Snapedom

With thanks to Anna M.


“I really don’t think they should let the other sort in, do you? They’re just not the same; they’ve never been brought up to know our ways.” (Draco in PS, V)

“Yer not from a Muggle family.” (Hagrid’s response to Draco’s comment.)




“Rotten ter the core, the whole family, everyone knows that--… bad blood, that’s what it is—” (Hagrid in CoS, IV)

“There are some wizards—like Malfoy’s family—who think they’re better than everyone else because they’re what people call pure-blood…. It’s [‘Mudblood’ is] a disgusting thing to call someone,” said Ron, wiping his sweaty brow with a shaking hand. “Dirty blood, see. Common blood. It’s ridiculous. Most wizards these days are half-blood anyway. If we hadn’t married Muggles we’d’ve died out.” (CoS, VII)

“Saint Potter, the Mudblood’s friend,” said Malfoy slowly. “He’s another one with no proper wizard feeling, or he wouldn’t go around with that jumped up Granger Mudblood.” (Cos, XII)

“He says the school needs ridding of all the Mudblood filth, but not to get mixed up in it.” (Draco quoting his father, Cos, XII)

“It all comes down to blood, as I was saying the other day. Bad blood will out.” (Aunt Marge in PoA, II)

“… that champion of commoners, of Mudbloods and Muggles, Albus Dumbledore.” (“Lord” Voldemort in GoF, XXXIII)

“Your Dementor has just destroyed the last remaining member of a pure-blood family as old as any—” (Albus Dumbledore about Barty Crouch Jr., GoF, XXXVI)

“I hated the whole lot of them: my parents, with their pure-blood mania, convinced that to be a Black made you practically royal…” (Sirius in OotP, VI)

“He’d play up the Pure-blood side so he could get in with Lucius Malfoy and the rest of them… the Half-Blood Prince—” (Harry in HBP, XXX, emphases mine)

“I am related to the Selwyns… Indeed, there are few pureblood families to whom I am not related….” (Umbridge in DH, XIII)

Sailorlum argued passionately that to call the WW’s “blood prejudice” anything BUT racism is totally to miss the point because after all, “blood prejudice” is, by definition, based on “blood”. And so is racism. Ergo, they are the same.

But on reflection I agree with Anna M that class prejudice is a better analogy to blood prejudice than racism.

Blood prejudice simply doesn’t work the way the racism I have experience with works.

When my family moved to Florida when I was a teen, my mother took up with a Southern “cracker”. Trust me when I say that my mother’s boyfriend would have esteemed the U.S.’s current president as being just as much of a “n—” as Obama’s Nigerian father. Indeed, a dark-skinned man who “kept his place” would have been more highly esteemed by a cracker than a lighter-skinned one who was demonstrably superior to him in every measurable way.

Southern racists and Nazis both felt that intermarriage with an “inferior race" didn't raise the inferior--it tainted the superior. And anyone who has braced hirself to read the diseased ravings of racist minds knows that nothing makes the spittle fly worse than “miscegenation”--most particularly, any hint of "them" defiling "our" pure women. In the WW, we do see a possible trace of that attitude with some of the Blacks and Gaunts. But if this were a general prejudice, literal half-bloods, at least, should have been subjected to as much antipathy as Muggleborns. Granted, Harry can be a bit oblivious, but even he should have been noticed if he was repeatedly taunted with being a filthy half-blood. Instead, we hear him called that only by Walburga’s portrait, Kreacher, and Bellatrix.

At the very least, Draco and his cronies should have been on Harry’s case all the time about how James Potter had defiled his pure line by taking to wife a dirty Mudblood, and how Harry shared his mother’s tainted blood…. And certainly Draco could never have boarded the Hogwarts Express with the firm intention of befriending Harry Potter. I mean, can anyone credit David Duke’s dutiful daughter (assuming he had one) trying to suck up to Malia Obama?

And how could Severus have possibly expected Bellatrix to believe that “many of the Dark Lord’s old followers thought Potter might be a standard around which we could all rally once more” (HBP, II) if they shared Bellatrix’s belief that actual blood purity counted? Everyone knew who Harry’s mother was—there’s a statue of her in Godric’s Hollow!

If anyone believes that in the real world, this one, former KKK members are rallying around Obama’s standard because he is now in power and he’s only half “black”, I’m sorry to have to disillusion you on that point.

Moreover, those half-bloods whose MOTHERS had married beneath them—Severus, Seamus, maybe Nymphadora—should have been, if anything, more hated than innocuous Muggleborns. Muggleborns might be a sport; half-bloods of slumming mothers are living proof that some old Muggle ram was tupping a pureblood’s white ewe. Every feeling revolts! Or at least, every feeling should revolt, if blood prejudice were truly the analogue to racism. (The last cross-burning that I know of in my state was at the home of an interracial couple, not of a political activist.)

And "one single wizard ancestor" should not be enough to purify one's family for the MBRC. Under the Nuremberg laws a single Jewish grandparent polluted one’s “blood”; under Southern law & custom, a single provable African ancestor ANY number of generations back made one a "black". (In Barbara Hambly's mystery A Free Man of Color, set in turn-of-the-nineteenth century New Orleans, the plot hinged upon the fact that a plantation owner’s "white" wife and his "black" mistress were visually indistinguishable. But this fact affected the legal and social status of neither.)

Sorry, I personally just can't "get" the idea of a racist who ACCEPTS miscegenation, welcoming the offspring of mixed marriages without a murmur even while discriminating against one parent. That just doesn't match the racism I’ve seen in real life.

*

So. We’re looking instead for a real-world prejudice supposedly based on blood/birth/heredity. Which is, however, only partly heritable—children of “mixed” marriages are acceptable to all except the most prejudiced of those of “purer” blood, and a family of no lineage at all can eventually become (mostly) accepted if said family joins the community and behaves as proper members for long enough.

That’s not how racism works. Prejudice against immigrants comes closer. But if Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen (and historical texts—but HP is literature, so I’ll stick mostly to literary precedents) are to be believed, class prejudice in England has worked in exactly that way.

Ever heard the term “blue blood”? And “bad blood”? Class apologists have clung to “blood”-based myths of superiority just as much as racists have. (Of course, those ‘blue-blooded’ aristocrats were also usually racists as well….) But their separation of themselves from “commoners” with “common blood” (terms used, significantly, by Tom Riddle and Ron Weasley, from opposite ends of the pureblood supremacist political spectrum) was not quite like racism, though it shared many of the same markers.

In old-style class prejudice, blood will always tell. But with a mixed marriage, while the inferior spouse can never be wholly acceptable, the offspring might go either way—depending on their upbringing and which parent they favor. And it’s possible to move upward even without intermarriage.

*

For a great rendition of the class-is-carried-in-the-blood school of thought, read Heyer’s These Old Shades, which I loved at seventeen but which made me cringe when I reread it when I was more politically aware. It is, among other things, a retelling of “The Princess and the Pea.” A nobleman’s only child, a daughter, was traded at birth for a peasant’s boy (her father needed a son to cut his younger brother out of the succession). She shone among the canaille like a jewel flung into a pigsty. Her intelligence, beauty, and native refinement survived every degradation intact; she was ultimately restored to her rightful place and married the Duke of Avon. The peasant boy exchanged for her, raised as a Vicomte, was a clodhopper who pined for pigs and was delighted, at the end, to trade the splendors of Versailles for a muddy farm.

See, insists Heyer, noble blood really does confer an inherent distinction over commoners.

The author of Nature’s Nobility would entirely approve of Heyer’s thesis; s/he simply differs in exactly what makes someone count as noble.

Here’s Heyer’s description of the switched children at nineteen. First, his supposed uncle’s description of the peasant Vicomte: “A boorish cub, Justin, with the soul of a farmer…. Mon Dieu, but there must be bad blood in Marie! My beautiful nephew did not get his boorishness from us. Well, I never thought Marie was of the real nobility.”

Next, the description of the two teens side by side: “For a moment they stood shoulder to shoulder, the one slim and delicate, with eyes that matched the sapphires… and glowing curls swept back from a white brow beneath whose skin the veins showed faintly blue. The other was thickset and dark, with square hands and short neck; powdered, perfumed, and patched, dressed in rich silks and velvet, but in spite of all rather uncouth and awkward.

“The Vicomte bowed, but although his bow was of just the required depth, and the wave of his hat in exact accordance with the decrees of fashion, the whole courtesy lacked spontaneity and grace. He bowed as one who had been laboriously coached in the art. Polish was lacking, and in its place was a faint suggestion of clumsiness. (TOS, Chapter V)

In Heyer’s fantasized world, blood clearly does tell, just as much as Aunt Marge and Hagrid think it does. It’s real, in this fictional world, that Leonie’s blood is better than Henri’s. That’s blood-based classism. And you’ll note both the similarities between lower-class and inferior-race stereotypes (Henri is also stupid and Leonie bright), and the references to “bad blood” and “the real nobility”.

But here’s the paramount difference: class, unlike race, can be changed over time. After four generations of my Chippewa ancestors marrying into French, English, Norwegian, etc., stock, a white boy in my home town (near the edge of a reservation teeming with every shade of half-breed) could look at me and call me, unerringly, a squaw.

But he couldn’t deny that I was as middle-class as he.

Income, education, and behavior make up most of the class differences in America today. (There are still snobs who believe in tracing genealogies, but they have little influence in general society.) In Britain, however, there are still the remnants of hereditary classes. But although “class” is as socially-constructed as “race”, and although it can be inherited, unlike with “race” the aristocracy has always been open to invasion by outsiders. A commoner could gain distinction (through great deeds or, apparently, great monetary gifts to the Crown) and be knighted or granted a title. And a commoner could sometimes marry in.

However, “new creations” were sniffed at by the older families. (Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliott notably consoled himself for being dunned by sneering at those inferior new baronetcies.)

And intermarriages between gentry/noble and common could, apparently, go either way—either dragging down the superior or elevating the inferior. But again, in either case, the children of such a match could end in either class, depending on which parent s/he favors and how s/he is reared. In Heyer’s Devil’s Cub, a marriage between a dissipated aristocrat and a woman of no birth and less virtue results in the aristocrat’s permanent degradation and in two daughters. One is semi-adopted by her paternal grandfather and educated at a select seminary; the second is reared wholly by her mother. The first is a lady; the second, a bourgeois whore-to-be.

Or read Heyer’s A Civil Contract. Merchant’s daughter Jenny Chawleigh is raised by her marriage to a viscount to the ton, but everyone knows that she doesn’t really belong. And Jenny suffers under that sting.

But Jenny’s son will belong. Between his noble father’s blood and his vulgar grandfather’s wealth, he’ll be a highly desirable parti when he’s grown. As Harrow-educated Major Darracott in The Unknown Ajax, with noble blood from his father and “gelt” from his mill-owner maternal grandfather, is an excellent “catch” for anyone.

One can even, to some extent, be simply educated upward. This was attempted with Jenny Chawleigh, with some limited success. (Her public manners show no vulgarity, but she continually betrays in her private reactions that she’s not really one of the ton.)

There’s even a Heyer novel (The Foundling) in which a boy, an ironmaster’s son, is being educated to move in higher circles than his father’s. A young duke befriends him, and at the end of the book offers to use his influence to get the teen a place at a public school. There he can be socialized to act like gentry, simply by learning to follow his better-born schoolfellows’ lead. This is portrayed as a more natural and congenial method of assimilation than what poor Tom had endured so far, which was having proper manners and knowledge beaten into him by a private tutor—a bullying, nasty, severe, unsympathetic-to-pranks schoolmaster.

Named Snape.

I think we can infer that JKR is at least familiar with Heyer, and with Heyer’s brand of classism.


Or turn to Austen, whom JKR admired and who had the advantage of setting her stories in the time and society in which she lived and who was praised for realism. In Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie Bennet is the offspring of a mixed marriage between a gentleman and a woman of lower birth —and the resultant unfortunate connections hinder both Lizzie and her older sister from marrying well. But Eliza and Jane, those gentleman’s daughters, themselves behave as gentlewomen and therefore merit being treated as such. Whereas their younger sisters betray that they belong more to their mother’s lineage.

(And then Bingley himself isn’t born into an old family—his father’s fortune derived from trade. But he was educated as a gentleman, and he is properly without occupation.)

The Price family in Mansfield Park is the result of a mésalliance between a gentlewoman and a marine. The woman was degraded by her match, and depending on both their differing natures and their educations, the resulting offspring range the entire gamut between vulgar and exquisitely refined.

And consider the snobbish eponymous Emma—who had to fantasize that the bastard Miss Smith had a noble father in order to consider her worthy of being Emma’s companion. “Harriet’s parentage became known. She proved to be the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been her’s, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment.—Such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch for!—It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman: but what a connexion had she been preparing for Mr. Knightley—or for the Churchills—or even for Mr. Elton!—The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed.” (Emma, Vol. III, Cptr XIX)

So in classism we have a prejudice, based (falsely, I hope we all agree) on “blood.” In my opinion (and that of scientists), there’s no difference between Emma’s blood and Harriet Smith’s, or the Duke of Avon’s and Jenny Chawleigh’s. (Or there wouldn’t be, were any of them real people rather than fictional characters.) Yet Emma and the Duke (and Harriet and Jenny—and to some extent, both authors) BELIEVE that “the blood of gentility” is better than “common blood”.

The first-generation interlopers are considered inferior by some of their social superiors. And they are portrayed as usually acting incorrectly ( “that total want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed by [Lizzie’s mother]” (P&P, Vol II, XII)—which is not at all unlikely with cultural immigrants dealing with different social norms. Eliza’s uncle and aunt, the Gardiners, are the only true “tradesmen” depicted in Austen as behaving convincingly like “people of fashion.” Yet Austen also gives us respectable naval officers—and the navy is therefore decried (by that contemptible snob, Sir Walter) as a “means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of.”(Persuasion, III)

Georgette Heyer, living more in fantasy-land, has not a single low-born character who manages to act like an aristocrat. In those few books where someone seems to manage it, a surprise awaits the reader about that character’s “blood.”

But in both Austen and Heyer, the second and following generations—whether or not they intermarry with their superiors to clear their blood of its taint—are looked upon with a little suspicion (in particular, that they might foist their vulgar relatives off on one). But if they are well-off, properly educated and ACT like gentry (and eschew those “dirty dishes”, their lower-born kin), they are accepted as such.

So either cultural assimilation/education or marrying “up” can eventually remove the taint on lower-class blood. Which is wholly unlike the racist’s “one drop (or one quarter) of bad blood taints the whole line” scenario.

Indeed, Jane Austen’s own position on the class issue seems to mirror the inclusionist faction in the WW—the Weasleys and Dumbledore.

Truly “low” people, servants and tradesmen and mill workers, the real members of the lower classes, are never treated as equals by Austen’s protagonists. A true gentleman or lady would never go out of hir way to harm them, but their sensibilities don’t require the same consideration as ours…. For the most part, they simply don’t exist; they’re entirely outside the view of Austen’s characters.

Austen’s paragon Anne Elliott, in fact, failed utterly to notice when Nurse Rooke, whose stories she’d been enjoying at second-hand for weeks, was the one to escort her to Mrs. Smith in the stead of the landlady or maid. Servants are LITERALLY indistinguishable. Yet it’s inconceivable that Anne would abuse a servant, or even be consciously rude to one.

Similarly, the Weasley/Dumbledore faction considers torturing or killing Muggles to be entirely unacceptable. But invading their homes without permission and Obliviating and Confunding them for one’s convenience is universally taken for granted. In short, one shouldn’t deliberately mistreat a Muggle. But one need never afford “them” the consideration due “us.”

However, persons sprung from the lower classes, but who have bettered themselves by acquiring wealth, education, and polish, should be accepted as all-but-equals by anyone except objectionable snobs. Darcy was wrong to take undue pride in his family’s antiquity, and right to accept Lizzie’s uncle “who lives somewhere near Cheapside” as a valued acquaintance once he knew him. And Lizzie and Jane themselves, and the Bingleys (whose income derived from trade) are worthy to tread the woods of Pemberley. That refinement of pride which claims that unbroken descent from the ancient families is necessary to make someone a true equal, is a vanity which makes its possessor contemptible…. Exactly as Ron Weasley explained about the Malfoys.

By this analogy between JKR and Austen:

Muggles=the vulgar: farmers, tradesmen, mill workers, servants & all the others—almost invisible in canon Austen, even though they comprised most of the actual British population. But they don’t count; they (and their feelings) don’t matter. Any more than we see actual living Muggles matter to any wizard/witch, whatever hir political leanings.

Muggle-borns=first generation self-improved (the Gardiners, Sir William Lucas, Captain Wentworth).

Literal Half-bloods=the Bennets, the Prices (offspring of a marriage between superior/inferior).

Half-bloods sprung from assimilated Muggleborns=second generation improved (the Bingleys, Charlotte Lucas).

Purebloods=pure descendents of “respectable, honourable, and ancient, though [sometimes] untitled, families” —Lady Catherine, Darcy, Sir Walter Elliott.

Darcy and Anne Elliott, in this view, are like Ginny and Ron Weasley, enlightened beings breaking the purity of their family lines to marry, respectively, the equivalent of a half-blood and a Muggleborn.

And the Malfoys’ treatment of half-bloods would to some extent mirror Lady Catherine’s or Sir Walter’s unamiable position: excluding excellent and worthy people as potential mates because their families are not ancient enough (“pure”). They admit them to acquaintanceship (Narcissa calls Snape Lucius’s friend; Lady Catherine admits Elizabeth to her home), but keep them in an inferior place….

Walburga and Bellatrix (and the DE’s in general) have no equivalent in either Austen or Heyer because neither admitted that upper class prejudice could either lead to serious abuse or that their privilege could need violence to enforce it. We do see characters (Mrs. Price’s family, Sir Giles Challoner) who, like the Blacks, cast off their children for making a mésalliance. And the distinction the Malfoys made between accepting half-bloods partially but Muggle-borns not at all is matched by Heyer’s haughty Duke of Avon, who consorted with the French king’s illegitimate sons while scornfully turning his shoulder upon Versailles’ most beautiful, brilliant, and powerful woman, the king’s mistress Madame de Pompadour. She was, after all, born a fish-merchant’s daughter. Sniff.

A better parallel to someone like Walburga might be found such characters as St. Evrémonde in Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, whose casually brutal mistreatment of peasants started a decades-long chain of revenge culminating in Madame Guillotine. And in real history you do have aristocrats who abused the “lower orders” quite horrifically, sometimes for sadistic pleasure (de Sade, remember, was a Marquis), sometimes as a deliberate tool of political oppression, sometimes as a mere matter of course. Countess Bathory comes to mind as a possible model for dear Madam Lestrange.

This reading also makes much more sense of Voldemort’s position vis-à-vis the Purebloods. Tom is not some President Obama suddenly volunteering (and being accepted!) as a leader of the KKK; he’s rather William the Bastard. Or “the Conqueror,” as William preferred to style himself. William was the son of a duke on one side, a tanner’s daughter on the other. And there were many in William’s youth who held his birth and “blood” against him. But by the time he’d become William I of England, his father’s indiscretion and his maternal grandfather’s profession were no longer being, ah, discussed in polite society.

(Although “Lord” Voldemort, unlike William the Bastard, seems to have obscured his “blood” from his later followers, if Bellatrix is to be believed. However, I can perfectly credit that William might have wanted to do the same had the opportunity ever been offered him.)

And offering Lily a chance to join the DE’s (as JKR said in interview Riddle did) was perhaps in effect giving Lily the chance to be another Jeanne du Barry. Jeanne Becu, that, er, seamstress’s daughter, was far too low-born to sleep officially with a king. So Louis XV married her off to an ersatz noble to whitewash her origins, to make it more acceptable to install her at Versailles…. Not that his haughty duchesses actually accepted her, but no one afterwards expected Jeanne to be loyal to the scum from which she’d sprung.

And she was not. Lowborn (lowest-possible-born) Jeanne ended by being executed in the French Revolution for royalist sympathies.

So with regards to adolescent Snape’s understanding of Lily’s best chances for safety, remember that in the French Revolution, when it came to open warfare between the aristos and the sans-culottes, it was the sans-culottes who killed the seamstress’s daughter. While the aristos were on top, she was safe.

Finally, Hermione’s contention that many of Voldemort’s followers were half-bloods “pretending” to be pure now makes sense.

When we looked at DE’s as being some hybrid between the KKK and the Nazi party, it made none. Why on earth would blacks and Jews (even half-blood blacks and Jews) want to join, even were they permitted? And why would Hitler allow, much less invite, a Herzl scion or a Jesse Owens to join him? And insisting that a scion of a known (published in the social pages!) mixed marriage could “pretend” to be pure Aryan? Does not compute, any of it.

But if we look at the DE’s as Tories, upholders of ancient privilege against those who would tear it down—and selected half-bloods as the newest would-be inheritors of that antique privilege—it all comes together. A properly educated half-blood (or even the occasional exceptional Muggle-born) could hope eventually to be accepted—by merit or by marriage. (Eliza marries Darcy, and Captain Wentworth marries the baronet’s daughter, after all.) And even if they are not quite fully accepted, their children can be. Everyone except the highest sticklers, the worst snobs, will accept them if they work hard enough to assimilate….

In fact, if they achieve enough power, even the worst snobs will have to accept them. Just ask the tanner’s grandson, William the Bastard. Or that cloth-merchant’s great-granddaughter, Good Queen Bess.

So the trick is to amass power enough.

Of COURSE the most ambitious half-bloods were drawn to this.

The half-blood DE’s weren’t pretending to be pure. They couldn’t—in a small, mostly closed society everyone knew each other’s origins. They were assimilating, showing their allegiance to the class to which they aspired. Now, Austen’s Bingley didn’t have to use violence to disavow his family’s origins, nor did Darcy enforce his privileged status by having his lackeys flog the peasantry. But… remember that “class warfare” has not always been just a metaphor.

The only thing we’ve ever been told about “Lord” Voldemort’s public programme in the late seventies was Kreacher’s account of Master Regulus’s fanboy enthusiasm: “For years he talked of the Dark Lord, who was going to bring the wizards out of hiding to rule the Muggles and the Muggle-borns…”

In the real world, there have been occasional differences of opinion between the rabble and their “betters” as to whether the “betters” had any actual right to lord it over the rest of us.

Insolent villains (originally villeins) who resisted aristocrats’ claims to power were not actually treated terribly kindly, though it’s been long enough ago that we tend to [want to] forget these things. To take an English example, for preaching the following—not for actions he took—the Lollard priest John Ball was given the most horrific and shameful death in his nation’s repertoire—being drawn, hanged, and quartered:

“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men.”

I do think that “Lord” Voldemort would have taken issue with this sermon as much as did Richard II.

So in saying that pureblood supremacism is more akin to virulent class prejudice than racism, I am not claiming that it’s more benign than racism.

Only different.