Taming the Prince
            A psychanalytical essay about Snape and JKR


“The poet’s version of the story only shows how fine is the transforming power of ideal immagination which can make out of a sordid and dishonourable incident such a lovely piece of work”
Edmund Spenser’s Works: A Variorum Edition, bk. IV, p. 286

J.K. Rowling’s declarations about Snape, immediately after the release of Deathly Hallows, sounded like insult added to injury to many of the fans who looked at him as a reference figure from the end of Order of the Phoenix. In an interview given to Meredith Vieira, for Today Show, a relieved Rowling, much more relaxed after finishing her big fatigue, declared that in no way the people should consider Snape as a hero (1). During Bloomsbury Live Chat of July 30, 2007, Rowling corrected slightly her previous declaration by stating that Snape is at least “an anti-hero”, very brave but irremediably flawed by his own character and especially by his attitude toward his pupils (2). At the end of that chat, Joanne eventually taped that also Harry is flawed, though clearly in a much lighter way than the Potions Master.
That Rowling seems to not give much about Snape, particularly by comparison with Sirius and other adult male characters, is a longing impression old fans are quite used to. While she always aknowledges the existence of a die-hard Sirius fandom, the author has ripetutedly tried to contain sympathies for Snape and Draco, arriving to call it “a bad boy syndrome”. At the very moment in which, in the novels, the attention was focused on Snape, in the interviews Rowling seemed to deminish the fans’ attachment to him. She seemed even reluctant in answering questions about Snape. She wanted people to believe there was something more behind the behaviour of the Potions Master (“Keep an eye on Snape”, she went on), but with a certain sense of emotional detachment. The maximum of distance from Snape was probably showed during the interview with Christopher Lydon for The Connection (WBUR Radio), October 12, 1999, when a seemingly sincere Rowling looked horrified at the possibility of a Snape in love (3). Who in his right mind would love Snape back? Part of the horror was certainly feigned, due to the impending necessity of keeping secrecy about the mystery sorrounding the friendship between Severus and Lily. Part of if, instead, was true. There is a permanent contradiction inherent to JKR’s attitude toward his creature, a contradiction that prevents JKR in seeing – and most of all, in writing – Snape through a limpid lens. No matter that she called him “a gift of a character” (Edimbourgh Festival 2004); in her hands, such gift seems double-edged. In this essay I’ll try to analyse the relationship between author and character, JKR and Snape, utilizing some features of the psychanalytical criticism. The obvious premise is that such an operation is always extremely delicate and fragile, and I give it here most as a suggestion, a provocation if you want, than as a solid interpretation tout court.

You don’t have to call me Professor, sir

The first and basic contradiction about Snape is that he was born, in fact, divided in two inside Rowling’s mind. This original fracture lays in the peculiar situation of the literary creation of this character.
Rowling confirmed on several occasions that the figure of Snape is inspired from her professor of Chemestry at the high school, Mr. John Nettleship (4). It was an hazardous act to choose an hated teacher to create a character who serves at least as helper to the protagonist, Harry (to use narratological terminology), or even as “the anti-hero” of the story. More logically, a writer would pick a despised acquaintance to create a despisable character. Rowling chose an hated person to forge a “good” character (in general terms). It was an hazard; it was also a stroke of genius. An hated teacher who turns out to be good! But such a felicitous invention implied the first split. The fact that there was always Mr. Nettleship behind Snape was unsuppressible; we always have Nettleship’s personality, on one hand, and what Rowling created over him, on the other. We can go as far a to say that with Snape Rowling tried to write a justification of Nettleship’s acts. His lessons are boring: let’s invent something more interesting behind him. His behaviour is cruel: let’s find a plausible reason attributing him a fictitious, mysterious past. It’s a mechanism of protection. This wasn’t probably the case, but if in her youth Rowling felt in some ways threatened by Nettleship (at miminum, because he could give her bad marks), to defend herself she could invent a story of the secret reasons that obliged her teacher to act in such a way. A fictitious justification shielded Rowling from feeling guilty of a possible lack from her part, and explained in a seemingly rational way Nettleship’s illogical (at least from JKR’s point of view) behaviour.
In any case, we remain with Nettleship and fictitious-justification-for-Nettleship; or, in the literary reinvention, with Snape-as-Nettleship, the much hated teacher who bullies his students, and Snape as JKR’s own invention over Nettleship’s motives. In the first case I will speak of him as teacherSnape; in the second case, I will address him as PrinceSnape. What Rowling invents to justify Nettleship – and Snape – in her eyes is so fictitious that Rowling herself, almost with a lapsus, felt the need to express this imaginary nature with a name – or a surname – that refers to fantasies and fairytales, a fictional reality far even from JKR’s own fantastic world (where, by the way, we have a prime minister, but never a Queen). Snape and his nickname, the half-blood Prince, explicitly show in which way he is divided in two: on one hand, his “realistic” features, more or less directly taken from Nettleship, including bullyism, sarcasm, poor physical aspect and general unpleasantness, sum up in his academic persona, Snape; on the other hand, the fictional attributes added by Rowling to the Nettleship basis, namely courage, loyalty, angst, everlasting devotion to a dead woman, form the fictional other self of Snape, his Prince persona.

Problems generate problems

Having successfully split in two her vision of Nettleship, Rowling can feel free to say everything she wants about him as nasty teacher during the delightful scenes of Snape’s Potions classes. There, Rowling can freely unleash her poisonous quill to depict a fully hateful Snape from Harry’s point of view. A belated revenge on intolerable Nettleship. As long as the relationship between Jo/Harry and Nettleship/Snape is one of hate, Rowling doesn’t feel any remorse about what she is doing; hating teacherSnape doesn’t raise psychic problems in her. He was hateful; she hates him back, that’s all. Such a teacher/student misunderstanding (incomprehension) does not carry ambiguous corollaries.
Real Nettleship was indeed hateful in JKR’s mind; teacherSnape is indeed hateful and unforgivable both for Harry and for JKR.
But what about virtually justified Nettleship/PrinceSnape? What if this fictional sosia was attractive? Could JKR surrender to the possibility of finding her behated professor attractive in his fictional form, PrinceSnape? It was a frightful possibility that must be repressed. Jo could not surrender to Nettleship even in her own-made creation, unfortunate and neglected PrinceSnape. Neither can Lily really reciprocate Snape: “She might even have grown to love him romantically (she certainly loved him as a friend) if he had not loved Dark Magic so much...” (Live Chat, 30-7-2007). There is always an “if” interposed between Rowling – and her fictional projections, Harry and Lily – and Snape. Rowling’s psyche must set up a series of subconscious fences to prevent her – and the reader – finding Snape attractive. She created the Prince to protect herself from the teacher; now she is obliged to undermine the Prince to stop the possible fascination for him.
One way of undermining the Prince was obviously precluded to her: she cannot say that the Prince is bad. The Prince was invented as a positive counterpart to the negative teacher; so the Prince cannot be attacked, even him, on a moral basis. But there are two more ways to deny him an attractive power: the first, and more important, involves a sexual note. The second one is narrative and is achieved through a constant displacement of PrinceSnape from the main action of the novels.

How teacher and Prince are combined through the narrative

I’ll start from a delucidation of the second point. TeacherSnape and PrinceSnape, once divided in two different personae, don’t reunite easily. In the first four books we almost see only teacherSnape, with a first, brief glimpse of PrinceSnape at the end of Goblet of Fire, when Snape shows his Dark Mark to Fudge. This is no more part of the things Rowling extracted directly from Nettleship; this belongs to her fanciful invention of an oscure past. It is no accident that PrinceSnape appears for a moment and then disappears to nowhere for the last pages of the fourth book.
A more incisive presentation of PrinceSnape, in the Order of the Phoenix, required a temporary suspension of the attention given to teacherSnape. Thus, to fill the possible void of a figure toward whom is directed the blame of readers, Rowling introduced a new character imbuted with teacherSnape’s nastier characteristics: Dolores Umbridge. An horrible teacher whose role is to act awfully for the reader’s sake. Professor Umbridge is there to be blamed and despised while Snape can finally be pitied by the reader. Only after having shifted the hate of the readers from Snape to Umbridge, Rowling allows herself to offer memories of Snape’s abused childhood and to present him as a victim of the Marauders’ adolescent arrogance. The splendid Snape’s Worst Memory chapter – probably one of the most loved chapter of the whole series – is possible only because, at the same time, the reader has moved to Umbridge some of the total amount of hate he/she fixes over HP characters. It’s worth to note that in OotP the deeper sights of PrinceSnape are confined to memories of the past, catched through Occlumency and the Pensieve, and don’t depend to something presently done by Snape as the exposure of the Dark Mark. This means that after the appearance of PrinceSnape, teacherSnape is let to have some more scenes, though in a minor key than before.
The sixth volume, Half-Blood Prince, recovers the usual, despicable teacherSnape – though with a different post – until The Flight of the Prince chapter, when we come to know all of a sudden that Snape is the Half-Blood Prince who laid underneath the whole episode and we begin to question about his true loyalties (at the end of the previous chapter we were too shocked to reflect). At the very moment when Snape’s Prince persona is explicitly declared, however, Snape disappears from the narrative for the rest of the book. What’s more, with the explicit manifestation of PrinceSnape, teacherSnape disappears, never to come back. One persona excludes the other, once they are both known by the readers.
In the seventh and last instalment, Deathly Hallows, we are left only with PrinceSnape. TeacherSnape has been replaced, inside Hogwarts, with the abominable Carrows brothers; outside Hogwarts, with the return of an Umbridge more gloating than ever. PrinceSnape appears, alive, only in the first chapter, where he does more or less nothing; in The Sacking of Severus Snape, where he is sacked both from Hogwarts and from the story (the sacking being a metaphor for his imminent death) and he is denied a proper duel with McGonagall and the others; and in The Elder Wand chapter, where he gets trapped in the Shrieking Shack at the mercy of Voldemort. Other information about Snape’s last year are given only in indirect ways: we learn that he has become Headmaster from the newspaper, that he has lightly punished Neville, Ginny & co. for stealing Gryffindor’s sword from Griphook, Dean and the other in the forest, and he is mentioned by Lupin and Fred during the Potterwatch. The great reason behind Snape is given only when he is properly dead, in a posthumous chapter whose title underlines, if necessary, the fictional nature of the Potions Master counterpart: The Prince’s Tale. No living Snape is allowed a confrontation with Harry or with other characters. Thus, Deathy Hallows displays a constant displacement of Snape from the main action, confining him to the beginning and the end of the narrative, bringing his voice to silence, precluding him to steal the scene to Rowling’s best loved creatures. After a dead Snape, no more able to threaten Harry/JKR’s present, Rowling can even name Harry Potter’s second son.
Unlike Snape, Umbridge is a totally fictional character and, as such, she doesn’t hide the psychological snares of teacher/Prince Snape. She is pure evil from top to toe, which means, from the author’s point of view, that she is a pure delight to write. Rowling can freely indulge in playing with Umbridge’s nastiness without the spectre of a better other self appearing behind her. The complete fictional nature of Umbridge, combined to the sheer pleasure of writing her, is the motive which assures not only Umbridge’s final survival, but also the absolute absence of a punishment attending her at the end of the series. Umbrigde can leave the HP world alive and joyfully unpunished, while Snape-Nettleship, psychologically dangerous both to Rowling and Harry in the case of his survival, must be contained, silenced, killed.
  
Emasculating Snape

Now we can return to the first way of diminishing Snape. As rm pointed out in Snape and gender (5), throughout the series Snape is connected with feminility and ridiculized through this connection.
Such mechanism begins with Snape’s physical appearance. Snape is described as having shoulder-lenght hair that curtains his masculine, prominent nose (we should note anyway that other male characters have long hair: Charlie Weasley, who keep them in a ponytail, Sirius Black and Dumbledore).
Adult Snape wears always long, black robes that billow as he passes. Other characters too are supposed to wear long robes (Dumbledore for one), but no emphasis is given on this feature. On the contrary, when Harry and Ron are obliged to wear long robes for the Yule Ball, the situation is used as comic relief, insisting on the shame the boys feel for such clothing.
Snape also uses a long nightgown (GoF) for the fun of the reader and of the unseen Harry, while, for example, Slughorn wears an emerald green silk pijamas by night (HBP – DH).
Snape is protagonist of another wonderfully comic scene when Lupin suggests Neville to dress his Snape-shaped boggart with the vulture hat and coat of Gran Longbottom. This is a scene in which JKR particularly enjoys in mocking Snape-as-Nettleship.
Even as a boy, Snape was dressed with a feminine smock (his mother’s?) when he approached Lily for the first time. It surprised me to find a reference to a “lilly smock” worn by Britomart during the night at Castle Joyeus (Faerie Queene, III.i.65.9).
Hermione Granger mistakes the Half-Blood Prince’s calligraphy for that of a girl (6). What’s more, Slughorn always attributes Harry’s brand-new ability in Potions to Lily’s inherited talent, which means, in other words, that Slughorn too takes the Half-Blood Prince for a girl.
On another level, Snape is literally subjected to a public humiliation of his virility when he is hung upside down by James’s Levicorpus in Snape’s Worst Memory. Such humiliation is exhilarating for the onlookers because it gives them the feeling to be better than Snape: a male exposing his underpants is laughed at by the audience in order to repeal the threat of his sexuality. Even Lily Evans, who allegedly was still Severus’s friend at the moment, can’t suppress a defusing smile.
The most evident way in which Snape is connected with feminity however happens in Deathly Hallows. In the seventh and last book, we are told that Snape’s Patronus is (was, alas) a doe, a specifically feminine animal, while other Patronuses can’t be easily differentiated by gender. Apart from Harry’s and James’s, that are (explicitly male) stags, Ron’s Patronus is a dog (unspecified sex), McGonagall’s and Umbridge’s are cats (unspecified sex; the cat however is usually connected with women and witches), Hermione’s is an otter (which in Italian – lontra – is feminine, but this doesn’t matter) and Aberforth’s is a goat, possibly a male with evident horns, because Aberforth is able to make the Death Eaters mistake Harry’s stag for it. Seemingly, Snape is the only male character who is given a female animal as Patronus. We can read Patronus as protectors, as a modern version of the typical animal helper of Medieval folklore, or as an external representation of their owner’s character (as a Socratic daimon). In this last case, the projection of Snape’s soul is a female. JKR wanted Snape to identify so much with Lily that his Patronus has become Lily’s one, or rather, Lily herself. The soul of Lily inside Snape. Which is a very romantic touch, but under the romantic veil, depicts a Snape who cannot differentiate between himself and the object of his love, a man who still lives in the blurred feelings of child sexuality, a man who sees himself as a woman. Male Snape as female Lily. In the sexual union, the lovers becomes physically and mentally one, but they are still two bodies and two brains. The adolescent lover, in his amorous urgence, cannot tell himself from his partner; the mature lover knows how to retain his own personality in the relationship with his mate. Snape is fixed – frozen – in a pre-sexual, adolescent vision of love in which one partner can actually transmute into the other.
Was thus Slughorn right when he attributed Snape’s Potions recipes to Lily? In a certain sense, yes. According to the timeline, Snape and Lily stopped being friends at the end of the fifth year. Advanced-potion Making textbook is used at the sixth year. Then Snape added his glosses to the book one year after breaking his friendship with Lily. Nowhere is explicitly told that Lily and Severus had studied Potions together, as a common theory goes, or who influenced the other; nowhere, in The Prince’s Tale, Snape declares his personal inclination toward the subject. Deathly Hallows leaves us with the disturbing, open possibility that Snape merely recorded Lily’s tips, and that he continued teaching Potions only in loving memory of her, especially when we look back to Snape’s preference for the DADA post as expressed in another of JKR’s statements (7). In this case, which I dearly hope is not true, we would have again Lily superimposing on Snape, a girl suffocating a male.

A spinning question

Also the problematic “spinner” of Spinner’s End, applicable both to Snape and to Dumbledore in the sense of plotters, can be linked in two ways with feminility. Firstly, if we imagine the spider as the archetypal spinner, classical mythology teaches us that the spider was a woman, Aracne, transformed into the eight-legged animal by Athena/Minerva as punishment for having beaten her in a tapestry competition.
Secondly, spinner makes alliteration with spinster. And we could describe very easily Snape as a spinster grown bitter with age, harsh with children, who lives alone, one who has loved once and nevermore, etc. I thought this was a little pet theory of mine before finding corroboration in one of the milestones of gender criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Referring to Emily Dickinson’s poems, they write that her use of spider symbolism

“is suggested by the strenght of the longstanding mythic tradition which associates virgin women – women who spin, or spin/sters – with spinning spiders. As spinsters indeed, such women are often defined as themselves being spiders, duplicitous witchlike weavers of webs in which to ensnare men (like Circe), metaphysical spinners of Fate (like the Norns) and fictionalizing weavers or plotters of doom [...]. But also, as virgins of long standing, free from male attachments, such women have often been seen as empty vessels (or chasm) filled with disquieting shadows” (8)

Connection with spiders thus reinforces the idea of Snape as a female virgin spinster.

Male Gryffindor, female Slytherin

Not only Snape, but the whole Slytherin house is linked with feminity. The standard features of a Slytherin – cunning, ambition, subtlety – are those generally attributed to female intelligence by misogynous tradition, opposed to more extrovert male characteristics of a logical, linear reasoning, open nature and bravery. All features included in Gryffindor way of life. Facing a male-connotated Gryffindor we will then have a female-connotated Slytherin. “Woman-as-virgin works through craft, guile, and secrecy, in operations... specifically contrasted to the overt and violent force wielded by the hero”, writes a scholar of the epic hero figures, Dean A. Miller (9).
“It is the tradition to have four houses, but in this case, I wanted them to correspond roughly to the four elements. So Gryffindor is fire, Ravenclaw is air, Hufflepuff is earth, and Slytherin is water; hence the fact that their common room is under the lake.” (JKR, interview with Melissa and Emerson, 16 July 2005)
It’s commonly known that the water is the female element par excellence; and while green could stand for envy and ambition (10), silver refers to the Moon, governed by a goddess (Diana, Isis or whichever), opposed to gold – Sun, governed by a god (Phoebus Apollo, Osiris, etc). Slytherin House is under the lake, sorrounded by the feminine water element, and in a horizontal position, while Gryffindor House is in a tower (just like Ravenclaw’s), a vertical architecture with stairs that lead up from the Common Room to the dormitories. Slytherin House is set under the influence of the moon/lake, and never sees the male sun which on the contrary bathes the walls of Gryffindor tower. Ravenclaw’s rational way of thinking, despite the fact that the founder was a woman, allows them to stay in a vertical, dominant male position, while Slytherin, founded by a man, is womanly horizontal and displaced from the main Hogwarts building to be put under the lake.
Many layers form the references across maleness and Gryffindor, on one hand, and femaleness and Slytherin, on the other. And no matter what Dumbledore’s second thoughts may be; the Sorting Hat is never wrong. Snape is most definitely a Slytherin; he also shares the double S name initials with Salazar Slytherin. Being a Slytherin, he receives the general feminine attributes of his own House.

The impossible task

One of Snape’s task in the last book is to give Harry Gryffindor’s sword. Snape sets indeed a task of male bravery to Harry, who has to free the sword (standind pretty obviously for male sex) from the water (the most feminine of elements, as we have just seen), in form of a lake (the mother womb, Jung would say). Harry so frees the male object from the mother, signifying the child’s separation from the mother in order to become an adult man. The meaning is completed by the fact that it is a man to set the task – inviting Harry to separate himself from the female, while he, Snape, can’t do that – through a female messenger, the silver doe. However, Harry can pass the task only with Ron’s help, and Ron is the one who uses the sword to break the locket Horcrux. It’s only after this display of virility that Ron can start his path to become a worthy match for Hermione. Harry will never use Gryffindor’s sword in the last book: Neville will be given too his proof of maleness and Gryffindorness extracting the sword from the Sorting Hat. Harry has not completely divided himself from his mother and cannot pass the task alone: he looks for his mother in the girlfriend he chooses to marry. With the same red hair, boldness and Gryffindor pride of his mother, Ginny is an exact copy of Lily in the Nineties world.
JKR uses all the female connections I have discussed above to prevent herself to feel engaged with Snape. She can makes fun as she pleases of teacherSnape, taking revenge of her old teacher Nettleship. PrinceSnape, the character she invented and adapted over Nettleship’s mocking figure, born from the double reason of finding a meaning behind the outward nastiness of the man and to neutralize that nastiness, must be deprived of his possible attractive side by denying his male status and the very possibility of considering him a potential eligible man. He is subjugated for ever to a woman that rejected him, thus sanctioning the fact that he is no worthy lover, up to the point that he is ridiculized by Voldemort for his “supposed great love”. At the end, Snape is condemned to die from bleeding, as a woman with her menses or of childbirth. Like a caustic retaliation for the Snape-is-a-vampire theory, the snake – traditional enemy to women since Eve’s ages – bites Snape in the neck, as vampires traditionally do with their female victims. Bleeding to death, Snape gives Harry what we could perhaps call metaphorically his “child”, his memories by which Harry would die and be born again. Snape gives birth to a Harry freed from the Voldemort within him.
And it’s useful to remind how much Snape is contrary to “foolish wand-waving”, i.e. to a male strutting his virility, as James and Harry, in his opinion, are (the wands having a phallic connotation, of course). Snape prefers to concoct potions and to mutter incantations. The only serious occasion in which Snape uses his wand is when he kills Dumbledore; otherwise, he would use his wand lazily, to write potions recipes on the blackboard, to empy Harry’s cauldron or to repel “with an almost lazy flick” Harry’s curses in The Flight of the Prince. Snape’s detentions usually don’t involve the use of the wand, in an abasement of the magical-sexual ability of the student punished.
We could start an endless digression analyzing Dumbledore’s murder as the realization of the Oedipus complex, as Snape killing his father, not by chance utilizing his phallic wand to performe the deed instead of more feminine means; but that is enough. In any case, Snape didn’t resolve his Oedipus complex. He forged his personality tending only to his mother’s side, rejecting all about his father. He cares only about the magical side of life, derived from his mother, and exonerated his father in taking his mother’s surname as nickname. Hermione Granger knew it better: the Prince is a woman, Eileen Prince. PrinceSnape fashioned himself after a woman, his mother. And JK Rowling can’t love romantically a character who is, in fact, a woman. Thus it is someway consistent that she finds strange that fans have come to love a character who is, for her, deprived of his own sexuality.
Through his physical appearance, beginning with his long, dark hair, Snape becomes his mother – the Half-Blood Prince becomes Eileen Prince. Harry and Ron mock Snape for his nose, the most evident display of masculinity by Snape’s side. While Harry’s virility is reinforced by his total likeliness with his father (except for his eyes), Snape looks exactly like his mother, except for the nose that he borrows from his father (and, indeed, he inherits his maleness, or chromosome Y, from his father). Curtaining his face with his hair, Snape tries to hide his father’s nose behind his mother’s hair.
The lake in the forest of Dean is frozen because male Severus (the sword) is still frozen inside his mother’s womb (the water). He hopes that Harry would be able to defrost this blocked relationship of mother and child, but Harry can’t do it. In book six, Snape had finally killed his father (Dumbledore) – or rather, he was obliged to kill his father, but was unwilling to do it – and so in book seven he is awarded, by the same Dumbledore, with a symbol of masculinity, Gryffindor’s sword. But Snape can’t tell what the sword stands for, and he puts it again in the mother-figured lake.

In praise of a virtuous Prince?

Unrequited loves, from a literary point of view, are pretty romantic. In fact, presenting Snape as a most faithful lover and giving him such a tragic love story, JKR seems to be raising him to a nobler status and to treat him exaclty like a wretched Prince of a most unfortunate tairytale. This impression is quite wrong.
Transforming Snape in a kind of widower of a long dead woman, JK Rowling succeded in denying his sexuality, in depriving him of voice in the present relationship field, in making him a virgin vestal to the altar of saint Lily. The other, winning characters are permitted a sexual life, as emphasized in the epilogue, where every character appears married and prolific. That Snape’s everlasting attachment to Lily is wrong – or, at least, not healthy – among the HP world is suggested by the fact that the three main positive characters – Harry, Ron, Hermione – go through a “sentimental education” before choosing their right mate. Harry is first connected with Cho Chang, Hermione with Krum, and Ron with Lavender Brown before setting rightly with Ginny, with Ron and with Hermione. Snape doesn’t pass this ripening step. The Prince’s Tale seems even more fictitious compared to Harry’s, Ron’s and Hermione’s growing up.
As Juliana Shiesari says in her article “In praise of Virtuous Women? For a Genealogy of Gender Morals in Renaissance Italy” (11), in the Renaissance praising a woman for being chaste meant to deny her a sexual, active life (which was instead conceded her during the Middle Ages); the praise confined her in the isolation of an ivory tower where she couldn’t act. Praising Snape for being chaste to the memory of a dead woman, JKR makes him enchained to it, a prisoner in a metaphorical desert. Lily chose James, underlining James’ male prerogatives, now transferred to Harry through his physical ressemblance with his father.
Snape, a man fashioned as a woman, a lover fixed in an adolescent phase, a Prince without swords, is of course of no sexual interest for Rowling. He is not even a total self: he is an half-blood prince, a demi-prince. He is not a hero, only an anti-hero. Aristotle said that women are half-men; this could be true also for Rowling, in Snape’s case. An anti-hero, because he is a half-man: he is a woman. Spinster, spinner, virgin and so on.

Haworth, Hogwarts

It could seem strange to consider, as I am doing here, Snape as a woman. Doesn’t he spread an evident male allure? Isn’t he adored by many etherosexual female fans all around the world? Isn’t he dubbed a “sex god” in fanfictions re-creation? Yes; and no. Here again, Gilbert’s and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic will enlighten us. Speaking of Heathcliff, they write:

“Despite his outward masculinity, Heathcliff is somehow female in his monstrosity. [...] To say that Heathcliff is ‘female’ may at first sound mad or absurd. As we noted earlier, his outwart masculinity seems to be definitively demonstrated by his athletic build and military carriage, as well as by the Byronic sexual charisma that he has for ladylike Isabella. And though we saw that Edgar is truly patriarchal despite his apparent effeminacy, there is no real reason why Heathcliff should not simply represent an alternative version of masculinity, the maleness of the younger son, the paradigmatic outsider in patriarchy. [...] But at the same time, on a deeper associative level, Heathcliff is ‘female’ – on the level where younger sons and bastards and devils unite with women in rebelling against the tyranny of heaven, the level where orphans are female and heirs are male, where flesh is female and spirit is male, earth female, sky male, monsters female, angels male.
[...] In even the most literal way, then, he is what Elaine Showalter calls ‘a woman’s man’, a male figure into which a female artist projects in disguised form her own anxieties about her sex and its meaning in her society.” (pp. 293-294)

Adapting himself to the teaching of Potions, Snape not only wanted to perpetuate the memory of Lily – the little talented potion-maker – but he also tried to let his choice pass for the adoption of a male occupation. Cooking (brewing) is a matter of culture, not of nature, and as such is included into the male sphere. The raw and the cooked, as Claude Lévy-Strauss called it, stands for the passage from barbarous, primitive habits to good-mannered civilization. The feminine is on the savage – natural – raw scale, while the male is on the rational – cultural – cooked side. Feminine Snape wears a male covering through his job and threatening manners, but this mask is cracked by irony. Again, we can find a comparison between Snape’s and Heathcliff’s irony as described by Gilbert and Gubar:

“Heathcliff’s charismatic maleness is at least in part a result of his understanding that he must defeat on its own terms the society that has defeated him. [...] He impersonates a ‘devil daddy’... His understanding of the inauthenticity of his behaviour is consistently shown by his irony. Heathcliff knows perfectly well that he is not really a father in the true (patriarchal) sense of the word, if only because he has himself no surname; he is simply acting like a father” (p. 297)

Consequences for Snape are pretty obvious: his position with Harry is perpetually false, and he too has no patrilinear surname, for he rejects it for his mother’s, becoming an half-Prince.
Given that many readers have instintively associated Snape and Lily with Heathcliff and Catherine  after The Prince’s Tale, Gilbert’s and Gubar’s words seems even more striking. It would even seem that JKR deliberately connected her characters with Bronte’s. A further passage of The Madwoman in the Attic (seems to) explain us even the reference used for Lily’s eyes:

“Catherine II’s union with Hareton reminds Heathcliff specifically of the heaven he has lost. Looking up from their books, the young couple reveal that ‘their eyes are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw’ (chap. 33). Ironically, however, the fact that Catherine’s descendants ‘have’ her eyes tells Heathcliff not so much that Catherine endures as that she is both dead and fragmented.” (p. 300)

In the over-deterministic world created by JK Rowling, where Neville becomes brave because his parents were brave and Draco is a brat because his parents are such, where every child is good if his parents were so and where Voldemort is evil because he was conceived under a love potion, Snape is finally doomed because he had the wrong mother – the mother of a murderer! – and Harry is saved because he had the most perfect mother of them all. Snape chose to replicate his mother, while Harry doubled not only his mother’s eyes but also her heart and her sacrifice. As modern psychology would say, everything depends from the mother. Snape decided to be “an half-blood Prince”, while Harry was not “a pampered little prince...”. Snape went back to fictional fairy-tales; Harry preferred reality, living and fostering a patriarchal family.
As the ending of Wuthering Heights presents the victory of civilized, alphabetized Catherine II and Hareton over disruptive Heathcliff, Deathly Hallows shows the success of child-provided, brave Gryffindor Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny and the defeat of childless, feminine Snape. In this perspective, also Lupin’s death seems suspect: he feared the responsibility of growing-up, becoming a father. Haworth, the Yorkshire home of Bronte sisters, has moved to Hogwarts.


Notes

(1) The exact quote reads “MV: Was Snape always intended to be a hero? JKR: [sharp intake of breath] Is he a hero? You see I don't see him really as a hero”.
(2) “Lechicaneuronline: Do you think snape is a hero? J.K. Rowling: Yes, I do; though a very flawed hero. An anti-hero, perhaps. He is not a particularly likeable man in many ways. He remains rather cruel, a bully, riddled with bitterness and insecurity - and yet he loved, and showed loyalty to that love and, ultimately, laid down his life because of it. That's pretty heroic!”.
(3) “Lydon: Er - one of our connec- ... one of our internet correspondents wondered if Snape is going to fall in love? JKR: Yeah? Who on earth would want Snape in love with them, that is a very horrible idea. Erm ...”
(4) See http://www.half-bloodprince.org/snape_nettleship.php by Snapesforte.
(5) On http://rm.livejournal.com/1124048.html.
(6) By the way, it’s a little strange that the Golden Trio didn’t recognize Snape’s writing after six year of homeworks corrected and marked in red ink by Snape’s handwriting. Especially when we are told that Snape still writes in a spiky and crumpled style, and most of all that Harry saw 16-year-old Snape writing his DADA essay during his OWLs.
(7) “When Prof Dumbledore took Prof Snape onto the staff and Prof Snape said “I’d like to be Prof of Defence Against the Dark Arts please” and Prof Dumbledore felt it might bring out the worst in Snape so said “I think we’ll get you to teach Potions and see how you get along there”, J.K. Rowling at the Royal Albert Hall, 26 June 2003.
(8) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven – London, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 632.
(9) Dean A. Miller, The Epic Hero, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins UP 2000.
(10) The use of green connected both with Slytherins and with Lily’s – and Harry’s – eyes is especially problematic. Red hair and green eyes are of course the traditional features of a witch, and as such they underline Lily’s enchanted and charming nature. But while green eyes are a positive mean of salvation, at least for Harry, Slytherin’s green is obviously a negative symbol, particularly when linked to Slughorn’s cowardice. We must assume that JKR is employing a double colour symbolism. Michel Pastoreau, in Medioevo simbolico, p. 184 of the Italian edition, writes that every colour has his double; there is a black for princes and a black for monks. Each colour can be interpreted in a positive or negative way. So in HP we have a good green (Lily’s) and a bad green (Slytherin’s).
(11) In Annali d’Italianistica, 7, 1989, pp. 66-87.