portrait? With his happier memories of Lily? This is what she was really like, this is why I valued her, this is what we were like together…. Sigh. Good thing I’m not a diabetic—I think I’d be in sugar shock from just the thought.)