Severus Snape died two years ago tonight, leaving behind a ream of unanswered questions and the final instruction, “Look…at…me.”

Readers remember Snape’s last words to Harry, but to each person, they seem to mean something different: Snape wants the last thing he sees to be Lily’s eyes. Or he wants Harry to see him for his true self. Hilary K. Justice shows that Snape means it literally, wants Harry to stop mid-battle to run up to the Pensieve and look at these memories. John Granger, who's speaking here next, talks about how Rowling is evoking Dante looking into the green eyes of Beatrice as he enters the kingdom of heaven, giving the answer to Snape’s question, “And my soul, Dumbledore? Mine?” There's a distinct possibility that Snape is implicitly saying to Harry, “But I intend to go to my grave without seeing you for who you are, Potter.” And so on.

My first reading was that this signals Rowling’s triumph: she wants us to go back and re-read from the beginning of the series, to heed his dying command and look at Snape, to see how he did it – how she did it.

Did he really want the Defense Against the Dark Arts job, and why? After all that build-up, don’t we get more of a look into his DADA classroom? Why did his cruel author stunt his development at adolescence? Why did some of us fall in love with him, contrary to her stated intentions? How did he succeed in fooling the world’s greatest Legilimens? How did he sustain himself through years of thankless work that earned him, not credit, but outright hatred? Most hauntingly of all, if Snape had a final walk through the forest toward death as Harry did, I wondered, who would walk with him?

Rowling sometimes poses questions in her story that, even if not addressed directly in her writing, can be answered through parallels she plants elsewhere. Perhaps the most famous instance is the “revulsion and hatred” on Snape’s face as he kills Dumbledore, which readers recognize as possibly hatred of the act itself rather than of Dumbledore, because it echoes her words on how Harry felt, “Hating himself, repulsed by what he was doing,” when he was fulfilling his promise and poisoning Dumbledore. This tactic of Rowling’s encourages readers to look more closely, to read again, in case the answers we seek are already there. Can we ever know and properly honor this master spy, when he kept his true self secret for all his adult life? I argue that if we look at Snape, as he asked, we can understand him as a fully knowable character using only, and all of, what Rowling gives us, applying things she shows us in other parts of the series.

Did Snape really want the Defense Against the Dark Arts job? We know he applied for it annually to stay in line with Voldemort’s orders, and people believed Dumbledore didn’t trust Snape around the Dark Arts. By the end of the series, we learned that it was Dumbledore, never Snape, who was at risk of relapsing toward the Dark Arts, and the rumor of untrustworthiness was yet another galling lie that Dumbledore required Snape to swallow, rather like the “Remedial Potions” cover story Snape issued about Harry. But I couldn’t figure out: did Snape desire the job for himself?

Until I had one of those classic J.K. 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 was 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 Gryffindor bullies, defense against Legilimency, defense against the Dark Arts. Some fans classify Snape as a nurturer because he is always protecting the Hogwarts kids even when he doesn't like them, but come on – 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 makes many disparate and contradictory details 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 Lupin 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, he interrupts a tête-à-tête between Lupin and Potter that clearly sends him into a nasty flashback to the 1970s, but still he 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.

Dumbledore understands this about Snape. After all of the spying, lying, and self-endangerment Snape has undertaken 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 is incapable of securing Snape's promise to kill him by giving Snape the care that he craves. So 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.

We see Snape's urgency about defense, too, in his angry responses to Harry's failures at Occlumency, or Dumbledore touching 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?

There are 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 reveal his underwear 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 hides a tidbit in book 6 about just how impenetrable his defenses are. In the chapter “The Unknowable Room,” Harry expects a low mark on his Defense Against the Dark Arts essay because he disagrees with Snape on the best way to tackle dementors.

Wait. There’s more than one way?

Did Rowling just give us an extra look into his classroom?

Here’s how I picture the scene:

SS: Can anyone tell me the disadvantages of relying upon the Patronus method? Very well; Miss Granger?

HG: It’s very advanced magic. Not every wizard can produce a corporeal Patronus, and when you’re overpowered by dementors, even a powerful wizard cannot.

SS: Hm. Can anyone tell me what information a Patronus can give away to the enemy?

RW: Muffliato. What enemy could be worse than a dementor? Maybe Snape is just trying to keep us from learning how to fight --

HG: The caster’s location, identity, and heart.

SS: Correct, but as this information is no more than you ought to have known – had that inadequate werewolf who taught Potter about Patronuses bothered to do the job properly -- no points to Gryffindor. Dementors feed upon your thoughts. It is sometimes preferable to use Occlumency against them, so they cannot detect you. Empty your mind, and the dementors, sensing nothing, will move on.

HP: But not everyone can --

SS: Discipline, Potter. With discipline, any reasonably competent wizard can learn Occlumency.

HP: It seems pretty sneaky and cowardly to me – sir -- just to get dementors to move on to their next victim. A Patronus can chase them off and protect everyone else, too.

SS: There are times when it is a greater service to others to remain undetected than to blast forth a Patronus for all to see. But I would not expect a Potter to appreciate subtlety over flash.

Draco, of course, is smirking, having mastered Occlumency by this point.

As powerful an Occlumens as Snape was, though, it was remarkable that he could deflect Voldemort’s Legilimency. How did he do it? It wasn’t that his Occlumency was foolproof, or he wouldn’t have needed to remove some memories into the Pensieve for his lessons with Harry. It wasn’t that Voldemort was unable to read love, because Voldemort thrived on creating fear by threatening harm to loved ones.

In book 6, Rowling shows barriers that allow certain people to pass through and not others when Harry guesses that only people with a Dark Mark could cross a Death Eater spell to the Astronomy Tower. We already know that Voldemort cannot possess Harry because he cannot coexist with love. What else could be foolproof against Voldemort?

Grindelwald, knowing Voldemort cannot ever possess the Elder Wand, says to him, “There is so much you do not understand….” Dumbledore identifies Voldemort’s greatest weakness as his "failure to understand that there are things much worse than death."  What might those things be?  According to the series:  life without a soul, without sanity, without love.  And, although hope and happiness and survival beckon beyond it:  the process of remorse, the full consciousness of one's crimes and their import.

Ah. So that’s the protection Snape puts around his true self and his thoughts. That’s why a child like Harry is a danger to his defenses when the Dark Lord is not. Voldemort cannot touch Snape’s mind because he cannot pass through remorse.

Before Snape threw Harry out of his office for crossing his defenses, though, the two of them shared one instance of a fully reciprocated, nourishing gaze.  When Snape snarls at Harry that it's not his job to figure out what the Dark Lord is thinking, Harry shockingly shoots back, "No -- that's your job, isn't it?"  They stare at each other.  Snape is going to punish Harry for this, right?  But no; Snape looks "almost satisfied" and says only, "Yes, Potter. That is my job."

He must have disobeyed about a million of Dumbledore's orders right there.

In Harry’s fifth year, Dumbledore has forsaken him.  Sirius can't be trusted to stay safe.  Hermione and Lupin and Molly Weasley are in line with Dumbledore's campaign of enforced ignorance.  Everyone is misreading Harry's scar pains and visions.  Only Snape nourishes him with truth.  It strengthens Harry.  Immediately after that, he's able to push back into Snape's memories for the first time, to occlude with a Shield Charm.  Snape doesn't enjoy this, but he actually praises Harry:  "That was certainly an improvement."  It’s the only praise Snape gives Harry in the entire series.  Harry has just understood the enormity of Snape's job.  Snape has, for a moment, been seen.

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; after he lost her, I don't think she ever 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,” and he tries to tell Harry to refrain from them even while making his escape at the end of book 6. Lupin says in book 7 that Sectumsempra used to be “a speciality of Snape’s,” but we see that the adult Snape casts this curse, like the Killing Curse, only upon Dumbledore’s orders, and then it’s in an attempt to protect Lupin again. 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 book 6 when he fears Snape is about to jinx him in class. At the end of book 7, when the Heads of House descend upon Snape and start to fight him, he uses only defensive moves against them and jumps out the window, to McGonagall’s cry of “Coward!,” rather than attack in return. Harry and Snape 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 is the basis of the Dumbledore’s Army lessons and, in the end, all that Harry needs to defeat Voldemort.

There are curious similarities between the conditions of Snape's "second chance" servitude to Dumbledore and the Time-Turner experience Hermione has at the end of book 3.  When I think of the rules that Dumbledore specified to Hermione, they help me understand a few things that confused me about Snape's storyline.

You must not be seen.  You are not allowed to change anything, except for the things you must change.  You have to spot the moment when it presents itself.  If all goes well, you may be able to save more than one innocent life.  Above all, remember:  you must not be seen.

Perhaps this is one explanation for why Rowling shows us time and again that any hope of adult romance in Snape's life is dead, dead, dead.  I reasoned that, as a double agent, Snape knew he could not risk romance; Rowling probably intended us to understand Lily as Snape's only beloved; perhaps, as well, winning or forfeiting the right to adult love is one of those things, like death, that simply cannot be reversed by any magic.  Even while turning back time or fulfilling the universal fantasy of a second chance to repair catastrophic mistakes, no one can return the dead to life or cleanse arms of the Dark Mark. Snape is not allowed to rescue himself, only others.

Is that why Rowling so cruelly rubs it in?  The gray nightshirt, the greasy hair, the pilfered letter fragment that bears not only sisterly love from Lily but is even addressed to someone else?  Snape's eyes fixed on Fleur Delacour and Roger Davies emerging from the rosebushes as he discusses his Dark Mark with Dumbledore?  Okay.  We get it. There is love, but not for Snape.

The protection of the mother's love only holds until the child comes of age.  On Harry's 17th birthday, Lily's charm broke; Ginny kissed him and sealed another charm, bringing him across the threshold from childhood with Eros, adult love.  It worked; it was of Ginny that Harry thought as he accepted Voldemort's Killing Curse.  There's no such charm for Snape.  He passed his 17th birthday without ever receiving the kind of “hard, blazing look” that sears Ginny's love into Harry.  He cannot change this on his repeat journey.

Hermione, accustomed to understanding more than one temporal reality at a time, poses the greatest threat to Snape's need not to be seen.  Throughout the series, she makes him work not to acknowledge her perceptiveness, her hand in the air as she looks directly at him. Even at the whirlwind climax of book 3, when passions and danger are running high and time is looping back upon itself, Hermione knows where the story is.

Thousands of pages before he asks for it, she says, "Harry, look at Snape!"  When he is knocked out cold on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, she "star[es] at the lifeless Snape with frightened eyes," the only one there to think he matters.  No wonder she is ready to conjure a flask, four years later, when no one else knows what to do; though her friends are with her both times, she is the only one who has lived this moment before, holding it open by her lone brave self until it's time for Snape to be seen.

The clock starts for Snape again the moment he puts a stopper in Dumbledore's death from the cursed ring. Snape says furiously, “I could have bought you more time.” But he has repaid Dumbledore with a second chance, an extra year. This marks the beginning of the end of his servitude.

That's what confirmed for me that when Draco mentioned Snape's promise to Narcissa and Dumbledore replied, “Of course that is what he would tell you, Draco, but –,” it meant that Snape had not told Dumbledore about the Unbreakable Vow.

Come back to Spinner's End with me for a moment. Snape cannot go back and unjoin the Dark Lord, he can't undo Lily's death, he can't win Eros for himself – but this, he can do. He can give a young Death Eater a second chance, a better one than he himself had, and reverse the death sentence that the Dark Lord has issued. He can help a mother who can thank him in person by protecting a child that, for a change, he doesn't loathe. He can deliver Draco safely to a future that includes a wife, a child, the luxury of thinning hair. Yes, this fits perfectly within the mission already undertaken; there is room for this. This is something that Snape can do for himself. More than one innocent life will be saved.

The first time I read “I’d wash my pants if I were you, Snivellus,” I found it a pitifully ineffective comeback to the shocking word “Mudblood.” The backstory about their childhood friendship and Snape’s increasingly one-sided love, though, showed me the full weight of Lily’s words. She had named the unspeakable. Family circumstance influences destiny, yes, but so does beauty.

Lily is beautiful. Snape is ugly. It didn’t matter when they were eleven, both so magical and smart. They grow older. Their destinies diverge. Unable to attract her, he can only try incoherently to deny the coming rift. Out of loyalty, mercy, and social nicety, she has never mentioned clothes or hair to the homely boy, until he breaks a taboo first and calls her Mudblood.

Then she names it, and breaks the other taboo; there is nothing to stop her. His underwear is dirty. He is sexually nothing. He is a fool, deluded, to dream of having her. She will take her place among the beautiful and privileged, and on her wedding day, he will be as ugly and unwanted as ever he was.

Rowling makes clear that the unfairness of beauty is not just about looks. She sums it up plainly in the description of James as a first-year, “slight, black-haired like Snape, but with that indefinable air of having been well-cared-for, even adored, that Snape so conspicuously lacked.” “Even adored” – those words hurt me to read. This is how neglect has shaped teen Snape’s appearance: “Round-shouldered yet angular, he walked in a twitchy manner that recalled a spider, his oily hair swinging about his face.”

Pitchfork-wielding Snape fans such as myself have a grievance with Rowling for insisting upon Snape’s ugliness and making the readers complicit in it. Rowling has said publicly that she dislikes spiders, much as Ron does; in comparing Snape’s appearance to one, she really wants us to get that in the merciless economy of beauty, privilege, and status that is adolescence, Lily and Snape are not peers. The strain on Lily has been growing as their social statuses have diverged; we can see this in her comment, “I’ve made excuses for you for years. None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you.”

Why do we Snape fans love him and find him beautiful, to his author’s stated dismay? The easy answer is that if you make a character fascinating and mysterious and then have a huge reveal of his romantic heart at the end, you really shouldn’t be surprised that people can’t resist this story arc. But there is another reason, and it has to do with beauty, and with desire.

A homely teacher is an intense embarrassment to most adolescents, who nearly gag when their minds poke timidly at the notion that everyone, even the most repulsive among us, is a sexually valid being. Any teacher has to develop a thick skin about being sexually ridiculed amongst the students. Rowling sentenced Snape to a lifetime before the merciless contempt of children, knowing they were cracking the same vicious jokes about him as the Marauder’s Map does in Prisoner of Azkaban. More unspeakable still is that he’s genuinely humiliated, a fact he must hide; it is not until these children become men and women that they’ll have the fortitude for a sight as raw as Snape on his knees holding Lily’s letter to another, tears “dripping from the end of his hooked nose,” hideous even in his truest moment.

But even those of us who are ugly have to get up and face the world every day. Even the homely, who need no cloaks or even magic to be invisible, have to make daily decisions about hair and clothes and posture. And so, long after Lily Evans with her center-parted 1970s hair has become dust in a churchyard, we find that Snape has become – not beautiful, but something. He commands a full class with a whisper. He strides into a room and even Death Eaters fall back. Perhaps the quintessence of Snape 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.


Some of it is a façade, of course; when it’s challenged, like the time Harry glimpses Snape’s bare bitten leg, or when Lupin gets Neville’s boggart to mock him, we see how tenuous it is. But that just underscores that it is a kind of bravery, what the adult Snape has made of the bare wisps of dignity at his disposal. Some of us may be Lily, naturally good and free of acne; some of us may be James, so vital and loved and athletic that we don’t need to be handsome. But the rest of us know how it feels to sigh and accept that we must work with what we have, to face that we will never have more than this to work with, because we have agreed to live, after all; and we have known and fiercely loved this bravery in others who are just as hook-nosed or sallow or unlovable as ourselves.

There’s an unspoken question between Snape and Lily as children that cements their love as powerfully as the one Lily asks as they sit together in a thicket of trees: “Does it make a difference, being Muggle-born?”
 

The scrawny child of a loveless family tacitly asks the same question of the pretty girl.

Does it make a difference, being ugly?

She sees his fearful need for reassurance; they are friends, they love each other, and they are magic together; no. It doesn’t make any difference to her, that he is ugly.

(Years later, long after his own betrayal pushed Lily to acknowledge the difference she’s tacitly forsworn, another Muggle-born child will look at him with tears in her eyes begging for acknowledgment, and he will lacerate her with his vicious response of “I see no difference” in punishment for her looking to him, of all embittered people, to have any answers or any mercy about beauty.)

How could I look at Snape, know him, and not love him?  Tales of wizards and magic are just fantasies.  But to be brilliant, and unwanted, and unlovely, and keening with the pain of desire for all things beautiful, hopelessly and hurtfully beautiful while knowing the self to be ugly, vilely and repugnantly so -- that is desire as I know it.   That's what we look like when we want, we humans.

Where does Snape speak of beauty? It’s in his legendary first-year Potions speech, his ode to magic, to “the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses….” There’s a direct connection between this ecstatic song of experience and the thing that Snape saw Lily do when they were children, the thing that pushed him to reveal himself, the single most rapturous image in the series: “Lily…held out her palm. The flower sat there, opening and closing its petals, like some bizarre, many-lipped oyster.” It’s inspiration itself in that image, breathing with her.

They become friends. She revels in magic alongside him. In their friendship, beauty is not external; it’s fixed in the preadolescent moment of pure shimmering potential, the “confidence in his destiny” that child Snape passed to his friend.

There is much that is painful about Snape’s arrested adolescence, but in this one aspect, he is blessed. Snape never stops learning and inventing. I don’t think he ever loses that childish excitement. It’s what’s beautiful in him, and someone once loved it. Lily loved him for the right reasons, loved the right things in him.

He had once been known.

     It’s a powerful protection. It gives him a defense against treacherous love, the spy’s Achilles heel. He honors Lily’s memory every time he learns new magic. This sustains him even in his profoundly lonely final year when he actually flies, a practical skill that saves his life, but also something that must have exhilarated him.

     Remember the first time Harry flew in book 1, when “air rushed through his hair, and his robes whipped out behind him – and in a rush of fierce joy he realized he’d found something he could do without being taught – this was easy, this was wonderful”? And how wondrous it felt to learn in book 7 that it hadn’t, after all, been his first time on a broom – that Sirius had given him a baby broom as well as his Firebolt, and Harry had been a natural then, too?
     Flight is the iconic fantasy of freedom. How fitting that the man who doesn’t need a wand to make magic doesn’t need a broom to fly.
      How, in your mind, did it look when Snape first learned to fly?
      I’d pictured Voldemort sharing the secret of flying to reward his favorite for killing Dumbledore, to parallel my image of Dumbledore granting Snape the DADA post for promising the same service. And I got hung up on one detail as I was feeling my way through it. How did Snape manage all the layers of feeling, accepting this most sublime of gifts from Voldemort, that murderer of joy?
      I’ve read Deathly Hallows three times, so far, and it seems I’ve only just calmed down enough to start hearing what Rowling was trying to tell us.
      I can’t believe I fell for it again.
      That Snape-shaped hole. McGonagall looks out of it and says that “he seems to have learned a few tricks from his master.”
      And I bought it. Even though Rowling has told us plainly that Snape is not what he seems to McGonagall. Even though she’s shown us that the first time we saw someone flying was not their first time flying.
     I don’t know how I missed it. It wasn’t Voldemort who taught him to fly.
     It was the first thing we see Snape seeing Lily do: “the girl had let go of the swing at the very height of its arc and flown into the air, quite literally flown, launched herself skyward with a great shout of laughter.” Lily learned to fly before Voldemort ever did; she flew by prolonging the natural joy of a child on a swing.
      Rowling, how quietly you slipped in this thrilling tableau, waiting for me to discover it whenever I was finally ready to look at Snape.
      “Look at me” is the essence of childhood discovery. Play with a child, and you’ll hear it twenty times a day. Watch what I can do! Want to learn how? I can show you!
      It was reciprocal, this friendship; she taught him magic, too. Flying is the best of childish joy. She gave him a childhood, and that sustained him until he could fulfill the potential they first claimed together in that thicket of trees.

How much was Snape loved? If Snape had a walk in the forest toward death, as Harry did, who would appear to walk by his side?

There is a room in the Department of Mysteries that is kept locked at all times. Magic cannot force the door. But we can put what we do know about love in a Pensieve, swirl our thoughts around and look for the connections. Examine the evidence with me and we’ll see if it opens the door.

“Look...at...me.” Why?

I had to picture the scene, put myself in it, to understand something about this final gaze. Snape is looking into Lily’s eyes, the way he did when they loved each other as children. Harry is looking at Snape while this is happening; Harry sees what it looks like when Lily gazes at somebody with love, and they look back. The love exists in the gaze between two people. It gets repeated in the Pensieve when Harry sees Snape looking at Lily. It gets repeated again in the forest scene, when Lily gazes at Harry: “her green eyes, so like his, searched his face hungrily, as though she would never be able to look at him enough.” It is repeated as Harry gazes back at his mother: “His eyes feasted on her.”

That is the nourishment the orphaned Harry craved from the Mirror of Erised, the thing Voldemort took from him. Harry would not have known this hungry loving gaze of Lily’s if Snape hadn’t given it to him first, as he died and again in the Pensieve, this gaze that sustained him on his walk toward death.

“Look...at…me,” Snape commanded. Let’s look again. He is telling Harry that he is about to transmit Lily’s love through their gaze. This love lived locked inside Snape through unspeakable loneliness and danger. He's passing it intact to Lily's son, to give Harry the strength he needs to enact the plan Dumbledore assigned Snape to transmit. Harry looks at Snape. The locked door swings open.

All through book 5, Voldemort and the Death Eaters are chasing the prophecy, something intangible and ephemeral that is magically encased in a tangible and perishable form, destroyed absurdly by a kick from Neville’s flailing legs. One of Rowling’s best tricks is to bring us back to mundane reality, with a disorienting feeling rather like exiting a Pensieve, when Dumbledore reminds Harry that the coveted sphere was merely a recording – that prophecies are nothing but words that were spoken to a person and can simply be repeated. Oh. Right.

So, prophecies can be contained in a sphere, or a person, and transmitted. Secrets can be contained within people, and transmitted. What if Lily’s love could be contained within a person, too? What if Snape was its keeper, in a love version of the Fidelius Charm?

Which means – well, let’s look at Dumbledore’s account in book 5 of how he conjured protections for Harry with Petunia:

“She may have taken you grudgingly, furiously, unwillingly, bitterly, yet still she took you, and in doing so, she sealed the charm I placed upon you.”

And then let’s look at Dumbledore in book 7, challenging Snape after Lily’s death:

“If you loved Lily Evans, if you truly loved her, then your way forward is clear. […] You know how and why she died. Make sure it was not in vain. Help me protect Lily’s son.”

The moment Snape says “Very well,” he seals the charm. Through loathing and aversion every bit as severe as Petunia’s, beyond the lifespan of the caster of the spell, he protects Harry Potter.

Dumbledore invoked a double protection from Lily’s sacrifice: the blood protection from Petunia, and the love protection from Snape. A magical shield for the Muggle world, and an ordinary, Muggle shield for the wizarding world. No wonder Snape’s protection of Harry was safe from Voldemort’s detection. There is nothing magical about love magic at all. It is utterly mundane, powerful, and unbreakable – even if Snape, like Petunia, might have needed the occasional Howler.

Perhaps after Snape spent his adult life protecting Lily’s son, teaching him disarmament and transmitting Lily’s love to him, he felt he regained the right to be looked at by Lily again. Perhaps by showing us Snape looking into green eyes and saying, “Look…at…me,” Rowling is telling us that as Snape prepares to go toward death, he is calling Lily Evans to walk alongside him.

Who else do you think walked alongside Snape?

Rowling told us that Snape had been loved, and certainly Lily loved the boy who saw both her beauty and her gifts, and was the first person to tell her who she was. What about the mysterious mother about whom we know so little? Did Eileen Prince Snape love her son?

Let’s look in the Pensieve again.

We know that she looks like a frightful witch in a storybook, just the kind of woman once burned at the stake by Muggles, and that she passed ugliness and personal neglect on to her child. Her married life was so bleak that her pre-teen son dreamt only of leaving home. How did a witch, someone whose position as captain of a recreational club meant she surely had friends at school, end up in a Muggle slum? Rowling doesn’t tell us; she only shows us Eileen Prince’s mute photo in book 6, the one most haunted by stories of what happens to women who are not beautiful.

It is quite possible that in Snape, Rowling has created English literature’s definitive portrait of the ugly, ill-tempered teacher who desperately needs to get laid. She cruelly sets his espionage post at his old high school, dooming him to constant flashbacks to his adolescent humiliations. No wonder the guy blasts apart rosebushes to find and punish romantic couples.

Those rosebushes. That’s where we get our answer about Eileen Prince.

He blasts rosebushes, but this is the same man who can gaze intently into a mortally anguished Narcissa Malfoy's eyes and swear to protect her bratty little son. Voldemort blasts families; rosebushes are of no concern to him.  Snape blasts rosebushes, but it doesn't hurt him to see a mother's love.

Let’s look at Snape again, in the “Spinner’s End” chapter of book 6:

His black eyes were fixed upon Narcissa’s tear-filled blue ones as she continued to clutch his hand.

“Certainly, Narcissa, I shall make the Unbreakable Vow,” he said quietly.

I see no Occlumency here, no double agency, nothing like the chapter “The Potions Master” from book 1, which says of Snape’s eyes, “They were cold and empty and made you think of dark tunnels.” I see only an open door.

That’s when I knew. Eileen Prince Snape loved her son. Some mothers scan their babies’ faces for beauty, or for family resemblance; she scanned his face for signs of magic. She recognized and loved his gifts. She was his first teacher, as he was Lily’s; she raised him on talk of the magical world and promised him Hogwarts as his birthright; she told him, as he told Lily, “You’ve got loads of magic.” The enduring loves this man had were for his gifts, for all magic dark or defensive, for Hogwarts, and these he got from his mother.

And this is what convinced me at last that he did accept Harry’s offer of a posthumous portrait in the Headmaster’s Office, instead of snarling, “You will not condemn me to an eternity of listening to those old gossips!” Perhaps it would have made his mother happy. Because I do think that on his final walk toward death, Eileen Prince Snape came for him, and said, “You’ve been so brave. I am…so proud of you.”

ETA:  Postscript.