Snape, Lily and the Courtly Love Tradition

OK, I've been thinking a lot about the courtly love tradition and the Snape/Lily back story. We're given tantalizing glimpses of their friendship, and what it meant to both of them...especially to Snape. But we're also left to fill in a lot of gaps, and to have to really think about what kind of devotion would move a man like Snape to utterly change the shape of his whole life.

I had hoped that Snape loved Lily. I had thought it would make sense if we learned he had. I had even hoped that it would play a major part in his motivation to grudgingly protect Harry all those years, and to turn toward the side of the light. Certainly his love for Lily ended up being the crucial piece of information we'd been missing about his journey. But even after reading DH twice, it's still a little hard to wrap my mind around his utter devotion. Given Snape's kind of creepy personal qualities, it would be too easy to just pass this off as a strange, unhealthy obsession...and while I think elements of that are there, there's got to be more. Otherwise this would not have been a love that could have motivated Snape to "stay true" for so long, at such a high and painful cost.

So I was really glad when I stumbled onto a discussion over at the HogPro website the other day. A few folks over there were batting some ideas about Snape and Lily's relationship back and forth, and someone made the observation that it could be looked at most helpfully from the courtly love tradition. They also made a wonderful observation that Beatrice (as in Dante's Beatrice) is referenced somewhere as having emerald eyes. I'll have to hunt down the reference later; I found that parallel striking though!

I first learned about the courtly love tradition in a 12th grade World Literature class in high school. We were able to choose books off a supplemental reading list, and one of the books I chose (and bought, and still have on my shelves) was Francis Petrarch's Songs and Sonnets from Laura's Lifetime. These poems were my introduction to the whole notion of courtly love: the love of someone for an unattainable someone else, a someone else who often attains the status of "spiritual guide" for the one who loves. In the courtly love tradition, as I understand it, the unattainable woman (usually married to someone else, or vowed to be chaste) leads the one who loves to a higher, better life. By contemplating the woman's beauty, he is led to real beauty, etc. It's this last I find utterly fascinating, especially in light of that silver doe patronus of Snape's.

Petrarch loved a woman named Laura who died in the Black Plague. After she died, he wrote a series of love poems which he proceeded to revise on Fridays (as an act of penance). Apparently even Petrarch wrestled with whether or not his love for this woman was in fact healthy and good. In the introduction to the poems, translator Nicholas Kilmer talks about another book of meditations that Petrarch wrote while he was first working on the poems. Apparently in this book he made St. Augustine a character (probably standing in the place of the church, and perhaps Petrarch's conscience?). Kilmer writes: "...the character of St. Augustine, commenting on Petrarch's obsessive attachment for her, points out the self-delusion and the self-indulgence that underlie the fiction of Courtly Love; the pitfalls of greed and desire for fame; and an attendant blinding, self-congratulatory, enervating depression that seems poetic and is in fact a symptom of the morbidness of the soul. Augustine emphasizes that the mortal nature of Laura makes her an unsuitable focus for the fascination of a soul that is immortal, and is designed for permanence, for the contemplation of far higher things."

I feel Snape snaking his way through so much of that sentence...Snape and the romantic movement and Byronic heroes...so much to think about here! And I think Augustine's warnings (or Petrarch's own warnings to himself, disguised in Augustine's voice) are sound. BUT I also think about the fact that often it's earthly love, incarnated love, that gives us our first real glimpse of the "higher things" and that can lead us toward them. Lily was Snape's first real friend, the first person he was ever in a position to help and to be magnanimous toward, perhaps the first person he ever really felt love for. And that's a powerful hold on his heart.

Kilmer goes on in the next paragraph: "Petrarch admits Laura's mortality, arguing that it is her pure and immortal soul that his eyes have led his soul to follow." Listen to that line!! And think of it in context of Snape and Lily! ... He goes on... "She is his spiritual guide, and above reproach. It is not she who deserves reproach, Augustine answers, but rather Petrarch, his past life, and his own carnal nature which is still laboring under damaging fixations. It remains only for Petrarch to accept, as best he can, the revelation that his desire has led him close to the death of his soul."

I am fascinated by this parallel. Petrarch, brilliant renaissance man, and Snape, brilliant wizard, seem to have a lot in common. I find myself rearranging sentences as I read them... "It remains only for Snape to accept, as best he can, the revelation that his desire to be a death eater has led him close to the death of his soul..." Makes sense, doesn't it?

If you can forgive what might turn into a bit of a research obsession :-) I hope to spend some more time in coming weeks (as I HAVE time, ha!) looking at these connections. I've been re-reading some of the sonnets themselves, which are absolutely beautiful, and am struck to the core about how some of them resonate when you read them as those in Snape's voice. Next post I will post a few of the snippets that have especially moved me.