Redemption Without Forgiveness: Snape and the Conflicted Politics of Restoration

• In Event: “The Boy Who Lived” On: Politics, Populism, and Harry Potter

Abstract

This paper proposes reading Severus Snape as a tragic figure in the context of redemptive politics. Snape finds himself pitted two competing frameworks of justice against one another. On the one hand, a racialized ascriptive politics, which promised power and honor for those who could seize it. On the other hand, a politics of compassion and care, embodied by his love for Lily Evans. In this love, Snape perceived the possibility of redemption, which could rescue him from the dangerous waters in which he had been raised.

This conflict is expressed through two critical turning points in Snape’s life. First, in adolescence where rage drives him to wield racial violence against her, thus demonstrating the thin line between love and hate. Second, after turning to darkness, he unwittingly contributed to Lily’s death, and this realization drove him back to the side of light. Upon this decision, Snape exists in a state of unrelenting internal conflict. He exists beyond redemption—the perpetrator of crimes so great that they cannot be named, much less forgiven—and yet he continues to strive nonetheless. Not out of principle as such, nor out of faith, but simply out of love for the one he has wronged.

Redemption is often deployed as a technique of whitewashing, to excuse the violence of history by seeking forgiveness after its gains have been solidified. But by locking the crime in the past, the present manifestations of that lingering violence are avoided, or even excused. Snape’s redemption offers a different perspective. His salvation is not a matter of excuse, but one of persistent agony. He lives his crimes daily, with no hope of forgiveness, precisely because she who he wronged is gone forever.

In Snape, therefore, we find two critical linked features of redemptive politics. First, its destructive force, whereby the potential force of redemption is perverted—used to destroy precisely that which is loved. Second, its unbreakable recuperative potential to restore the moral order through love. This second feature is all the more radical because it is expressed through the character of one who does not believe in the possibility of his own salvation.

Author

• Charles E. Olney, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley