"By you, I was properly humbled": the Reformation of Lily's Suitors (Part One)
I posted this on Snapedom in 2008 or so; my apologies to those who have already read it.
A comparison of Pride and Prejudice and JKR’s romances between James/ Lily and Severus/Lily.
Like many fans, I assumed before DH (back in my innocent youth, when I was willing to accept what JKR said about her characters, rather than minutely examining what she showed) that James as a boy might have been a bully and over privileged jerk, but that he’d grown out of it before Lily accepted his suit. I assumed that Snape’s Worst Memory had been James’s nadir, that the werewolf “prank” followed it, and that the realization that he and his friends had almost killed someone had sobered James. (I’d also assumed that James had in fact rescued Severus at least in part because, like Harry with Dudley and the Dementors, he was too decent to stand by and let even an enemy die when he could do something. Remus’s assurance that James had rescued Snape “at great risk to his life” had assured that parallel for me-until years later when I realized that James had always had the option of turning into his stag form and saving himself.)
So I accepted what I thought was Rowling’s line about James: that pre-prank, James had been a bullying idiot, but that post-Prank, James straightened up, stopped hexing people for fun, and became responsible and virtuous enough to merit being made Head Boy and winning Lily’s love.
Then JKR decided to destroy that reading by making SWM follow the prank.
So if the Marauders’ near-manslaughter had no effect whatsoever on James’s attitude and behavior, to what were we supposed to credit his supposed reformation? Why did Rowling expect us to believe that a sadistic bully whom she showed us torturing someone for giggles and whom she told us repeatedly endangered the lives of innocents for thrills became a hero worthy of Saint Lily? What did she think the mechanism of his change was? And Rowling is obviously confident that she did show us enough to make James’s reformation plausible; she expects her readers to just ‘get’ that James became one of the heroes of his age.
Well, I think we’re supposed to understand that James, like Severus (too late), was Reformed by the Love of a Good Woman. And JKR thinks that she showed us the endpoints of the process and gave us the model she followed, so that her readers should just connect the dots.
JKR has mentioned being a fan of Jane Austen. I think that James was supposed to be a rewrite of Austen’s best-known hero, Mr. Darcy, and that (lower-born, but it’s SO rude to harp on that) Lily’s rejection of him in SWM was supposed to be James’s Pride and Prejudice moment.
“The turn of your countenance I shall never forget, as you said that I could not have addressed you in any possible way, that would induce you to accept me…. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.” (Mr. Darcy, P&P, Volume III, Chapter XVI)
The Lizzie-Darcy romance, shorn of Austen’s sparkling prose, is: Proud rich boy meets lower-born (but still acceptable to all but the worst snobs in his class) girl. Boy alienates girl with his arrogance. Girl is impertinent in response; boy falls for her. Boy proposes. Girl rejects boy with stinging criticism. Girl finds out that her own prejudice had led her to wrong boy. Boy, humbled, changes his arrogant behavior; girl is touched and flattered by the change. Boy secretly saves someone he despises for the sake of girl’s peace of mind. Girl falls hard for boy, who still loves her. He approaches her again, this time without presumption. And they both live happily ever after.
*
Or, at any rate, they marry.
*
Mr. Darcy’s flaw was unregulated pride; the misbehavior resulting from that flaw was behaving with no consideration to those he considered beneath him. His reformation occurred off-stage; his turning point came not when he heard Lizzie’s criticism, but when he finally accepted it and applied himself to changing his ways. “Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive how they have tortured me-though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.”(Mr. Darcy, P&P, III: XVI)
Here is Darcy’s full confession to Lizzie of his errors, after months of self-examination:
“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son, (for many years an only child) I was spoilt by my parents, who though good themselves, … allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own … circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.” (P&P, III:XVI)
So. Was James Potter supposed to be a modern Fitzwilliam Darcy? Spoiled only son in a rich and well-born family, check. Blessed in addition with above average looks and talents, check. “Taught what was right… given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit,” check, per JKR. (James was, after all, always on what JKR assures us was the “right” side regarding those delicate questions of sorting into Gryffindor vs. Slytherin, pureblood politics, and Dark magic, even while he strutted around Hogwarts felling other children left and right with his hexes.) Surprised and chagrined when the lower-born girl turned him down, check. Secretly saved someone he despised who was connected to the girl (James knew full well that Severus at least had been Lily’s friend), check. Changed his behavior for the girl’s sake, check.
And Lily’s equally obviously modeled on Lizzie. She’s both of lower birth than her suitor and nominally his equal according to all but the worst snobs (she’s a powerful witch, if a Muggleborn, as Lizzie’s a gentleman’s daughter); she’s easily superior to her “better-born” rivals in talent and intelligence (Head Girl). Lily’s manners, like Lizzie’s, were sportive, lively, playful-and impertinent, but charmingly so.
“Now be sincere: did you admire me for my impertinence?” “For the liveliness of your mind, I did.” (P&P, III: XVIII)
“Vivacious, you know. Charming girl…. Very cheeky answers I used to get back too. (Slughorn on Lily, HBP, IV)
And, of course, both Lily and Lizzie rejected their suitors with the utmost disdain, as though “insensible to the compliment of such a man’s affection.” (P&P, II: XI)
Here’s Lizzie refusing Darcy, and his reaction:
“You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.” Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. (P&P, II: XI)
And here’s Lily refusing James, and his reaction:
“I wouldn’t go out with you if it was a choice between you and the giant squid,” said Lily.
…
“What is it with her?” said James, trying and failing to look as though this was a throwaway question of no real importance to him. (OotP, SWM)
Rowling’s language is markedly less elegant than Austen’s, but the parallel is exact.
So I think Rowling gave us the beginning (or middle) in SWM, gave us the ending (“Reader, I married him,” to quote another classic), told us through Sirius and Remus that James had “deflated his head” to win Lily, and just expected us to fill in the gaps. The hero was humbled; the heroine realized that the hero had been a better man all along than she’d been willing to give him credit for. Every reader already knows this storyline. So Rowling felt no need to SHOW us James’s reformation, or what made Lily decide that James was a better person than she had previously thought him to be.
Moreover, since Lily did decide in James’s favor, so too should the readers. We all know, after all, that Lizzie’s prejudice against Darcy had led her astray in judging him; her reassessment (once Darcy had deflated his head a bit) that he was a worthy partner was correct. So Rowling didn’t need to show us James becoming a good and virtuous man: his winning Lily was all the proof we should need.
Finally, if Lily is supposed to be Lizzie, that makes sense of Rowling’s interview assertion that Lily could possibly have loved and chosen Severus. Because Lizzie, in canon, acknowledged but was unmoved by Darcy’s wealth, good looks, social status, and even intelligence (though she could not have loved someone she disdained as her intellectual inferior). Instead, Lizzie’s first preference was for a talented man of inferior birth to her own and no money at all. She was weaned of that preference only when she became convinced that her first choice, Wickham, held moral standards that were unacceptable.
If Lily were a Lizzie, then, so too must Lily have been unswayed by James’s surface attractions, and been attracted only when James had established his MORAL superiority to her other suitor. And Lizzie’s reason for coming to love Darcy (well after she’d decided that Darcy was worthy of her general approbation) was explicitly her gratitude for his loving her enough to change in response to her criticisms:
“But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude.-Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection…. Such a change in a man of so much pride, excited not only astonishment but gratitude-for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed.” (P&P, III: II)
So had Severus (James’s equal in being “a man of so much pride,” if not in wealth, looks, or social status) changed in time, attended to Lily’s criticisms instead of giving up after her stinging rejection and allying himself with the Death Eaters, obviously Lily might have loved him instead.
Indeed, Severus in canon might even have been Lily’s Wickham, her lower-born but talented first choice-though there’s little canon support for the contention that Lily ever found Severus sexually attractive (one blush when he looked at her “intently”, which might as easily have been embarrassment as reciprocal sexual awareness). Still, he was at least her acknowledged “best friend” during the period that she was overtly scorning James. If so, like Wickham, Severus insisted on proving himself unworthy of her.
There’s a further parallel between Wickham/Severus and Darcy/James besides that both Wickham and Snape proved themselves ultimately unworthy of a good woman’s affections. Darcy had to save Lydia’s good name to save Lizzie’s reputation and peace of mind. He forced the marriage between Lydia and Wickham, paid up Wickham’s debts and settled money upon her, and left Lizzie’s happy sister to “all the claims of reputation which her marriage had given her.” (P&P, III, XIX)
Darcy did this with absolutely no wish whatever of saving Wickham. But save Wickham he did: from debtor’s prison and from permanent infamy. Helping Wickham was the unpleasant consequence of saving others: Lydia from the consequences of her impulsive folly, Lizzie from an unmerited on her part, but overwhelming and probably permanent, loss of family reputation.
Similarly, James Potter saved Severus from the werewolf, not for Severus’s sake, but because James had to in order to save those he DID care for. Saving Severus was a unfortunate side effect of saving Sirius from his impulsive folly in setting Snape up to be killed, and Remus from being exposed as a werewolf. And James clearly scorned Severus as much (or more) after the rescue as before-as Darcy did Wickham.
[In one particular, however, Severus is more like another Austen villain, Willoughby of Sense & Sensibility, than Wickham. Austen’s readers never see Wickham mourn his (deserved) loss of Lizzie more than casually. Willoughby, on the contrary, betrayed his love Marianne-and then grieved (though not as extravagantly as the Half-Blood Prince) over his self-inflicted loss, readers are told, to the very end of his days. And when Willoughby believed that his betrayal had brought the woman he still loved into danger of death, he took himself to his enemy to confess and to make what poor amends he could:
“Tell me honestly”-a deeper glow overspreading his cheeks-“do you think me most a knave or a fool?” (Willoughby in S&S, XILIV)
Severus’s fans and detractors are still debating that question regarding Snape’s joining the DE’s.
*
So that’s the model Rowling was following, and she thought the parallels were perfectly plain.
A comparison of Pride and Prejudice and JKR’s romances between James/ Lily and Severus/Lily.
Like many fans, I assumed before DH (back in my innocent youth, when I was willing to accept what JKR said about her characters, rather than minutely examining what she showed) that James as a boy might have been a bully and over privileged jerk, but that he’d grown out of it before Lily accepted his suit. I assumed that Snape’s Worst Memory had been James’s nadir, that the werewolf “prank” followed it, and that the realization that he and his friends had almost killed someone had sobered James. (I’d also assumed that James had in fact rescued Severus at least in part because, like Harry with Dudley and the Dementors, he was too decent to stand by and let even an enemy die when he could do something. Remus’s assurance that James had rescued Snape “at great risk to his life” had assured that parallel for me-until years later when I realized that James had always had the option of turning into his stag form and saving himself.)
So I accepted what I thought was Rowling’s line about James: that pre-prank, James had been a bullying idiot, but that post-Prank, James straightened up, stopped hexing people for fun, and became responsible and virtuous enough to merit being made Head Boy and winning Lily’s love.
Then JKR decided to destroy that reading by making SWM follow the prank.
So if the Marauders’ near-manslaughter had no effect whatsoever on James’s attitude and behavior, to what were we supposed to credit his supposed reformation? Why did Rowling expect us to believe that a sadistic bully whom she showed us torturing someone for giggles and whom she told us repeatedly endangered the lives of innocents for thrills became a hero worthy of Saint Lily? What did she think the mechanism of his change was? And Rowling is obviously confident that she did show us enough to make James’s reformation plausible; she expects her readers to just ‘get’ that James became one of the heroes of his age.
Well, I think we’re supposed to understand that James, like Severus (too late), was Reformed by the Love of a Good Woman. And JKR thinks that she showed us the endpoints of the process and gave us the model she followed, so that her readers should just connect the dots.
JKR has mentioned being a fan of Jane Austen. I think that James was supposed to be a rewrite of Austen’s best-known hero, Mr. Darcy, and that (lower-born, but it’s SO rude to harp on that) Lily’s rejection of him in SWM was supposed to be James’s Pride and Prejudice moment.
“The turn of your countenance I shall never forget, as you said that I could not have addressed you in any possible way, that would induce you to accept me…. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.” (Mr. Darcy, P&P, Volume III, Chapter XVI)
The Lizzie-Darcy romance, shorn of Austen’s sparkling prose, is: Proud rich boy meets lower-born (but still acceptable to all but the worst snobs in his class) girl. Boy alienates girl with his arrogance. Girl is impertinent in response; boy falls for her. Boy proposes. Girl rejects boy with stinging criticism. Girl finds out that her own prejudice had led her to wrong boy. Boy, humbled, changes his arrogant behavior; girl is touched and flattered by the change. Boy secretly saves someone he despises for the sake of girl’s peace of mind. Girl falls hard for boy, who still loves her. He approaches her again, this time without presumption. And they both live happily ever after.
*
Or, at any rate, they marry.
*
Mr. Darcy’s flaw was unregulated pride; the misbehavior resulting from that flaw was behaving with no consideration to those he considered beneath him. His reformation occurred off-stage; his turning point came not when he heard Lizzie’s criticism, but when he finally accepted it and applied himself to changing his ways. “Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive how they have tortured me-though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.”(Mr. Darcy, P&P, III: XVI)
Here is Darcy’s full confession to Lizzie of his errors, after months of self-examination:
“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son, (for many years an only child) I was spoilt by my parents, who though good themselves, … allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own … circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.” (P&P, III:XVI)
So. Was James Potter supposed to be a modern Fitzwilliam Darcy? Spoiled only son in a rich and well-born family, check. Blessed in addition with above average looks and talents, check. “Taught what was right… given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit,” check, per JKR. (James was, after all, always on what JKR assures us was the “right” side regarding those delicate questions of sorting into Gryffindor vs. Slytherin, pureblood politics, and Dark magic, even while he strutted around Hogwarts felling other children left and right with his hexes.) Surprised and chagrined when the lower-born girl turned him down, check. Secretly saved someone he despised who was connected to the girl (James knew full well that Severus at least had been Lily’s friend), check. Changed his behavior for the girl’s sake, check.
And Lily’s equally obviously modeled on Lizzie. She’s both of lower birth than her suitor and nominally his equal according to all but the worst snobs (she’s a powerful witch, if a Muggleborn, as Lizzie’s a gentleman’s daughter); she’s easily superior to her “better-born” rivals in talent and intelligence (Head Girl). Lily’s manners, like Lizzie’s, were sportive, lively, playful-and impertinent, but charmingly so.
“Now be sincere: did you admire me for my impertinence?” “For the liveliness of your mind, I did.” (P&P, III: XVIII)
“Vivacious, you know. Charming girl…. Very cheeky answers I used to get back too. (Slughorn on Lily, HBP, IV)
And, of course, both Lily and Lizzie rejected their suitors with the utmost disdain, as though “insensible to the compliment of such a man’s affection.” (P&P, II: XI)
Here’s Lizzie refusing Darcy, and his reaction:
“You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.” Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. (P&P, II: XI)
And here’s Lily refusing James, and his reaction:
“I wouldn’t go out with you if it was a choice between you and the giant squid,” said Lily.
…
“What is it with her?” said James, trying and failing to look as though this was a throwaway question of no real importance to him. (OotP, SWM)
Rowling’s language is markedly less elegant than Austen’s, but the parallel is exact.
So I think Rowling gave us the beginning (or middle) in SWM, gave us the ending (“Reader, I married him,” to quote another classic), told us through Sirius and Remus that James had “deflated his head” to win Lily, and just expected us to fill in the gaps. The hero was humbled; the heroine realized that the hero had been a better man all along than she’d been willing to give him credit for. Every reader already knows this storyline. So Rowling felt no need to SHOW us James’s reformation, or what made Lily decide that James was a better person than she had previously thought him to be.
Moreover, since Lily did decide in James’s favor, so too should the readers. We all know, after all, that Lizzie’s prejudice against Darcy had led her astray in judging him; her reassessment (once Darcy had deflated his head a bit) that he was a worthy partner was correct. So Rowling didn’t need to show us James becoming a good and virtuous man: his winning Lily was all the proof we should need.
Finally, if Lily is supposed to be Lizzie, that makes sense of Rowling’s interview assertion that Lily could possibly have loved and chosen Severus. Because Lizzie, in canon, acknowledged but was unmoved by Darcy’s wealth, good looks, social status, and even intelligence (though she could not have loved someone she disdained as her intellectual inferior). Instead, Lizzie’s first preference was for a talented man of inferior birth to her own and no money at all. She was weaned of that preference only when she became convinced that her first choice, Wickham, held moral standards that were unacceptable.
If Lily were a Lizzie, then, so too must Lily have been unswayed by James’s surface attractions, and been attracted only when James had established his MORAL superiority to her other suitor. And Lizzie’s reason for coming to love Darcy (well after she’d decided that Darcy was worthy of her general approbation) was explicitly her gratitude for his loving her enough to change in response to her criticisms:
“But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude.-Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection…. Such a change in a man of so much pride, excited not only astonishment but gratitude-for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed.” (P&P, III: II)
So had Severus (James’s equal in being “a man of so much pride,” if not in wealth, looks, or social status) changed in time, attended to Lily’s criticisms instead of giving up after her stinging rejection and allying himself with the Death Eaters, obviously Lily might have loved him instead.
Indeed, Severus in canon might even have been Lily’s Wickham, her lower-born but talented first choice-though there’s little canon support for the contention that Lily ever found Severus sexually attractive (one blush when he looked at her “intently”, which might as easily have been embarrassment as reciprocal sexual awareness). Still, he was at least her acknowledged “best friend” during the period that she was overtly scorning James. If so, like Wickham, Severus insisted on proving himself unworthy of her.
There’s a further parallel between Wickham/Severus and Darcy/James besides that both Wickham and Snape proved themselves ultimately unworthy of a good woman’s affections. Darcy had to save Lydia’s good name to save Lizzie’s reputation and peace of mind. He forced the marriage between Lydia and Wickham, paid up Wickham’s debts and settled money upon her, and left Lizzie’s happy sister to “all the claims of reputation which her marriage had given her.” (P&P, III, XIX)
Darcy did this with absolutely no wish whatever of saving Wickham. But save Wickham he did: from debtor’s prison and from permanent infamy. Helping Wickham was the unpleasant consequence of saving others: Lydia from the consequences of her impulsive folly, Lizzie from an unmerited on her part, but overwhelming and probably permanent, loss of family reputation.
Similarly, James Potter saved Severus from the werewolf, not for Severus’s sake, but because James had to in order to save those he DID care for. Saving Severus was a unfortunate side effect of saving Sirius from his impulsive folly in setting Snape up to be killed, and Remus from being exposed as a werewolf. And James clearly scorned Severus as much (or more) after the rescue as before-as Darcy did Wickham.
[In one particular, however, Severus is more like another Austen villain, Willoughby of Sense & Sensibility, than Wickham. Austen’s readers never see Wickham mourn his (deserved) loss of Lizzie more than casually. Willoughby, on the contrary, betrayed his love Marianne-and then grieved (though not as extravagantly as the Half-Blood Prince) over his self-inflicted loss, readers are told, to the very end of his days. And when Willoughby believed that his betrayal had brought the woman he still loved into danger of death, he took himself to his enemy to confess and to make what poor amends he could:
“Tell me honestly”-a deeper glow overspreading his cheeks-“do you think me most a knave or a fool?” (Willoughby in S&S, XILIV)
Severus’s fans and detractors are still debating that question regarding Snape’s joining the DE’s.
*
So that’s the model Rowling was following, and she thought the parallels were perfectly plain.