Snape’s Redemption

I stumbled across this picture while browsing reddit, so this isn’t a completely random post written years after the conclusion of the Harry Potter series. I mean it is, but it isn’t random to me.

Snape is an interesting character. He’s smart and witty and (for most of the series) he is completely and nearly irredeemably evil. He is irredeemable because, although Snape doesn’t spend the entirety of the books as the villain (even before the grand reveal in the final novel), Harry Potter, the character through the events of the story are filtered never comes to trust him. In the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry accuses Snape of performing some elaborate curse on his broom to kill him, or worse: ruin Gryffindor’s chances to win the House Quidditch Cup.

Then, at the end of the story, Harry, Ron and Hermione learn that Professor Quirrel was performing the curse and it was Snape who saved Harry’s life by performing the necessary counter curse to keep Harry’s broom in the air. Hermione latches onto this, Snape’s first redemptive quality, and internalizes it for the rest of the story. She is the only one of the trio and her belief in Snape is quickly labeled as a naïve trust in all things authorial and professorial. Harry continues to see Snape well within the spectrum evil, even after Snape saves him from Barty Crouch Jr. at the end of the Goblet of Fire and even while Snape is teaching Harry Occulmency to protect his mind from Voldemort in the Order of the Phoenix. Every single one of Harry’s assertions, and everyone else’s suspicions about the Snape’s true nature are confirmed when he kill Albus Dumbledore.

It just goes to show you that you should never ever trust a biased narrator.

Because we eventually learn the truth about Snape, his motivations and his place in the battle between good and evil. And, most importantly, we learn that love was the key to it all. Snape’s love for Lily Potter was what drove him from Voldemort and the Death Eaters. It was what convinced Dumbledore to put his absolute, highest trust in Snape. It is what convinced the Potions professor to die so Harry Potter could die…and then live, again.

And thus, finally, Severus Snape is wholly redeemed. One of Harry’s children is named in his honor. Fans clamor around the hero they once reviled. You see, he was a double agent the whole time! His soul, quite unlike his greying, frayed underpants, is in fact pure and clean. And so the people draw the kinds of pictures seen above, of Severus slouching against the Mirror of Erised with his one true dream, his only love trapped in the glass behind him, immortalizing what was once an unimaginable perspective of Severus Snape.

Wrap a bow on that folks, because that’s the moral of this story. Love conquers all. Lily’s love for Harry protected him from Voldemort’s killing curse. Snape’s love for Lily allowed Harry to avenge Voldemort’s death. Rowling wants us to cheer for him.

But I still hate him.

In my eyes, Snape is still that slimy, jealous prick who I reviled for the first six novels of the series. His story has an added twist and it makes it particularly tragic and even sympathetic because imagine loving someone and never being able to requite that love. Imagine watching your childhood crush date, marry and have a child with your childhood bully. Then imagine joining an organization of pure evil, pitting yourself against the single person you ever claimed to love. Imagine standing by as your comrades kill thousands, torment millions of innocent wizards and defenseless muggles, again as the one person you love struggles to fight against you.

Sure, it was a mistake. He let the spite he felt for James to consume him. He allowed that hatred to overpower the love he harbored for Lily. Then Severus spent the rest of his life in an attempt to fix it. And maybe that’s the point. He fought for the redemption of an entirely irredeemable act because of a love that was once so easily squashed by hatred. And we are convinced he is redeemed?

He can’t be redeemed, not in my eyes. Snape was as much, if not more, motivated by guilt and regret as he was by love. Lily was gilded by the memories the two shared and precious to Snape. But their relationship never survived through adolescence. One of the memories Harry sees during the Order of the Phoenix is one of the final interactions we see between Snape and Lily. After Lily convinces James to extinguish his Levicorpus spell, Snape shouts at her. He calls her a filthy mudblood. And he storms away.

People can talk about mistakes. People can talk about getting lost in a moment. People can convince themselves that change is possible. But you cannot persuade me to think that Snape does not absolutely hate with a boiling passion Lily in that moment. He hurls this horrible epithet at the only one he loves and then he retreats to a place he doesn’t come back from until her death.

What makes Snape so horrible to me, what makes him irredeemable (as I have so many times called him) is that he gave up. He didn’t love Lily, at least not enough to actually love her, not enough to keep her away from James, not enough to protect her from Voldemort. He convinced himself, possibly after a long and drawn out mental exercise, that he hated her, that he couldn’t love her, that she was exactly what he called her down by the lake, that she was a filthy, vermin mudblood.

That is his sin. He didn’t kill Lily Potter. He didn’t kill James either, although he must have wanted to. He isn’t even guilty of murdering Dumbledore (unless you haven’t finished Deathly Hallows). He gave up on love. He gave up on himself. And when he realized the grave error that he had made, it was much too late to make it right.