Snape Victorious (Nov Potterdelphia talk)
Why did Snape really want the Defense Against the Dark Arts job? Did he even like teaching enough to want the work? Didn’t he realize the position was cursed? Was he trying to use the curse as a way to get out of his binding contract with Dumbledore? Or did he want to take on the challenge of breaking the curse? Did Dumbledore really fear that proximity to the Dark Arts might cause Snape to relapse? Or was he just trying to keep his best spy on staff? So many questions and no answers in sight.
Until I had one of those classic JK Rowling reading moments and realized: the answer has been in front of me all along. I’ve just been looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the “dark arts” part of the job title is not the important part, after all.
Of course what Snape wants to teach is defense. He has been hardwired for defense since birth: defense against domestic conflict, defense against Muggle prejudice, defense against bullying schoolmates, defense against legilimency, defense against the dark arts. One of the presenters at Terminus was arguing that Snape is a nurturer because he is always protecting the Hogwarts kids even when he doesn't like them, but come on - that is clearly wrong. This is not a nurturing man. This is someone whose lifework has been learning how to be completely self-sufficient and invulnerable - to perfect nonverbal spells, to invent defenses against enemies, to master the “obscure” but “highly useful” skill of occlumency. He is driven to teach these achievements to others not because he cares about them, but because the same sense of imperiled urgency that drives these achievements also curses him to feel almost unbearable, disbelieving agitation when others do not defend themselves as they ought.
The scrawl in the Half-Blood Prince’s potions textbook says it all: “Just shove a bezoar down their throats.” Are those the sentiments of a nurturer? That sentence perfectly encapsulates the inimitable Snapely admixture of impersonal rescue, personal hostility, and chronically aggrieved impatience.
This understanding of Snape as the compulsive defense master is the one reading that has made all the disparate and contradictory details about Snape fall into place for me. This is why he would brew wolfsbane for a man he utterly despises -- "an entire cauldronful," as he says - and even bring it to Lupin’s office when he forgets to take it. And this is also why he would break Dumbledore’s secrecy oath about Lupin’s illness and finally force the werewolf out of Hogwarts: not to be petty, not to relieve his disappointment about Sirius Black’s escape nor settle an adolescent grudge, but because Lupin let himself be a danger to students once again, despite Dumbledore’s assurances once again, and Snape takes control and defends against mortal danger when he sees that others cannot. Both the wolfsbane and the expulsion come from the same motive for Snape, even if that motive is heavily obscured by his epic ill will. When he brings a "smoking goblet" to Lupin's office, interrupting a tête-à-tête between Lupin and Harry that clearly sends him into a nasty flashback to the 1970s, Lupin starts talking about showing Harry a grindylow and Snape says "fascinating" without even looking, and grumbles that Lupin should hurry up and drink. Snape’s only concern is defense, and as usual, he is rather agitated that nobody else seems to be as concerned as they ought to be.
This reading even helps me to make sense of Snape’s petty sadism, which is often so difficult for Snape-lovers like me to assimilate alongside his genius and self-sacrifice. Of course, Rowling shows us the way to understand this when we see him sneer at Tonks’ Patronus; unlike him, Tonks has not found a way to defend her lovesick vulnerability. When he taunts Hermione by pretending she doesn't exist while she's bursting with her hand up, and then taking points when she speaks without being called, he's punishing her for reminding him of his own childhood failure to defend against his hunger for recognition. When he deliberately impedes Harry’s attempt to fetch Dumbledore to help Bartemius Crouch, he is recognizing and punishing that sense of uncontrollable urgency that he himself so often feels. His sadism is inexcusable, but Rowling has sketched an astonishingly thorough character study of a traumatized man. I think these incidents are all in keeping with the way Snape responds angrily to Harry's failures at occlumency, or Dumbledore giving in to the temptation of the cursed ring: Protect yourselves, people! Why do you not build up the defenses that I built for myself? Why do you give yourselves away? Don’t you realize this is life or death?
We see cracks in Snape’s defenses periodically, when they are spread too thin: when Harry views his worst memory, when Harry calls him a coward, and of course, when the Marauders turn him upside down and he calls Lily a mudblood. But by the time he enters his final, terrifying year, when the life-or-death nature of the danger hits its peak early and stays there, his defenses have neared perfection. Rowling shows us Snape looking straight into the eyes of Charity Burbage as she begs him to save her; between his acute knowledge of exactly how it feels to be levitated by enemies and his hardwired urge to rescue and defend, his nerves must be screaming, but his control fools even Voldemort. At this point, he is locked so tightly that I believe his Occlumency could probably make the Mirror of Erised show nothing.
But there is another sense in which Snape is a master of defense, and to understand it, we must remember what he is protecting when he occludes Voldemort’s access to his thoughts. He is hiding Lily’s love, which he forfeited through his own inability to defend himself against the lure of the Dark Arts; as I said in last month’s talk, after he lost her, I believe she never looked at him again. He has locked away his soul until he feels he has earned his way back to deserving her gaze, and one of the ways he labors for redemption is to renounce offense, especially by Dark Magic. He has never cast an Unforgivable Curse except to kill Dumbledore, as we gather indirectly from Bellatrix Lestrange’s complaint about his “usual empty words, the usual slithering out of action” in the “Spinner’s End” chapter of book 6, and he tries to tell Harry to refrain from them even while making his escape in “Flight of the Prince.” Lupin says in book 7 that Sectumsempra used to be “a speciality of Snape’s,” but we see that he casts this curse, like the Killing Curse, only upon Dumbledore’s orders, and perhaps it misses its mark partly because he can’t bring himself to cast it with conviction. When he and Harry fight, Rowling pointedly shows us that the two of them can knock each other off their feet purely with shield charms, as Harry does reflexively in the book 6 chapter “The Half-Blood Prince” when he fears Snape is about to jinx him in class. These characters are the two masters of DADA; if we go back to book 2, we see that Snape is the one who teaches Harry his signature move, Expelliarmus, which turns out to be all he needs to kill Voldemort.
Severus Snape is a pacifist. Who knew?
Another loose end that kept raising questions in my mind was the clumsily convenient timing that presented Harry Potter from underneath his invisibility cloak just before Snape died of Nagini’s bite. What if Harry had arrived ten minutes later? Wasn’t Mr. DADA Potions Genius carrying an antivenin on him, at the very least? Whatever happened to “Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it?” After all the angst and vowing and scheming, what Plan B did Snape and Dumbledore have in mind in case Voldemort set Nagini upon Snape before Snape delivered the final message to Harry? For surely Dumbledore foresaw, if he intended Snape to end up with the Elder Wand and he realized Voldemort would go after the Elder Wand sooner or later, that Voldemort would not be using a wand to kill Snape and gain mastery of the Death Stick. But no; Nagini bites Snape, Harry appears, Snape dies, and millions of fans say, “That was it?”
Well.
To try to puzzle this out, I have to go back to the beginning.
How would a would-be Master of Death choose to die? In Harry’s first year, Dumbledore said goodbye to his fellow genius and research partner, Nicolas Flamel, and learned from Nicolas and Perenelle how to die. As Dumbledore tells Harry in the chapter “The Man With Two Faces,” they “have enough Elixir stored to set their affairs in order and then, yes, they will die. […I]t really is like going to bed after a very, very long day.”
How peaceful that sounds, so unlike the turbulent circumstances surrounding Dumbledore’s own impending death. The “thick golden potion” that Snape used to stopper Dumbledore’s death after he touched the Gaunt ring bought him only a little time in which to set his complex, risky affairs in order. His first order of business is to secure Snape’s vow to kill him, a step so crucial that we can see hints of his desperation when Snape threatens to renege.
After all of the spying, lying, and self-endangerment Snape has performed for Dumbledore, we see the raw bitter state of things between the two men: when Snape asks the stark question, “And my soul, Dumbledore? Mine?,” Dumbledore cannot seal the agreement by giving Snape the care that he craves. Instead, he triggers Snape’s compulsion: “I confess I should prefer a quick, painless exit to the protracted and messy affair it will be if, for instance, Greyback is involved[…] Or dear Bellatrix[…]” The man who defied Dumbledore and revealed a colleague’s lycanthropy is incapable of permitting anybody to go undefended against Fenrir Greyback. Sure enough, in the chapter “The Lightning-Struck Tower,” when Snape arrives, he takes in the scene “including the enraged werewolf.” If nothing else decided him to perform the Killing Curse, that alone would have.
In Dumbledore’s last words, “Severus…please,” I hear a plea to Snape to be the one to write Dumbledore’s ending. Let it not be lycanthropy or madness. And perhaps most of all, spare him a death with unfinished business or failure - for if Dumbledore dies according to Voldemort’s plan instead of his own, without feeling he has done everything possible to set up Voldemort’s defeat, he risks a restless eternity as a ghost.
But how can he die freely unless he knows for certain that Snape will survive long enough to pass Harry the entrusted message? That message is rather crucial, after all, and Dumbledore is taking quite a gamble by waiting until the last moment to impart it to Harry, by proxy, no less. What does Dumbledore know that we don’t?
Perhaps the quintessence of Snape as a master of Defense Against the Dark Arts is the haunting image of him healing Malfoy’s Sectumsempra wounds with incantations, quite possibly of his own invention, that are almost song. He is arresting at that moment - almost phoenix-like, almost beautiful. He sings a counter-curse again when treating Dumbledore’s hand: “Snape was muttering incantations, pointing his wand at the wrist of the hand, while with his left hand he tipped a goblet full of thick golden potion down Dumbledore’s throat.” We know from Molly Weasley’s response to the loss of George’s ear that ordinary healing charms cannot cure wounds caused by Dark Magic. We know that Dumbledore refuses Harry’s suggestion of Madam Pomfrey after he has drunk the poison in the cave, saying, “It is … Professor Snape whom I need.” Dumbledore alone cannot defend against Dark injury; Snape can.
What is in the potion that can put a stopper in death? Its power and its golden color suggest phoenix tears. Its consistency confirms that it is not phoenix tears alone; it has been brewed. Snape and Dumbledore have collaborated on this potion.
Why is Snape “trying to staunch the bloody wound at his neck” before he sees Harry? He knows Nagini’s potency; her bite has venom and causes blood loss, but more than that, it curses. Staunching the wound will not help. Why is he bothering? But then, as Hilary K. Justice pointed out in her Terminus paper “Mind the Gap: Severus Snape and the Final Imperative,” when Snape sees Harry, he makes “an either/or choice - try to save himself or to give Harry the memory.” He takes his hands off his wounds to seize Harry’s robes.
It looks to me like he’d been preparing to take the thick golden potion he was carrying and perform the incantations necessary to stopper his death and buy enough time to find Harry.
If Dumbledore died knowing that Snape would be able to do this if necessary, he died in peace.
Snape chose to die when he did because his affairs were in order; he had completed everything he wanted to do. He could die with his secrets and Lily’s love intact, imparted whole to Lily’s son. At long last, he had nothing left to defend. “Look…at…me,” he said to Harry, and what he passed to Harry in that gaze was his own version of the Resurrection Stone: his eyes, almost dead when Harry looks into them from Voldemort’s eyes, open at the close, delivering to Harry the ultimate defense against the Dark Arts. The timing of Snape’s death wasn’t haphazard coincidence, then, after all. He wasn’t, after all, anticlimactically undefended against Voldemort and his snake. The man who gave a timely death to Dumbledore claimed one for himself as well, having ensured that how and why Lily died was not in vain.