Quote from Naaga on August 8, 2023, 2:29 am

Source: Snape and Class

Do you think Snape hate has increased since we found out he was poor?

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I think there’s a number of reasons, but yes, I think it’s a possibility.  We can quickly compare and contrast how Draco and Snape are perceived by fandom, or even Regulus and Snape.  I suspect that the poverty that the Snape family were steeped in is too difficult for some readers to wholly grasp, whereas perhaps it is far easier to admire and aspire towards the riches and decadence of the Blacks and the Malfoys.

Maybe it’s also easier for some modern readers to imagine the psychological impact of not agreeing with the politics of your parents than it is to imagine the undercurrent of domestic violence and living in a destitute environment in a dilapidated house.  Additionally, there are uncomfortable messages for some from Snape - this dirty, unloved, dishevelled child is as powerful and as capable as any other wizard, and given the opportunity, he flourishes.  Depending on your class, you may read Snape’s success as a powerful message of triumph over adversity - or perhaps, a dangerous message about competition from the underclass.

Still, I suspect the real issue is generational - and not necessarily generational from Harry starting at Hogwarts in 1991 and us discussing this almost 30 years later, but generational from JK.  I’ve spoken a lot previously about how her depiction is of teachers from the mid 70s put into a book set in the early 90s and how that doesn’t wholly translate to the kid of the late 10s.

With that in mind, I think her notion of a love story is also mired in history.  For someone of JK’s age when she started writing, unrequited love was seen in positive terms - it wasn’t meant to be creepy.  Love is a huge theme throughout the series, and the idea that Snape - who had walked down this horribly dark path and was outwardly a mean and nasty and spiteful man - would completely change his ideology and allegiance due to his unrequited love for Lily was supposed to have been indicative of the power of love.

But we read Potter now with modern eyes, and unrequited love has not aged particularly well.  It seems rare that people genuinely ‘quietly love from afar’ - and instead, fandom insists on applying traits to the character which don’t exist in the text.  For instance, there’s no indication of Snape being a stalker or a creep, there’s no indication that he wanted a sexual relationship with Lily, there’s no indication that he bothered her or harassed her.  He isn’t a ‘nice guy’ or an ‘incel’ - but some readers can’t find the trope that they’re expecting, so they apply others to the series, even if they don’t quite fit.

So, I think the author and the readership are in conflict.  The author wrote a tale of genuine unrequited love, and the readers are trying to view it through modern frameworks, and they draw incorrect conclusions about the character’s motives.

I suspect this is exacerbated by the readership not ageing with the series.  Everyone who read Potter whilst it was being published had to wait for the next book to be written, but these days, they’re binge-read.  I think that lack of distance between each book (and the subsequent lack of maturity, because you’re reading the next one within a week, and not waiting three years, so you can’t have matured further) means that many struggle to separate Snape from being a cipher for their mean teacher at school to becoming the secret hero that he is.

I think that’s my real conclusion.  The problem is that this is an old text which is being read as if it is modern - and that leads to a clash between reader expectation and authorial intent.

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It is interesting, because I wonder when unrequitted love has begun to get a creepy thing, I am millenial and was in love unrequittedly twice in the mid to late 2000nds, at the time from my experience, it was not yet considered the same kind of creepy as it is now, where even to dream about someone is considered sexual assault for some People, BUT for a person like Snape or myself, who are not good Looking or popular, WAS considered creepy, because the Person who loved was creepy, nowdays it has a more General Notion.

An other thing is also again the class thing, because as someone who has climbed downwards, I read his destinity as quite negatively, because it reads that you need a Network and the upper class People to succeed no matter how brilliant you are, that as someone from working class (or somone with other issues such as Disability (Lupin) or mental illness or whatever else, you have no chance to so appropriately, like Snapes Network are Death Eaters, and he dies at the end. But I am Snape fan so.

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Ah, your comment on the class aspect is something I do agree with and have mulled on before.  Here’s what I’ve said previously on it - you might find it of interest, as it seems to align closely with your thoughts:

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The thing that grips my heart when it comes to Snape is that juxtaposition between what he outwardly achieved as an adult and what Lily would’ve thought of his achievements, and how he came to achieve those things.

By this, I mean that if Lily had discovered at 13 that her best friend would become one of Hogwarts’ youngest teachers, Head of House and Headmaster, I think she’d have been equally astonished, proud and impressed.

In fact, if she knew that he was on that trajectory, there’s even the chance she may not have dropped him, because the fact that he becomes that person on paper means that all of her fears must’ve been unfounded.  It justifies her interest in him to other people (”What?  Sev?  No!  He’s going to be Headmaster, remember?!”) - he is no longer a Dark Arts obsessed greasy oddball; he is a boy with potential.

Now, the irony with Snape is that he would have been unlikely to attain those positions on merit, and yet during his tenure as a teacher, we see that the kids gain good grades, Slytherin has a period of dominance with the House Cup, and his Slytherins seem fond of him.  Without opening up the can of worms about his teaching style (really, that’s not what this post is about) - he is canonically a successful teacher.

And it reminds me of this:

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould

Because in an AU where Severus Snape does not become a Death Eater, let us not pretend; Severus Snape does not become one of the youngest wizards to teach at Hogwarts.  And yet, as we see, he was clearly capable - and that potential would’ve been lost.

And the more I mull on Snape, the more the fact that he apparently succeeded bothered me.  It’s not because working class people can’t succeed, but because there are pitfalls that people from other classes do not fall into.  So, the fact that Snape manages to transcend his social class is astonishing on the surface - the fact that he goes from one of the lowest in society to being a respected teacher at a boarding school…and he even passes to the untrained eye as being a pureblood.  That’s incredible.

And when you see Snape’s story slowly unfold, it gradually makes more and more sense.  There’s the oddities in his presentation - the spitting on the ground, the greasy hair, the idea that he was “another” pureblood’s lapdog.  Then there’s the revelations - that he was a Death Eater, and his family was poor, and his childhood was unhappy, and he was brutally bullied by two of the most popular purebloods. …but even so, people didn’t quite grasp the class issue (there were a lot of thoughts pointing at a pureblood family who fell out of favour, lost money through gambling etc - a family who were high in society who fell down, not someone starting from the bottom).

Finally, the truth outs - he’s a halfblood, with a Muggle parent, who grew up dirt poor in Muggle Britain, and he’s absolutely the bottom of the scale.  And then it all fits together, because you realise that he didn’t earn his place at Hogwarts on merit - he was gifted his place at Hogwarts because it was for the war effort.  (Sirius has this very lament when he wonders why Dumbledore would employ Snape; he’s wrapped up in the Dark Arts / Death Eater issue, but it doesn’t occur to Sirius at any point that perhaps Snape was the best person for the job, or someone who could be trusted…that someone who had been in such a valued position for so long might’ve actually gained his place on merit.)

So the spectre of class looms large again.  Snape appears to be a poster boy for aspiration - the idea that even the lowest of the low can become the richest and most successful.  But once you realise his full story, you become horribly aware that he only made it to the position he did through being useful - not on merit, not on ability, not because he had opportunity to prove his skill and worth.

And the more that I think about that, the more it bothers me.  Because Snape had the potential to achieve the sort of social standing that would make him someone that Lily would bother with - but because of his early social standing, he probably wouldn’t ever have got there.  Their friendship was always incompatible, and the gulf was too large for them to get over.  “You’ve chosen your way,” she says…which would’ve been easier to take, had there ever been any choice for him at all.

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Wonderful meta, what also occurs to me is that there are similar issues with other characters (except for Hermione) but Hermiones destiny unfolds in Cursed Child, written long after the original series. Lupin can only be accepted, because he is protected by two popular upper class purebloods and the very respectable Dumbledore. And yet he does not achieve anything in life.

Moreover climbing the class ladder seems to punished/seen negatively in the Franchise (at least as far as the books and pottermore goes)

Umbridges ambition appears to be out of place, because she is evil and sadistic. Plus, she too falls into the pitfalls real purebloods would not fall into.

A similar issue can be seen with Percy, whose ambitions are punished and who at the end of the day gets a job similar to his fathers.

I do not think that this is what JKR meant, BUT at the times the book screams: DO NOT CLIMB THE CLASS LADDER it is bad and evil and impossible.

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Yes, excellent points - especially with regards to Umbridge.

Lupin is a halfblood, and when he loses his pureblood support (James dies, Sirius is imprisoned), he goes into freefall.  He is ‘rescued’ by Dumbledore in PoA - but just as with Snape, this is solely because he is useful and not due to his abilities.

There’s a wonderful parallel between Lupin and Snape at Hogwarts - both have a secret which may see them shunned (lycanthropy, Death Eater past), and yet both are demonstrably talented teachers.  Unlike Snape, Lupin serves his purpose within that year, so he is let go and is not held onto for longer - and although fandom often likes to whine that Lupin’s departure is Snape’s responsibility, the weight truly lies with Dumbledore, who chose to hire him in a position where he could not stay longer than a year - and who did not choose to help him by hiring him sooner.

I agree with your conclusion, in both ways - in the message that’s being communicated, and that it is unintentional.  I think the Malfoys and the Blacks in particular are fantastic examples of darker characters that fandom rushes to embrace, forgive, and understand - and I wonder if some of this fits with the idea that society has long been taught to ‘respect your betters’.  In contrast, Snape is a commoner, an oik - a man undeserving of the position that he attempted to claim, so deriding his actions and spitting on his legacy is justified.

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Umbridge’s class-hopping is directly portrayed as evil, in both the books and expanded canon—her sadistic revelry in authority, her driving her father out of his job because she was embarrassed to be related to a mere maintenance worker, her lies and false claim of family heirlooms to augment her background, her devotion to preserving the power structure and the Ministry’s authority at great moral expense up to and including an assassination attempt on a fifteen-year-old boy (the Wizengamot was visibly surprised at Harry’s ability to produce a corporeal patronus, an ability revealed only to Dumbledore, Lupin, Sirius, Ron, and Hermione in text, which means Umbridge didn’t know Harry to be capable of defending himself against the weapon she chose) … in all honesty there are strong parallels with Bellatrix in terms of her fanatical devotion to her chosen employer and the moral depths she’s willing—and happy—to plumb in that man’s service.

Snape’s class rise, meanwhile, suffers a sort of agency theft, mostly via Dumbledore. It is very much the “I am proud of you” type dismissal we see at the climax of Captain Marvel, only claimed by the narrative rather than by the mentor figure: Snape’s rise to authority, rank, and power is presented as granted to him by Albus Dumbledore, and the fact that he’s actually worthy of same is discreetly kicked aside as irrelevant.

(And, indeed, it is not so much of a class rise, only a rank rise: if Snape has attained pseudonobility, he’s still impoverished pseudonobility, in one form or another: he maintains residence in his childhood home, it’s still dingy, dark, distinctly unhomelike, though this may be a reflection of his emotional deficits rather than financial lack—the impression we draw is that he is poorly suited to self-care and he doesn’t know how to make a comfortable living space or doesn’t think he deserves one. But the teachers are not portrayed as anything resembling rich except for Slughorn, who has attained his wealth (again, in a social-climbing fashion) by attaching himself to a multitude of rising-star students and reaping the rewards of influence; indeed, everyone on the staff seems to be sober, rustic, frugal, or sensible, the type of people who will accept and be content with not much pay; Dumbledore with his brilliant robes, collection of devices, and researching-alchemist history is an outlier, but he’s the headmaster—and pureblood, and rich.)

Honestly, Severus’ entire story is bounded by a sort of co-option of his agency and his talents, with people again and again “granting” him his own power, partially to have the use of it, partially in order to keep him from claiming it himself in a way that might let him get ideas above his station.

• The alleged but probable “lapdog” relationship with Lucius as Severus’ patron.
• The lifting of halfblood Severus to a high position in the Death Eaters.
• The hiring of repentant Death Eater Severus to teach at Hogwarts.
• The continued high favoring of returned penitent traitor/abandoner Severus to a key position in Voldemort’s favor.
• The promotion of Severus to Headmaster, seemingly orchestrated by both Dumbledore and Voldemort.
• His position in Umbridge’s regime as a favored, trusted ally (this one, notably, revoked hard the instant he fails to produce unreasonable (and impossible) results to an order—the same “I made you, I can destroy you” message is very strong here).
• His position as Albus’ spy/agent/secret weapon, redeemed Death Eater, “Dumbledore’s man,” in both practical and emotional terms: Dumbledore provided the evidence and the patronage that freed him from legal charges, and Dumbledore chose to make a servant of him rather than kill him, and Dumbledore chose to demand his obedience when Severus balked at a task to which he was set (killing Dumbledore and appearing to sever ties with everyone in the Light).
• His personal esteem by Albus Dumbledore (”you disgust me” becomes “I sometimes think we Sort too soon”).
• Even his friendship with Lily is presented thus, with dark, dirty, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Sev watching bright, shining Lily, who grants him her favor. (He fights with Petunia, another noted social climber, for Lily’s affections throughout their youth, until Petunia rejects Lily for climbing where she can’t follow (magic) and devotes herself to normalcy, then Vernon Dursley, then Dudley.

Practically everyone who esteems him in the story is either bestowing the power of their regard on him or following the lead of someone else who has done so. Lucius, Voldemort, Dumbledore, Umbridge, and even Lily, if not deliberately on her part, do some degree of placing him on a pedestal of their own making, and all of them possess the power to shatter that pedestal and dump him back on the ground should they so wish (and Lily does this—”you’ve chosen your way” resolves to “I can’t fix you”/”I can’t redeem you” with a strong hint of “I don’t know what I expected”).

Class stratification runs strongly on lines of assertion that the higher-ups are better, smarter, stronger, more moral, and otherwise more deserving, but under that run equally strong lines of assertion that only the higher-ups are allowed to succeed by those merits. The idea that any lower-class child, or laborer, or slave, could be as great as Einstein if given the opportunity is very carefully kept a hypothetical, and should such a person ever assert those merits openly, they are either fiercely suppressed or firmly co-opted; their success is the exception that proves the rule, and their success is made to serve some existing interest rather than that of their own, especially when that might be too consistent with the interest of their fellows in the slums and sweatshops and fields.

After all, stratified societies need an underclass, which means they need a means of creating and keeping one. The occasional “misfiled” genius, if accidentally allowed to slip through to accessing their powers, is packed into a loftier space as if given a gift, with the altitude disguising repackaging as promotion; the shackles are replaced with jewelry still functional as chains, and that person’s effort is carefully directed to serve the interests of the class of which they are now provisionally a part, which includes co-opting, if not suppressing, any more geniuses.

(Einstein is a noteworthy choice as the subject of Stephen Jay Gould’s quote up there, as a person who fled from a regime that would have preferred him as bones in a mass grave to the great and good living human he was.)

Voldemort’s goals are easily recognizable as fascism, one of the more extreme of the highly-stratified systems, with a power structure of

• Leader
• High-ranking officials
• Favored masses
• Provisional masses
• Vermin

which can be further simplified to

• Leader
• Subordinates
• Targets

with a great deal of mutability going on as to the status of the subordinates, who can be lumped in with the targets at the drop of a hat, the structure’s ideal being a host of devoted followers who gave the leader the power to define their worth because they liked how he was defining it, and whose actions are now shadow-coerced by the threat that that will change if they fail to be the very picture of pure, devoted followers.

Here, we have Voldemort at the top of the power structure, having functionally claimed the legacy of the agreeable-but-departed Salazar Slytherin.

Below him are the Death Eaters, and possibly certain agreeable Ministry officials.

Under that are the purebloods, those who can claim pureblood status or ancestry, and under that the halfbloods, who are acceptable, if not ideal, under the rhetoric, due to their magic having come from an acceptable source.

We see in Deathly Hallows how swiftly the move was made to treat muggleborns as vermin: the propaganda pamphlets, the humiliating hearings, the theft of their wands, the threat of execution by Dementor, the reduction of them to homeless beggars in Diagon Alley, and, notably here, the refusal to let them prove themselves magical—because they are magical, and everyone knows it, and the truth of it is actively destroyed so that the oppressors may pretend the oppressed unworthy in the hopes that belief in their unworthiness will solidify enough to replace fact.

Severus is an outsider almost everywhere he goes. His family, his town, his school, his muggle world, his magical world, his first political affiliation, his second political affiliation. Everywhere, he is either dependent on someone to raise him up, and everywhere that doesn’t acknowledge such a person’s reach, he is forced to stay the least and lowliest.

Examples of the latter are his family, the Marauders, and the Order of the Phoenix after Dumbledore’s death. This is not an abstract threat, or a situation he’s won free of, but a recurring source of trauma throughout his life; he is never removed from the fear that he may be cast down again:

• His parents are some mix of neglectful and abusive.
• James and Sirius actively torment, harass, and assault him; we see James, in the text, reject (and in fact, act with great hostility towards) Lily’s advocation and promotion of Severus.
• We can infer that Snape faced severe legal consequences after Voldemort’s downfall, perhaps even spending time in Azkaban pre-trial; it is very clear to him how the wizarding world would discard him.

Dumbledore’s order to publicly murder him, leaving no one aware of his true allegiance, is a huge demand. A massive sacrifice, in fact, not inconsistent with the sorts we see having great power in other contexts, such as Lily’s death choice protecting her son from the killing curse and causing Voldemort’s first downfall. A delayed punishment consistent with what Severus himself might have felt he deserved for his part in Lily’s death, withheld then and delivered now when he’s no longer suicidal, when he has built something of his life he cares for.

(Here is another recurring theme, that of leniency or forgiveness followed up by over-severe punishment later on, done by many characters in the books, but this essay is long enough as it is.)

This demand really drives home the nature of Severus Snape’s achievements. He has no power here—Albus Dumbledore is demanding the sacrifice of everything Severus has been given so far, while revealing the looming loss of that small fraction of what Albus promised Severus in the first place and persuaded him to accept in lieu of full payment. Albus Dumbledore gave Severus all he has, and Albus Dumbledore can and does take it away.

Voldemort actually takes second fiddle here, with his discarding of Severus as a thoughtless, unnecessary sacrifice despite believing him the most faithful and useful and competent of his servants only depriving Severus of his life, which has already been stripped of near every meaning; Severus dies begging Harry Potter for one small thing: a glimpse of Lily Evans’ green eyes as he slips away into death, having lost or sacrificed everything else he cared for in the world.

Part of the attraction of the character is that, in spite of all this maneuvering of power players around him, Severus really is exceedingly formidable—brilliant, strong, powerful, dedicated, disciplined, devoted, defiant; he made himself his own master despite living his whole life in chains of one make or another, and one is compelled to wonder what a mark he would make on the world if given the true opportunity.

“Prince” as his maternal surname was well-chosen.

Lesser men have made themselves kings.